IN THE FIRST YEAR OF PRESIDENT OBAMA
December 13, 2009

A sermon by Rev. Jack E. Skiles

Luke 3:1-6; Baruch 5:1-9

They say that God is on the move. They say that God is still speaking. It is already the second Sunday in Advent 2009. Have you seen or heard from God?

In the crazy intense mixed-up world that I live in I have seen a lot of the same old same old happening. There are at least a couple of growth potential areas in my life that remain simmering on a back burner. I have a lot of good intentions, but don't seem to easily move them up front and give them the focus they deserve in my spiritual quest for wholeness.

In the world of stuff that surrounds us, it is most often not easy for me to see the movement of God as God gets focused for me through the national media outlets. In this last week we had the shooting deaths of the four early in-life police officers in a suburb of Seattle, Washington, by a man who has been a repeat violent offender since he was a child. We have witnessed the tarnishing of the star and halo that was over Tiger Woods. And, now after nearly eight years, we are about to surge into Afghanistan for a third time and meanwhile, 46 million of our own citizens have no health insurance and one dear soul here in Monroe County who works full-time at minimum wage found that after taxes and health insurance her pay check amounted to 55 cents.

We live in a very balanced State politically. We have a Republican senator, Richard Lugar, who says that now is not the time for health care reform and who voted to not even debate the issue in the Senate; and we have a Democratic Senator, Evan Bayh, who seems to be open to debate but finds himself in the bind of being married to a person who sits on the board of one of the largest for-profit healthcare companies in the country, for which she is paid a ton of money. Change will not come easily in this sort of political environment, and meanwhile, in Indiana alone, it is estimated that our Hoosier economy will lose at a minimum between 2.3 and 4.6 billion dollars due to the shorter lives and poor health of the uninsured. (Center for American Progress, 5/29/2009).

Do you sense the movement of God? Do you hear the voices of God's prophets stirring from the pages of Scripture? I do.

For those of you who have fancy Bibles complete with those colored ribbons, place one at the beginning of Luke's Gospel story. Luke is our gospel for this new lectionary year that started last week. This year will be devoted to our seeking to understand the ministry and good news of Jesus from the perspective of this one author, Luke. Luke is unique in many ways, but perhaps most so for the fact that Luke is the only gospel writer who wrote two volumes, as Luke also gave us the Book of Acts.

Luke begins Chapter 3 by fixing the events he is writing about in a firm temporal context. This story of Jesus' ministry, teachings, miracles, betrayal, execution and resurrection has no a fairy-tale beginning, "Once upon a time." Instead, Luke is reporting sacred history anchored in secular history. The story he is about to tell, that we will spend a year listening to and studying from, this story began, says Luke, in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, emperor of Rome, when others sat upon provisional thrones and Caiaphas was Israel's high priest. This story of Jesus' adult ministry began according to Luke's third chapter in the year 28 CE.

Luke has two characters, John the Baptist and Jesus, whom he wants to contrast against all the other big name players. In the verses and pages that follow, Luke will discredit everyone from Caesar to Caiaphas to Pontius Pilate and lift up both John and Jesus. Luke does what you and I must do. Luke places the faith of Jesus in a real-time political/religious/economic context.

Because of Luke's specificity we know when Jesus' story happened...."In the fifteenth year of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John in the wilderness."

Our faith, your faith, must be grounded in our real time. We are in the first year of the presidency of Barak Obama, while Mitch Daniels is governor of Indiana, and we are represented in Washington by Senators Richard Lugar and Evan Bayh during the pontificate of Benedict the 23rd and the loose confederation of popular Protestants with speaker Rick Warren.

Gospel writer Luke contrasts the world of power and economic brokers, both secular and religious, who run the world over and against John the Baptist and Jesus. Luke understands that the battle lines are drawn for the political, economic and spiritual soul of their country.

Luke says that God's work is in the hands not of the political and religious elite of his day, but is best represented by this gruff out-in-the-wilderness guy John the Baptist and the one who follows him, Jesus of Nazareth. Luke goes to great lengths to state God's intention for the people, especially the people who are not benefiting from the advantages that come to the economic and political elite. God's intentions are for political justice, fairness, equitable distribution of wealth, eliminating poverty, and all the people and leaders living in loving and redemptive relationship with each other. When? Now. There is a lot of political talk that now is not the time to bring health care justice, economic justice to those 46 million who have absolutely no health insurance and many of the rest of us who see huge raises in our health care premiums and co-pays. When is the time? God says through John and Jesus this morning that the time is always now.

It is worth noting for the story line, that God starts all of this business out in the desert. It really seems that it is nearly always in the desert that God meets and transforms God's people. Perhaps that is a good reason to stay out of deserts, but then we have to deal with the metaphorical deserts of our lives and those are so very hard to avoid.

It was in the desert wilderness that Moses met God at a burning bush. It was into the desert that the escaped slaves from Egypt fled and there also that they met with God at Mount Sinai and were formed into the nation of Israel. It was in the wilderness that Israel received the Law that taught them God's intention for society—the kind of world God wanted Israel to create. It was always into the wilderness desert that God's prophets fled to be emboldened for their mission to the world. It was from a long sojourn in the desert that the remnant of Israel returned to rebuild Jerusalem after living in defeat in Babylonia. It would be in the desert that Jesus will go to wrestle with the temptations of building God's Way versus Satan's way, the way of the world. John the Baptist is found this morning, crying out to us from the desert to prepare the way of God in our lives, in our businesses, in our politics, in our health care, in our treatment of the homeless and the sick and the grieving. It has always been in the wildness of the desert that Israel has met God and has heard God seeking to shape them into the nation that God intends for them to be.

John the Baptist's job then and today has not changed. John came calling from the desert, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. John called on the people Israel then, on us today, on everyone no matter what nationality, to repent of their acceptance of life lived under political oppression, economic exploitation of the poor, and religious domination by a power elite and called on us to symbolize that repentance through being baptized, cleansed of our sins. John then and again this morning calls us to repent of our willingness to seduce and to be seduced by the systems of this world that benefit the few at the expense of the many. We are called upon to repent and to do justice, to love all others tenderly and to walk humbly with God.

Incidentally, if you are feeling put upon by the insinuations of this message of John's, then you, we, are feeling the insult that good Jews felt when John was preaching. Jews did not ever have to be baptized. They had personal cleansing rituals that looked like baptism rites. But baptism was something that gentiles had to do in order to convert to Judaism. It was a dirty person's problem. John was asking Jews to be as Gentiles through admitting publicly that they had rejected God's intentions for themselves and their nation, were now publicly repenting, and were committing themselves to become true Jews as John said God defined what it meant to be Jewish.

It was amazing how many Jews responded to John's call and it caused great distress to the existing definers of Jewish culture and religion. And Jesus was among those who came forward.

Luke concludes this morning's story with a reference to the great prophet Isaiah, who said that one would come out of the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord. And the task of the people—us, if you will—is to make paths straight, valleys filled, mountains lowered, crooked ways made straight, rough places made smooth. In other words, we are to straighten out the world in which we live, its political, economic, labor, social, and spiritual dimensions as well as its individuals. We are to prepare for the coming of God. And when God comes and when we embrace God's vision for the world then "all flesh shall see the salvation of God” in the world, in real time, existing as God has always intended for it to be.

This is the Good News in our time and our ministry. God is on the move and no one can stop God and us working together. They say that it is already happening. Can you sense it?