Second Sunday of Advent – December 5, 2021
Luke 3:1-6

Preparation takes work, and in this season, a lot of work. You know the drill: haul the Christmas decorations from the storage, decorate the house, prepare the menus for the parties, feasts, and potlucks, prepare the gifts and gift-giving. And that’s just our homes. Then there’s the church part of the preparation: ready the bulletins, ready the sermons, ready all the moving pieces for a spectacular season of joy, love, and peace. And for the brave ones among us, ready to think about planning for the Lenten season and Easter! It’s like the effort to prepare for a vacation (not that Advent is a vacation by any stretch of the imagination); what should be a time of rest and joy actually takes a lot to pull off. Thus, we feel we need a vacation from the vacation. For Christmas, then, we need joy and peace for all the preparation that goes into having joy and peace!

Luke 3:1-6 presents to us a daunting task of preparation. On the one hand it locates John the baptizer and Jesus’s ministry during the political tenure of certain actors – there’s the historical piece. Thus, if there is any doubt that the Word made flesh was a historical figure, the Gospel writer is clear that Jesus of Nazareth and his cousin John were not fictitious, mythical figures.

But there’s another angle: the advent of Jesus the Savior takes a lot of preparation; in fact, it’s like being in “the wilderness.” Consider this, all those politicians and powerbrokers listed in verses 1 and 2 – that’s pretty daunting – the wilderness of the empire, of the tetrarchy, of the high priest. What you have there are not only historical figures confirming Jesus’s and John’s life and ministries in actual history, the Gospel is painting for us the context of “wilderness” – the ones in charge of “powers and principalities.” And then there’s more. The wilderness also involves baptizing for repentance and forgiveness because people were sinning, and unforgiving, and being hard-headed, and hard-hearted, and doing all sorts of really bad and nasty things that make us need the Savior. And then there’s more. The wilderness involves paths that are not straight but crooked and cragged, and rough and flesh that don’t yet see the salvation of God.

Thus, preparation is needed. And it’s preparation not so much in the form of finely choreographed kids’ musicals or a perfectly made apple pie, or Uncle Bob and Aunt Becky not getting into a fight, or the sermon that will be preached with the right intonations with your robe and stoles perfectly ironed and starched. It could be all that, but there’s more to this familiar promise of the preparation. It’s the promise that underneath the weight of it all, in the underbelly of our angst of the season, from the underside of the powers and principalities that would rather not have the Savior intrude on the agenda and plans of the world … comes bursting forth a word about God, about God’s love, and about the One who leans into our lives and this broken world to make things right, to fix what is so wrong with us, to mend relationships, to heal, to feed, to free the captive. There’s one word for that kind of preparation: justice.

Preparing for God’s justice and doing God’s justice is a lot of work. And that’s why we need the just Savior to do it, to be it, and to help us keep on keeping on with it.