Scripture: Luke 1:5-20
I sat down last Monday to read the first two chapters of Luke’s gospel. This was the week I had scheduled myself to preach on the Christmas story as it appears in Luke, having already talked about Mark and Matthew and planning to talk about John next week. So I sat down last Monday morning to read Luke, knowing pretty much what was there, having read it a few times before, but trying to stay open to what I might discover or what might attract my attention.
The gospel of Luke is the one that has many of the parts of the story that we are most familiar and many of the passages that are read at this time of year.
There is the passage referred to as the annunciation, where Mary gets a visit from an angel who tells her that she is to be the mother of the messiah.
There is Mary’s visit with her cousin or kinswoman, Elizabeth, who has also been visited with news of her unexpected pregnancy, and Mary’ words, which have come to be known as the Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…”
There is Zechariah’s speech after his wife Elizabeth has given birth to John who will be known as John the Baptist, Zechariah’s speech known as the “benedictus”: “Blessed be the God of Israel, for God has looked favorably on God’s people and redeemed them…”
There is, of course, the story of the birth itself: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus…” and the trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem, the no room in the inn, the baby in swaddling cloths lying in a feeding trough, a manger, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace”, shepherds in the field keeping watch over their flocks by night receiving their own visit from an angel, led to the stable where the baby had been born.
And there is the story of the news reaching two Jewish elders, Anna and Simeon, who says the words known as the “nunc dimittis”, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to your word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. So much of what has traditionally been part of the Christmas story is in the gospel of Luke.
In my reading, I didn’t really get to any of it, not right away. Before I got to any of the familiar parts, I got waylaid at chapter 1, verse 17, much as I had been waylaid by the verse in Matthew about how Joseph and Mary were to name their child Jesus, because he will save the people from their sins.
There is a story early on in Luke about an angel paying a visit to Zechariah, telling him that his wife, Elizabeth, is going to have a child who will be seen as “great” by many people and who will have a role to play in the coming of the messiah. In the course of the angel bringing this news to Zechariah, the angel says: “In the spirit and power of Elijah, he will go before him to turn the hearts of parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”
That’s where I had to stop. Hmm…”prepared”, I thought. “Prepared for the Lord”. That’s an interesting concept, and although Advent is often thought of as a time of preparation and I know I’ve used that language often myself, I’m not sure I know what it means. I sort of know what it means to be prepared, say, to give a sermon on Sunday morning. I’m not sure I know what it means to be “prepared for the Lord”. In fact as I thought about it, the more I thought about it, the more the tone of voice I was using to talk to myself changed. At first it was “hmm…prepared…for the coming of the Lord…I wonder what that means.” Then gradually it was “hmm…prepared…prepared? For God? What could that possibly mean? Prepared??? You got to be kidding!! There’s no way people can be prepared for God.” So before I even got to all the other parts of Luke’s account, I got stuck here on this business of being prepared.
What first flashed through my mind—and I know these are birth stories, stories about the birth of John the Baptist and Jesus and that is what the angel was talking about being prepared for—but what immediately flashed through my mind were experiences at times of death and how so often we are not prepared, even when we thought maybe we would be.
I’ve been around death quite a bit. I’ve lost people I loved and I’ve been around church members and friends when they’ve lost people they loved. Sometimes people have said to me referring to the death of someone close, “she was ready, I was ready.” Much more often though, people have said to me, even in a situation where death may have been expected, even in a situation where death may have been merciful, even though a person may have thought he was ready and even actually been in many ways ready, people will say, “I wasn’t prepared. I guess you can’t really be prepared for something like this.” And I agree. It rings true to my own experience. It seems to be the common experience of many people. The death of someone who has been a part of you is never, or almost never, something you can be prepared for, not really, not in the ways that matter most. We can’t know ahead of time or be prepared for the various feelings that may come flooding in on us or be prepared for how we will be affected over time. There are some things we can anticipate and be on the lookout for. We can never really be prepared. That’s one kind of thought I had when I read that the angel told Zechariah that this son of his would “make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” Not really a connected thought, maybe, but not entirely disconnected either.
