Saint Luke's United Methodist Church, Washington D.C.

Sermon Archive

« The Genealogy of Jesus: Or, God Finds a Way | Most Recent Sermon | Everything Turned Upside Down »

December 11, 2005

A Visit from God

Isaiah 61:1 – 4; 8 – 11
John 1:6 – 8; 19 - 28

Text: "He (John the Baptist) said, 'I am the voice of one crying out in
the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the Lord.'" . . . from John 1:23

How do you prepare for a very special visitor? Well, it is the Advent Season and today's Scripture finds John the Baptist telling us that we are to "prepare the way of the Lord." Therefore, I would like to tell you a story from my childhood about how my family prepared for a very special visitor.

Dr. Goater was one of the pillars of my home town church in Orono, Maine. He may have been the Lay Leader, head of Finance or Chair of Trustees; it really doesn't matter, he was one of those people whom everybody respected and stood in awe of. I certainly could tell that by the way my parents deferred to him. He also was head of the Department of Plant and Etymology at the University of Maine. My mother was one of the secretaries in that department during my early elementary years. My father, at the time, worked at least two jobs - one was as a butcher in the town's only grocery store, the other was working at either wall-papering or house painting during the evening hours.

So it was a big deal when Dr. Goater asked my folks after church one Sunday if he could visit us the following Saturday.

Mom and dad started cleaning the house. Now, to fully appreciate this, you have to realize that my mother was a meticulous house keeper. Every Saturday morning my mother would clean. And I mean clean. Out came her prized possession – the Electrolux – followed by cleaning rags and furniture polish. There was not a part of the house that wasn't affected. Even the old upright piano got dusted, complete with a cloth dampened with milk to clean the ivory keys. There was never a time in my house when you could write dust me on – or under – any piece of furniture. The kitchen floor was washed and waxed every week, and stripped of wax every month. Every spring and every fall there was an even more thorough cleaning. All the windows got washed with Glass Wax, the screens were swept and vacuumed, scatter rugs were taken outside and hung on the clothes line to be beaten (my job!), the hot air registers were taken apart and cleaned as far down as my father's arms could reach, and even the springs under the mattress got dusted.

But regardless of all this, Dr. Goater's announced visit accelerated the cleaning efforts a magnitude of ten. Instead of going out to paint and earn money, dad stayed home three nights during that week. One night, I remember him on the floor scouring it with ammonia and a razor blade, getting it ready for another coat of wax. The other two nights he was doing touch up painting on the front porch and the door frames. Mom, after defrosting the freezer (she would reverse the air flow of the Electrolux and stick the hose in there), and cleaning the refrigerator, bought an extra bottle of Easy Off oven cleaner to make sure the oven was clean. (I never quite figured that one out. Try as I might, I couldn't imagine Dr. Goater looking in the oven during his visit. But if you knew my mother, you didn't question her as to why she was doing it.)

Meanwhile, other than being a rather amused, but by-in-large an uninvolved 7 or 8-year-old observer of all this frantic cleaning, I was left to my own devices. So I went outside to play. And play I did. I have always had a fondness for construction, and I loved my toy dump trucks and road-graders. So left to my own devices while my parents diligently cleaned the inside of the house I transformed our modest backyard into a system of dirt roads and bridges – complete with streams and rivers. There never was much grass in our backyard, and when I finished that week there was nothing but mud and dirt, all the better to build roads with. Needless to say, I was quite proud of my efforts. The one draw-back was that my parents were so busy preparing for Dr. Goater's visit that I never did get them to witness and approve my creative efforts.

Until Saturday, that is.

You see, there were two ways to get to my house from where Dr. Goater lived. The more "adult" way would be to go by road and come in the front door. That is certainly what my parents had counted on. But there was another way. You see Dr. Goater lived about 300 yards away – as the crow flies – across a hay field. If he were to take the "adult" way – by road or sidewalk, it was about 1/2 of a mile. Well, during the week of frantic cleaning by my parents, and proud road construction by me, the field between Dr. Goater's house and ours also got mowed, raked, and baled.

