Sunday, December 6, 2015 | 8:00 a.m.

Preparing the Way

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 25:1–10
Jeremiah 33:14–16
Luke 21:25–36

. . . the waiting,
      the preparing of the mind for “chance,”
      the softening of the heart,
      the deepening of intention and desire,
      the readiness to really let go,
      the recognition that I really
      do not want to let go,
      the actual willingness to change—
      our readiness is the work of weeks, months, and years
      of opening ourselves to God.

Richard Rohr

Last week on Thanksgiving Day, following worship here, my husband and I enjoyed the festive, delicious Thanksgiving meal that Fourth Church hosts each year. We were sitting next to a couple in their sixties who were unfamiliar to us. So I began conversation. Where are you from? “A western suburb.” Do you have family here? “Yes, two grown children, but they couldn’t be with us this holiday.” Are you part of Fourth Church? “No, but for a couple years now we have come downtown on Thanksgiving to stay overnight at a nearby hotel, worship with you, eat with other Christians, then have fun shopping.” Then we talked about the strange weather, which slipped into talking about climate change. Suddenly it seemed the woman wanted to end that conversation because she asserted, “Well, it’s all in God’s hands.” Hmm. I couldn’t help but respond, “Yes, but God has given us freedom, and with it responsibility.” Later I wished I had added, “God does not mysteriously heal our broken world without needing us to take action.”

God did create nature in such a way that it has wondrous capabilities of evolution, adaptation, renewal, and restoration. To a point. Creation can also be destroyed and has been, by people. It is not God who caused such terrible pollution in China that people become sick in their cities socked in by a heavy haze that necessitates that they wear face masks. It is people who cause such pollution by the overuse of fossil fuels in densely trafficked areas. God did not bring to extinction or near-extinction hundreds of species. People have caused that by invasion or loss of natural habitats from industrial and commercial development. God will not remedy any of this without the action of people. God gave us not only freedom in how we relate to creation, but also the ability and expectation to be responsible stewards. That’s why the climate summit happening among world leaders in Paris is so important right now.

People clearly understood that they were supposed to take action after hearing the prophet John the Baptist. The prophet John the Baptist gave voice to the cry, “Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight. Bear fruits worthy of repentance.” The crowds quickly responded, “What then shall we do?”

That is our question, too. In this Advent season, God calls us to prepare the way of the Lord. Make way for the Messiah to come and reign. But what, exactly, does that look like? What then shall we do?
Pastor Mark Trotter served a church in a suburb of Pasadena, California, where a lovely community called the British Home was located. The British Home had little California bungalows that housed immigrants from Great Britain. One day it was announced that Queen Elizabeth was going to visit the British Home with her husband Philip. You can imagine the residents’ excitement. The day before the queen arrived, there were landscapers all over the property, planting blooming flowers, placing shrubs in tubs along the path where she would walk—making the “crooked straight and the rough plains plain.” They even purchased a new British flag and raised it. When royalty visits, you make preparations. You want to make everything ready.

So, too, with the Prince of Peace, the Ruler of All Nations. John the Baptist cries out, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” But what a different preparation is called for for Christ the King than for Queen Elizabeth. Instead of cleaning up our yards we are to clean up creation. We are to clean up the ways we live.

Is there anything we can do? John says, “Yes. Whoever has two coats must share with someone who has none. And whoever has food must do likewise.” Even tax collectors came up to him and asked, “Is there anything we can do?” He said, “Yes. Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” Soldiers asked him, “Is there anything we can do?” He said, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusations, and be satisfied with your wages.”

This scene gives us a concrete picture of life in first-century Palestine. There were the poor, and there were the rich. The rich, to prepare for the Messiah, were to have compassion for the poor, to take from their abundance to feed and clothe them. The powerful were to stop using their power for personal gain. The tax collectors, whose earnings were taken right off the top of the taxes they collected, were to stop setting the tax as high as they could as often as they could in order to get more money. And soldiers, carrying arms, were to stop just walking right into people’s homes with implied threats if you did not do what they said.

Sound familiar? Lack of compassion and justice for the poor. Abuse of power for personal gain. “Is there anything we can do to prepare for the Messiah?” “Yes. You can stop doing those things.” John is very concrete and specific in his answers.

John’s specificity reminds me of a story Eugene Bay told in his sermon “What Shall We Do?” (Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 14 December 2002). Bert was telling Harry about the virtues of socialism. Harry is not sure he understands. “Do you mean that if you have two tractors, and I have none, that you are to give me one of yours?” Bert says, “That’s what it means.” Harry then asks, “If you have two cars and I have none, you would give me the extra one?” Bert replies: “That’s right.” Harry goes on, “And if you have two hogs, and I don’t have any, I could have one of yours?” “Dad-gummit, Harry,” says Bert. “You know I have two hogs.”

