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Sermon - The Second Sunday in Advent (C) - 6th December 2009
St Aidan's Anglican Church West Epping 8:30am
Readings: Malachi 3:1-4, Song of Zechariah, Philippians 1:1-11, Luke 3:1-6
The Song of Zechariah, also called the Benedictus, is a New Testament psalm, supposedly spoken by Zechariah, upon the birth of his son, who was to become John the Baptist. The historical context of the Benedictus is as important as its literary context. As Luke was concerned to remind his readers, the births of John the Baptist and Jesus, heralding God's redemption, occurred while Israel suffered under the domination of Rome and the vassal king, Herod. It can hardly be accidental that Luke began what he called his "orderly account" by setting the time of God's wonderful new deed "in the days of King Herod of Judea". However, God did not act through Herod. Instead, God visited an elderly priest and his barren wife. Luke also sets the birth of Jesus in the context of a decree from Caesar Augustus that the conquered people be enrolled by name and city, presumably for the purpose of taxation. God was visiting the people in the midst of their oppression.
That haunting phrase, "to guide our feet into the way of peace”, ends Zechariah's blessing upon John, his newborn son. This is the first of fourteen references to peace in the Gospel of Luke. The Benedictus links the promise of salvation and redemption inseparably to the achievement of peace. God's people cannot have redemption without peace, for each is necessary for the realization of the other.
Throughout the Gospel peace is closely associated with God's redemptive work and the salvation that comes to God's people. Angels announced Jesus' birth with the refrain of "peace on earth" and those who followed Jesus as he entered Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday, cried out, "Peace in heaven and glory in the highest heaven!". Jesus brought peace to those who received him: the old man Simeon, when the child Jesus was presented in the Temple, the woman who wept on Jesus' feet and the woman with a haemorrhage. Through faith, each found peace.
Luke also explores the ways of peace. Disciples on mission announce peace and are received by sons and daughters of peace. There are various kinds of peace. In one parable we are told that peace that is achieved by strength, is always vulnerable to the attack of one who is stronger. In another, king whose troops are outnumbered will, therefore, make peace with his enemy.
Paradoxically, in a saying regarding the choice that revelation inevitably causes, Jesus says that he has not come to bring peace but division and that the "way of peace" provokes hostility, often with terrible consequences. Jesus himself suffered violence from those to whom he offered peace, for Jerusalem did not know "the things that make for peace". In the process of bringing peace, he died, but when Jesus appeared to the disciples his words of common greeting still echoed his ultimate purpose: "Peace be to you".
The Benedictus states that God's purposes are being fulfilled in the delivering of God's people from our oppressors. Our feet are being guided in the way of peace so that we may worship without fear.
In the Gospel reading, the first several verses fix the time and political circumstances of his call. The story begins with a roll call of important persons: governors and kings, even the high priest. In surprising contrast, however, "the word of God" comes not to any of these but to an unknown prophet out in the wilderness. The redemptive work of which Mary sang in the Magnificat is under way: "He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, / and lifted up the lowly". In all ages, God's work proceeds among the poor and the dispossessed. In a middle-class church, such as ours, in a nominally Christian society that enjoys religious liberty we will have a hard time grasping the fact that Luke does not use these terms in a merely metaphorical or spiritual sense.
Moreover, the saving events that began with John in a remote corner of Judea were, by God's design, the beginning of the fulfilment of God's concern for the salvation of all people. Repeatedly in Luke we find this theme underscored. Our tendency is to circumscribe God's activity and limit it to our own kind of people and the causes that are socially and ethically important to us. However, God's concern for all people continually pushes us to break across the boundaries that we set for it. In many respects, the story of the ministry of Jesus in Luke and the spread of the early church in Acts, also written by Luke, is the story of God's challenge to social, ethnic, economic and racial barriers to the spread of the gospel. All people always includes precisely those groups who are not present in our religious communities, either because we have not allowed them to be there or because we have maintained cultural patterns that have excluded them.
Because God's redemptive work is still unfinished, the salvation of all people has not yet been realised, John serves as a role model for the church. The Gospel announces not only what God has done through Jesus but also what God is still in the process of doing. All who hear the word of God are called to declare what God is doing in our midst and to point ahead to the fulfilment of God's reign as king. John was a forerunner, announcing the great things of God that are yet to come, a vision of a society redeemed and renewed by the vision of the prophets. As John's preaching shows, he held the vision before others, issued a challenge for them and called for repentance. He is, therefore, an appropriate model for the church as it seeks to recover its vocation as a prophetic voice in a secular culture.
This Advent, may God use us as people who proclaim the coming kingdom to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death and guide their feet into the way of peace, so that peace may reign for all humanity.
This sermon prepared using The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol IX.