Year C Advent 4: The Magnificat

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

Mary went out with haste into the hill country.

A young woman, a teenager pregnant with a baby of uncertain paternity, an unwed mother in first-century Galilee – you can bet that she got out of town with some haste. She literally ran for the hills. She went to find safe haven with her cousin, Elizabeth, and her husband, Zechariah, a priest of the temple, who might be expected to disapprove, but Mary had a hunch, from something that the angel said, that this couple might, instead, understand.

They did more than understand. When Elizabeth saw Mary coming, she ran to embrace her. She blessed her, she poured out her love upon her, she anointed her with the Holy Spirit that was spilling out of her. Elizabeth did not simply tolerate or accept or understand Mary and Mary’s condition: she loved her, and she loved her loudly and openly.

Mary stayed with Elizabeth for six months, until John was born. The two women must have both been quite terrified at what was happening to them. One was too old to have a child, had suffered so many disappointments in her life before this happened, it must have been hard not to dream in the night of all that might go wrong. She had not asked for this, at her time of life; it had been dropped in her lap as an unexpected gift, and while it was amazing and the most joyful and wonderful gift she could have imagined, it was also beyond her imagining, and it was pretty scary. And the other, she was too young to have a child. She had no idea why this had happened to her, why the angel came to her, of all people – had everyone else said no, and she was the only one foolish enough to say, “Let it be to me as you have said?” Or did the angel know something about her that she had not yet realized about herself, as young as she was, as new to her own life? At any rate, it was frightening to think about how to explain her growing belly, and it was frightening to think that one day soon she, a mere child herself, would have a child of her own. Mary stayed with Elizabeth for six months, until John was born, so that the two women could take care of one another, share their fears, their hopes, their wonderment at their angel-announced pregnancies, their doubts, their love.

These two women, one old enough and one young enough to be quite overlooked by society, these two women in the hill country went about quietly, in the stillness of Elizabeth’s house and in the privacy of their own bodies, preparing the way for God’s salvation of all flesh.

Actually, scratch that, they weren’t altogether quiet about it. After Mary arrived, and Elizabeth hugged her and blessed her and Elizabeth’s baby bounced up and down with joy at the sound of her voice, Mary was so relieved and overwhelmed and overcome with the rightness of it all, with the wonder of it all, which she could enjoy now that she was safe; Mary was so excited by her cousin’s baby’s affirmation of her own child that she burst into song.

She was a teenager, after all. Perhaps she danced a bit, too.

“My soul magnifies the Lord,” sang Mary, “my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.” But while her song of praise is full of relief and gratitude for what God has done for her, Mary does not stop there. She realizes, about halfway through her song, that what is happening to her is not for her alone. It will have implications for the whole world. This child, which has been presented to her by the angel, is not for her alone, but for everyone.

Jane Williams puts it this way: “[Mary] is fiercely glad that God has asked her to do this thing, but although she is rightly proud of her own role, she also knows that this is not just about her. The Bible shows that it is about God coming to establish a new world order, and to be close to the poor and the powerless.”[1]

Just as Elizabeth’s child was announced as someone who would have profound implications for the people, turning the hearts of many back to God, so Mary’s child was not simply a happy accident for her to enjoy, but the sign of God’s favour on all of God’s people, the coming of the day of the Lord spoken by the prophets, when order would be restored, oppression ended, the reign of God brought near to replace the iron rule of Rome.

“God’s mercy is for those who fear God,” sings Mary, “God has shown strength with his arm; scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts, brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. The hungry have been filled with good food, and the rich sent away empty. God has fulfilled the promises made to Israel, to Abraham and his descendants for ever.”

Salvation is never merely personal.

It may start that way, with a message from an angel, or a word from a friend, an embrace from a cousin, a sharing of wonder and love, but salvation is for everyone, and it demands to be shared. The kingdom of God is a public event, not a private club, and access is unlimited.

The proud have been scattered in their imaginations, the powerful brought low while the lowly are lifted up, the hungry fed with the bread of the rich. Salvation wreaks havoc with the social order: unwed teenage mothers are celebrated and embraced by their rather religious family.

It starts at the personal level, with family, with a house in the hills, but it has implications for the whole of history. It cannot be contained.

