Scripture: Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6

“A Voice cries in the Wilderness: ‘Prepare a Way for the Lord, make his Paths straight ’.”

-- Luke 3:5 (quoting Isaiah 10:3-5)

Today we lit the second candle of Advent, the candle of John the Baptist. I have confronted John at this time of the year for almost 40 years now and my first thought this year is, ‘What else can I say about him, that I have not said 40 times already?” Then I notice that the lectionary links John’s proclamation with a saying of the Apostle Paul in Philippians, and the message for this year begins to emerge. The Apostle writes, “My prayer is that that your love for each other may increase more and more and never stop improving your knowledge and deepening your perception so that you can always tell the difference between right and wrong and recognize the best. This will help you to become pure and blameless, and prepare you for the day of Christ, when you will reach the perfect goodness which Jesus Christ produces in us for the glory and praise of God (Philippians 1:9-11).” The clue to a message is that the phrase translated in this modified JB translation as  “…tell the difference between good and evil and recognize the best” (dokimadzein ta diapheronta, in Greek) is the hub of the NT teaching on spiritual growth and recurs at three pivotal points in Paul’s letters. It also suggests to me the meaning of the command to make a straight path for God to come into our lives.

At the beginning of the letter to the Romans Paul says that we have all lost the ability to tell the difference between right and wrong and choose the best because our failure to honor God has corrupted our desires and thus confused our minds. We desire the wrong things, - chiefly to be God to ourselves - and thus think wrong thoughts. Paul calls this state, in the KJV translation, “the reprobate mind.” In Romans 12:2, as we were reminded last Sunday, Paul encourages us to take advantage of the benefits of the work of God in Christ, which he has been describing in the chapters of Romans between the reprobate mind of 1:28 and the renewed mind of 12:2, to renew our minds, or in John’s terms, to make our ways of thinking straight again.

In our Philippians passage that return to straight thinking will occur when we return to loving one another. Mutual love will clear our minds to see what is best for ourselves and for others, and prepare us for the judgment day. So the gift of grace is the gift of a miraculous love for others, friends and enemies alike, in the community of the church. (We must remember that Jesus reckoned always that there would be enemies within the group of believers. He teaches us in the Sermon on the Mount to love not only our friends, but also and especially our enemies (Matthew 5:43-44), which he would not have done if he did not anticipate there being enemies within. Indeed, he warns us explicitly that our enemies will come from within our own households (Matthew 10:36), and, of course, he lived with Judas throughout his ministry and in the end knelt before him and washed his feet. Jesus knew what it is to live with enemies and to love them).

In the light of this lectionary context, as I have already hinted, I hear the cry of the Voice in the Wilderness, “Prepare a Way for the Lord, Make his Paths straight,” this year as a summons to intellectual clarity and moral reformation. We have been morally deformed and need to be reformed, we have become intellectually twisted and need to be straightened out. Intellectual twisting causes moral twistedness. We need to get our thinking straight so that we can straighten out our lives! There are several facets of this messages that would reward reflection, but here we must limit ourselves to one or two.

First let us appreciate the intellectual component of NT moral salvation. Making our paths straight begins and ends with renewing our minds, and that renewal can takes several forms. One form is the seeing a broader swath of reality than we usually do, with enlarging our horizons, with appreciating the world from more than our own point of view. This is sometimes called an open mind, the opposite of a censorious and condemnatory mind. It is always open to the probability that it does not understand all that it needs to and so should be humble and generous. Thus a good mind produces good moral attitudes, namely humility and generosity, and these are already half way to the crowing attribute of the moral life, love for friends and enemies.

Second, let us reflect on the reprobate mind. Let’s try to imagine it. I think such a mind would be marked first by prejudice, because prejudice is the refusal to think again, or to think for oneself. Prejudice is the mark of a mental and moral laziness that simply takes over existing thoughts and feelings, too lazy to think for itself. Because of its prejudice the reprobate mind lives life at second hand, always wearing someone else’s soiled mental underwear, and occasionally wonders why it feels so unreal to itself. I once knew a young woman who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She experienced a miraculous cure, which transformed her into a sincere Christian. She told me that the chief regret she had when she thought she was dying is not that she would soon die but that she had never really lived. Henry David Thoreau, you recall, said that he went to live alone on Walden Pond because on his deathbed he did not want to feel that he had never really lived - intentionally, deliberately, originally, and authentically. Can you hear the voice in the wilderness of your inner self, crying, “Make the way straight? Get in touch with the truth! Learn to think for yourself! Stop hiding in all that prejudice! Stop following the herd!  A reprobate mind does not think for itself; it barely thinks at all, preferring the safety of immersion in the gross national mind to the risk and effort of thought.

Thirdly, let us look at John as an example of the renewed mind. John the Baptist was such a renewed and renewing mind, who like Thoreau, (or rather the other way around) went out to be alone for a while, and then to bring back a message to the world. The message he brought back from the solitude, -that the Gospel summarizes by the quotation from Isaiah 40, - breaks down into important particulars. When he warned people to repent, that is, start thinking for themselves and thus break free of prejudice and change their minds, they said in reply that they were “OK” as they were because they were “children of Abraham (Luke 3:7-14).” To which John replied that that was worth about as much as these stones in the desert. This is the reply of the culturally smug who are so comfortable within the cocoon of their own cultural assumptions that they never question them and persecute or drive out anyone who does.

When people asked John what concretely they should do to be spiritually authentic he told them to be generous and to share their goods with those who are in need. To the tax collectors he said, “Don’t be dishonest and extortionate,” and to the soldiers he said, “Don’t be violent to civilians and don’t take their goods by force.” Such practical, down to earth doings! Yet these are the signs of a spiritually clear mind that leads to a loving heart, which is the presence of God in the lives of men and women. So simple, so practical, so profound! Just do good as you are given opportunity and you will become authentic again! However, the NT describes such simple goodness as the result of a change or renewal of the mind. Repentance means change of mind, just as Paul’s application of the term “renewal” does.

So this year I ask you to hear the message of John as a summons to take up the challenge of thought, serious thought about moral matters. What do you think about the current war we are waging? What do you think about the suffering of the Palestinians at the hands of our bought and paid for post-Zionist gangsters? What do you think about Mr. Bernard Rapaport of Austin Texas who recently got a $920,000 tax cut from our government, while you and I averaged $250. Mr. Rapaport thinks it’s a scandal and a shame; he thinks it’s unpatriotic. As he says, “Don’t they know that taxes support education? “ How do you think it is fair to load huge debt on our children and grandchildren so that the top 1% can get tax reductions worth millions, which they clearly do not need, while our poor go without health insurance or in many cases a living wage, despite multiple jobs, and the public schools fall apart? What do you think of that? Or do you not think of such things at all, or only through a filter of Republican loyalty that you have habitually and unreflectively used for years and are certainly not going to change now? What do you think of the fact that we are arguably living in the most corrupt period of Federal government since the Gilded Age, when Jay Gould and JP Morgan, Leland Stanford and Colllis Huntington raided the public coffers to enrich themselves beyond measure, and the Union Pacific Railroad company was, mutatis mutandis, an exact anticipation of Enron. And does it disturb you at all that Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers, the erstwhile Chairs of Enron and WorldCom respectively are vocal born again Christians, or that a prominent fundamentalist Christian leader proclaims that the American Bible Belt to be Israel’s safety belt, while he flies around the world in a private jet supplied by Jewish interests?