Sermon Archive

Last Friday, our family’s “Christmas preparations” were to have gotten underway in earnest. And before the snows came, Margaret did get to the post office to mail packages and buy our Christmas stamps—you know, the sacred kind, with Mary and the Christ-child, not the secular ones with a snowman, or reindeer, or dancing elf! She also got to the bank to put our finances in order for this month’s rush of writing checks for charities and purchasing gifts for loved ones. And she got as well to the discount store to find some outdoor icicle lights to hang on the front of our house. But we had intended, on Friday night or Saturday, to buy a Christmas tree and to choose our present to each other—some new carpeting for our hallways and staircase. And, of course, that did not happen. So, measured by the standards of this world, our Christmas preparations started out well but wound up way behind.

Of course, upon reflection I must admit that few of those proposed Christmas preparations had anything to do, really, with what John the Baptist had in mind when, long ago, he shouted out for all to hear those words found in our First Lesson, those words taken from the book of the prophet Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”

In fact, as I once again pondered those words from scripture, in the midst of Saturday’s blizzard, I suddenly recalled a John-the-Baptist-like warning that I’d first encountered some forty-five years ago, in college, when I read Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s then-new Christmas poem “Christ Climbed Down” (in A Coney Island of the Mind, 1958), a Christmas poem that alludes throughout to Good Friday and Christ’s cross. Ferlinghetti’s poem begins gloomily:

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars

Several stanzas later, the poem continues, in satiric despair:

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carollers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees

Yet the poem concludes on this surprisingly optimistic note:

Christ climbed down
From His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest of Second Comings

So, as Ferlinghetti sees it, each Advent, Christ waits anew to be born again from the womb of human hearts.

But now let’s return from Ferlinghetti to the original John the Baptist. As portrayed in the Gospel of Luke, John was a gruff, loud, abrasive man, who kept bellowing forth both his urgent summons to repentance and his startling announcement that the coming of God’s Messiah was closer to hand than most were imagining.

You see, John the Baptist felt called to challenge the people of his time to quickly re-order their priorities and re-form their lives so that their priorities might stand in harmony with their core identity—their identity as servants of God.

And that, of course, is precisely why the Second Sunday of Advent is always observed liturgically as John-the-Baptist Sunday—because during this season, which leads us up to Christmas, we modern folk also need quickly to re-order our priorities and re-form our lives. For we need to be preparing for Christmas in a Christ-like way. We need to be preparing ourselves not for a Christmas in which we indulge our love for “things,” but rather for a Christmas in which we give rebirth to Christ from the womb of our hearts and lives.

This need to re-prioritize our lives toward more love like Christ’s is a subject also addressed by the apostle Paul in this morning’s Second Lesson. There he says to the Christian community in Philippi, “And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more, with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, [what your priorities should be,] so that in the day of Christ you may be [found] pure and blameless…” (Philippians 1:9–10)

Now, on this Second Sunday of Advent, I’m reminded not only of the John-the-Baptist-like poem by Ferlinghetti but also of the John-the-Baptist-like proclamation made six years ago by the Roman Catholic bishop of Cleveland to the people of his diocese. In that proclamation, Bishop Anthony Pilla offered first his analysis of how we American Christians prioritize various components of our personal identity. Pilla said that whether we’re conscious of it or not, each of us tends to identify ourself first and foremost as “me, a consumer,” and then second of all as “me, an American,” and then thirdly as either “me, a liberal” or “me, a conservative,” and only fourthly as “me, a Christian,” as “me, a person who belongs to Christ.” And in response to Bishop Pilla’s analysis, I can only ask, “Is such also the case for many of us here today? Is that the way many of us either consciously or unconsciously prioritize the various components of our identity?”

Now, Pilla’s diagnosis constituted just the first part of his remarks. He went on, like John the Baptist, to offer a concluding prescription. Pilla called on the people of his diocese to re-prioritize their lives, to re-prioritize the rank they assign to each of these four identities, and Pilla went on to urge his flock to spend their season of Advent elevating to the first place in their lives their identity as “a Christian.” He urged them to use their season of Advent to free themselves from consumerism’s love for “things,” to use their season of Advent—as a song from Godspell puts it—to see Christ more clearly, love Christ more dearly, follow Christ more nearly, day by day!

To which thought I can but add that my prayer for us this Advent is like that of the apostle Paul for his church: namely, that our love “may overflow more and more” as we prepare for the day of Christ by coming to see Christ more clearly, love Christ more dearly, follow Christ more nearly, day by day, by day, by day.

I invite you now to take a minute to think about who the most important person on your Christmas gift list is. Who is at the very top of your list? (Pause) And now, think about what you want to give to that person. (Pause) Now let me ask you, is the person at the top of your list the One whose birthday we will be celebrating on Christmas, Jesus? I hope so! And is the gift you want to give to Jesus the gift of your ever increasing love? Again, I hope so!

But you may be saying, “You tricked me, Byron! And besides, it’s very difficult to even think of offering any gift at all to One who seems so removed from us as does the apparently invisible Christ—not to mention how difficult it is to imagine offering such a One so personal a gift as our ever increasing love. My spouse, my partner, my child, my parent—I can understand how to go about growing in my love for these, for they seem so immediately present to me. But how can I grow in my love for One who seems as hard to find as Christ seems?”