It is still that way. We gather, first as individuals, then drawing in our family, our friends, those whom we think could use a bit of good news, a word of salvation, and as we grow, as our faith grows in us, we wonder what fruit it might bear beyond ourselves, beyond our building, beyond our own four walls. What difference could this new life of God born in us make to the hungry, to the proud, to the lowly? Can we, as small as we are, make a big difference in the world around us?

Why not? Mary did.

As we leave here this morning, to finish up our own preparations for Christmas Day, we will take a few moments to talk about our work in this place, what God is growing in us here, how we can share our blessings, our joy, our hope with those around us. We will pledge to continue our life together, and to reach beyond ourselves to be a refuge, a beacon, a place of blessing and joy to those around us. We are here because God has made a difference in our lives, God’s salvation has visited us, has blessed us, has embraced us. We can use those visitations, those blessings and embraces to make a difference beyond ourselves. Salvation is never merely personal. We are called to make a difference, to share those blessings, to feed the hungry with the bread of the rich, to mess with the imaginations of the powerful by calling on them to lift up the lowly, to recognize the reign of God in our midst. We are called on to magnify the Lord and rejoice in the coming of God, our Saviour.

“Blessed are you,” Elizabeth greeted her. “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.” And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is God’s name.”

Amen.

[1] Jane Williams, Approaching Christmas (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2005), p. 11

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Out of the mouths

Posted on December 22, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…” – isn’t that what the Bible says?
Yesterday, the NRA broke its quite understandable, even welcome, silence following the news out of Newtown last week. More guns, they suggested, would prevent more gun violence. Armed guards at school, they opined, would heighten everyone’s sense of security.
Yesterday, I dropped my son at school early. In the parking lot were two police cruisers. When I took my daughter over a little later, I reminded her that the administration had promised a more visible police presence at the school, and not to worry.
Actually, they spent most of the afternoon in sub-lockdown state, so she worried anyway.
But while I am glad that the police station is a minute from the school, and that the city is committed to the safety of our children, and while I am most grateful to our first responders for their responses, I have to tell you that the young people I know do not consider more armed guards, more “good guy guns,” more bullets in their vicinity to be any guarantee of safety. On the contrary, when they see this level of “security,” they are more afraid. They understand that the more we expect violence of one another, the more we expect to meet violence with violence, the more we rely on death to save lives, the further we move away from peaceable coexistence, from safety, from the common good.
From the mouths of babes and sucklings…

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Twenty-eight bells

Posted on December 21, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

In a few minutes, I will sound the bells at our church twenty-eight times, in memory of the people who died in Newtown, CT last week in an incident which has filled our country with grief, horror and sorrow.

Over the past couple of days, it has come to my attention that there has been some debate about how many times to toll the bell. I am comforted by the fact that several people at this church thanked me after service on Sunday for including the gunman in our prayers along with his other victims; Jesus taught us to pray for all people, including those who are our enemies, those who persecute us, and this is part of following that call.

A friend and colleague, the Rev Peter Faass, posted on facebook, in part, “Despite our wanting to condemn and judge and separate what we believe to be the wheat from the chafe, that is God’s responsibility and not ours. 28 people, all children of a loving God, despite how broken their lives may have been here on earth, lost their lives tragically in Newtown. If we see it any other way than this, than there can be no healing and no new life for us.”

There is another, more personal reason that I have for including the final toll, and I share this story with you as one of hope, and one which finds its hope in the possibilities of forgiveness and redemption.

I know that it is not the same thing; it is nowhere near the same thing. But here it is:
For a decade or two, I believed that it was not unreasonable to expect that the end for our family would be a murder-suicide of the kind one reads in the papers, sees on the television news. It is not as though I worried that each day would be our last, but a violent end did seem inevitable for a long time, and this the most likely way that it would fall out.

After I left home, it became clear that were this indeed to happen, I would be the survivor who would need to work out how appropriately to mourn the dead. I wondered, not morbidly but simply because the possibility was present, how I would handle it. Would the family be mourned together, even the one who perpetrated the act? I decided, yes. I decided that it would be my responsibility to initiate the healing, the putting back together of our family, to work towards forgiveness, even if it angered others. I knew this in advance, so that I might have a chance of putting it into practice should the occasion arise.

