Poolesville Presbyterian Church
12.09.12; Rev. David Williams
Childhood feels different these days. Maybe it isn’t, and maybe it’s just that the distance between myself and my kidlyness has stretched out. I mean, I remember being in seventh grade. That was me, or so I remember. But my ability to recognize the reality that I was once a middle-schooler is challenged when the seventh graders come swirling out of my son’s middle school when I’m there to pick him up. Did I ever have that much energy? Was I ever part of such a babbling, churning cascade of youth?
But I must have been. Maybe it isn’t that childhood is different. The world that children inhabit is so different now, a mindbending cornucopia of flat-screens and and touch screens and apps that offer up anything and everything you might want to see, at the moment you want to see it. It’s neat and marvelous, in it’s own way, but there are things that I used to do that I’m just not sure happen in childhood any more.
Like, say, the ways you’d pass a half-hour on a rainy day in summer. Homework would be done. Your room would be cleaned-ish, meaning you’d very carefully and methodically shoved everything under your bed. There’d be nothing on any of the five channels of broadcast television, and you’d just finished reading a book. Outside, the rain would be a light drizzle, cool and dreary.
The usual activities wouldn’t work. Remember, this was back in those ancient days of yore when kids would be set loose to wander feral through the backwoods for a day, returning as darkness fell, scraped and mud-encrusted and expecting to be fed.
So...what to do? That, O child, was for you to figure out. And so figure it out we did.
One rainy day activity I remember doing regularly as a boy of maybe seven or eight involved going out to the screened in porch of our house. It had a painted cement floor, and a slight slope leading towards the front of the house. On a rainy day, the rain would spatter through the screens at the back of the house, and gather in pools on the painted cement. In some places, little rivulets would be slowly, slowly moving down the incline from the top of the porch to the bottom.
If you touched the edge of that cool pooled water with your finger, and then drew your finger across the cement floor, the water would follow the track of your touch. It would move with the touch of your wet, dusty finger. It would flow as you wanted it to flow, like you were drawing a line with a pen of rain. It would go where you wanted it to go.
Well, more or less. There were limits. You couldn’t make it flow upwards. Gravity, she is a cruel mistress. You also couldn’t get it to turn too sharply. Then, it would pool at the bend in your line, until enough water had gathered that it would being sending out its own tendril. You had to work with what the rain gave you.
I remember whiling away the rainy day time, creating pictures and patterns and networks of rain channels on that concrete floor, paths that would intersect and interconnect. It was fun.
It was also, in its own simple way, a reflection of how we can prepare ourselves for the arrival of Christ in this advent season. From Luke’s Gospel today, there’s a whole bunch of preparation-talk that sets the stage for the life and ministry of Jesus. That talk takes two forms.
First, Luke’s Gospel, being in the form of a Greco-Roman history, needs to prepare us by establishing context. The first two chapters start out as much of the history of the time started out. Those chapters aren’t filled with dry dates and facts and statistics. History in the ancient world was all about storytelling. At its best, it was deep and rich and personal. So this “history” starts out with stories of angels and shepherds, miracles and songs. But eventually, it needed to get to the nitty gritty context, and answer the question: When did this happen?
So verse one and verse two of chapter three of Luke’s Gospel give us exactly that context...sort of. A whole bunch of names come at us all at once, a scattergun blast of mostly pronounceable names and places. And as much detail as that seems to provide, it still frustrates historians because...well...things in the ancient world weren’t quite neat and tidy when it came to time. Saying it was in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar seems to nail it down, but this was ancient Rome. Emperors didn’t have clear inauguration or start dates. And there was also the question of just exactly what a year was. That period of time was variable in the ancient world, depending on whether you used the Julian, Jewish, Syrian, Macedonian, or Egyptian calendar.
Where that gets us is more or less to the somewhere between the year 25 and 34, but what the Gospel is mostly trying to say is: this is something that happened. This was a real thing, part of the fabric of our history and our time and our space.
What was the thing that was happening right around this time? What was happening was John the Baptist, whose prophetic challenge to corruption of the Herodian dynasty and proclamation of the coming of the messianic age were seen by all of the Gospel writers as setting the stage for Jesus. At the core of that message was the demand for repentance through the living waters of baptism, the command to turn away from the dry and lifeless and towards the joyful and living promise of a life woven up with the will of the Creator.
Each of the four Gospel accounts links John’s message with the words from chapter 40 of the Book of the prophet Isaiah, about a voice crying in the wilderness, and about making the way of the Lord straight. Matthew, Mark, and Luke describe John as fulfilling that declaration by Isaiah. John places those words directly into the mouth of the baptizer. However expressed, that command to prepare the world for the arrival of God is at the core of what Isaiah is teaching.
And that is the second form. What we hear from Isaiah about the beginning of the time of God’s fulfillment comes to us from the time of the Jewish exile in Babylon, from sometime after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. They were in a place of disgrace, surrounded by menacing mountains and perilous valleys, in which their very hope as a people had been crushed from them. Isaiah’s promise to them was of restoration and renewal, that creation would make a way for their God to reconnect with them, even in their time of despair and slavery.
As creatures created at liberty to live...or not live...in keeping with the grace of our Creator, we are given the option of either creating paths in our lives that draw God further into our day to day existences or that preclude our Creator’s deeper engagement with us. The baptism of repentance proclaimed by John and taught by Jesus requires us to make choices about how we will respond to the possibilities that God offers each and every one of us.
We can choose to live according to God’s grace. We can, through our choosing to , allow God’s Spirit to move in us. Those choices, day by day and moment by moment, bring us deeper joy, more hope, and closer connection with both God and neighbor. When we make our way work with the Creator’s love, our lives fill and move with the flow of that Spirit.
Or we can choose instead to trace the lines of our life away from God. We can choose distraction and bitterness and resentment and greed. But God’s Spirit will not flow into and enliven those places in us where grace is absent. God’s creative power will not dwell there. That place is a dry and dusty dead end, futilely etched into being.
But whether we choose it or choose against it, we all return to our Creator, as inexorably and inescapably as water flows down a gently sloped slab of painted concrete. In this season of preparation, and this season of beginnings, make that way in yourself.
Let is be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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