Sermon preached by The Rev'd Dr. Susan Kraus

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

The Second Sunday of Advent, December 9, 2007 - 8:00 a.m.

As the world encourages us to prepare for the Christmas season with sentimental songs and pictures of happy families and all kinds of pressure to “party” and to buy things, the church is doing something very different. The readings for Advent are not at all sentimental or comfortable or fun! The theme for Advent is this: wake up, get ready, repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!

This morning’s gospel features one of the giants of our tradition – John the Baptist. Let’s remember his history. It is intimately connected with the history of Jesus. John was a “miracle child.” His parents were Zechariah, a priest, and Elizabeth, a kinswoman of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Zechariah and Elizabeth were old and had no children. Then, while Zechariah was offering incense in the Temple, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and announced “Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John… He will be great in the sight of the Lord … even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit” (Luke 1:13-15).

When Elizabeth was six months pregnant, the angel Gabriel visited Mary to announce that she would bear Jesus. Mary then traveled to visit Elizabeth. Luke’s gospel describes their meeting: “Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy” (Luke 1:41-44). Even before his birth, John the Baptist, often called the forerunner of Christ, helped his mother recognize her Lord.

John was dedicated to the service of God from birth. He lived an extraordinary ascetic life, famous for his diet of locusts and wild honey and his animal skin garb. He preached repentance and had such a spiritual charism that crowds of people came to be baptized by him. Some wondered if he were the Messiah. But John always clearly pointed to Jesus Christ and never faltered in his understanding of the greatness of our Lord. He told the crowds, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matthew 3:11).

In preparing the way of the Lord, John the Baptist calls us to repent. The word “repent” means “think again.” So the first step in repentance is to think about ourselves – our thoughts, feelings, motivations and behavior – individually and collectively. We are called to take a good, hard look at ourselves and honestly admit where we have been wrong.

But that is not enough. Like other prophets in Israel’s history, John the Baptist would not accept mere words, or even the ritual baptism of repentance, as sufficient. Rather, John called the people to “bear fruit worthy of repentance” (Matthew 3:8). We must change, and our behavior must reflect that change. To be prepared for the coming of Jesus and the Kingdom of God, we need to change what is not right.

Listen again to the vision of the Kingdom of God described in Isaiah. “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:6-9).

This is a vision of peace and harmony, of gentleness and safety. A vision of a new kingdom, where no one hurts or destroys, where no one is hurt or destroyed. This is the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom so different from the world, the Kingdom Jesus proclaimed in word and deed, the Kingdom we await when Christ comes again.

During Advent, as we prepare for the celebration of the birth of Jesus, I pray that each of us may come closer to God. Let us take the time to look inward and identify a place where we have gone wrong, and then ask God for forgiveness and for the grace to change. And let us each do something this Advent to bring the vision of God’s Kingdom to reality, something to make peace or to rescue the poor. This is the time to prepare for the birth of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, a poor infant laid in a manger, our Lord and Savior, who calls us to follow him. Amen.