The danger is now in our past. The person who suffered from un- and under-diagnosed mental illness for all of his pre-adult and adult life is now in a situation where he is no longer a danger to himself or to others. He has also almost entirely recreated the past and most of the present in his own mind. In his memory, he is a gentle soul, a loving son, brother, father. He would not hurt a fly. This is the person he imagines himself to be, and the one he would have liked to have been, had his illness allowed him the freedom to live that way. His self-image affirms my decision made long ago to redeem his memory, should the worst happen, should I be called upon so to do.

I know that it is not the same thing; it is nowhere near the same thing. The people who died at Sandy Hook Elementary School did not know their killer, did not owe him like family.

Still, as I ring these bells this morning, as I reach the twenty-eighth toll, I will think of my brother, and after those children, their teachers, and his mother, I will pray for the other one all the same.

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Blue Christmas homily

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

I remember one Christmas Eve years ago, when I was a Sunday School teacher trying to wrangle small children dressed as shepherds and herd animals dressed as small children and deal with both kings and wise guys and try not to show favouritism to the little angels …

There was a ten-year-old girl who was not at all happy to be there at the pageant rehearsal. Ten going on eleven is a difficult age: everyone tells you that you’re growing up, but they still treat you like a child. There are secrets whispered around the house behind closed doors, and you are awake late enough into the evening to hear both them and the raised voices that might follow. Your body keeps growing and changing – you can’t rely on it from one day to the next to be in the same condition as you left it in the night before. Everything is in flux, there is little security to be found, and it is frightening and frustrating, so this young girl was understandably angry at the world, at the pageant, and at her mother. “I don’t want to,” and “I hate you,” were the refrains to her Christmas caroling.

And this, this was the child they had chosen to be Mary.

The pageant director showed her, in no uncertain terms, her place. The child sat scowling, kicking her foot in front of her.

The mother of the baby Jesus, little Joshua, brought her son, her firstborn, her heart, and placed him in the girl’s arms. And she changed.

Her foot stopped swinging. Her face stopped scowling. Her breathing grew quiet and calm, as though she were breathing the sleeping child a lullaby. A kind of peace – the kind of peace which passes all understanding, came, not as if out of nowhere but as if out of the core of her being, called out of her by the baby boy in her arms. She sat, suddenly serene, and all of the little shepherds and the wise guys and the animals and the angels tiptoed around her in reverence and awe for as long as the spell lasted, which was for as long as the baby was in her arms. And even later, as they trailed away for the journey home, you could still find traces of calmness in the air where they had sat and moved and had their being.

I think that one of God’s wisest moments was when the choice was made to be born as a vulnerable and dependent child. The fact that we depend on an almighty God for our very being is a wonderful comfort in times of deep despair, and it can be one of great frustration when we wish that we could do more for ourselves, make the world in our own image.

In coming to us as a newborn baby, God shared our dependence, our lack of control, our frustrated cries, our hunger and the pain of separation; our deepest danger and our profound doubt in the face of an uncertain future.

We are told that Christmas is a time of joy, and it is, but joy is about more than happy feelings and bubbly thoughts. Joy, true joy is more complex; it understands frustration and anger and fear, even deep sadness, and it owns them. Joy does not depend on the perfection of the season, or of the world, or of our lives, thank God. Instead, joy is that which allows our entire being to know that we are beloved of God, as newborn infants cradled in gentle arms, whether we are crying or sleeping, or scowling or smiling. Joy is the knowledge that God delights in us, and calls us into that peace which passes all understanding, through the birth of a child at Christmas time, in the bleak midwinter, when all was dark and cold, and the only light was a stable lamp, lit to brighten the arrival of the one who loves us all. And that is the joy, the peace and the joy, that I wish you all this Christmas time.

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How long?

