Prepare ye

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN,

and St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8^th, 2024

SECOND SUNDAY OF ADVENT

 

READINGS

 Philippians 1: 3-11

For the Psalm, Luke 1: 68-79

Luke 3: 1-6

 

Luke constructed his telling of the Jesus story carefully. He wanted to ensure that his listeners knew that Jesus stood in the prophetic tradition of the Hebrews, while simultaneously representing a new, a unique incursion of God into human and cosmic history. Luke’s time scale is less universal than John’s and Mark’s brilliantly ambiguous references to beginnings.

Luke uses a more subtle literary, oratorical device. He addresses his Jesus account, as well as Acts, his account of the miraculous spread of the gospel across the Roman Empire, to a figure named Theophilus. Nothing is known of Theophilus, and I subscribe to a school of thought that suggests he never existed. Luke is giving an air of solemnity by referring to a weighty, socially important recipient of his letter, designed to encourage the listeners that the account is carefully crafted, and the story is reverberating in august circles.

By this he intended to – and succeeded in – giving gravitas to his story, first of Jesus and then of the work of the Spirit, in pushing the history-shattering good news through time and space. But he plays with us – not for the sake of cleverness, but to remind us that the Jesus story transcends time and space.

To return to my much-favoured phrase from Dr. Who, his air of authenticity, anchoring the story in “the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor,” is “timey wimey.” Our time scheme, our BC/AD, “before and after Christ,” that has more recently become BCE/CE, “before or after the common era,” didn’t exist until the sixth century. Luke uses a time scheme that anchors time in relation to the rulers of the Empire.

Using that scheme we would, I think be in the third year of King Charles. Or perhaps the second year of Christopher Luxon.

But it’s less straightforward even than that. Luke uses different and contradictory anchor points for time: as if he wrote “in the 73^rd year of Queen Elizabeth and the fourth year of Christopher Luxon.” That combination does not exist.

John the Baptist appeared in time, yet out of and beyond time, and Luke wants us to know that. It is as if Luke deliberately said we need  to know that the salvation that John was proclaiming, that Jesus brought, is not limited to a select and rarified group but to all who will hear the good news. He pretends he is proclaiming to Theophilus but knows he is proclaiming that news throughout populations and space and time.

News of new truth, new beginnings, new certainties in the hands of the one who will soon receive baptism at the hands of the prickly prophet.

Why does this matter? It matters because Luke was at pains to explain that the ramifications of his message reached far beyond the limitations that the followers of Jesus were wanting to set. That God is a God who moves beyond, outside and around our expectations. It was as if Luke knew, by experience, the ways in which as followers of Jesus would barricade his truths, reconstruct them in images that were more suited to our ideas and prejudices. He did. His people had always erred, and so have we, for we too are Luke’s people, Jesus-people.

He then goes on, largely in Jesus’ own words, to tell the story of the one who breaks our expectations of God. As these next months go on we will journey with Jesus’ mould-breaking teachings, but in the meantime Luke is simply teaching to be alert, ready and willing to have our eyes and ears opened in unexpected ways.

The implications for us are, as individuals, as parish, as diocese, are the same. We are called to be Jesus-followers in many ways that will be unfamiliar to us. Much that we have loved is being dismantled – our infrastructure, our music (as we see today), our place not being the place that we once had in society.

Luke, as he tells the story of Jesus, holds dear the words of the prophet, centuries before: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”