Luke 3:1-6.
We continue our waiting for the coming of, the advent, of Jesus. Remembering with wonder the incarnation of God as a little baby and looking to his coming again in great hope to fulfil and bring to completion all things.
Last week we focused our waiting on hope, and today, via John the Baptist, we look at how we can be filled with peace in this time of waiting. John is the great prophet who bridges the old and new testaments.
The message that he gives in the gospel reading today is about Jesus’ first coming, but it also applies to his return, for which we wait.
Now Advent, as we said last week, is a penitential season and John is saying we should ‘repent and believe,’ the very first words Jesus himself preached in his ministry on earth.
We might think that repentance has little to do with peace but hopefully we will come to see that all these fruits of grace we look at in Advent; hope, peace, joy and love, are also actually fruits of repentance.
The gospel writer Luke was a very good researcher and reporter. There is a wealth of detail in today’s gospel reading that allows us to date the beginning of John the Baptist’s ministry to 26AD.
Knowing the date might seem unimportant, but it allows us to accurately know the historical context of John’s ministry which led to this Old Testament prophet proclaiming such a New Testament truth - salvation through repentance.
Now in Jesus’ and John the Baptist’s time, life was pretty good for the most part even under Roman rule. People were prosperous and secure. Yet, this generation was spiritually bankrupt. They had drifted into deep legalism and moral waywardness.
Legalism came from the religious leaders and their teaching. Keeping the law, but forgetting the God who gave it. Liking the wrapping paper more than the gift.
The waywardness came from much of the Roman influence; witchcraft, astrology, divination, oracles, and what we would call New Age Religion. Abortion and the killing of infants were very common.
This was despite all of what had happened to Israel due to them turning not to God, but to idols; their exile and subjugation under various powerful empires for the last six hundred years. Like anyone who doesn’t know the Lord, other things will be substituted, for them; they had substituted legalism in the place of God.
They worshipped their ability to keep the commandments and even went beyond that with additional rules they made up. The truth was that they were not really keeping them. They were keeping their perception of them. In fact, they were breaking all of them.
As I was doing my background reading, I was struck how their historical setting is similar to ours. We have forms of legalism running rampant in religious and even Christian circles and we have rampant New Age spiritualism. We have laws that do not bring life but death.
Now repentance is truly a God given, spirit-led, change of heart and mind toward God’s will. As we wait on the Lord we turn, or change our direction toward the will of God. The phrase “waiting on the Lord” is common in both Testaments of the bible and in both it means the same thing. It is not a passive waiting.
As I hope I have said before, the root of the word ‘waiting’ used here means something like a vine wrapping itself around a tree. The vine attaches itself to the tree and the whole future of the vine is dependent on the tree, so in that sense the vine waits on the tree.
This is exactly the way we are to wait on our Lord. We cleave to God as a vine cleaves the tree from which it receives life. For the vine, the tree is the most important thing in its life, it dies without it.
Another way to put it is that in our waiting on God, we turn and change our direction toward Jesus, by making Christ first in all things, not an add-on at the fringes of our life. The best way I think to describe this is to describe what happens if we don’t put Jesus first in all things.
If things go well and we can live comfortably, we very soon forget about the Lord completely. We become apathetic and lukewarm, and our faith becomes legalistic. If I just tick some boxes, I can then go and do the things I really love, love more than Jesus. This is pride.
If we don’t put Jesus first, and things don’t go well in our life, in our heath or in our finances, we blame God.
Either way, God can’t win our hearts because the vine has detached itself from the tree and we are no longer waiting upon the Lord, because we have attached ourselves to some other thing. This is what sin is, a separation.
So repentance is turning away from sin and turning to God, one is impossible without the other. We make a covenant, or agreement, with God to follow him only by turning to Christ.
John the Baptist is saying it is because of this new covenant; that is, our faithfulness and God’s blotting out of our sin, that salvation comes. The very saving of our souls!
This is what we celebrate every Sunday in the Great Thanksgiving prayer of wonder and gratitude at the price paid for the grace of this salvation. The price paid for it is nothing less than the shed blood of this little baby that we remember being born in a cattle feed trough and later executed because of the great love that God has for the whole world.
We say Jesus’s own words every week. “Drink from this cup all of you, this is my blood of the new covenant, shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins!” Shed for our salvation in other words.
We make this move to repent of our sins and turn to Christ in faith. Faith is a decision; we have to seek it for ourselves and when we do, we find that God himself provides it.
The promises of all God’s covenants are true. Just as the Old Testament or Old Covenant promised that Jesus would come to save us, which he did, the New Covenant promises that Jesus will come again with all the authority as God to judge us.
This is why John is inviting us, almost pleading with us, to be ready. Be ready!
So as we wait on God this Advent, as we cleave to the tree, a strange and unexpected thing happens. We find that the tree is the very same tree upon which Christ was crucified for us, the one whom Isaiah prophesied would be called the Prince of Peace.
We are filled with an unexpected and inexpressible peace that truly does pass all understanding. Whether we happen to be blooming or dormant for a time, we are filled with the same peace. This great peace which comes from the certainty of our hope, which fill us with joy, but that is next week’s sermon!
Let me pray … Dear father; may each day’s living become a testimony that old undesirable things have passed away, and the new has become part of us. Send your Spirit to open our hearts to the coming of your son who made himself one of us, and who is our Lord forever and ever. Amen.