What You Have Where You Are
December 15, 2024 – Advent 3C
Zephaniah 3:14-20 • Philippians 4:4-7 • Luke 3:7-18
A few Christmases ago, we opened our gifts and put many of them in our guest room. When the next Christmas rolled around, we still hadn’t found a permanent place for several of those gifts. We’d also lost the ability to use that room for a year.
On a more recent Christmas, I received the very welcome gift of storage containers, which I put on the bed in our guest room. There they stayed until the following April, when I finally used them to organize a closet. Yes, I’m pretty sure Easter came before I’d put away my Christmas presents.
Enough of my shameful secrets. I ask myself each Advent: If I can’t make room in my house for Christmas presents, how can I make room in my heart for Jesus? I’m like the Bethlehem innkeeper on the night Jesus was born, saying to Mary and Joseph, “Sorry folks, we’re all full!” (If only I had a barn out back.)
Of course, I’m fortunate to have family members who give gifts, loved ones to buy gifts for, enough room in our budget to buy gifts, and a safe and warm home to shelter it all.
But when I’m trying to organize and clear out a bunch of stuff while also buying and having family members make wish lists for more, I feel a wave of desire expressed by the Lord through the prophet Zephaniah: “I will utterly sweep away everything / from the face of the earth . . . ,” says the Lord who wants to judge the world.
At the beginning of the book of Zephaniah, the Lord cries out for a complete do-over. He goes on, “I will sweep away humans and animals; / I will sweep away the birds of the air / and the fish of the sea . . . I will cut off humanity from the face of the earth” (Zeph 1:1-3).
My own desires to clear out my house don’t go quite that far. But I understand the feeling of wanting to throw everything away and start over from scratch. Separating the wheat from the chaff is just too much work.
Today’s reading from the prophet Zephaniah comes from the book’s conclusion. By the time we get today’s reading, the Lord’s desire for a complete do-over has worked itself out. The message has turned from judgment to salvation. The prophet tells the Israelites to sing out loud, shout, rejoice, and exult. God has taken away judgments and turned away enemies, and God is in their midst.
The desire to wash everything away, or to burn everything down and start over from scratch, is something God works through a lot in the biblical narrative. God wipes the face of the earth clean with a Flood, but promises not to do so again. God wants to consume all the Israelites with fire-hot wrath for worshipping a golden calf, but Moses talks him out of it (Exo 32:7-14). God deposes King Saul but decides to work with King David instead of rejecting him and finding someone else for the job. Through the stories of Scripture and the witness of the prophets, we see a God who works through and overcomes the desire for a complete do-over.
In the short book of Zephaniah, the prophet describes a turn in God. At first, God wants to wipe everyone from the face of the earth. But then, God wants all the earth’s people to witness God’s power to gather, to save, and to rejoice over those who’ve been discarded, scattered, shamed, and oppressed. This change happens because, again and again, God ultimately resolves to work with the people he’s got, and to meet them where they are.
About five hundred years after the prophet Zephaniah, John the Baptist again described God’s desire to burn most everything down and start from scratch. This God doesn’t want to just prune a few branches. This God wants to cut things down by the root.
Like snakes fleeing a prescribed burn in a farmer’s field, people have fled to John the Baptist asking how to escape divine judgment. John wasn’t the only prophet at the time with ideas for how to flee fiery wrath. Leaders of some movements advised the faithful to return to God through extreme renunciation, like fasting, abstinence, and permanent residence in the desert.
John’s answer might have surprised them. In today’s gospel, he advises people to work with what they have and to start where they are. Don’t give away everything, but do share your extras. Don’t quit your job, but do it with integrity. Make sure others have their basic needs met, and be content enough with what you have that you don’t exploit others.
John the Baptist warns us about God’s desire to radically overhaul the world. But the initial responses John prescribes aren’t all that radical. When the people ask, “What then should we do?,” John’s advice to the tax collectors is simply not to profit above the terms of that they’re allowed to collect. John’s advice to the soldiers is simply to be content enough with their pay that they don’t shake down people they’re sworn to protect.
John’s advice to work with what we have and start where we are is good news. Maybe sharing our extras and fulfilling our responsibilities are modest acts with unexpectedly radical effects.
Later in Luke’s gospel, the answers to the question, “What then should we do?” get more demanding. When a scholar of law asks Jesus what he should do to inherit eternal life, Jesus tells him the story of the Good Samaritan as an example of lavish mercy (Luke 10:25-37). When a rich ruler asks Jesus what he should do, Jesus suggests that he sell everything and give the money to the poor (Luke 18:18-25).
I don’t know about selling everything I have, but this time of year, I’m just about ready to ditch as much as I can. Having so much makes me feel inadequate to participating in the radical change that the prophets call for. There seems so little room for God’s saving power. But John the Baptist’s advice at least gets us started.
In the crowds that gathered to John the Baptist, and in the community gathered here, some of us might feel we have too little, while others feel we have too much, to be of any use to the radical transformation God seems to desire for the world. But as John baptizes the people, fire-proofing them against the destructive desire to throw everything away and start over, he gives them good advice: Just work with what you have. Just start where you are. That good advice is good news. God, in Christ, shows how to follow it.
