Fairhaven UMC

This past week, I saw a video online that I watched most of the way through before I realized that it wasn’t actually a joke. I thought it was a joke. It was a pretty typical looking movie theater, and up front were a handful of British soldiers, the fully uniformed kind, you know, in the red coats and the tall, bare-skin hat. And these British soldiers marched to the front of the movie theater, in front of the screen, and commanded the audience to stand in this movie theater.

And they lifted trumpets and horns and began to play a fanfare. And so once that fanfare concluded, all the flourishes, they moved into the United Kingdom’s national anthem, God Save the King. And at that moment, King Charles III entered the balcony of the movie theater, waving to his subjects around him and below him, who all clapped and cheered the king. Because he had come to watch Gladiator 2.

And I don’t totally know why, but this whole scene was just so funny to me. All this ceremony, this great display of power and formality to make way for the king of, you know, what was until 60 years ago, the largest empire in the world, much larger than the Roman Empire they’re watching on the movie screen. And they made way for the king to come sit in a squeaky chair that probably had Raisinets melted into the cushion. His expensive leather shoes were probably sticking to pop puddles on the floor.

And the choice of the movie itself, it’s not like this was some kind of high art, you know, film festival piece that we’d associate with royal tastes. It was a gory action film, Gladiator 2, just barely more highbrow than an Avengers movie or something. It hardly seems to fit the noble fanciness of the occasion with the band and the bowing and the music. And so all this to say, the king’s night out at the movies, despite being a completely serious event as far as everyone in that theater was concerned, seemed to me almost to be kind of a parody of royalty and power, demonstrating how absurd it all is when you start really looking at it.

Because when it comes down to it, the king is just some guy who by accident of birth owns an enormous amount of land and a couple castles and has his face on a bunch of countries’ coins. God did not handpick and put him on the throne like King David. And I don’t mean to pick on our British friends either. God didn’t elect President Biden.

God didn’t elect President Trump. Those are just two guys, two men who find themselves in command of a handful of aircraft carrier groups and some nuclear weapons. Nor is this only true for political figures. The same for your Warren Buffets, your Elon Musks, your Jeff Bezos.

They’re not divinely favored. They’re not immortal. They’re not special in God’s eyes, no more so than you or me, and maybe a bit less than whoever is currently standing asking for money on the corner of 51. Royalty, military power, obscene wealth.

They’re flimsy. And in an eternal sense, they’re not real. They’re meaningless. They’re fading away.

The tales from scripture that we turn to at Advent remind us of this, refocus us year after year on what is true and what is passing away. The past few weeks we’ve heard from John the Baptist, that wild-eyed prophet who brings the voice of God to the people. And he does this on the margins of civilization, out in the wilderness along the Jordan River, while the kings, the governors, the emperor, the priests go about their business in the bustling cities, just completely disinterested and unaware of what John’s doing out there. God bypasses royalty, bypasses the greatest military the world had ever seen, bypasses the temple in which he was believed to dwell, and the priests whose job it was to hear from God.

And God speaks instead through this strange man in the wilderness who lives on locusts and wild honey. And the prophetic call to prepare the way of the Lord then as now comes not from palaces and cathedrals, but from the midst of this dusty, undignified crowd of people whose names we don’t know. And this morning, we come to marry the mother of Jesus and see a very similar kind of situation. The Messiah who’s been promised for generations to be seated on the throne of David, to save his people, to free them from shame and oppression, he’s born among human beings.

And is he conceived by a king and a queen in Jerusalem or Rome? No. Is his conception marked by an imperial proclamation, an army parade, or God’s voice tearing open the heavens for everybody to hear? No. And in fact, if we rewind a few verses here in Luke chapter one, it seems the total number of people informed about the impending coming of the one who will be called the son of the most high is one single person. And that one person who knows what is to come is Mary, who is nobody.

The angel Gabriel tells her she will have a son conceived by the Holy Spirit. She consents. And then we’re where we begin our reading today. Mary is this young teenager who’s now pregnant with Israel’s Messiah.

And she heads out, presumably on her own, to visit her elderly aunt, Elizabeth. And Elizabeth too is nobody. If anything, her identity is rooted in her husband. He’s a priest and she’s the priest’s wife.

Beyond that, she’s just some old lady without any influence, without any power. But she too has experienced a miracle. She is pregnant in her old age with the boy who will one day be called John the Baptist. So Mary arrives at Elizabeth’s house in the Judean highlands.

And without a word of explanation, Elizabeth’s unborn son jumps for joy in her womb. She feels it. John recognizes the coming of the Lord Jesus, who’s probably not even yet a visible bump. John just knows.

And Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, knows. The world is about to turn upside down by these children who are still months away from even taking their first breath. Why do I have this honor? Elizabeth asks. That the mother of my Lord should come to me.

These pregnancies, both miraculous, are bigger miracles than they even appear. One baby conceived by a virgin, another by a very old woman. Yes, that’s miraculous. But it’s more than that.

Because they will come to first proclaim and then usher in the kingdom of God on earth. And so Mary sings a song that has come to be known as the Magnificat. She sings, I rejoice in God from the very depth of my being. He’s favored me, despite me being nobody in this world except for his servant.

And everyone forever will call me blessed because of what he has done for me. He’s faithful to those who love him. He is strong. The arrogant and the rich and the powerful, she says, are yanked down from their places of honor and authority while the nameless and the irrelevant are lifted up.

He fills the hungry. He snubs the rich. And he has been and always will be faithful to his people. The God of Israel, she sings, turns the world upside down.

Worldly power is nothing. Worldly honor is nothing. Riches or fame or strength, nothing. How can they be if this teenage peasant girl from Nazareth has been chosen to be the example of faithfulness for all time, the mother of God? How can all those things matter if God picked Mary? God promises reversal.

And Mary, even more than any of her biblical forebears, experiences it firsthand, the kind of reversal that Jesus would bring into the world in which one day we’ll be all in all. And Mary’s song is such an incredible moment. It rings down through history. It’s a rebel song.

It’s a song of revolution. Quite literally, it’s declaring that every human king is illegitimate. It’s prophesying their downfall. It’s proclaiming the days of the rich living large while the masses suffer are coming to an end, that God’s going to do something about it.

In Europe, for almost a thousand years until the 1700s or so, Christians had a festival to commemorate the reversal that Mary sings about. This was a really rowdy kind of festival, one that eventually got suppressed, but one that maybe we can learn a little bit from. In countries across Europe, France and the south of Europe especially, there was a carnival-like celebration called the Feast of Fools, which, like God’s choice of Mary to bear Christ into the world, mocked and belittled tradition, hierarchy, power, and wealth. This was every winter in the spirit of the Magnificat.

A Pope of Fools, they called him, would be elected for the length of the festival from among low-ranking priests. One of these low-ranking, no-name priests would become the Pope for a week. It’s like whenever a town elects a dog mayor as a novelty thing. Some priests would dress as women and then sing and dance in the church.

During Mass, monks would wear their vestments inside out. They’d hold their books upside down, and the ones that wore glasses would replace the glass with orange peels. And amazingly, this is the part that I like the best, they would bring a donkey into the church to be celebrated. They would all hee-haw, and then they would sing a special song to the donkey.

This lowly, goofy animal was honored as the animal that Mary rode into Bethlehem, and later Egypt, as the Holy Family fled King Herod. God made the donkey worthy and noble, more than any war horse, and it was sung in a mix of Latin and French. This is a song we have a lot of record of. Here’s a couple verses.

In eastern lands the ass arrived, pretty and so strong, fit for burden. Hail, Sir Ass, hail. He eats barley, beards and all, and spiny thistles. He separates the wheat from the chaff on the threshing floor.

Hail, Sir Ass, hail. There’s a modernized version of this song, actually, in our hymnal. I literally learned this two days ago. Number 227.

We’re not singing that today, but take a look at it sometime. It commemorates a lot of animals, but the first verse is indeed about the donkey. But what a celebration this is. A donkey is made noble, and a peasant girl is made the mother of God.

Today is a day to remember that there are rare moments where the overturning that Mary prophesies breaks through into the world. Even if it’s brief, it’s like we get to peek through a window and see into the coming kingdom. Consider all the moments in scripture, in Jesus’ life, whenever this happens. The feeding of the 5,000 from a boy’s lunch.

The raising of Lazarus from the dead. Think about Jesus himself riding a donkey into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. This mock royal procession against military might, against the puppet kings of the emperor. Jesus comes as king.

And then there’s the modern example, a modern example, that gives me chills when I remember that it actually happened. It’s been a couple years since I’ve talked about this. I’ve got to get back to it. The Christmas Truce of 1914.

Christmas Eve 110 years ago, in the trenches of northern France, a miracle happened. Once the sun had gone down on Christmas Eve, German soldiers lifted little Christmas trees and candles over the edge of the trenches. They started singing Christmas carols. And British soldiers on the other side of no man’s land responded by singing their own Christmas carols.

And this happened over and over again along thousands of miles of the front lines. And soon French and British and German soldiers had climbed out of their trenches and they spent Christmas with their enemies. They played soccer in the no man’s land that was full of craters. They just went and played soccer there with each other because that united all of Europe, as it still does.

They shared cigarettes, chocolate, and liquor. And it was a genuine miracle. Some soldiers who wrote about it later, almost all of them actually, say that it didn’t even seem like it was real. As they remembered the next couple years of the war and looked back on it, it seems like it wasn’t even real.

There’s an English captain who describes singing Auld Lang Syne among Scots and Irishmen and men from all over the German Empire. And he said a couple years later, if someone had shown him on film what he saw with his own eyes, he would have believed it was fake. And these unofficial truces ground the war to a halt until at least the 26th of December, longer in some places. And the fighting resumed then.

And many cases only whenever commanding officers who were terrified that all the men would just refuse to fight anymore, ended up forcing them out of the trenches at gunpoint. The war would go on for four more years. It would kill at least 17 million people. But it could have ended right there.

And this is obviously a very dramatic moment. We don’t see miracles on this scale very often. We don’t see God’s peace break into the world in that dramatic way very often. But we can catch these glimpses of reversal, of God’s kingdom taking root, and see the promise of salvation and redemption is on the way.

The same way Mary did when she sang her eternal song. We can see it. I wonder if you could think of whenever in your day-to-day life you’ve seen it, whenever you know in the depths of who you are in Mary’s words, the glory and the power of the Lord. At the very least, we get it at least once a month, whenever all people, rich, poor, hungry, full, powerful, weak, are invited to share a feast at Jesus’ own banquet.

And I was thinking about it and even the elements themselves experience this reversal, this elevation. Regular old bread and juice from shop and save become holy food. The body and the blood of the Lord. This is what the Magnificat is pointing us to.

These moments where the kingdom breaks through, where we see what one day is going to be everywhere through Christ. Mary sings that much of what we see, which likes to pretend that it’s going to be forever, is crumbling into dust. Wealth rusts and rocks and crowns and guns shatter into pieces. And Mary insists and sings, and she knows because it’s happening in her own body, that God is doing something else entirely.

God is making all things new. Christ the Lord is coming to save his people in the form of a fragile baby boy. And in fact, he’s coming to save the whole world. Can you hear Mary’s song with Christmas days away and Christ’s return on the horizon? Can you sing it? And can the world hear us as we sing, as we live and proclaim the good news, the promise of a holy revolution? May it be so in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Something that I know I do sometimes when I’m reading the Bible is mentally collapse the timeline of the whole thing. So I think you can easily understand what I’m talking about here. If I tell you to picture somebody who’s dressed like they were in Bible times, you know exactly what I mean. Even though the Bible was written over a period of literally thousands of years, we have this one image of what Bible times was.

So the Bible is really old to us. Even the newest parts of it are 2,000 years old. And so it all becomes a long, long time ago in a land far away, despite actually being a collection of books taking place in very specific times, very specific places throughout history. And accordingly, we lose track of how far apart or how close together various events in scripture are in relation to one another.

For Protestants, this issue is even a little bit amplified because the Catholic and Orthodox churches have what’s called the Apocrypha or the Deuterocanon in their Bibles. And this is a series of additional biblical books that cover the time between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And they cover what’s often called the intertestamental period. And this period covers the time following Israel’s return from exile in Babylon, an act of the Persian emperor Cyrus.

And then they exist under the domination of the Persian, the Greek, and the Roman empires. This is a three-empire span of time. And the Deuterocanon’s narration of that time includes the books of Maccabees, for example. That’s where the Hanukkah story comes from.

This is in a Jewish rebellion against the Persians. So really there’s a whole lot of major world history going on across the span of time, including the rise of both Alexander the Great and then Julius Caesar. So we Protestants, on the other hand, just have a gap in this space. And one we really rarely think about because we can just flip from Malachi on one page to Matthew on the next.

But that single page flip is 400 years and a handful of empires long. And so the 400 years of the intertestamental period are sometimes called the silent years. And of course that’s not completely correct. Obviously, God did not take a 400-year vacation and just leave the people of Israel to fend for themselves.

That’s not who God is. We see in those Deuterocanonical books what’s going on among the people of Israel at the time. God’s definitely at work, even if we don’t treat those books as a scripture. God was at work each and every day in their lives and in the world in that half millennium between the end of the Old Testament and the opening of the New.

But what that idea of silence, of this silent period alludes to, is that prophets, in the classical sense, had basically disappeared. There were no prophets at all. God was not interacting with the people through the prophets like God had done so many times before. You have, you know, your Amos, your Zechariah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Malachi, Ezekiel, all those little two-chapter minor prophets.

That type of guy who would wear a shirt made of horsehair, who would demand justice in the public square, who would proclaim God’s judgment on the king and on the people, engage in these dramatic, symbolic acts, that kind of guy faded away. And prophets became this historical phenomenon, not a present vocation. So there’s your context for whenever John the Baptist enters the scene. The people in Jerusalem and in the villages of Galilee would say to one another, There’s a new prophet out there, out in the wilderness.

Like in Bible times, that’s what they’d say. They are no more used to this than we are. Something new and different, something so new because it’s so old, is happening when John comes on the scene. But the word of God has come upon John, the son of Zechariah, a respectable priest in the Jerusalem temple.

And he heads to the region around the Jordan River, the outskirts of civilization, a wilderness far away from the major cities and towns of Judea and Galilee. And that is where he proclaims that the people must be baptized in repentance of their sin. And rest assured, if again you think this is a totally alien culture to our own, that people in those days were not really keen of repenting for their sin either. This is not something they like, not something they’re big fans of.

And the fact that the crowds are streaming out to go hear John in the wilderness and be baptized in the cold waters of the Jordan, that is unusual. Even then, it is something from another time and a sign that a new era has come, that God’s doing something different that none of them have seen for hundreds of years. There’s a well-known political scientist still alive today named Francis Fukuyama. He famously wrote in the 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Soviet Union, that we’d experienced what he called the end of history.

And by this, he meant that all the real possibilities of fundamental change had vanished. Everybody had gotten where they’re going, which is just to become a capitalist democracy. Everybody was there. The age of revolution, of international conflict, all of that stuff that defined the 20th century, the world wars, all of that was over, he said.

And 30 years on, we see how that’s gone. The Syrian government fell yesterday. But I have to imagine that the people of Israel, who hadn’t heard from a prophet in 400 years and lived under an empire that governed the entire known world, probably felt about the same way. History had ended.

This is just it now. But then John shows up in the wilderness, and history starts rolling again. I picture that moment in the old, the 1971 Willy Wonka film. You see the smokestack over the factory light up after years of dark stillness, and something is happening.

No one knows what, but something is starting to happen. And Luke, meanwhile, in the writing of this story, wants us to explicitly understand that we’re watching history in the making. John’s ministry is not this once upon a time fairy tale. It’s an event that happens in a very specific time and place while all this other stuff is going on.

This is real life. This is the 15th year of the rule of Emperor Tiberius. Pontius Pilate is governor of Judea. The kingship of Herod Antipas is over Galilee.

Annas and Caiaphas are the high priests of the temple at this time. This is a specific year, position, and time. These are the people who are in charge. And then John shows up.

John has appeared sent by God to shake things up for all of these specific people. And he’s an Old Testament prophet who’s jumped out of the pages of Israel’s scriptures and has come to act as this bridge between even what they thought of as Bible times and the coming of the Messiah. He’s opening this door for something that no one’s seen. And he’s a figure of opposition to religious and political power in every way.

There’s a reason that he’s going out to preach in the middle of nowhere to these nameless masses. He’s not hanging out with Tiberius and Pilate and Herod and Annas and Caiaphas. He’s out in the middle of nowhere with people that we don’t know. The system doesn’t know what to do with people like John anymore, if it ever did.

The same way ours wouldn’t. If someone jumped into the world and started doing biblical things. And so the disruption is immediate and it is significant. And so what is his disruptive message? What does he go out there and say? How does he prepare the way for the Lord? He doesn’t explain what’s coming to the people like you might expect.

He doesn’t educate them on step by step what’s about to happen. Really he probably doesn’t even know. There’s this common misconception of prophets that they tell the future like a psychic. But really in the Bible that’s not what we see prophets do for the most part.

Instead John calls the people to repent. Or as the CEB helpfully translates it, Change your hearts and lives. We have this idea of repentance that it’s like apologizing to God. And that’s not what God is asking of you or me through John.

It’s a component of repentance. We do say we’re sorry. But repent in the terms that we see in scripture. Comes from the Hebrew verb shuv which means literally turn.

Change your hearts and lives. Turn away from your sin. The obvious ones and the ones you hide deep down. And turn towards God.

Turn towards holiness. What God is calling you to be. And this is the appropriate response to the news that the Lord is coming. Just as you would clean your house before guests come to visit, so must you straighten up your heart and your life before God comes in power and glory and judgment.

This is what John is saying. Make yourselves a suitable home for God to inhabit. Make yourselves a suitable people for God to dwell among. And John tells that to Israel and to us today.

When the Lord comes after all, Malachi tells us what that will be like. He’ll be like a refiner’s fire or like a cleaner’s soap. And it’s in our best interest to get that refining process started before he comes and does it for us. And it’s stunning that John’s call for repentance clearly strikes a chord among the people.

Enough so that huge numbers of them make a pilgrimage to the Jordan to be washed by him in the water. John’s really the first one to do this thing we call baptism. That wasn’t a ritual that really existed at the time. But it’s almost like their souls are aching to be cleansed and renewed.

I have the image of a dog whose hairs become matted and painful. It’s an article of faith among many preachers, really many Christians, that no one wants to hear about sin. Of course, the truth is we definitely want to hear about sin, just other people’s sin, not our own. But neither of those things seem to be the case here with John.

The people are going out to hear about their own sin, to be baptized, to repent and change their lives because this wandering preacher told them to. And I wonder if those days are maybe here for us now too, where we are really longing for something like this. Where we and masses of other people are aching to repent, longing for God’s refining fire. In any case, the people definitely hear John’s message and they receive it.

They go so far as to seek out this new birth in the water to mark this new start to their lives. And it really is a new beginning. Just as creation began with the Spirit sweeping across the water, God is at work there over the water again with those people, stirring up the water to try something new. And after this long 400-year period of prophetic silence, the voice of God is heard again.

And this moment of revival, of anticipation, sweeps across Israel who no longer expected things like this to happen. They were waiting, but not actually expecting. Soon Jesus would appear and those who heard John’s words of invitation would know that the Son of God walked the earth in human flesh. I think maybe it feels today, a lot of the time, like we live in a time of divine silence.

I think maybe God’s speaking and acting in our world in a mighty way, right here in the midst of life and history, seems too often like the stuff of Bible times, long ago in a land far away. Definitely not now, though. And so it’s worth remembering in this season of Advent of preparation. It was exactly the same way before Jesus came on the scene.

They weren’t expecting anything, but he’s promised to return. And now in the quiet of the winter darkness, we can hear that voice crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way for the Lord. Make his paths straight. And John’s word for us is just as fresh as it was 2,000 years ago, Repent.

Change your hearts and your lives. Christ is coming and history has not come to an end. All humanity will see God’s salvation. So prepare the way.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.