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

Last week, as I was leaving my children’s school after the morning drop-off, a fluttering thing caught my eye. I realized that it was a red and black ribbon, tacked to a tree at the end of the driveway. It had been there since February, when the whole drag had been festooned with the colours of Chardon High School after a very disturbed young man killed some of his classmates, injured others, and changed countless lives forever, including his own.
I wondered, last week, when it was that I had stopped seeing the ribbon. I guessed that over the summer the rest had come down, and this one missed; it was old and a little jaded. But it has been months since the school year began, and I have driven that driveway Monday through Friday, and I had not seen it until last week.
Two days later, I found another one, closer to the school, halfway out of the parking lot. I realized that the one at the end was not an orphan, left by accident; the ribbons had never been removed, but left to fade away. But when had I stopped seeing them?
I was horrified in February when I heard the news. Two of my former Sunday School students were at the school at the time of the shooting, and I longed to hear that they were safe, and my heart went out to their parents. I was proud of the way that they led their community in prayer and strength and comfort in the weeks that followed; but I was angry. They should never have been in that position; this was not an age-appropriate experience for two young teenagers.
I was angry, too, because this was the second time in my own daughter’s high school career that two of her friends had been present in a school where shots were fired (it was fortunate that the first time no one was harmed); the second time that children I had seen grow up in our church had been found to be in mortal danger where they should have been as safe as houses; the second time that I had had to imagine what my friends were going through, waiting for their sons to come home. Twice in four years, children from the same congregation had witnessed gunfire in their schools.
Last week, those ribbons snuck out from behind their trees one by one to accuse me of letting inertia outrun anger, resignation outlive grief. When had I stopped seeing them?
There are those who will never forget what happened last Friday, and today my heart goes out to them, I weep for them, and they are in my prayers.
But the ribbons have fixed me with their long pins: they want to know, How long will you remember this time? Long enough to make a change? Long enough that next time will never be?

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Year C Advent 3: Rachel refused to be consoled

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

Here’s Matthew’s gospel, telling what happened not long after Jesus was born:

Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old and under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, “A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more.”

When John was born, when Jesus was born, when the two cousins were young children, too young to know the details of what was happening, but old enough to absorb the fear and the anger and the grief of their elders, this outrage was happening in the heart of their nation, in the cradle of their society, and it was unimaginable, and it was cruel, and it flew in the face of the good news that the angels had just proclaimed, “Peace on earth, goodwill to all people.”

No wonder John’s version of the good news was so conflicted and uncompromising, so harsh and unyielding.

“You brood of vipers,” says John. “Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” With these and many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news.

Getting good news out of these and other exhortations; it’s like getting blood out of a stone. It makes about as much sense as the news that we hear, that while we live in one of the richest countries in the world, one in every seven people lives in poverty, one in five children does not know where his next meal is coming from. Living in the land of the free, where one person’s freedom to keep firearms may at any moment rob another person’s freedom to live safely and without fear, even a child’s, even a mother’s. Living in a city where healthcare is big business, where hospitals act as worldwide magnets for advanced treatments and technologies, and the poor and the middle income struggle to find adequate access to mental health services for themselves and their families. Where living in the land of the brave means celebrating with tears of anger and grief the courage of an elementary school teacher who lost her life trying to protect the children in her care.

But that’s just John’s point.

Being children of Abraham is not sufficient to guarantee righteousness. Being part of a nation that is called and blessed by God is a gift, not a self-fulfilling prophecy of doing the right things. Being part of a blessed society does not mean that it will not take work and discernment and hard decisions in order to do the right things. In fact, doing the right thing may be counter-cultural and go against the grain even in a blessed community, whether it means tax collectors resisting the tyranny of greed and the prevailing culture of corruption; whether it means sharing our food and our resources with those who have too little, rather than keeping what we claim as our own only for ourselves; whether we need to stand against our culture of either denying or criminalizing mental illness, and instead name our demons and help those who suffer; or whether it means giving up political expediency to do the difficult work of addressing our problem of gun addiction; we can find ourselves in John’s exhortations; his advice applies to us.

John lived in a nation called and chosen and blessed by God, which nevertheless had fallen prey to the oppression of the empire and had lost its way within itself. He lived under a king of the Jews, a leader of the chosen people, who could go so wrong, so far away from the paths of righteousness, as to order the killing of innocent children just because he was afraid of a rumour of good news.

We live in a country blessed with a fairly determined tradition of democracy, a pretty decent overall standard of living, judiciously applied laws and civilized expectations, universal education and an interest in the good of the commonwealth. Yet in weeks like this one we are lost and we are bewildered. Christmas carols jangling the supermarket aisles clash with the somber news on the car radio, and every crying child is a symbol of what we have lost.

“A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more.”

There is a time to respect Rachel’s refusal to find consolation. There is a time to sit quietly beside her while she rages and rents her clothes and wails her grief. There is a time to let the good news wait, because for now it can hardly be heard over the loud lamentation, and it will, after all, still be there tomorrow.

John said, “One more powerful than I is coming.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

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Words

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

There are no words for some days;
there are no words to take away
the grimness of the children’s story,
fantastic in its horror, incredible
yet all too real; we reel, we recoil;
there are no words.
Even as we wait on the Word that was
and is and is to come,
the light of the world, the life born in darkness,
even as we wait on the Word,
there are no words.

 

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Broody vipers

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

“John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You broody vipers!” (Luke 3:7 … almost)

broody vipers

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Year C Advent 2: John’s story: to be continued

Posted on December 9, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

The first in a two-part mini sermon series at Church of the Epiphany, Euclid

There is a backstory to today’s gospel. Luke gives us lots of context: who was ruling where, and had been for how long; he gives us a snapshot of the political situation, the state of the temple priesthood, a backdrop of desert scrub and wilderness; but the story itself has got a little shaken up by our lectionary selections; last week, Jesus was preaching at the end of his ministry; this week, John is preparing for it; in a week or two, they will both be back in the womb, awaiting Jesus’ birth at the dead of night on Christmas Eve.

It’s like one of those movies which is edited so that flashbacks compete with foreshadowing, and the present thread of plot slithers through, possible to follow but difficult to grasp and hold onto.

It’s like coming to church and giving out Christmas presents for the Jesse tree before Advent’s half over, and planning Christmas dinners and parties before the candles are lit, and making new year’s resolutions at the beginning of December; and every week, every time we meet we tell the story of Maundy Thursday and the last supper; of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, even in the deep midwinter.

So it’s no surprise, perhaps, that John bursts onto the stage out of order and unkempt, right after his father has sung him a lullaby.

Because that’s what we heard between the first and second lessons today: Zechariah’s song; we sang it as a hymn of praise, the song which Zechariah sang to his newborn son.

So here it is in flashback: the beginning of the story of John, who in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, when Herod was tetrarch in Galilee and his brother Philip in Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch in Abilene, and Pontius Pilate, of whom we will hear much more in the months to come, was governor Judea – this John heard the word of God and had no choice but to share it out loud.

Back in the day, when Herod was king of Judea, there was a priest called Zechariah, who was married to the daughter of a priest, called Elizabeth, and they were good people, and they lived alone together, each other their all, since they had no children. One day, Zechariah was burning incense in the temple, while the multitudes prayed outside, and an angel appeared and told him that he would have a son, called John, and that his son would be the cause of great rejoicing, and would turn many hearts back to God, preparing the people of God for the salvation of God.

Zechariah was taken aback and tried answering back, which despite the angels’ habitual greeting of, “Do not fear,” was apparently not such a good idea. The angel, Gabriel by name, told Zechariah that for his rash words, he would be unable to speak any more until the child was born. Perhaps Gabriel was concerned that Zechariah’s doubt would spoil the surprise gift for everyone else, and wanted to keep him quiet for that reason. At any rate, Zechariah was not able to speak again until after the angel’s promise was fulfilled, and Elizabeth was safely delivered of a son, and his father, following the angel’s instructions this time, because he was nothing if not a quick learner, wrote on a tablet that the child was called John. And just as Gabriel said, his arrival caused quite a stir, and Zechariah, knowing a little more than the rest from their earlier conversation, sang a song inspired by the Holy Spirit, and told him, “Blessed is the Lord our God, for he has visited us and redeemed us, and saved us; he has remembered us, and brought us into his presence. And you, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, to tell the people of his salvation, of the forgiveness of their sins, because God is merciful, and God’s light has dawned upon us and upon all who live in darkness and in the shadow of death; God shall lead us into the ways of peace.”

Scroll forward to the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar. John, the son of Zechariah, is living in the wilderness of Judea when the word of God comes upon him and tells him that it is time, it is time to live into the future that the angel promise, that his father proclaimed, that he would turn the hearts of the people back to God in preparation for the coming of God’s salvation, and he used the words of the prophet Isaiah from centuries gone by, “Prepare the way of the Lord; all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

John bursts onto the stage in today’s gospel, unkempt and out of order; but he has not appeared out of nowhere. His story has been generations in the making; his father’s song casts the foreshadowing all the way back to Abraham; his baptism recalls the Exodus through the Red Sea; he quotes the prophet Isaiah who has apparently been watching a National Geographic documentary about continental drift, valleys being raised up, mountains being laid low, the land shifting through the ages and epochs of the earth. He is located very precisely by Luke in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod and Philip and Lysanius the tetrarchs of their respective provinces, and Anna and Caiaphas high priests in the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem; but his story is timeless; it hovers over time and space, preparing the way for God’s mercy and salvation, preparing creation, preparing the people for their forgiveness and redemption by repentance and baptism in living waters.

