Luke 3:1-6
December 7, 2003
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
For the most part, I know how to get around in San Francisco. With a Triple A map from Rodney Tom, you can find almost every little street, lane, circle, alley, place, there is. On our new church website, you can click on directions and it would automatically link to Mapquest for you to get the most up-to-date directions from wherever you might be coming from to arrive at church on time. Now if you are the kind of person who still get lost, there’s this GPS satellite global positioning system that literally tells you to turn left and right, right on your dashboard. With all these helps, San Francisco is nothing like an untamed wild wilderness. It’s hard to get lost in San Francisco.
Today, John the Baptist stands before us loudly giving directions for those who may be lost in the wilderness. He asks us to check our spiritual compasses. He requests that we check the direction of our lives. He implores us to make sure we know where we are headed, that we are clear about which direction we are carrying the message of our lives.
But we might say, “Who gets lost in civilized San Francisco anyway? It’s easy to get around.” What is John trying to say to people who are living in the Bay Area today?
Lost in Fulfillment
For the past week, the SF Chronicle has done a daily feature on those who are homeless. The daily feature starts on the front page introducing us to who these people are. And gigantic pictures spread across 3 to 4 pages in the back of the front section are like portraits of people trying their best to survive in San Francisco. They want us to see the homeless as real people. When I read about their stories, the homeless are lost in the San Francisco wilderness. They’re in the wilderness trying to find a place to call home.
But for those of us who do live in houses, condos, apartments, and flats, what are we yearning for? In fact, for most of us, if there is something we yearn for, we can pretty much go out and buy it. For people like us, when there is so little lost-ness in the wilderness and so many fulfillments, what is there left for the gospel to say?
In August when our church sponsors its annual Youth Camp, we tell the youth to leave all their CD players, Gameboys, cell phones, and boom boxes at home. In fact, we ask the camp to wrap up the pay phone booth with canvas so that we can get the kids unplugged. They are securely connected to their global positioning system so much all the time that unless we get them unplugged for the week, there is no way to tell them that they are far away from home and lost in the tall redwoods so that we can speak to them about Jesus.
We have so much electronic stimulation, so many material goods, that we have nothing to yearn for anymore. We are lost in our fulfillments. We are so familiar with our world that it’s hard for us to feel lost.
But until we can confess to the reality that we are lost in our lives, we won’t be able to change directions to find the new life that God promises to bring our way.
Lost in Freedom
In addition to how we are lost in fulfillment—of having almost everything that we need and want, we are lost in having too much freedom. One of the reasons why we have so many cars on the freeways is because we like the freedom to go anywhere we want. Rather than to be restrained by someone’s schedule, we all drive alone in cars so that we would have the freedom to come and go whenever we please. But too frequently, as we drive around alone, we are lost in the wilderness of this city.
We have the freedom of choice. More choices are available to us than any other people in history. But in this culture of “over-choice,” we have become overwhelmed by the dizzying array of possibilities set before us. Instead of choosing between two or three options, we have a dozen. With so many choices and freedom to choose whatever we want, we are lost in knowing what we really see as important in the first place. It’s like there are so many highway signs pointing you to different directions that you are numbed by the possibilities. So we are lost.
You would think that as an envy of the rest of the world with the freedom of choice that we have that we would be happy. And yet, there is widespread unhappiness. With all of our freedom to choose, many people still speak of a sense of unfulfillment and despair. So what is going on?
Yearning for Christmas
At this time of the year, Advent is a time of yearning. In Advent, the hymns we sing are somewhat restrained so that we may yearn for what is to come. They speak of desire, of waiting, of expectation. So today, the Advent prophet of John the Baptist speaks to us, a people in exile, a people suffering from homelessness, lost and despair.
John the Baptist’s voice is that of one “crying in the wilderness.” In order to hear John’s cry, one must be in the wilderness. Is there anyway in which where you live could be described as wilderness like those who have been featured in the Chronicle this week? Is the address where you live here in the Bay Area really your home? Or are there moments when you get the impression that you are not fully at home, that you are on exile, that there might be more to life than the life that you are living?
It takes a certain amount of courage and conviction to admit that we are lost in life and are yearning to hear the good news from John.
