{"id":1597,"date":"2024-12-11T16:37:05","date_gmt":"2024-12-11T21:37:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/?p=1597"},"modified":"2024-12-12T12:19:47","modified_gmt":"2024-12-12T17:19:47","slug":"get-ready","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/2024\/12\/11\/get-ready\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Ready!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/Get-Ready-121224-11.33\u202fAM.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A Sermon for the Locust Grove United Church of Christ of York, PA<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">by Rev. James Eaton, Interim Pastor \u00a9 2024<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Second Sunday in Advent\/C \u2022 December 8, 2024<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"http:\/\/bible.oremus.org\/?ql=600952824\">Luke 3:1-6<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mise en place. Unless like me, you\u2019re fascinated by French cooking videos on YouTube, Mise en place may not be a familiar phrase. It\u2019s a French that translates roughly, \u2018Preparation\u2019. It means before you set out to make something, getting all the ingredients ready and at hand. For example, I make Hollandaise sauce at home. It\u2019s a fussy sauce, prone to falling apart if you don\u2019t attend to it. So before I start, I separate two eggs and put them in a little bowl. I slice a butter quarter into bits and put the bits on two separate little plates. I zest two lemons and then squeeze the juice into a cup. Only when all the preparation is complete do I start actually cooking. It makes a lot of dishes\u2014but when the ingredients are combined and heated and the critical moment occurs and the sauce thickens, I\u2019m not looking for something I forgot. Mise en place: preparation. Today\u2019s reading calls us to a spiritual mise en place, spiritual preparation, and advent is the time to get ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of the most important steps in preparation is clearing the space. This past week at our house, before the Christmas decorations were brought up, before Jacquelyn did the amazing transformation she oversees each year, we had to put things away. The light on the table behind the sofa by the window: gone! The lamps that sit against the wall: moved. The sofa had to be moved to make space for the Christmas tree. We don\u2019t have a lot of electrical plugs, so things had to be unplugged to make space. All this is mise en place, all this is preparation. All this is before the decorations appear. And there is a moment, just a moment, when the space is bare, almost back to the emptiness of when we first arrived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Luke wants to summon us to just such a moment with Jesus. Mark starts with John the Baptist and Matthew hurries past a genealogy and the story about the wise ones. But Luke has already told us about the special birth of John. The long call to worship we read this morning is John\u2019s father\u2019s song about his son coming into the world; we\u2019ve already heard this when we get to hearing about his ministry. Luke is preparing us; Luke is getting ready, getting there slowly but surely, and we\u2019re invited along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Luke starts with the particulars. Folk tales start, \u201cOnce upon a time\u2026\u201d. Luke is using the dating conventions of his time. We talk about, \u201cAD, BC\u201d; scholars now use \u201cCE\u201d for Common Era to mark the same thing. People in Luke\u2019s time used the reign of rulers to set dates. We do the same, don\u2019t we? In our house, we have \u201cbefore we were married,\u201d \u201cWhen we lived in Norwich\u201d, \u201cthe year we got that huge snow storm in Owosso\u201d. Luke is using events but honestly, Luke\u2019s dates don\u2019t quite match up. They roughly put us in what we would call about 27 AD. Tiberius is emperor; Herod Antipas is governing Judah. Pontius Pilate is the Roman procurator, something like governor, of Palestine.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is a lesson behind Luke\u2019s careful dating. He wants us to see the particularity of God. God always acts in a particular place, a particular time, a particular person or people. \u201cWho shall ascend the hill of the Lord?,\u201d the Psalmist asks, and the answer is always someone\u2019s name, some particular person who lives in a time, who lives in a place. Luke asks us to see John as a real person, as real as any of us. He\u2019s inviting us to see that God is acting in all of history though this particular man in this particular time. What God does is to call him to preach a message of repentance. Next week we\u2019ll hear more of what he preaches but for now, we\u2019re offered two parts. One is that he\u2019s calling people, including us, to prepare for God\u2019s coming. The second is that he\u2019s offering a baptism of repentance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is the portion from Isaiah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-group\"><div class=\"wp-block-group__inner-container is-layout-constrained wp-block-group-is-layout-constrained\">\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: \u201cPrepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.