It is a story which began with the Spirit of God moving over the waters of the deep, preparing them for creation. It is drawing to a point: it has been for thousands of years, and God is still coming, and we are still waiting, and we do not wait in vain. It is a story which continues in our midst, as we are called to repentance and into our baptismal covenant, to make straight the paths of God, to walk in the ways of peace, to level the playing fields and the make smooth the rough ways which our fellow people are called to walk upon, to respect the dignity of all flesh, in order that we may be ready to see God’s salvation when it comes. The gifts we give at Christmas, the season of giving, mimicking good St Nicolas and his like; those gifts must be backed up by the kind of generosity which knows no season; the kind of charity which will not rest until all people have what they need to live on level ground; which seeks to change the topography of the world so that everyone is led into freedom, so that everyone can know peace, everyone share in health and security, so that everyone can see the light of God’s salvation, instead of living in the shadow of death and the darkness of oppression.

In Advent, we hear the story of John the Baptist as though it were an event long past, but if we listen closely, we hear its echoes still whispering through our own worship, our own prayers, our own times. We are the baptized and the baptizers, and we are the ones called to continue the legacy of John’s story, which began in the mists of time and which continues to call to the people of God, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” Next week, John will have more specific advice for the people; so this story is to be continued. In the meantime, we know that God is coming. We know that Jesus is already here and yet to come. We have a story to tell, and we, like John, are called to tell it, to call the people of God to hear it, to prepare for God’s salvation, even here in the wilderness of suburban Cleveland. For this the church was formed and called and set in motion, from generation to generation, just like John, called to proclaim the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, soon to be born and already with us, Emmanuel.

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John’s backstory

Posted on December 8, 2012 by Rosalind C Hughes

(Sunday sermon spoiler alert!)

There is a backstory to today’s gospel. Luke gives us lots of context: who was ruling where, and had been for how long; he gives us a snapshot of the political situation, the state of the temple priesthood, a backdrop of desert scrub and wilderness; but the story itself has got a little shaken up by our lectionary selections; last week, Jesus was preaching at the end of his ministry; this week, John is preparing for it; in a week or two, they will both be back in the womb, awaiting Jesus’ birth at the dead of night on Christmas Eve.

It’s like one of those movies which is edited so that flashbacks compete with foreshadowing, and the present thread of plot slithers through, possible to follow but difficult to grasp and hold onto.

So here it is in flashback: the beginning of the story of John, who in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar etc., etc., etc.

Back in the day, when Herod was king of Judea, there was a priest called Zechariah, who was married to the daughter of a priest, called Elizabeth, and they were good people, and they lived alone together, each other their all, since they had no children. One day, Zechariah was burning incense in the temple, while the multitudes prayed outside, and an angel appeared and told him that he would have a son, called John, and that his son would be the cause of great rejoicing, and would turn many hearts back to God, preparing the people of God for the salvation of God.

Zechariah was taken aback and tried answering back, which despite the angels’ habitual greeting of, “Do not fear,” was apparently not such a good idea. The angel, Gabriel by name, told Zechariah that for his rash words, he would be unable to speak any more until the child was born. Perhaps Gabriel was concerned that Zechariah’s doubt would spoil the surprise gift for everyone else, and wanted to keep him quiet for that reason. At any rate, Zechariah was not able to speak again until after the angle’s promise was fulfilled, and Elizabeth was safely delivered of a son, and his father, following the angel’s instructions this time, because he was nothing if not a quick learner, wrote on a tablet that the child was called John. And just as Gabriel said, his arrival caused quite a stir, and Zechariah, knowing a little more than the rest from their earlier conversation, sang a song inspired by the Holy Spirit, and told him, “Blessed is the Lord our God, for he has visited us and redeemed us, and saved us; he has remembered us, and brought us into his presence. And you, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, to tell the people of his salvation, of the forgiveness of their sins, because God is merciful, and God’s light has dawned upon us and upon all who live in darkness and in the shadow of death; God shall lead us into the ways of peace.”

“And the child grew and became strong in the spirit, and he was in the wilderness till the day of his manifestation to Israel” (Luke 1:80)

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