2022.12.04 | Clearing the Way
“Clearing the Way”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, CA
Second Sunday in Advent
December 4, 2022
Seventeen years ago, Eden Church employed a young man by the name of Kyle Salwazer. He served as one of our sextons for about a year. Kyle was then a recent high school graduate. He had no prior work experience, and he didn’t even know what a sexton was.
But the Trustees hired him anyway, because Kyle was young and strong, and the Trustees and the other FT sexton on staff were not as young and strong as they once were. The Trustees also decided to give Kyle a chance because his high school biology teacher (who was a church member) assured us that Kyle was coachable and trustworthy.
Although we prefer that employees stay with us more than a year, having Kyle on staff proved to be worthwhile for all involved. Kyle got the time that he needed to sort out his future plans. His parents were content with him taking a gap year, so long as he was doing something productive. And, our head Trustee in those days, Marilyn Sundberg, got a lot of her projects accomplished, with her coaching and Kyle doing the heavy lifting.
The last day that Kyle was on our staff, I met with him for his exit interview and to hand him his last paycheck. In that interview, I asked Kyle one of the same questions that I ask everyone on their last day on the Eden payroll. I asked, Did you learn anything from working here?
Kyle pondered my question for a while, and then he said, “Yes. I learned a lot. I learned that there are at least two standards for ‘clean’: there’s ‘guy clean,’ like how I cleaned before I started this job, and there’s ‘old lady clean’ — like how the Trustees want things cleaned.”
Kyle’s analysis of Eden’s cleaning standards were spot on.
II
My thoughts turned to that conversation about cleanliness standards with Kyle as I reflected on today’s gospel reading, because Matthew presents John the Baptist as one who envisions an epic house cleaning in Israel.
Here in Matthew 3, John repeats the prophet’s declaration, “Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.” This passage is from Isaiah 40, where Isaiah describes the construction of a highway from Babylonian to Israel on which the exiles will travel home following a generation of indentured servanthood.
John builds on this description by explaining that God’s about to unleash what my people in the fly-over states call “a big can of whoopass.”
John says that the Pharisees and Sadducees are hypocrites, meaning that they say one thing and do another. He refers to them as “a brood of vipers,“ and implores them to repent, rather than to rest on their laurels or take pride in their pedigrees.
One is coming who is greater than me, John said. This messiah will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire, and he would clear the threshing floor with his winnowing hook, and gather the wheat into the granary and burn the chaff with an unquenchable fire.
Ouch!
To expound on our former sexton’s observation, we might say: there’s guy cleaning, there’s old lady cleaning, and then, hello world, there’s prophetic house cleaning!
John was talking about a house cleaning that far surpassed the dusting and vacuuming that we do before friends come over. He was talking about more than a once-a-year rearrangement of the furniture to make room for the Christmas tree. John envisioned epic changes to the geological and social landscape in Palestine. And, God knows those changes were needed.
III
In the early centuries of the Common Era, Israel was under foreign occupation. The Emperor of Rome, Caesar Augustus, ruled the known world. Caesar appointed Quirinius as governor of Syria, and gave him authority to rule over Israel. Quirinius’ main job was to keep the peace and maintain order, so that Rome’s international business affairs ran smoothly.
Under Quirinius, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The wealthy one percent lived in urban areas and leased out their farmland and pastureland to tenant farmers who raised cash crops that largely benefited the land owners.
The tenant farmers who raised the rich people’s crops and livestock barely had anything to eat. Slaves sometimes fared better than tenant farmers, because their owners fed and housed them. Tenant farmers, by contrast, were on their own. If their crops failed and their livestock died, they starved unless others took pity and shared resources with them.
In addition to the harsh economic oppression that most peasants endured, the vast majority were also considered spiritually difficient compared with the Sadducees and Pharisees.
The Sadducees were composed of the wealthy one percent. They owned the means of production, and ran the Temple in Jerusalem.
The Pharisees, by contrast, were more diverse economically. They believed that Israel’s salvation was dependent upon rigid adherence to liturgical practices and purity codes.
Neither group concerned themselves with the social implications of the gospel. They did not feed the hungry, cloth the naked, heal the sick, welcome foreigners, or visit prisoners, as Matthew described in chapter 25. The Sadducees and Pharisees accepted the economic disparities existent in their time, rather than challenging and overturning the social infrastructure that maintained these inequities.
As a consequence of their differences, the Sadducees and Pharisees were often at odds with each other. In John’s view, they had lost their way. He called Sadducees and Pharisees a “brood of vipers,” and implored them to repent and be baptized.
The one who is coming after me, the Messiah, John said, would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. He would clear the threshing floor with his winnowing hook, and gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he would burn with unquenchable fire.
IV
Those who are paying attention today cannot possibly miss the sharp contrast between the way that Advent is described in Isaiah and the Gospels, and the way that Disney, Hallmark, commercials, shopping centers, and retail websites depict this season.
The contrast is palpable. The manufactured versions of secular Christmas in our society remind me of life in a “snow globe.”
The Prophetic Advent and Secular Snow Globe preparations for Christmas are 180 degrees different from each other. Surprising though, this fact is lost on most people. Why?
Well, for starters, who wants to deal with Advent?
Who wants to don sackcloth and ashes and eat grasshoppers and honey like John the Baptist? Maybe only Gringos visiting Oaxaca for an ascetic pilgrimage, but others — not so much!
Who wants to do the hard work of Advent? Not so many. Is it any wonder why there are always more people shopping on the four Sundays of Advent than going to worship? No.
Advent requires us to face what’s wrong in our lives and our world. Advent evokes prophetic truth telling. Advent requires the righting of wrongs. In short, Advent demands whoopass house cleaning.
V
I won’t try to pretend that the true work of Advent is tons of fun, but I promise you this, the work of Advent produces its own rewards. Once we’ve said and done what needs to be said and done in our personal and communal lives, real Christmas can take hold.
For example, once we’ve realized how traumatic incidents in our childhoods may have shaped the adults we’ve become and the types of relationships we have forged, we can choose to review those incidents and explore therapies that can help us heal and have happier lives and healthier relationships.
Similarly, once we’ve named the proverbial elephant in our family living room — be that addiction, mental illness, marital infidelity, financial mismanagement, or some other struggle — we are immediately on the path to health and wholeness.
And, as more of us learn how we arrived at the racial inequities and disparities that exist in our society, we can more effectively dismantle the social structures that perpetuate them and recreate the peaceable kin*dom that Isaiah envisioned. Amen.