In 21st century America, we have been led to believe that we can find our own way. “How can we be lost with maps and satellite global positioning systems?” we say. We are told that with the freedom of choices, we can satisfy all of our needs. And yet, there is still a sense of unfulfillment. When we are honest with ourselves, we discover that we still yearn for the meaning of our lives that we so badly desire.
So John the Baptist calls us to come home by preparing ourselves for repentance. Prepare a way for the Lord! Examine your life—examine your priorities, your values, your behavior. Check out your emotional, your spiritual, your ethical life. Are you headed in the right direction? Are you headed in the direction of doing good? Are you headed in the direction of God? If not, then, repent. Turn around. Change direction.
Is your health unhealthy: your blood pressures too high, your cholesterol too rich, your weight too much? (By the way, my annual physical shows that I am in excellent health!) Well, then, repent. Turn around. Change direction.
How is your family life? Is it balanced, honest, open, connected? Is it stressed, precarious, lonely, brittle, broken? Repent, Turn around. Change direction.
What about your work? Is your work rewarding, creative, compassionate? Or is it tedious, overwhelming, demanding, disconnected from your vision and your dreams, an unsatisfying use of your gifts and your energy? Repent. Turn around. Change direction.
And what about your faith? Is it vital, growing, healing, serving? Or is it small, tired, timid, dull? Repent. Turn around. Change direction. This is what the candidates for baptism and church membership will be doing this afternoon. They will be telling you that they are repenting. They are turning their lives around and changing directions so that their lives will be following Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.
My friends, if we want God to come into our lives, then we need to get ready. We need to prepare. We need to repent. We need to change our directions of being materialistically fulfilled but spiritually unfulfilled; given so many choices and yet we still haven’t chosen Jesus.
There is a medieval legend about a man who was decadent and irresponsible in many ways but who had enough grace in him to want to do good. He went to a costume maker who gave him an angel costume to wear, complete with a halo wired to his head. As the man walked down to the street he was tempted to act and react in his normal, shiftless way, but then he remembered the halo on his head. So he decided to act differently.
He gave money to a beggar on the street. He treated his wife nicely. He refused to cut corners at work. Eventually he returned the halo angel costume, but as he was leaving the costume shop, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror—and he saw a permanent halo glowing above his head!
It seems that he had become what he did. His repentance had made possible God’s forgiveness and transformation in his life. Yes, by turning around and beginning to behave in a new way, this man found a permanent new direction for his life.
Today’s Wilderness
In the third year of the presidency of George W. Bush, when Arnold Schwartzenegger is Governor of California, Willie Brown is on his last year being the Mayor of San Francisco and Roy Medley is the General Secretary of the American Baptist Churches in the USA, in the year 2003, the word of God comes to John and through John, the word of God comes to us—to Nelson and Lea, to Wes and Sheryl, to Paul, to John, to Wendy, to Melanie, to Ken, to Dana, to Lindsay, to Lauren, to Aaron, to Avery, to Becky, to Jayson, to Cardenas—the word of God comes to us in the wilderness.
For us to see the light of Christmas, one has first got to become accustomed to the darkness of being lost in San Francisco. For us to see the stars in the highest heavens, one must first sit for a while in the darkness here on earth. It is only when we can honestly admit that we are lost in our ways—groping around in the wilderness—will we be yearning for Christmas.
People sometimes accuse the church of always criticizing, of always bringing out the worst about us in the world. John’s message of baptism is an invitation for us to repent in our hearts— filled with anger, hurt, shame, or guilt and to confess that we have sinned. John’s message is not judgmental, it’s an invitation to come and prepare your life for the Lord. By turning away from our wrongdoings, we turn toward the one who is inviting us to come in from the cold and make God’s love our home. No longer are we lost in the world but God calls and claims us as his very own.
This is the good news on this second Sunday of Advent. To those who live in exile, lost in the wilderness, wandering in the Bay Area, God is making a way. You heard John the Baptist:
“Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth.”
You don’t need Mapquest or a satellite global positioning system, God is making a way through the wilderness, a highway straight to you. All you have to do is to keep looking, keep yearning and you shall see the “salvation of God.”
Let us pray.
God of mercy, we humbly come to you this morning with an open and willing heart to confess our sins and to seek your way. Lead us to change directions, leaving behind the false dependency on the things of this world and to yearn for the way of the Lord. There, O God, we pray to receive your salvation. Amen.