With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous. To make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

Normally when we speak of John the Baptist it is in terms of his general weirdness: the angry prophet in the wilderness, the guy who ate locusts and wild honey, the one who was so critical of the religious and political leadership that he was beheaded by Herod, the one who played bad cop to Jesus good cop role.

And while I am anxious that we listen to, and take seriously, John’s strong and challenging message as the one who prepared the way for Jesus, I don’t think I have ever looked to him as the model of how we are to prepare the world around us for these coming weeks of Advent.

However, when you go back and read John’s job description, as given by the angel Gabriel to his father before his birth, it sounds like a pretty good set of goals for us in this time of preparation.

For, you see, the preparations themselves, the decorating and baking and planning and wrapping, those things contain, within themselves, blessings that we often miss because we are too busy complaining that we are too busy, or that some store clerk wished us a politically correct Happy Holiday instead of a piously correct Merry Christmas, or well you know the litany of complaints that we use to avoid seeing the holiness of these days, don’t you?

So what can John the Baptist teach us?

Here’s what Gabriel said he would be doing:

With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous. To make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

And what is the Spirit and Power of Elijah?

It was the courage and eloquence to speak the truth about the pain of the world, of the nation, of the faithful, of the families, of the individuals.

And as we look around us, on the 1st Sunday of Advent, where is the darkness of pain? Where is the darkness of failure? Where is the darkness in your life this morning?

Those are not happy, smiley face, Ho-Ho-Ho questions, I know.

That’s because Advent doesn’t start with happiness and joy, Advent starts with darkness recognized.

Only when we have stared into the abyss of our pain, only when we have clearly understood the realities of our lives, only then can we move on in our preparations: you don’t need to put up lights if you don’t think you have any darkness.

But, for the rest of us, those who know – only too well – the pain that we have known, and caused to the heart of God and others, once we have hung the lights in our darkness, then movement and growth begin, then we can praise God with our preparations, then life wakes up, as Paul said in Romans: you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.

And when we begin to wake from sleep we find the second step in John’s ministry: With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children.

Now you might think that is easy to turn our hearts to our children, especially each December, you hang around the kids and you can’t help but begin to smile as you soak up that love.

But I’m not so sure we’ve got that right. For Gabriel is clear: the burden is not upon the children to be happy and to lift our hearts, the burden is upon us to turn our hearts to them, to fill them with joy, to protect them, to teach them and to love them.

For years I have had a suspicion that those who insist that "Christmas is for Children" are often avoiding the reality that "Christmas is for adults" and it starts in the darkness of our lives and our past and then refocuses us toward the children and the future.

And that is John's gift to us today: a faith prepared for adulthood.

If you and I are mature enough to accept it, if you and I are smart enough to plug our lights in, before we try to turn them on, then we will find God’s presence in our preparations.

Which brings us to the next step in Gabriel’s outline of John’s life.

With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous.

Notice that wisdom is not seen as the mere accumulation of knowledge, wisdom is not measured on a smart/dumb spectrum, rather it is a disobedient/righteous spectrum.

And where do we fall in that spectrum?

What do the “righteous” have to teach us from their wisdom?

One of the more righteous men I have ever known, and certainly one of the wisest, was Vernon Kooy, my NT professor and your former pastor. And one of the wisest things that Dr. Kooy taught me, in his gentle way, was that every Christmas is unique, that Christ did not only come to Bethlehem and shepherds and the carpenter and his lady, 2000 years ago, but that he comes to us, today, where we live and work and shop and love, differently than he did then, because we’re different, our hopes and fears are different.

Each year there are people who complain about December being the same old stuff each year, and each year I try to encourage them to see things differently, to do things differently.

In our home each year there are clear and constant landmarks for our souls, places where certain decorations go because they can’t go anywhere else. But there are also things in places they have never been, so that we can by surprised by the reminders of God’s grace that they bring to us.

And here I will try to do, in these coming weeks, what I have always tried to do, to hold the story before us and let it tell itself in familiar and different ways, as we walk familiar and different paths than we have ever walked before.

With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous. To make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

In order to make ready this people that we are today, for the sacrament of this morning and for the celebrations of the coming weeks, let me turn as I have often in the past to Robert Frost, who has helped me understand - or at least ponder - this adult view of the season with these words:
      The silver of one star
      Plays cross-lights against pine green.
      And the play of this silver
      Crosswise against the green
      Is an old story . . .
      thousands of years.
      And sheep raisers on the hills by night
      Watching the woolly four-footed ramblers,
      Watching a single silver star -
      Why does the story never wear out?
      And a baby slung in a feed-box
      Back in a barn in a Bethlehem slum,
      A baby's first cry mixed with the crunch
      Of a mule's teeth on Bethlehem Christmas corn,
      Baby fists softer than snowflakes of Norway,
      The Vagabond Mother of Christ
      And the vagabond men of wisdom,
      All in a Barn on a winter night,
      And a baby there in swaddling clothes on hay -
      Why does the story never wear out?
      The sheen of it all
      Is a star silver and a pine green
      For the heart of a child asking a story,
      The red and hungry, red and hankering heart
      Calling for cross-lights of silver and green.

I don't know exactly what is going on with you and your life and your family this First Sunday of Advent, 2010, here in Clover Hill, I’m not even sure what’s going on with me and mine as the changes spin around us and none of us are quite sure of what the coming year will hold.

And so, more than ever, my vagabond heart wants to come home again, not just to the physical reality of a place, but to the memories stirred by old decorations, my red and hungry, red and hankering heart is calling out, crying out for the lights and songs and dreams, for the cross-lights of silver and green once again, needing to hear and needing to speak and needing to know the assurance that God is with us!

And needing to offer my praise in my preparations.

God presence may seem weak and fragile, like a baby or a poem.

Yet God comes to us weak and fragile with the power to turn the tools of war into the tools of prosperity, swords into plowshares.

And in weakness we find strength.

And in fragility we find endurance.

And in silence we hear the songs of Heaven.

And in surrender we discover victory.

It makes no sense, I know that.

It makes no sense, until you have tried it. It makes no sense, unless you have believed enough to live it. Then you understand, and then the rest of the world makes no sense.

I can't explain it, but that's OK because no one else can either.

I can only tell you that it has worked for me in my dark times of pain and failure and death and it has worked in my times of joy and victory and life.

And I can invite you to walk with me and hope that you let me walk with you so that we might become a people prepared for the Lord.

Here, throughout this month, in bread and wine, song and sermon, prayers and poems we will praise God for what has always been provided for us: Light in the midst of darkness, Light that darkness will never overcome.

And as my old friend Linus would say, “that’s what Advent is all about Charlie Brown!”

With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous. To make ready a people prepared for the Lord.