Advent 2, Year C | Luke 1:68-79
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
December 5, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
“You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High,
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way.” – Luke 1:76[1]
One summer back in the early 2000’s I spent a month or so with a mission group working in Meru, a city several hours outside of Nairobi in the mountains of Kenya. According to the people I was staying with, that particular area had an average temperature change of only 20 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit in the course of an entire year. One day as we were driving to an outlying village, I saw a group of people repairing a road. A dozen or more of them were squatting on the ground chipping apart blocks of gray rock by hand. Even the best paved streets and highways of the area were pretty rough, and locals had told me that they had to replace them every two to three years due to washouts and poor quality. I remember thinking, “Back in Wisconsin we sometimes have 30 degree temperature swings in one day. If they had the machinery to build roads like we have there, you’d never need to fix these. They would last forever.”
Accurate assessment or not (probably not), that memory has come back to me frequently since moving here to Las Cruces, where 40 and even 50 degree swings seem to be common this time of year.
I later learned another layer to the story of the road repairs that went beyond simple weather issues or construction technology. Because it was a significant regional hub, important politicians liked to visit Meru. However, because of its inconvenient location, they came only once every two to three years, and those visits always just happened to coincide with a rush to complete road replacements or repairs—nobody I talked to was sure whether that was because local officials were trying to impress their political superiors or because the more important politicians were trying to drum up votes by fulfilling infrastructure promises. But for a few weeks around the time of the VIP’s arrival, everything looked and worked great—no potholes or buckles anywhere in sight. Unfortunately, after a couple months—sometimes even just weeks—it would all start falling apart again and continue to degrade until the next campaign cycle.
Each Advent, the Lectionary gives us a week or two of readings involving John the Baptist. John is considered the Forerunner of Christ, and the New Testament clearly positions him as fulfilling a prophecy from Isaiah chapter 40. Several of the Apostles were his followers before Jesus eventually called them away. Yet despite his significance among the earliest Christians, many of us today don’t really know a whole lot about him, much less his mother Elizabeth and father Zechariah, whose canticle we read today instead of our usual Psalm.
John came from an important Levitical line. Back during the Exodus, Moses had assigned the Levite tribe to work in the Temple,[2] but only a small number were priests. Zechariah happened to be born into that family tree. Luke further enhances John’s pedigree by telling us that Elizabeth was a descendant of Aaron, Israel’s original high priest. The couple was childless until late in life, when an angel appeared to Zechariah while he was offering incense in the Temple. Luke tells us that because he wouldn’t accept the angel’s message, he lost his ability to speak until John was born, when he burst out with what we know as the Song of Zechariah.
If you’ve ever practiced Morning Prayer, that particular canticle comes up frequently, but it’s always felt a little bit staid or formal to me. However, one of my seminary classmates recently had their first child, and his enthusiasm about the baby has been flooding my Facebook feed. When I was looking over Zechariah’s song this week, photos of my friend and his wife thrilling over their infant run through my mind. I can hear the excitement in their voices and the hope echoing along with it, which has given a real sense of life and immediacy to Zechariah’s words. This birth was a big deal: everyone was expecting John would herald the dawning of a metaphorical new world.
So I wonder what Elizabeth and Zechariah thought when their son marched off to become a literal “voice crying in the wilderness.” With such a strange and auspicious birth, I’m sure his family had outsized expectations for him—how he would rise in significance at the Temple, becoming a leading priest and guiding Israel into a new era. And the way our Gospel reading begins with a list of the region’s political and religious authorities, I wonder if Luke wasn’t trying to set us up with the same expectations. Having the Forerunner suddenly abandon a ready-made road to influence, fame, and power must have surprised—and likely disappointed—everyone around John. And I wonder how hard it was for him to step away from that predetermined path of respect, comfort, and privilege to take on a job less like a Forerunner for the Messiah and more like a foreman for metaphysical construction work, overseeing repair to the seldom-traveled and long overgrown Way of the Lord.
Last week we talked about how Advent is a time of external preparation when we struggle to set the whole world in order for the arrival of the coming King. We essentially join John in the daily labor of bridging chasms, filling potholes, and regrading foundations as we work to repair this Royal Road. After all, in order to make way for the King, we need a decent way for the King to come! But as we bury ourselves in the necessary work of squatting along the roadside chipping apart rocks, it’s easy to miss the implications our first reading this morning points out regarding Isaiah’s words.
It turns out all this work isn’t necessarily for the benefit of the King. We tend to assume the intention is to make things look good so we can impress the powerful figures who might pass through every few years, but the “way of the Lord” wasn’t really designed for the convenience of the powerful or important. After all, mountains and valleys aren’t obstacles for God. Crooked paths and rough roads won’t really inconvenience Deity. God isn’t interested in this route receiving the superficial repairs we’re prone to provide. The Way of the Lord—the Way of Love—is intended not to make things easy for the great but to free the masses to travel.
While we may have started our preparation this season thinking we need to ready the world around us for the Great King’s arrival, that isn’t necessarily why God wants us to join in making the path as simple and smooth as possible. The highway is to be broadened and repaved so all of God’s people might have equal access to the Kingdom.
Two thousands years later many still respond to the echo of John’s call, spreading his word and joining in the work of preparing for the King’s arrival. We do what we can to improve the highway, to patch its potholes and upgrade the pavement, trying to make it as easy to pass as is possible. But the Royal Road was never supposed to be a restricted lane where the only the rich or powerful might pass. Nor was it meant to be one-way a loop where the King might occasionally deign to grace us commoners with his presence. The Royal Road we tend and widen and repair is a highway built for all of God’s people—all of God’s children—to travel freely. We smooth the rough places and straighten the route not simply so God might come to us but so we and those around us might more easily follow the path to God.
“You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High,
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Tabernacle, during Israel’s earliest era