All Saints’, Dorval
Advent II, Year C
December 5, 2021
A pre-pandemic Bible study session, Advent 2019.
It was good for my soul this week to resume Wednesday morning Bible study, for which three faithful souls showed up in person and three more tuned in on Zoom. As was generally our custom pre-pandemic, we looked at the readings for the coming Sunday. As a preacher, it’s always refreshing to hear the questions that people are actually asking of these texts, as a way of keeping us grounded and connected to our hearers.
And there were many questions. We read the Gospel passage first, and there was much discussion about what “a baptism of repentance” signifies. How is the same as, and different from, the later baptism of Jesus? Does it bring healing? Meaning? What does it mean to have your sins washed away if you then go and sin again, as is pretty much inevitable unless you wait to be baptized on your deathbed? And what about people who, for whatever reason, don’t have the chance to be baptized? What happens to them when the Messiah comes – or comes again?
For Luke (as for the other gospel writers) the message that John proclaims by the river Jordan is in fulfillment of the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
The prophet speaks these words, of course, in the context of the return to Jerusalem from the Babylonian exile around 500 BCE. Seventy years after being violently torn from their homeland, God’s chosen people can finally return. The prophet Baruch, student and protégé of Jeremiah, sings a glorious descant on this theme in our first reading from today, from the perspective of the desolate city awaiting her long-lost children: “Arise, Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them. For they went out from you on foot, led away by their enemies; but God will bring them back to you, carried in glory, as on a royal throne. For God has ordered that every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low, and the valleys filled up, to make level ground, so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God.”
And there is a push and pull in these texts, between the insistence on Israel as God’s particular, unique, chosen people, returning to its own promised land, and the universal message implied in the words of Isaiah, “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
There has always been a strand of hope in the Jewish tradition that someday all the peoples of the world would come to the holy city to learn how to live in the way of the One True God. And the coming of Jesus, as a Jewish prophet who nevertheless preached a message that reached far beyond the Jewish people, is one of the moments in history in which that hope has been realized, and indeed, all flesh sees the salvation of God.
Which leaves us with two questions: what is the salvation of God, anyway; and what happens when all flesh sees it?
It is very firmly embedded in the minds of most Christians (and many non-Christians) that the Christian heaven is a vague place somewhere up in the sky where disembodied people go after death to float on clouds, wearing wings and halos, and playing harps. The actual words of the Bible, though, give a very different picture. Our readings today are only a tiny slice of the wealth of imagery in the Bible depicting God’s realm not as an insubstantial otherworld, but as a redeemed, remade, and glorified earth, where justice prevails, the exiles are brought home, nature rejoices, and there is no longer any hunger, fear, mourning, or death. And this is not a promise just for a small selection of humanity: all flesh shall see it.
So the question, for all those human eyes that will see the salvation of God revealed before them is, how do they respond? Do they greet the new and redeemed earth, where the mighty are cast down and the humble are exalted, with joy? Do they celebrate the end of poverty and pain, the bringing in of the exiles and the setting of the prisoners free?
Or do they look at that world, and the God who is bringing it about, and cross their arms and say No? No, I prefer to keep accumulating as much as possible for myself, regardless of whether others are in need? No, actually, I like being able to exclude people and feel superior? No, I think the poor deserve their poverty, the prisoners should rot away in jail, and the powerful deserve to lord it over the rest of us?
In our baptism, we Christians sign up to be part of the new creation, the kingdom of God whose coming is being foretold by the prophets, preached by John the Baptist and revealed among us by Jesus. In Advent, we consciously recall what that new creation will look like, and remind ourselves that it is to be desired above all things, and we prepare our minds, bodies and hearts to welcome God’s salvation when it comes. We do not have to be perfect; we only have to want what God wants.
In our Bible study on Wednesday, a surprising number of the people there described their atheist or agnostic friends who are nevertheless curious about their lives of faith, and ask them questions about what they believe and why. I think this is a tribute to our church members, for one thing, both that their friends know they are religious and that they feel safe asking questions! But, for the religious people fielding these questions, it does bring up a question of our own – if we believe that God’s salvation is the ultimate good, does that mean that we will receive it and our quote-unquote “unbelieving” friends will not?
Well, what does scripture say?
All flesh will see the salvation of God. All flesh will witness the revealing of God’s new creation of justice, mercy and love. Those who know and love Jesus will, we hope, be somewhat more prepared to celebrate the coming of the kingdom of heaven. But we pray that there will be many, many more to whom its revealing comes as a glorious surprise, to be greeted with glad cries of “Oh! That’s what I was hoping for all along!”
And so, we need not fret about the eternal fates of our friends. God does not send people of goodwill to be burned in unquenchable fire just because they don’t go to church. God is striving always to bring the scattered children home, gathering them from west and east, making the path straight before them.
Let us therefore, with Paul as he writes to his beloved Philippians, pray that “we may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help us determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ” we may greet the revealing of the new creation with joy.
Amen.
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