A Sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent

This time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a wild time, sort of an out-of-body experience. You can sense it in the drug store, with discount Halloween candy still lingering in the far back aisles, and Thanksgiving cards and paper products for sale on the endcap displays, and Christmas ornaments and stocking stuffers filling the windows and walkways. We’re exhausted from having pulled off the production of costumes in October, a grand dinner and family festivities on Thanksgiving, but forging ahead, running on adrenaline, coffee, and gingerbread, as we check off our list of gifts to buy, refill the pantry and freezer for the next big family meal, and make our final push to complete school exams, big work projects, end-of-the-year finances.

And in the midst of it all, we, as people formed by the church calendar and tradition, are dutifully pumping the brakes, trying to stop the world from spinning right on into Christmas, and tending to the Advent spirit of watching and waiting for the coming of the Lord.

As part of the annual Advent rhythm, this Sunday, the second Sunday, stars John the Baptist, who, every year, during our out-of-body experience of early December, this eye-widening period nestled in between two major holidays, treks out of the desert, walks his way from the wilderness into our lives and cries “Y’all, it’s time to prepare!”

John was a contemporary of Jesus, and a cousin, of sorts. And God destined him to signal to the people the imminent coming of the Messiah, to alert them to prepare for Christ’s arrival. And each year in the holiday season, we hear his words again, a reminder to prepare ourselves for the coming of Christ, once again, into this world.

There are some things in life that we know exactly how to prepare for, because the work is up to us. Taking exams like the bar or the LSATs or the SATs have workbooks and classes and tutors. Running races like the 10K or marathon have training plans and coaches. Hosting events like a conference or a dinner party have checklists and etiquette books. Many things that we must do in life have clear ways for us to prepare so that we can be confident we will do our best when the time comes.

At other times, there isn’t the same laid out path for success. Sometimes there are things in life we want to prepare for but simply cannot. As a passenger, how do you prepare for a safe airplane flight? As a patient, how do you prepare for a successful surgery? Or how do you adequately prepare for something like giving birth, being baptized, or even facing death? There are these big moments in life that, while we will do our best to prepare for them, are really just something that we have to let happen; we can’t ensure their outcome. Sometimes there are things in life that we can sort of prepare for in one sense, but in another, we just have to let them be done to us. Often, these are the holy and sacramental moments of life where what happens is in no way up to us, because it’s up to the mysterious work of God happening in us.

On a Monday morning in early October last year, I found out that at 39.5-weeks pregnant, I was to be induced because of a medical complication. My OB-GYN told me that they had an opening at 3 p.m., so we had several hours to get into gear. With this news, I burst into tears while Blake burst into action. With excitement in his step, he hopped in the car to run to the grocery store to grab some snacks for the hospital, then to Home Depot because he absolutely had to buy an extendable hedge trimmer that very day, and then to drop off a pair of pants he just had to get tailored before the baby came. With a sense of overwhelm, I called my parents, called the staff, and slowly started to straighten up the house with tears still streaming down my face. In our own ways, we were both trying to process the fact that there was no turning back, and that there was no way to prepare. Today was the day… We would enter the hospital as two and eventually exit as three; we were about to welcome our daughter into the world, and no amount of phone calls or errands or chores or tears could prepare us for the change about to take place in our lives, for what God was about to do in and through and to us.

Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight.

Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God, a pathway for God to get straight to you.

Is this the kind of thing for which we have a checklist to tick off? Is this an event that comes with a training program to follow? Well, sort of. There are certainly things, like worshipping and studying and praying, confessing our sins and forgiving our neighbors and being agents of peace, that can open us up to the coming of Christ. But, and this may be hard for the perfectionist types in the room, John’s call to us to prepare might just be more like how we prepare for a flight or a surgery, or baptism or birth or death.

Preparing the way of the Lord is a call to an effort that perhaps has no real effect on the outcome. Because the thing about God is that God came into the world when the world was yet sinners. And the thing about God is that God will come again, independently of us or how ready we are. How could we ever truly be ready to see Christ walking down the path towards us, anyway? How could we ever honestly do enough to brace ourselves for the coming of Christ into our lives? Not that that should keep us from trying; the work that we might do to prepare the pathway for God is still important work to do for our transformation and the transformation of this world.

But in that work, we must always keep in mind that what we do, how we seek to prepare for that time when God appears, doesn’t change the fact that God did once before, and doesn’t impact that reality that God will once again appear to us.

Just like the folks in Jesus’ day who, although they heard the cry of John and knew the prophecies of old could be coming true, could have never been equipped to encounter him. The blind man made to see when Jesus spat in his eyes, left speechless and humbled and without a clue as to what just happened or who just happened. The woman sick for 12 years who snuck behind him, touched his garment, and was made well on the spot, and left a heaped-up trembling mess, healed and made whole. Or the criminal who just happened to be nailed up beside Jesus on the cross, who had likely not been to temple in a while or kept his daily prayers or had time to put up a Christmas tree, who was sprawled out in his most vulnerable and shameful state, who had done nothing to prepare himself for the coming of Christ into his life, but was met with the promise from Christ’s very lips that that very day he would be with him in paradise.

Prepare the way of the Lord. Make way for him. Talk to God about how you might ready yourself for what God will do to you. But never lose sight that Christ came for saints and sinners alike, and that he will come again, for you who have followed your workbooks and read all the materials, AND for you who have fumbled and forgotten along the way.

Prepare ye for the Lord. Get ready, y’all, for the arrival of Christ. Brace yourself for the life-changing, soul-saving, redemptive, and reconciling work that Jesus Christ is coming to do in and through each and every one of you.

Amen.

The Rev. Kilpy Singer