The Gospel of Luke is quite concrete and specific. It locates the proclamation of John the Baptist in a very particular time and place, starting with “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius . . .” That doesn’t mean much to us now, but it would be like our hearing “In the seventh year of Barack Obama’s presidency, when Bruce Rauner was governor of Illinois, Rahm Emanuel was mayor of Chicago, Toni Preckwinkle was President of the Cook County Board; during the papacy of Francis and the second year of Shannon Kershner as head pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church . . .” We are immediately drawn into a particular time and place in history, within our specific context of economic, political and social issues. Where we find ourselves is exactly where God calls us to give witness to our faith.

Last week the first American serviceman was given Israel’s highest honor granted for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II: Master Sgt. Edmonds. The Chicago Tribune reported:

The Nazi soldiers made their orders very clear: Jewish-American prisoners of war were to be separated from their fellow brothers in arms and sent to an uncertain fate. But Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds would have none of that. As the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer held in the German POW camp, he ordered more than 1,000 Americans captives to step forward with him and brazenly pronounced: “We are all Jews here.” He would not waver, even with a pistol to his head, and his captors eventually backed down.

I was deeply moved by Edmonds’ courage and moral conviction. I was also struck by the fact that he is receiving this award posthumously, seventy years later. His own son didn’t discover what his father had done until decades later, after his father’s death. Such humility—Edmonds had not told even his family about it. The chairman of the Yad Veshem Holocaust Museum said, “Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds seemed like an ordinary American soldier, but he had an extraordinary sense of responsibility and dedication to his fellow human beings.”

His humility reminds me of the Christians in the small Protestant town in southern France called Le Chambon. During the most terrible years of World War II, there, quietly, peacefully, and in full view of the Vichy government and a nearby division of the Nazi SS, the villagers and their clergy organized to save thousands of Jewish children and adults from certain death. A documentary film was made about them that included interviews with some of those villagers. When they were asked why they risked their lives to save Jewish people, their response was very low-key. Sometimes they would just give a shrug of the shoulder, as if to say, “Of course, that was just the right thing to do.” They understood themselves simply to be doing what Christ called them to do.

One of the most frequently told stories about Fourth Church also took place during World War II, when Harrison Ray Anderson was pastor. Soon after the invasion of Pearl Harbor, restrictions were placed on gatherings of Japanese-Americans in the United States. A group of Japanese-Americans had been worshiping together in Chicago. The Session of our church, at the urging of Dr. Anderson, invited their congregation to meet on Sunday afternoons in our Stone Chapel. They readily accepted and continued to worship there, and later in our Westminster Chapel, until 1953. Because of the witness and nurture of Fourth Presbyterian Church, the original nondenominational church became a Presbyterian church. But this welcome was not without controversy. A book on our history, A Light in the City, says, “A long, long story could be written of the numerous times our church and her pastor were misunderstood because of protecting this little church” (p. 118).Those misunderstandings and bad feelings were both within and outside the church. Nonetheless, Dr. Anderson himself would often keep guard outside the chapel on Sunday afternoons to make sure the Japanese-Americans arrived safely for their services.

All that happened during World War II. Our world presents us with different challenges. In our lifetimes, most of us will not be in a situation to perform heroic deeds. As pastor emeritus John Buchanan preached years ago, “We have to find a religion and a spirituality and a discipleship which makes sense where we are and has something to do with keeping on keeping on” (“The Ordinariness of the Christian Life,” 19 January 1992).

Karl Rahner, one of the most distinguished church leaders and theologians of the twentieth century, wrote, “The demands of everyday morality are not easy at all. Everyday life as it is already asks a lot of us. . . . To keep on through dull, tedious, everyday existence can often be more difficult than a unique deed whose heroism makes us run the danger of pride” (Karl Rahner, Meditations on Hope and Love, p. 22).

What are those daily moral demands for us? A voice still cries out to us from the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” We still ask, “What shall we do?” And specific answers still come—ways to live out our lives with compassion, justice, and integrity. Specifically that means close the gap between the rich and the poor. It means reduce gun violence. Demand the proper use of power by the police. See everyone first and foremost as beloved children of God. Decry dangerous talk that incites hatred based on race and religion. Welcome and sponsor a refugee family in the midst of fear-mongering in our nation. Prepare the way of the Lord looks like being a tutor-mentor to a student from an under-resourced city public school or helping one’s employer keep the company from losing its way when there is too much focus on making a profit. It looks like changing laws so fewer people are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, especially people of color. For parents and teachers it looks like not molding children in their own image, but calling forth children’s unique personalities and abilities. Prepare the way of the Lord looks like using eco-friendly modes of transportation and restoring wetlands and prairies.

What then shall we do? As Karl Rahner wrote, “When we are true to our conscience… God’s kingdom comes to us just where we are, living quite ordinarily, carrying on patiently” (Meditations on Hope and Love). Let us prepare the way of the Lord.