December 5, 2010 - 2nd Sunday of Advent

Jesus Finds a Way
Matthew 3:1-12
Advent 2 – December 5, 2010

One of my favorite books from when I was a kid was The Monster at the End of this Book, starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover. It's a fun book – Grover talks to you the whole way through. You open it up to the 1st page, and Grover, it seems, has seen the title. And poor old Grover is in a panic – because there's a monster at the end of this book, and there's no way that Grover wants to meet that monster. So he spends the whole book trying to convince you, the reader, not to keep going. He pleads, he cajoles, and when that doesn't work, Grover tries to keep you from getting to the end of the book by setting up obstacles: he ties the pages together, he builds a brick wall – hoping you won't be strong enough to turn the pages, because every page brings the end of the book nearer, and there is a monster at the end of this book!

We come to this second Sunday of Advent, and as we always do (there's a pattern to these Sundays of Advent every year) – we hear John the Baptizer out in the wilderness, crying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near!... Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” But we're a lot like Grover. Because when we hear what John has to say to the Pharisees and Sadducees, how the one who is coming after John the Baptizer will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire, how he comes with a winnowing fork in his hand to clear the threshing floor and burn the chaff with unquenchable fire, we get nervous. We get afraid. We get anxious. Like Grover, we're pretty sure we don't want to meet what waits for us as the end of this book. So we hear the call to prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight, but instead, we set up obstacles & road blocks. Instead of clearing the way so that Jesus can come to us more quickly, we do whatever we can to slow him down. It reminds me of this past spring, when Andy & I were driving around Oceanside after that big wind and rain storm. You remember that – the one that knocked out the power and blew down trees and made a big mess. We were there a day or 2 after the storm, doing some errands, and for whatever reason, we thought it would be easier or faster to go down side streets, rather than fighting traffic on Long Beach Road – but every way we wanted to go was blocked off. We wanted to turn right – we had to turn left. We wanted to go straight, we had to turn. All because of downed trees and barricades. No one had prepared a way for us; our paths were not straight – and it took us forever to get where we were going.

And I was wondering how often we do that to Jesus, however unintentionally. We fill our lives with the roadblocks of busy-ness, detours for distractions, sinkholes of sin. The closer Jesus gets to the monster at end of this book, the more we try to stop him, afraid we will be destroyed by what he finds there.

It's hard for us to face ourselves a lot of the time, to admit where we have gone astray, to confess our sins in the presence of God and of one another. It's not something we do very often, if at all. Sure, we do the confession of sins ever week at the beginning of worship. But it's a pretty generic thing - “Most merciful God, we confess that we are captive to sin, and cannot free ourselves. We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed; by what we have done, and by what we have left undone... (ELW)” And it's good to confess together – but we never really put any specific sins into words – we don't name particular thoughts, words, or deeds. We don't confess exactly what it is that we have done or left undone, at least not out loud, not so anyone else can hear. I was trying to imagine what that scene in the river would have looked like – if the crowds coming to confess got to whisper their sins for John's hearing alone, or if they had to stand there in the river and name their sins for all to hear. Either way, it's a scary thought – because to name them out loud makes it more real. It forces us to take responsibility, to consider what it would really look like to actually repent, to change our lives, to let Jesus go ahead and separate the wheat from the chaff of our lives.

Confessing our sins is never easy. Repenting and preparing the way of the Lord go hand in hand, and so it's no wonder that we set up roadblocks. As hard as that can be, as frightened as we are about what we'll find at the end of our book, no matter how hard we try to keep Jesus away, the good news is that Jesus always finds a way to get to us. Nothing we do can keep him from coming to us – not to burn us up, but to save us from ourselves, to transform us. The Message translation of the Bible puts it this way: The main character in this drama—compared to him I'm a mere stagehand—will ignite the kingdom life within you, a fire within you, the Holy Spirit within you, changing you from the inside out. He's going to clean house—make a clean sweep of your lives.”

That's what Jesus comes to do – to give us kingdom life, to stir up the Holy Spirit. And what a relief when he does, when we remember the water of our baptism pouring over us, cleaning us, washing our sins away, bringing new life within us, a fresh start, a chance to begin again - so that we don't have to be afraid of what the end of the book holds. Because at the end of the story, there is only Jesus, and he comes to set us free. Thanks be to God. Amen.