When a person dies who has lived inside you and you have lived inside them, when a person dies who you have been deeply connected to, things change in ways we can’t really be prepared for. When a birth occurs, when someone new comes into your life who will live inside you and you inside them, things change in ways we can’t really be prepared for. We can do our best, and we can know intellectually that things will be different, but we don’t know ahead of time how deeply different or in what ways different because all of that unfolds over time. It is not predictable, knowable ahead of time, preparable. All of that is true just on a human level. Death and birth are events too profound for us to think we can be truly prepared. Any kind of dying we do, any kind of loss we experience, any kind of birth that takes place within us, if such things are profound experiences that happen to us and in us, we will not be prepared for them. That’s almost by definition. If it is something that we can be prepared for, it probably isn’t all that important. The most important part of anything we do, is the part we can’t really prepare for.
Now tell me I’m about to meet up with God, tell me that God is going to become not just some word, some concept that I can comfortably believe in or not so comfortably half believe in but who is actually going to touch me in some way that will change me, tell me that God is going to come into my life in some very real, very powerful way—and you want me to be prepared? I don’t think so. I’m sorry if it sounds a little bit like I’m arguing with the scripture here; I guess maybe I am. But I feel like the only way I could prepare myself for such an encounter is to know, to practice knowing, that whenever this happens, however this happens, I won’t be prepared. I figure if I meet the messiah and I feel like I have been prepared to meet the messiah, I better pay no attention to that fella ‘cause he ain’t the real thing. I’m not even so sure we want to meet up with God, we humans. Too much uncertainty, too much unpredictability, too much possibility that we might lose control. No, if God were to be sent into my life in some extraordinary, improbable way, I wouldn’t be prepared.
So, to treat the scripture the way I understand our Sunday school children are encouraged to respond to the Bible: I wonder what that angel meant, talking to Zechariah about making ready a people prepared for the Lord. That angel surely knew better. I don’t have an answer I have any confidence in as far as what the angel meant, but I do have a thought.
My thought has to do with the word disobedience which you may recall appears in that verse also. “With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him to turn the hearts of parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” Frankly, the idea of obedience and disobedience is also one I stumble over. But I think the reason I do is because those words are associated in my mind with the image of a God who commands from on high, expects our obedience and threatens punishment for our disobedience—a God who, shall we say, I have found it difficult to get close to.
But what if God is not so much all about power but is all about love. What if Jesus was sent to us from the heart not of the omnipotent God but from the heart of God whose very essence is love. I know that Handel’s Messiah sings that the Lord God omnipotent reigneth, and I know that we humans seem to want to think, or think we want to think of God as powerful otherwise God wouldn’t be God, but it is hard for me to see Jesus as coming from the heart of that kind of God. One way to summarize the message of the Christmas story is to say that contrary to popular opinion God is not so much a God of power, but a God of love, not one who commands and threatens but one who comes among us unprotected and vulnerable.
Perhaps that is what the angel called the wisdom of the righteous, that God is after all not synonymous with power but is synonymous with love and being obedient means living in harmony with that holy spirit of love. It gives a whole new flavor to the idea of disobedience and obedience, it does for me, if what we are being obedient to is not this all powerful God who commands obedience but this all loving God who doesn’t want our obedience, or our devotion or adoration or even our love, who maybe doesn’t want our focus even to be on God so much, but who redirects our focus to one another, whose desire is our love for each other.
And in terms of preparation…well it may be that it is not when we think we are preparing, not when we are consciously preparing for God in some way, not when we are trying so hard to be ready for God, it may be when we have forgotten about all that and are simply going about the business of loving each other the best way we know how, however imperfect that may be, it may be that when we are doing our very human, very fallible best to love each other that we will someday find that we have been trying to become a people prepared. In any case, I believe it is in the end the only way of preparing we really have. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 16, 2007