December 4, 2022 – Second Sunday of Advent
There’s a key phrase in this week’s Gospel reading that I wonder if we all kind of skip over, hoping to get right to the meat of the story: “in the wilderness.” It’s relayed by Matthew not just once, but a second time, echoing the words from the prophet Isaiah.
John – the Baptizer – shows up in the wilderness and cries out from the wilderness. As much as we want to focus on what John says and does, it’s just as important for us to understand where the prophet speaks from. A prophet’s place gives a prophet purpose. A prophet’s place locates the testimony to an explicit need. Prophecy means nothing if it does not touch the specificity of setting and site.
If a modern prophet suddenly popped up in rural Kansas, it would mean something very different from that prophet speaking on the streets of East LA. One could imagine a prophet in LA talking about gang violence and culture. What would the Kansan prophet discuss? Corn? Location is important!
We tend to forget that the prophets in the Old Testament – like Elijah, Jeremiah, Jonah, and others you’ll start reading about on December 12 if you’re following our Advent Devotional – were not predictors of the future or intent on speaking of doom to come. They were not oracles, but they were truth-tellers of the present. They were able to speak about what would be only because the past and the present, God’s past and present, determined a certain trajectory. Their prophetic messages were rooted in their location, in their context, in their circumstances. These weren’t just people offering moral lessons or advice, but they were spreading messages about the people’s interactions with God based upon their present situation.
John shares this news about the kingdom of heaven in this out-of-the-way wilderness, and he attracts others to come to repent and confess their sins. It would be like some radical preacher inviting us to head to the middle of rural Pennsylvania to visit for a worship service!
We always think about prophets being these specially selected people whom God has picked by hand and anointed for the task. But by virtue of our baptism, truthfully, we are all prophets, my friends. We have promised to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as yourselves” and to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being” (BCP, 305). We all have a responsibility to give voice to those whose voice has been silenced. It is to give voice to those who have been told that their place doesn’t matter. It is to give voice to those still in the wilderness who have no other voice to hear except ours.
Through the prophet Zechariah, we hear God say, “Render true judgements, show kindness and mercy to one another; do not oppress the widow, the orphan, the alien, or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another” (7:9-10).
The theme for the second Sunday of Advent is frequently said to be Peace, as shown on your bulletin cover today. Below the word peace, we read the second stanza of the hymn we just sang, Come Thou Long Expected Jesus: “born to set thy people free”. John is calling us to speak boldly to those who are in the wilderness, to invite them in, to welcome them, and to allow them to be free. We – through our own prophetic voices of sharing the Gospel – can give them the peace that they so long for at this harried time of the year.