You sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation.
The messengers. Prophets of old. Speak to us across the centuries. Malachi tells us that God is sending messengers to help prepare the way of the Lord.
They are sent by God to help prepare the way of love. The way of hope. The way of redemption from the sins that hold us back, that break our relationship with God and with one another. These prophets invite us into repentance for not following the way that God has given to us.
And by inviting, I mean they holler at us. They break through our barriers, convention, all that settles us into the status quo, that we like. We encounter John the Baptist in the Gospel of Luke.
Every Advent our Gospel readings center on this strange, austere, humorless character John the Baptist. The John of the Gospel is no one’s idea of Christmas joy: subsisting on locusts and wild honey, clad in camel hair, haunting a wild river bank. In the larger culture, he has become a non figure, forgotten, in our rush to Christmas. If it were not for churches and our readings on these Sundays in Advent, we would forget him entirely too.
In one way, John did his job as the forerunner, he announced the messiah, he gave a baptism of repentance and he stepped out of the way… he followed his calling and it eventually led to his death at the hands of King Herod.
The spirit set him on fire for his work and he did it. Advent is a reminder that although his work was finished, ours is not. We are called to repentance in our lives today, to forsake our sins and what leads us away from God, and to prepare for God by following the way of love in our lives.
300 years after John the Baptist, in a small corner of what today we call Turkey, Nicholas, Bishop of Myra ministered to his people, preparing the ground there. “Saint Nicholas, through his miracles and wonder-working, symbolizes all that is good in giving and in learning how to receive” but he also embodies the spirit that also lived in John the Baptist & he too would be imprisoned for a time for his work. (Rosenthal)
Naomi Starkey, in her book Pilgrims to the Manger says, “Saint Nicholas is remembered now because of the generous spirit he embodied, but, rather than simply linking him with seasonal giving, we can reflect on him as an example of one so devoted to serving God that the Spirit coursed through his life unchecked, touching with grace all those he encountered.”
The spirit of God set him on fire; coursed through his life unchecked, touching with grace all those he encountered. Nicholas followed the path that John the Baptist helped make smooth, preparing the way for our Lord. We in our own time are called to live in such a way…
Tomorrow, on December 10, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded in Oslo, Norway. The recipients are not world leaders or internationally recognized authorities in law or economics or science or philanthropy. The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize will be shared by a 63-year-old physician working in Africa and a 25-year-old survivor of sexual violence.
Dr. Denis Mukwege is gynecologist who has seen the damage from Congo’s brutal civil war play out in the bodies of women. In 1999, he opened a hospital that specializes in treating the victims of sexual violence and rape: the Panzai Hospital treats thousands of women each year. More than five million have been killed in the Congo, where militia groups frequently target civilians. At the risk of his life and that of his family, Dr. Mukwege continues to operate his struggling hospital, with little electricity and never enough medical supplies, and campaigns relentlessly to call attention to the plight of his innocent patients. Dr. Mukwege was in the operating room when he was told that he won the Nobel.
When the Islamic State overran her homeland in Northern Iraq in 2014, Nadia Murad was abducted along with thousands of other women and girls from the Yazidi minority. Nadia Murad was sold into sexual slavery. She managed to escape — but rather than remain silent and anonymous as her culture dictates, Ms. Murad has openly and courageously told her story, calling the world to act on behalf of millions of women and girls who have been sexually brutalized by war. She has spoken before the United Nations Security Council, the British Parliament, and the U.S. House of Representatives — but while other Iraqi survivors testified before the same bodies with faces covered so as not to be identified on television, Nadia Murad insisted on showing her face. She is considered an icon in the villages of her homeland. She finds her work of public activism exhausting but “I will go back to my life when women in captivity go back to their lives, when my community has a place, when I see people accountable for their crimes.” As she writes in her autobiography The Last Girl, “I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine.”
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize casts a spotlight on two regions in the world where women have paid a devastating price for years of armed conflict. In their courage and perseverance, Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege are nothing less than prophets in the spirit of the great prophets of Scripture, in the spirit of John the Baptist’s heralding of the Christ, in the miracles and hope of St. Nicholas, in the spirit of the prophets of our own time who have given their lives for the sake of what is right and just.
In Baptism, God has called all of us to be his prophets: to proclaim repentance and reconciliation here and now, to prepare the way of love along our own Jordan Rivers. We are his messengers now, and as one pastor reminds us:
Someone you may not have noticed is waiting,
longing for healing, for justice, for hope.
You only mean to be passing by,
but they see you.
And even if they don't know what they are asking,
they are asking.
“Are you the one?”
Are you the messenger to bring hope,
to be a light in the darkness.
Helping prepare the way.
There may be someone in some kind of prison
looking for some kind of encouragement,
someone longing for healing or appreciation or forgiveness.
Will you be the one, or should they wait for another?
There may be people of color who see a white person
and assume racism, until they see otherwise.
There may be a non-conforming person
who assumes you will judge them
unless you clearly don't.
Will you be the one to shine light in their darkness,
or are they to wait for another?
Sit still in the grace of God.
Let the light that is dawning for the world
dawn in you.
Let that light grow and radiate.
Bear it with you through the day.
You will meet someone who seeks grace,
who longs for a sign of hope.
And for them
you will be the one.
(adapted from Steve Garnaas-Holmes)
May we be like the prophets of old, sitting in the grace of God, letting that light grow, that we may be so devoted to serving God that the Spirit courses through our lives, touching with grace all those we will encounter. May we be the one. Amen.
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