Word's Out
Text: Luke 3:1-6
For list-lovers, ‘tis the season to be jolly. And, ole Luke is definitely a list-lover. Mark and John aren’t so much list-lovers. Matthew is and well, Luke, he can’t seem to tell a single story without one. His love of lists begins with the first verses of his Gospel: “In the days of King Herod of Judaea there lived a priest called Zechariah who belonged to the Abijah section of the priesthood, and he had a wife, Elizabeth by name, who was a descendant of Aaron.”
I have never lived in a land that loves lists more than the DC area. In DC, the list is often not a list of names, but a list of acronyms. A typical D.C. conversation goes something like this: “Oh yes, you know him; he is the assistant secretary of the FHA working for EMB who was appointed by JB only a week after being in the W.H.” If you’re in the know, you can track the shorthand acronymic conversation without a second thought. If not, you scratch your head and wonder what language is being spoken.
If you listen carefully to Luke’s list not of acronyms but of names, you will hear his deep Southern accent. For in the South, introductions with a list of relationships, by naming who belongs to whom. The late Clarence Jordan captured Luke’s Southern accent well in his colloquial paraphrase: “Now during the fifteenth year of Tiberius as President, while Pontius Pilate was mayor of Atlanta, and Herod was governor of Georgia, his brother Philip being governor of Alabama, and Lysanias still holding out over Mississippi; while Annas and Caiaphas were co-presidents of the Southern Baptist Convention, the word of God came to Zack’s boy, John, down on the farm. And he went all around in the rural areas preaching a dipping in water – a symbol of a changed way of life as the basis for getting things straightened out” (modified from Clarence Jordan’s, The Cotton Patch Version of Luke and Acts).
Southern or not, Luke loved lists of names and he could drop a name with the best of them. After dropping a long list of names of the most powerful political and religious leaders in the land, though, Luke never says one more word about them. Instead, he focuses on the most unlikely name on his list: “the word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah, in the desert.”
Notice that the word of God does not arrive at Herod’s doorstep or on Pilate’s portico or even in the inner sanctum of the Jerusalem temple while the high priest, Caiaphas is saying his Shabbat prayers. The word of God arrives to a no-name, desert rat, a person not on anybody’s list of names of the rich and powerful, a person who was not even a footnote on the Jerusalem society’s page of who’s who.
“The word of God came to John,” says Luke. John has nothing about him that speaks of greatness or of worthiness to entertain such a divine visitor. And yet, “the word of God came to John.”
Up to this point in the story, we know next to nothing about John except that for some reason the word of God comes to him. And, once the “Word’s Out” and inside John, John does not sit quietly in his favorite garden spot and meditate on his good fortune. With God’s word at work inside him, John does not pursue a silent retreat in a deserted spot. No, with God’s voice echoing inside him, John can’t sit still and won’t keep quiet.
The rich and famous in Palestine must have rued the day that the word of God came to John, because John didn’t dance around Judea sprinkling holy water on Roman political policies that stomped on justice and ignored mercy and considered compassion as a sign of weakness. John told anyone who would give him a hearing that the Word’s out and that means things are going to change inside them and in the world.
The word that arrives in a fury to no-name John will arrive just a few months later screaming out of Mary’s womb, screaming in halls of power, screaming in houses of worship. This Word made Flesh will not arrive to bless the way things are. No, once the “Word’s Out” says Luke, ready or not, change happens.
In her typical untamed tongue, the late British playwright and scholar, Dorothy Sayers warned anyone rushing about getting prepared during Advent. She warns us to take a second look at the One for whom we are preparing. Sayers writes: “He is one who . . . insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites. He referred to King Herod as ‘that fox’; he went to parties in disreputable company, he was a friend of publicans and sinners; he assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the temple; he drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations; . . . he showed no proper defense for wealth or social position . . . He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either” (Dorothy Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church, pp. 4-5).
God bless the sharp and revealing tongue of Dorothy Sayers. After more than four decades of pastoral ministry, I am so tired of hearing fellow Christians speak about a boring God, a God who would never push us to reconsider our own prejudices, who would never dare hurt our feelings or ask us to inconvenience ourselves for the sake of someone who needs us. The God of popular Christianity today certainly is not a God who expects much of us but who is like our religious Santa waiting for our list of expectations.
I am weary to the bone of Christian talk about the coming of a dull God who just wants you and me not to stir the water, a timid God who will give me a gentle nudge when I am heading in the wrong direction, but will never shake me to the core and set my feet in a new direction, a tepid God who cares about so little and is quite content for us to care about even less.
As the first and second Advent candles now burns, if they burn as a symbol of a dull, tepid, and boring God then, for God’s sake, would someone come up here and blow them out. Fortunately, thanks to Luke, these candles still burn because Luke does not write about the coming of a dull, tepid, and boring God. Luke tells a far more fascinating story, a story that reminds us that the “Word’s Out” and when the “Word’s Out” the world will never be the same and neither will we.
Writing from the Tegel prison in 1943, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this to his fiancé, Maria about what happens when the “Word’s Out”:
Be brave for my sake, dearest Maria, even if this letter is your only token of love from me this Christmas-tide. We shall both experience a few dark hours…and be assailed by the question of why, over and above the darkness already enshrouding humanity, we should be subjected to the bitter anguish of separation whose purpose we fail to understand…
And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong…Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment . . . Whatever people may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as Love and rules the world and rules our lives.
God comes into the very midst of evil and of death, and judges the evil in us and in the world. And by judging us, God cleanses and sanctifies us, comes to us with grace and love . . . God is with us. We are no longer homeless; a bit of the eternal home itself has moved unto us.
Perhaps Advent then is mostly about bracing ourselves to hear a desert rat cry above all the castles and empires, above all the seductive words luring us to sanctify selfishness and to never gaze far from home. Advent is about listening to the least likely one in Palestine announce that the “Word’s Out,” love will prevail no matter how hard the world tries to squelch it, and in the end, the only name worth remembering, the only name worth dropping is not John the Baptist or Herod, not Biden, not Trump. No, the only Word that finally matters is the One we know by the name of Jesus.
So, beware, the Word is out. Believe that and you and God’s beloved world will never be the same.
AMEN