How many of you remember the movie "The Homecoming"? It was a made for TV movie that was the prototype for the series, The Waltons, though with a largely different cast. The story is about a depression era rural family. The father has gone away to find work but he has promised his family he will be home Christmas eve. The day comes when the family are expecting him home. It is snowy and the family wait expectantly to see if he will make it safely. He is late in arriving and the family fear the worst. But he makes it, and in spite of their poverty, they celebrate Christmas as a united family.
Advent is in some ways about a homecoming. It's not Jesus' homecoming, though we wait in anticipation for the arrival of . . .
How many of you remember the movie The Homecoming?1 It was a made for TV movie that was the prototype for the series, The Waltons, though with a largely different cast. The story is about a depression era rural family. The father has gone away to find work but he has promised his family he will be home Christmas eve. The day comes when the family are expecting him home. It is snowy and the family wait expectantly to see if he will make it safely. He is late in arriving and the family fear the worst. But he makes it, and in spite of their poverty, they celebrate Christmas as a united family.
Advent is in some ways about a homecoming. It's not Jesus' homecoming, though we wait in anticipation for the arrival of the Promise of God. The promise is our homecoming, and this is what John is preaching.
We read John quoting the prophet Isaiah:
As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, "The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God."
The passage from Isaiah was the word of God to the Jewish exiles in Babylon. It meant that their time of exile was ending and God was coming to bring them home. What is interesting about this is the route God promised to take. He promised to come the shortest route through the wilderness where no one traveled. The normal highway from Babylon to Jerusalem did not go directly west. The highway went some distance north first then bent to the west and then due south, following the fertile crescent. What God is saying is that this highway is coming straight through the wilderness. God isn't taking the long and scenic route--He is coming directly and immediately.
What John is saying is "get ready. God is coming again. He is not coming through indirect means, but directly and immediately."
God is coming to take home any who are ready and willing, so prepare yourself.
Get ready to move on in life.
The time is now.
The word that came to Isaiah was to the children and grandchildren of those taken from Judah to Babylon. These were people who for the most part had no first hand knowledge at all of Jerusalem. They heard what their parents and grandparents had told them. So they are going to a place that had been placed in their mind, their heart and their imagination. Just like for years before the modern state of Israel, a Jewish benediction was "next year in Jerusalem".
Isaiah's prophecy is startling. The road home leads right through the wilderness. Not the roundabout way through the normal trade caravans. God is coming directly.
When Jesus was born into the world, it was a time of great political instability. The taxation by Caesar Augustus was unusual. Herod the Great's time was nearly over and there were many factions jostling for power in Judea. Jewish nationalists ultimately so destabilized the country that Rome stepped in and destroyed Jerusalem and deported many of the population in 70 AD.
This census was not just inconvenient, it was the first heavy hand of a despotic regime in a turbulent and unruly nation.
It is against the backdrop of imminent trouble that Jesus is born.
Christmas isn't just for kids
Christmas and Advent are supposed to be a time of celebration. Our culture has turned it especially into a time for kids.
But Christmas isn't just for kids.
It is especially good news for anyone whose world is topsy turvy.
It is especially good news for anyone who feels that they have run out of hope.
One of the dominant themes at Advent and Christmas of course is the Christ child. Our nativity pageants put the baby Jesus at center stage surrounded by the cast of supporting characters. Fair enough.
But we make a mistake I think, when we see Christmas as the glorification of innocence.
The child is innocent, but that is not primarily what Advent is about.
Jesus coming into the world is not to give us a new icon of innocence and purity, though he is both.
He comes into the world to lead us out of despair and grief and guilt.
He comes into the world to give us hope in troubled times.
He comes into the world to lay down his life and to take upon himself the collective guilt of the race.
This is not the triumph of innocence.
It is the triumph of redemption.
One of my favorite poets is the seventeenth century English poet William Blake.
Blake has a set of poems called Songs of Innocence and Songs of experience.
Here is The Lamb from songs of innocence.2
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee!
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
This is the Jesus of Away in a Manger. .....little lord Jesus, no crying he makes...
I love that carol, but it is a carol of innocence. It has its place, but it is not the focus of the incarnation.
The Advent of Jesus was for the people in Blake's Songs of experience. Here is Holy Thursday:
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine.
And their fields are bleak & bare.
And their ways are fill'd with thorns.
It is eternal winter there. 3
It is eternal winter there. I am sure that is what C.S. Lewis had in mind in the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe4 when just before the return of Aslan the Lion, Narnia is a land where it is forever winter and never Christmas.
This is the land of Judah where Rome is poised to strike at the least sign of rebellion; where the teachers of the law bind their heavy demands on the backs of the poor and downtrodden; where the priests and levites in Jesus parable would pass by on the other side and leave it to a Samaritan to care for a hurt and wounded man.
This is the world into which Jesus is born.
It is a world like ours.
In a scene of The Homecoming, one of the children; Elizabeth I think, receives a doll from a charitable mission for her Bible memorization. The doll's face and head are broken and Elizabeth sobs, "It's dead!"
And so John proclaims his message. Make a straight path. God is coming through this wilderness of eternal winter, of uncaring religious expression, of cruelty and of sorrow. He is not going around it. He is coming straight through it.
Jesus does not bypass the suffering of our world. He comes straight through it
He came straight through a stable to a town called Nazareth. He came straight through Galilee it to the cross and straight through that to a tomb and straight through that to you and to me.
He leads us straight through our wilderness to a city, whose builder and maker is God.
This is the meaning of Advent.
Get ready, Jesus is coming.
Jesus is coming to lead us out onto the road in the wilderness.
This road leads home.
Let us pray:
Father we thank you for sending us Jesus, who came through our wilderness to lead us to the road back home to you.
Harold McNabb
West Shore Presbyterian Church
Victoria, British Columbia
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Notes:
1 The Homecoming, based on the work of writer Earl Hamner,
2. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, Blake Digital Text Project, including an online edition and concordance of David V. Erdman's Complete Poetry and Prose, by Nelson Hilton at the University of Georgia
3.Ibid.
4. C. S. Lewis, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Harper Collins, 2002
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Sources consulted:
Norval Geldenhuys, The Gospel of Luke, The New International Commentary on the New Testament, Eerdmans, 1977
Malcolm Tolbert, Luke, The Broadman Bible Commentary, Vol. 9, Broadman Press, 1970
Esermons.com
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