Second
Sunday of Advent
8 December 2024
Church Year C
Into the
Desert
Luke 3:1-6
Fr. Steven G. Oetjen
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Every
year
during Advent, the figure of St. John the Baptist is placed
before us.
He calls out to us with the same urgent message of
repentance: “Prepare
the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.”
Today, let us reflect for a moment on the place in which
he does
this.
The
Gospel
tells us that the word of God came to John “in the desert.” This is the place he
preached, and this is
the place where great crowds of people came to listen. This is significant. If people wanted to
hear him, they had to
leave behind the comfort of their homes, the familiarity of
their villages and
cities, and go out into the wilderness.
They did not go to the theater, as if to be entertained. They did not go to the
marketplace, as if to
engage in commerce. Nor
could they
simply sit on their couches and tune in to listen on the radio,
the television
or a livestream. They
had to leave the
world of comfort, of superficiality, of business as they knew
it, and go out
into the desert to hear John.
Clearly,
something
was drawing them. They
recognized
something in Joh the Baptist’s words that they were not fining
elsewhere. There is
truth in what he
says. There is
something much more real
here, more important than all those things that they were
normally preoccupied
with. Even if it
meant going out into
the desert to find it, they were willing to go.
We
have
the same need as they did.
We need to
hear the voice of the prophet, the word of God.
We need to hear the truth – not just any truth, but that
all-important
truth that is deeper than the concerns that normally dominate
our
attention. And, in
order to hear it, we
need to leave ‘behind those worldly cares that crowd it out. We need to go out into
the desert ‘if ‘we are
to hear ‘the voice crying out in the desert.
The word of God is there for us, if only we would listen.
Here
is
an example of a subtle way we might be unwilling to go into the
desert, where
we can truly hear the word.
Sometimes,
we are tempted by the thought, “I wish the Bible were more
relevant. I wish it
spoke to my everyday life.”
This seems at first glance to be a good
thought. After all,
we should not want
the Bible to be irrelevant to us.
But
the danger is that we pay little attention to what the Bible
says when it is not
immediately apparent what the application is.
Or, in trying to pay attention to it and make it
“relevant,” we end up
taking it and fitting it into the world of “my thoughts” and “my
preoccupations.” We
risk watering it
down, reducing it to just “a cute little story,” something I can
distill a
little lesson from, but which does not really change my life. The danger is that we
may fail to leave out
own world; we fail to go out to meet the Bible on its own terms.
If
we
do choose to leave our own preoccupations behind and enter into
the biblical
narrative, we find that our lives make sense there. I find my own life in
that story. In the
Scriptures, we find something much
more real, much more meaningful, much truer than all the
narratives the world
tries to tell us. It
is not a matter of
fitting the Bible into my world or into my sense of what is
relevant. It’s
about fitting myself - finding myself –
in the world of the Bible.
In other
words, the Bible is not what needs to change to accommodate me. I need to change to
accommodate it.
The
Bible
does, however, need to be opened for us.
Maybe we do not understand it, and maybe that is not our
faith. But the key
is the willingness to be taken up
into it, not simply to reduce it to my level.
This means getting out into the wilderness to hear the
prophet, not
trying to bring the prophet into my own world of superficial
concerns.