Readings

Good morning, and welcome to the second Sunday of Advent. The prof in one of my undergraduate philosophy classes explained his lectures this way: I’m pretty much talking to myself; you all are free to listen and to expand the conversation. Not a bad description of this sermon.

This sermon will be on the short side. The challenges today’s texts pose are more behavioral than conceptual.

“And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to [John], and were baptized by him in the river Jordan.” Jerusalem to Jericho: I walked the middle stretch of that route the last time I was on an excavation in Israel. The first stretch is the more or less flat stretch from Jerusalem to the edge of the plateau; the last stretch is the flat bit once you reach the Jordan valley. The middle stretch: a narrow path that drops 3,500 feet.

I don’t go down to John—I don’t seriously enter Advent—if my world is working, if I can say “We’re doing OK.” Later in Mark we’ll hear Jesus say “Healthy people don’t need a doctor, but sick people do” (2:17 CEB). If I think I’m healthy I don’t make an appointment with a doctor, much less trudge down, then up from the Jordan.

If I say “We’re doing OK” our second reading has two things for me to think about. First, the new heavens and the new earth are coming, which will mean a sharp devaluation in our current currency. Even a wheelbarrow load won’t be enough to purchase even a slice of the bread of life. So how’s my balance of the new currency—love—doing? When Paul says “Owe no one anything, except to love one another” (Rom. 13:8) it’s that new currency he’s talking about.

Second, my “We’re doing OK” tells me I’m working with a really impoverished referent for “we.” What “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18) tells me is that my neighbor is part of my “we.” The divine patience Peter describes is also the patience so that this penny can drop.

No, we’re not doing OK. So, down to the Jordan…

Down at the Jordan, John “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Repentance. This Advent I’m finding this question uncomfortably useful: “Do I spend more time and energy angry at the sins of others or at my own sins?” As that famous Pogo cartoon put it “We have met the enemy, and he is us” (Earth Day, 1971). Not that the others are sinless, but focusing on their sins is unlikely to be productive either for them or for me.

I’ll risk an example. As Katherine Cramer, professor of political science at the UW Madison explored in her book The Politics of Resentment (2016), there’s a lot of resentment in rural Wisconsin directed at urban Wisconsin, a good part of it unjustified. But not all: Back in 1959 Ezra Taft Benson, Secretary of Agriculture in the Eisenhower administration, told farmers “get big or get out.” We like cheap groceries, and pay insufficient attention to the folk who foot the bill.

“Do I spend more time and energy angry at the sins of others or at my own sins?” Since I don’t know how soon I’ll have an answer I like to that question, here’s my backup question: “Do I spend more time angry at the sins of others or praying for these others?”

Watching the news, reading the newspaper, scrolling through the internet: these are spiritual activities, whether we do them in a disciplined fashion or not.

“And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to [John], and were baptized by him in the river Jordan.” Let’s join them.