\u2019&#8221; [Luke 3:4b-6]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Straight paths, valleys and mountains made level\u2014this is the language of road building. Have you seen this? In 1971, I drove across the country to my first church, the Mt. Hope Presbyterian Church in Idaho. Interstate 90 wasn\u2019t complete yet. Every so often, I\u2019d have to detour off the highway, drive past the bulldozers and work crews building the next section. The most spectacular part was in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. There, they were taking the zigzagging rising road and straightening it, filling valleys, literally making crooked places straight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Isaiah may not know about Interstate 90, but he does know about road building. He lived in the time of Babylon and every year Babylon had a big New Years festival. The climax of the festival was the king dressed up like the god Marduk being pulled on a huge parade float into the city. But before that could be done, thousands of slaves would be sent out beyond the city gates to make the road smooth, fill in low places that had washed out, cut down hills. Curves would have to be changed into straight sections. This is what Isaiah is imagining: making a way for God to come to us.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Our culture emphasizes what we do, and we\u2019ve let that leak over into our spiritual lives. So we hear a lot about \u201ccoming to Jesus\u201d. But the testimony of scripture over and over again is that it is not we who come to God; it is God who comes to us. What we can do is to prepare the way for God to come, make the path straight and easy.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We do that the way we prepare for anything. Mise en place: get things ready. Every Sunday, we all receive a bulletin here that Linda carefully, thoughtfully prepares. Take it home. You heard the scripture in a few minutes, but a great discipline is to take that bulletin, make it a devotional guide for the week. Read the scripture readings again, you will have my thoughts; consider your own. How does it make you feel? What questions does it ask? What does it ask you to do? Read a little before, a little after the reading. Scripture is particular: every reading is new. I\u2019ve been a lectionary preacher over 40 years. The lectionary is a three-year cycle of readings, so I\u2019ve been through the whole cycle more than a dozen times. Yet every week when I start to prepare to talk with you, I read the scripture for that week fresh, I find fresh things in it. Because the reading is not just words, it is the mix of the words with this particular moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Preparing takes some space. Perhaps the hardest spiritual discipline of all for me is just that, making space, doing nothing. I don\u2019t know about you, but if I sit down for am minute with nothing going on my mind starts to fill up with all the things I should be up doing. I have to consciously push them aside for prayer time. Yet isn\u2019t that precisely what John is asking? \u201cPrepare the way of the Lord.\u201d Make a moment; listen. Once again, our culture misleads us. We think of prayer as something we say. And God surely wants to hear what we want to say, God surely wants to hear our particular fears, our particular hopes, our concern for others. But real conversations aren\u2019t just what we say, they are what we hear as well. What if we just listened?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The second thing we learn about John in this reading is that he\u2019s preaching a baptism of repentance. Now repentance means changing your direction. When you\u2019re lost, it\u2019s easy to keep getting even more lost; it\u2019s hard to stop and ask for help. But that\u2019s what John is preaching.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nothing can prepare us for all the events of our lives. Eighty-three years ago, people just like us sat here. I\u2019m sure some worried about the war in Europe, some were anxious to get on to Christmas, they had all the daily hopes and fears we all have. I imagine the pastor preached a good sermon that day, they sang some great hymns, perhaps hymns we still sing. They left church, went home, and heard on the radio the terrible news of Pearl Harbor. Nothing had prepared them for that. In that moment, everyone\u2019s life changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nothing can prepare us for all the events of our lives. We can, however, prepare for God to come to us and when God is with us, those events will not crush us or overwhelm us. \u201cMise en place\u201d: prepare the way of the Lord, as carefully as we would prepare to make something wonderful on the stove. The gift of advent is time to get ready. The gift of advent is time to prepare. The gift of advent is to make straight God\u2019s path to your heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Amen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Advent invites us to get ready for God&#8217;s appearance through prayer, and small actions like studying the weekly scripture readings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[68,371,3,32],"tags":[373,374,372],"class_list":["post-1597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advent","category-luke","category-sermon","category-year-c","tag-bible","tag-discipline","tag-prepare"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1597"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1602,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1597\/revisions\/1602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}