Saturday came, and it was a bright sunny day. Mother had completed her best John the Baptist job all week long in "preparing the way" if not for the Lord, at least for Dr. Goater. She was the voice crying out, "Repent. Get the house in shape." And, now that I think about it, my road construction had filled in some valleys and leveled some mountains; I had made the crooked roads straight and the rough roads smooth. All was right in the world for Dr. Goater's visit.

However, when Dr. Goater came to visit on Saturday, being a bright sunny day, instead of driving to our house and coming in the front door, he simply walked across the field, carefully stepped over and around my muddy and dirty road construction and knocked on the – back door.

Mother was mortified. Never in her wildest dreams, did she expect Dr. Goater, the head of the Plant and Etymology Department, the head layperson in the church – he might as well have been "God" in her eyes – she just never expected Dr. Goater to cut across the field, walk through my road construction and come in the back door.

As it turned out, it was a delightful visit. Dr. Goater was absolutely charming. And even though mother was mortified with what I had done to the back yard, he was quite complimentary to me about my creativity. And if he looked in the oven, I never knew about it.

There was nothing to fear. Mom had prepared the house for the Health Department Inspector. But the one who came was coming just to tell us that we were a valued family in the church; and . . . by the way, "would my dad be willing to recruit and coordinate the volunteers to paint and wallpaper the parsonage?"

This experience is one I find so similar to this season and the appearance of John the Baptist a couple of weeks before Christmas each year. Each year, from one of the Gospels, we hear John the Baptist shouting: "Repent! Shape up! Get your house in order because the Messiah is coming." As Ronald Luckey has said, "Isn't that interesting? Because the Messiah is coming to save us precisely because we can't get our house in order! If we could shape ourselves up, straighten out our lives, why would we need a Savior?"

Upon reflection, I am more thankful than I can say that this Jesus comes to our house even when the oven has burned on pizza cheese, and the paint is flaking off the ceiling and door frames.

Not that we don't need to hear and respond to John's word. I am glad that we tried to get our house in order, for there is always much that we need to do to get our spiritual house in order. There is a lot that is crooked in my life that needs straightening out. And there is a lot rough that needs to be made smooth: the discouraging words we speak to one another; the harshness and testing; or worse, the taking for granted of those we love. We have angry thoughts and selfish desires. We tend to ignore the poor, while we remain captive to our culture and its values.

John the Baptist is right. We all desperately need to turn our lives around and make them conform to the will of God. There is no arguing with John on that.
So we had better pay attention to John

But if John the Baptist and his word is all there is to Christmas, then it won't be a very Merry Christmas around your house or mine. Because we can never get our house Spic and Span clean enough for the coming of God. If Jesus is coming to inspect our house and yours with a white glove, then there will be hell to pay – literally. Because we can start now and repent 'til the cows come home and never do enough shaping up to be worthy of Christ's coming. There will always be one more area, perhaps hidden in the back yard, that isn't clean enough; or one more layer of wax that clouds the clarity of our values.

And that's the dark side of John's message. As much as we'd better repent of our ways, we can never do enough or make ourselves spiffy enough. We live in a real world where perfection is not an option and where even when we want to do what is honorable and holy, we end up compromising and choosing the lesser of two evils.

So, are we condemned?

What John the Baptist is saying is "No." A new thing is about to come to pass. A visit from God is about to happen. In Bethlehem a new order began where being perfect is still God's demand and where the call to repent of our sins is still valid. But when we have done what we can this day, and cleaned our house as clean as we can this day, and tried as best we can to discern and do God's will, God gives us the gift of Christmas.

And what God sees from then on is not a stain on our character, but a sinner worth redeeming. God declares us redeemable in the name of Christ. The house – even our spiritual house – may still be a mess, but we are "in Christ" and have the grace and forgiveness of Christ to begin to help fill every valley, make the mountains and hills low, the crooked to be straight, and the rough places made smooth; and then "all flesh shall see the salvation of God."