Matthew 3.1-12
Church of St Mary the Virgin and St Nicholas
Littlemore, Oxfordshire
Second Sunday of Advent
“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his
paths straight.”
May I speak to you in the name of the true
and living God +Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Last Thursday night, Nelson Mandela passed
away at the age of 95. This is a great
loss for the entire world as Nelson Mandela was a leader who strove for peace
and reconciliation in South Africa after forty-six years of Apartheid.
We should not pretend that Apartheid, the
systematic stripping of rights and segregation of the South African people by
its white, settler minority, was this nebulous evil that affected South Africa in
the past and is now gone forever. Nor
should we reduce Nelson Mandela’s legacy to a mere sense of good feeling about
peace. Both were more than that. The evil of Apartheid, where people were
categorized by ethnicity based upon the presumption that white skin and
European ancestry was a sign of genetic superiority and then segregated from
one another in public facilities, and where the native African population was
forcibly enclosed in so-called ‘homelands’ and stripped of their rights and
humanity, was the natural conclusion to centuries of Dutch and British
colonialism that subjugated, enslaved, and dehumanized the African majority of
South Africa.
Nelson Mandela spent much of his adult life
fighting against Apartheid, both through non-violent and violent resistance
against the Apartheid government. His
association with communist groups and his attempts to overthrow the South
African government in 1962 had him sent off to prison for 27 years where he
endured brutal conditions and treatment.
It was only after intense international political pressure that he was
released in 1990 and Apartheid came to an end in 1994 with the first free,
general, and open elections in South African history, which he helped to
negotiate and instigate.
In Nelson Mandela’s presidency of South
Africa we find something extraordinary.
His presidency was one of national reconciliation. A truth and reconciliation committee was created
to serve as a forum for people, both victim and perpetrator, to speak of their
experiences and actions during apartheid.
People who worked in the apartheid system such as law enforcement
officers and government officials were pardoned; national programs were set up
to attempt to redistribute the wealth that had become concentrated in the white
population to the now enfranchised African majority. These programs were not initially popular, but
it was necessary to heal the wounds of a nation scarred by the great sin of apartheid. As Nelson Mandela said “courageous people do
not fear forgiving.” There could not be
justice or peace without forgiveness.
Nelson Mandela gives hope that indeed someday there can be true justice
in this world. And though racism, other systems
of apartheid in other parts of the world, and sin still exist, Nelson Mandela
throughout his life fought to ensure that justice could be realized.
Like Nelson Mandela, there are people who
have lived, and who live among us now, who somehow are more than they seem. They
say and do things that sometimes may be considered strange, or dangerous, and
yet they somehow are the most attuned to society around them. They can
challenge the most powerful people in the world, and even the powerful can live
in fear of them (indeed Mandela was labelled as a terrorist by the United
States even as late as 2008). They sometimes
march to the beat of their own drum; in tune with something we cannot perceive. The Bible refers to these kinds of people as
prophets.
We often associate prophets with predicting
the future, and though they serve that purpose to some extent, they speak as
much about the present as they do the future.
There are many prophets in the Bible: Moses who openly confronts the
Pharaoh of Egypt to free the Hebrew people from slavery, Deborah who liberates
Israel from the Canaanite King Jabin, Elijah who challenges Ahab and Jezebel’s
priest of Ba’al to a contest on Mt. Carmel to demonstrate the power of God, and
Jeremiah who laments the destruction of Jerusalem caused by their apathy
towards the poor and suffering in their midst.
Today, we hear from two very important prophets, Isaiah and John the
Baptist.
It is interesting to compare Isaiah to
Nelson Mandela as they are very unlike one another. Nelson Mandela was a political revolutionary
who spent a third of his life in prison before working to transform South
Africa as its first post-Apartheid president.
Isaiah by comparison, was probably in the upper echelons of the Kingdom
of Judah, and had the ear of the royal court and king. He too was willing to challenge and condemn
the sins of the Kingdom of Judah such as ignoring the plight of the poor and
the destitute among them. But even when
the Assyrian Empire was about to overtake the Kingdom, and all hope was lost,
he delivered a message of hope to the people:
A shoot shall come
out from the stock of Jesse,
and a branch shall
grow out of his roots…
He shall not judge
by what his eyes see,
or decide by what
his ears hear;
but with
righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with
equity for the meek of the earth;
This person is the hope that God will not
abandon those who are in need. The poor
and defenceless will find equality and hope in the world. And this hope isn’t a temporary salve or
release from the bondage of this world in the next life, but the transformation
of the very order of the world itself.
The wolf shall
live with the lamb,
the leopard shall
lie down with the kid,
the calf and the
lion and the fatling together,
and a little child
shall lead them.
The cow and the
bear shall graze,
their young shall
lie down together;
and the lion shall
eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child
shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned
child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
These things should not happen, and yet
this vision of a world contrasts with our own where the wealthy take from the
poor, where the strong oppress the weak, and where greed and power are
celebrated as virtues. What Isaiah gives
us is a song of a world as it should be.
But we shouldn’t just listen to the words, but to the melody as well—the
coming of the root of Jesse upends the world and creates a new Kingdom where
the oppressed and the oppressor find peace with one another.
What hope then might an encircled Judah
find from Isaiah? What hope might we
find from Isaiah? To know that hope, we
need to turn to John the Baptist.
John the Baptist is a rather iconic
person. He is a bit of a recluse, living
out in the desert, wearing itchy camel’s hair, eating a protein rich diet of locusts
and honey, and baptising people who probably walked for many miles in the river
Jordan. He calls out to the religious
leaders of his time and refers to them as a ‘brood of vipers’ because he
perceives them to be self-righteous hypocrites who seem to follow the Law of
Moses in exactitude whilst ignoring the hardships and burdens of people around
them. He too speaks of one who is
coming, and that time is drawing near as ‘even now the axe is lying at the root
of the trees’. The world is about to be deeply,
deeply, changed.
If we were to sum up the work of all of the
prophets, all that they said and did, it comes together in what John the
Baptist cried out “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!” The prophets call out to their time to remind
us that God is active and in the midst of our world, and he is about to do
something in it. The implications of
this though need to be considered.
However, the light does give a response, and
it sings out ‘prepare ye the way of the Lord.’
Nothing else.
In our time, how many philosophers,
theologians, historians, and scientists continue to reach towards that
light? So many seem to claim to have the
answer, the right interpretation, the right insight, and the response that
comes back is ‘prepare ye the way of the Lord.’
The prophets remind us that God is the one who crosses that threshold as
Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, Emmanuel, the shoot of Jesse, and the coming
dawn upon a world covered in darkness.
The words and deeds of the prophets are the music that overwhelms the
cacophony of our lives that draws us closer to God’s Kingdom.
We are not isolated from the music of the
prophets. When we share what we have with
others, particularly the poor; when we show kindness to one another,
particularly the lonely; when we welcome the stranger into our midst,
particularly the foreigner or one who is different; and when we stand up for
the oppressed, particularly those whom we might have a difficult time
accepting; we become attuned to that music and can say like the prophets
‘prepare ye the way of the Lord’. And
when we accept the gifts from others, when we receive kindness, when we are
welcomed, and when we are protected, we find the very kingdom the prophets
spoke of in our midst.
In this Advent Season, let us join with
Isaiah, John the Baptist, Nelson Mandela, and all the prophets as we let the
music overtake our busy preparations for Christmas.
Let us prepare the way of the Lord.
Amen.