Well, I suggest that Christ is not really as hard to find as we may at first think, and I suggest that the very first step we need to take in preparing ourselves to grow in love for Christ—the very first step is to learn where in the world to look for Christ.

Now Jesus himself answered this very riddle quite plainly when he was addressing his followers near the end of his life. In preparing his disciples for the time when he would no longer appear to be with them physically, Jesus told them that whenever they offer the gift of their love to a person who's hungry or thirsty or naked or sick or imprisoned or estranged they will in fact be also offering that gift of love to Jesus himself (Matthew 25:31–40), for within each and every person-in-need there resides, in truth, the very image of the crucified and risen Jesus. So every time we offer the gift of love to a person-in-need, we are growing in our love for the Christ-Child as well and we are preparing ourselves quite well for Christmas.

Now this is the Sunday following World AIDS day, so my thoughts today about finding Christ in persons-in-need turn naturally to the more than 40 million persons who are living with the HIV virus, in each and every one of whom the image of the crucified and risen Christ resides.

And if we are to succeed this Advent in “preparing the way of the Lord”, then it follows that we must grow in our practice of love toward those who are HIV positive or have full-blown AIDS.

So let us listen to some words written by Joanne Mariner, a New York-based human rights attorney, just a week and a half ago, on the day before Thanksgiving (FindLaw.com; November 26, 2003):

“Here are some numbers to consider: 14 million, 35.9 billion, and 1.

“The first [figure, 14 million] is an estimate of the number of people who will die of AIDS and other treatable diseases [like tuberculosis and malaria] over the course of the coming year [2004].…” 14 million people!

“The second figure [35.9 billion] represents the combined 2002 profits, in dollars, of the 10 biggest pharmaceutical companies listed in Fortune magazine’s annual review of America’s largest businesses.” 35.9 billion dollars!

“The third figure [1] corresponds to the number of countries that, last week, voted against a U.N. resolution on access to drugs in global epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria. The resolution emphasized that the failure to deliver life-saving drugs to millions of people who are living with HIV/AIDS constitutes a global health emergency. One hundred [and] sixty seven countries voted in favor of the resolution. The single vote against it was cast by the United States.” 1 country!

“Sadly, these [three] numbers [14 million people, 35.9 billion dollars, and 1 country] are closely related. To protect their exorbitant profits, drug companies are fighting the production and distribution of cheap generic versions of patented drugs. Unable to afford the medicines that could save their lives, millions of poor people around the world die of treatable illnesses every year.

“And, as the recent U.N. vote exemplifies, the drug companies have a reliable ally. Not only does the U.S. government use its considerable economic power to bully developing countries into restricting access to low-cost generics, it continues to try to change the international rules that allow such generics to be made in the first place.…

“In their vulnerability to treatable diseases, the rich and the poor live in different worlds. Every year, millions of people in developing countries die of illnesses that they would likely have survived had they lived in Europe or the United States. A key factor in the enormous global disparities in death rates is poor peoples’ lack of access to needed drugs.…

“In the United States, the cost of anti-retroviral drugs is generally in the range of $10,000 to $15,000 per patient annually, and people with advanced cases of AIDS may pay far more.… Pharmaceutical companies in India that produce generic drugs are able to produce effective ones at a cost below $300 per patient per year.” $15,000 vs. $300!

“The U.S. vote [on November 19th] in the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly was not too surprising, given [our] record. Still, it was dismaying to find the United States willing to stand alone against 167 other countries—as if it were a matter of principle to oppose a resolution calling for widespread public access to the drugs necessary to combat global epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.…

“President George Bush, in a number of his most high-profile speeches, has expressed a rhetorical determination to assist in the global fight against HIV/AIDS. By allowing U.S. officials to lead the world in protecting the commercial interests of [U.S.] drug companies, he betrays his public commitment to this cause.”

I have no doubt at all about what’s one of the most priceless presents we can give to Jesus this year for his birthday. It is the gift of reasonably priced drugs for everyone living with HIV/AIDS. It is the gift of sufficiently developing our love for the image of Christ that is present in every person-in-need. It is the gift of including on our list of Christmas preparations some active contribution to providing people with access to the effective, low-cost drugs that can extend their lives by decades. And such an active contribution by us can, of course, include writing to President Bush and to the U.S. drug companies, urging them to give Jesus a birthday present this year by dropping their effort to block the distribution of low-cost generic drugs and thereby saving millions of people from premature deaths, not only this year but every year.

Writing letters such as these—this kind of Christmas preparation takes no more time and energy and a lot less money than our normal “materialistic” Christmas preparations, and this kind of Christmas preparation truly honors the One whose birth we celebrate.

Yes, “prepare the way of the Lord” this Advent by seeing Christ more clearly, loving Christ more dearly, and following Christ more nearly, day by day. By doing this, we can give rebirth to Christ this Christmas Eve—rebirth from the womb of our hearts and lives.

Let us pray: