Malachi 3: 1 – 4 / Luke 1: 68 – 79 / Philippians 1: 3 - 11 / Luke 3: 1 - 6
This is the homily given at
Flohr’s Lutheran Church (ELCA), McKnightstown, Pennsylvania on Sunday, December 8, 2024 by Fr. Gene Tucker.
“MATCHING OUR
INSIDES TO OUR OUTSIDES”
(Homily
texts: Malachi 3: 1 – 4, Luke 1: 68 – 79
& Luke 3: 1 - 6)
“The
voice of one, crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make
straight in the desert a highway for our God!” (Isaiah 40:3 – 5)
My
first Bishop once said, “If you are going to come and serve here, your insides
must match your outsides”.
I’ve
never forgotten that comment. It strikes to the heart of the ministry and the
work of St. John the Baptist, who was the “voice crying in the wilderness”.
Each
year, the Second Sunday of Advent places John the Baptist’s work and ministry
before us. His was a counter-cultural ministry, carried out in the wilderness,
the place where the troublemakers and the outcasts of society hung out, the
place where one often goes to find God.
Let’s
remind ourselves about the facts of John’s life and his work.
We
should begin by remembering that John was the son of a Temple priest,
Zechariah. This morning, we heard Zechariah’s prophecy concerning his son, the Benedictus
Domine Deus, as we find it in Luke 1:68 – 79. As the son of a Temple
priest, John, too, would have qualified to also serve in the Temple, once he
had reached the age of thirty.[1] In fact, he would have
been expected to serve in the Temple.
But,
instead of choosing to serve as his father did, John went into the wilderness,
proclaiming a baptism for the repentance of sins.
Let’s
pause here for a bit.
Notice
that John isn’t administering the ritual bath[2] that was required before a
person could enter the precincts of the Temple. Instead, John is engaging in
another sort of bath, one which required the confession of wrongdoing.
At
the heart of the focus of John’s ministry is a concern for inner holiness and a
right relationship with God. It puts the outward observances, such as those
that took place in the Temple, in second place.
John’s
work stands in the long tradition of the Old Testament prophets, who called
God’s people, again and again, to a right relationship with God, a relationship
that required holiness in the heart and in the mind. Consider some of the
utterances of these prophets: “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices,
says the Lord? I have had enough of burnt offerings of ram and the fat of
well-fed beasts.”[3] (Isaiah 1:11). Or “Your sacrifices are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices
pleasing to me.” (Jeremiah 6:20b) Or, “I desire steadfast love, not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” (Hosea 6:6)
The
prophet Joel is especially important in this regard. Hear his words: “Yet even
now, declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with
weeping and with mourning; and rend your hearts and not your garments.” (Joel
2:12 – 13a)
As
grand and glorious a place as the ancient Temple was, there was a significant
problem with its size, scope and beauty: It was all-too-easy to worship the
place and not the God that its size and beauty was meant to be a reminder of.
It was all-too-easy to concentrate on the rituals associated with the
requirements of the Law of Moses (Torah).
Religious
observance of this sort can easily devolve into an outward show with little-or-no
inner substance, a hollowed-out shell.
In
part, it seems that an outward observance, devoid of inner holiness and
devotion to God, is John’s concern. We might also add that John probably knew
very well just how corrupt the Temple priests were, for they had created a
system of currency conversion in order that Roman coinage (which bore the image
of the emperor) couldn’t be used to pay for the rituals of the Temple, But
these priests were the ones who controlled the rate of exchange. Recall that
Jesus said that these priests had made the Temple a “den of thieves”.
John’s
focus brings us back to the matter of inner holiness and righteousness before
God, instead of a perfunctory, outward cloak of religiosity.
Recall
that John’s baptism was a baptism for the forgiveness of sins. It we put
ourselves into the waters of the Jordan River as so many did at John’s
invitation, can we imagine John saying to those who’d come into the water,
“What do you have to confess? Say those things aloud. Be specific”. John’s
ministry dealt with the inner soul, the heart and the mind, the condition of
those things compared to God’s holiness. If we put ourselves into that
scenario, the thought of standing next to John in the water is a daunting one,
perhaps even frightening.
The
Church today stands at a crossroads: We are inheritors of a system in which the
Church enjoyed favor and a privileged place in society. But that system, that
favor and that privileged place have gone away. Now, we stand - as the Church –
on the margins of society in many ways. In the past, the Church could get away
with outward appearances. Now, it no longer can. It could, in times past, enjoy
the participation of people who were Christians in name only. The Church could,
back then, be content to be the visible Church in the world.
But
now, God calls the Church – that part of which that is known as “organized religion” - to return to its mandate and its chief
concern: Working to build up the membership in the invisible Church, that body
of people who have come into a right, holy and intense love relationship with
God through Jesus Christ our Lord.
That’s
what the Church is to be about. Put another way, the Church’s work is to
“introduce people to God and God to people, and to nourish that relationship”.
We – as the Church – will be successful in this calling only if we, ourselves,
have a genuine and lively faith with the Lord. After all, we can’t share what
we don’t have ourselves.
John’s
voice calls to us across the centuries, bidding us to (re)enter the waters of
baptism, confessing our wrongdoings, our shortcomings, and the ways in which we
do not bear faithful witness to what a relationship with the Lord looks like.
Come,
Holy Spirit, our souls inspire. Come, Holy Spirit, enable us to see ourselves
as you see us. Come, Holy Spirit, root out from within us all things unholy.
AMEN.
[1] This age may have come from the stipulations
outlined in Numbers 4:3.
[2] The Hebrew word for this ritual bath is mikvah.
The ruins of the Qumran community just north of the Dead Sea, the one that
produced the well-known Dead Sea Scrolls, had a number of mikvahs, which
can still be seen today.
[3] English Standard Version
