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Prepare the way! Make straight the paths!
Leap into the waters of repentance. Cry out aloud in the wilderness.
Fantastic Stuff!
Isnt it?
You can feel the blood quickening. You can feel the pulse beating.
Prepare the way. Make straight the paths!
Lets try it.
Stand up. Everyone.
Now I want this half of the church to Call: Prepare the way!
And this half to respond: Make straight the paths!
How was that?
Can you feel your heart beat now?
The possibility of change, of transformation, of something new breaking thru into creation is an exciting thought.
It can also be a terrifying one.
When was the last time you experienced a major change in your life?
Maybe a change of job or change of address?
Maybe you fell in love or got married
or got pregnant or had a baby or retired or fell ill,
maybe there is a new grandchild or
maybe someone you loved deeply died?
Maybe you have experienced a time of depression and then the lifting?
Maybe you were suddenly alone?
When was the last time you experienced a major change in your life?
Maybe you are experiencing it right now?
What does it or did it feel like?
Can you remember the sense of dislocation that comes with change,
the sense of separation,
the sense that you are standing on a threshold looking out into a new world?
Today we have witnessed three people,
three little people and their families
stand on that threshold and then leap off into sacred space.
Today we have participated in Major Change!
Whether we recognise this intellectually or not.
Today we have witnessed and joined in with a ritual
‘O so ancient and so new’
which has been given to us by Christ in order to help us
to open ourselves to the mystery of the living God.
And while this ritual is important and helpful and holy
it means nothing if we do not live out of it as transformed creatures
who are prepared to love mercy and walk humbly with our God.
John the Baptist makes this abundantly clear when he strides in
demanding a change for the whole of creation.
Demanding a change which begins in the individuals heart
and then extends out into a transformation of society
and the cosmos as a whole.
As Uniting Church theologian William Loader puts it:
John makes it plain that only one thing counts:
change and the behaviour which indicates such change.
Status, birth, pedigree, past religious experience, even a whole C.V of spiritual experiences, count for nothing,
if there is not ongoing evidence
of the new orientation in the way we live.
Jesus makes the same point in the closing sections of the Sermon on the Mount.’
All that matters is that we grow fruit of justice and of love,
everything else can be cut away and left behind.
Words about cutting and leaving can make us nervous
but sometimes they are necessary,
sometimes, for example,
we may be aware of aspects of our behaviour
or patterns in our emotions
which are simply unhealthy
and from which we have to allow ourselves to be released
lest they imprison us for ever,
lest the spirit of love is never able to swoop
up and down the paths of our soul
because these paths
are so blocked and so crooked
with old wounds and broken dreams
and self deception and self doubt
that there is no room to grow.
It can be helpful to remember that the God who encourages us
to set ourselves free, the God who shines through the wild man John,
is
a wild God,
a God who,
as Francsican father Richard Rhor writes
‘doesn’t care much about temples and offerings or rules and regulations
but who cares a lot about the way people were treated
and the opening of the human heart’
and that this wild God is never once
refered to in the bible as being nice
and that in fact God’s people are only ever ‘nice’
if they have managed to break free,
wildly free, of the tit for tat and quid pro quo
and pettiness of a legalistic ‘eye for an eye’ life
and if they have begun to love as God loves, extravagantly,
deliriously and with compassionate abandon.
But in order to break free we can sometimes need a little help,
a little help to
‘Make straight the Paths’ and to ‘Clear the Way’
and that one of these ways
is through the power of ritual.
The figure of John appears abruptly in the gospel of Mathew
and this abruptness is a matter of theological design not literary clumsiness
The action of God in history is often sudden and unexpected.
God does not always work gently, lapping softly on the shores of the great beach of psyche
So too, true ritual, breaks into our everyday and shocks us into awakening.
In another time and place we may have dunked Bianca and Ali and Alex
fully clothed or completely naked
into a river dark and strong
and we may have slapped them as they came up for air
to really shock them into the wonder of their new true identity,
their identity as a child of God.
What do you need to make straight the paths in your life?
What part of you needs to be dunked down in the waters of our wild Christ?
Can you prepare the way for the coming of your own inner child of God ?
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