Waiting Time

Luke 3.1-6

1In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, 2during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 3He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, 4as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.
5Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;
6and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”’

Sermon by Martin Warner

(Martin is to be consecrated bishop in York Minster on Feast of Timothy and Titus in January and serve the archbishop as Bishop of Whitby with additional responsibility for anglican priests, laity, and parishes throughout the diocese of the traditional integrity)

“I KNOW this is not no type of game. This is something I really have to prepare myself for. I’m pretty much going day to day now until the time comes.” This is a description of serious waiting, from a 29-year-old African-American man on death row in Texas.

This statement, given to a reporter in softly spoken words, has to be balanced by the acknowledgement that it comes from a young man who murdered an elderly woman, a retired teacher, and did so with relentless brutality. And the motive: money for crack cocaine.

But the waiting of the culprit for his death sentence has dramatically extended the toxic blend of weakness, violence, and evil which was already dehumanising him and his relationship to others. Perhaps his most chilling statement was in a note he passed to the appeal court: “If I can’t be free — Kill Me!!”

This is a very extreme example of waiting, but it contains within it something about the challenge of Advent, the season when we pay particular attention to time — how we use it, waiting for God, and the judgement God brings for us all.

The challenge is how we use our waiting time to resist and restore what dehumanises us. The loss of an awareness of our own and other people’s dignity is the hallmark of becoming less human; that, together with a capacity to see, experience, and believe in what is good. These deprivations are characteristic of oppression, and they feature in today’s Gospel, albeit in a subtle way.

Luke begins Chapter 3 of his Gospel, today’s reading and the prelude to the public ministry of Jesus, with a reminder of the context in which that ministry, and its violent end, was set. The list of those in authority is no neutral statement. It should strike a chill in our hearts as an expression of the Roman imperium which could rule without mercy or concession.

By the time Luke was writing his Gospel, the Romans had already terminated Jerusalem, its temple, and all that was sacred to the Jews. When set against this catastrophe, the eruption of the word of God, through John the Baptist, emerges as a potent contrast with the potentially dehumanising effects of government that loses sight of the sovereignty of God. The coming Kingdom will issue in universal redemption, “and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” The contrast is what Luke wants us to note.

Isaiah’s dramatic description of how the earth prepares for the coming of God points to creation itself as the means by which we have access to our salvation. This is, if you like, prophetic legislation for disabled access on a cosmic, universal scale. No matter where we live, or how frail our bodies, senses, and social confidence might be, a way will be made.

Making a way for the most vulnerable and needy people among us is never easy. Comparison to levelling mountains is perhaps not inappropriate as a description of the task. But such is the vocation to which the Advent prophets call us, if we, as Christians, are to reveal the freedom and dignity of the Kingdom of God in the human society we now inhabit.

One of the aspects of contemporary life to which we should be most attentive as Christians is the extent to which people who have been damaged and traumatised deserve particular understanding. We begin to understand this when reading about the experience of war from which our soldiers are returning, especially those who return with serious injuries. But what of others?

As Christmas approaches, we might do well to reflect on the needs of children who are damaged in the most tender stages of nurture. How will we, as a society, ensure that those children have a way built for them to share in the benefits we rightly expect that every child deserves? And children are not the only casualties. Inside every victim of crime, as inside every one of us, there is an element of the child and its vulnerability which lives on. The child that, all of us know, is there within the adult can also experience serious challenges when facing life after violence.

There is more. As the gap widens between those who have access to the benefits of our still very prosperous society and those who do not, we should also be attentive to people who are on the disadvantaged side of that gap. Those for whom jobs, homes, health, and education seem not to be so accessible must challenge us to find a way to reveal the vision of human flourishing which is the salvation of God — evident here and now in the dawning of its reality. This is urgent: salvation begins today: it is not the promise of jam tomorrow.

What Baruch so beautifully describes as the future of Jerusalem is the universal pledge of restoring humanity, redeeming the time for every prisoner, every victim: take off affliction . . . put on beauty . . . and God will show your splendour everywhere.