Bypassing the Big Deals--December 9, 2024

Bypassing the Big Deals--December 9, 2024

"In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins..." (Luke 3:1-3)

God knew who all the movers and shakers were.

God knew the names of all Big Deals and the So-and-Sos.

God knew the locations of all the Centers of Power and Influence... and then promptly bypassed all of them in order to set up shop in the wilderness.

And God did all this, the Scriptures tell us, for the sake of getting through to all the folks who were NOT the Big Deals or powerbrokers, the ones who had been told they had messed up too many times for God to have anything to do with them, and who lived on the margins rather than in the spotlight or center of attention.

Now this whole choice of God's, which many of us heard about in worship yesterday, shouldn't come as a surprise--at least, not if we have ever listened to Luke the storyteller here in the Gospel attributed to him.  Luke is the one who gives us Mary's Magnificat song, the lullaby of her firstborn son the Messiah, about how God "fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty," and how God "pulls the mighty down from their thrones and lifts up the lowly."  Luke is the one who tells us about Jesus' declaration of blessing on the poor and hungry--and of Jesus' lament for the apathetically affluent. Luke is the one who reminds us, too, that when the Christ-child is born, the news is sent from God to a bunch of nobodies outside of town on the margins of society--the night-shift shepherds--rather than Caesar or Herod or even the Respectable Religious Leaders. Luke wants us to know that God's way, so often, is to seek out the scattered, the gather in the lost, and to lift up the ones treated as unimportant and unworthy by the rest of the world. 

So when Luke introduces us to John the Baptizer, who sets the stage for Jesus' public ministry, he is up to his old habits.  Luke wants us to know that God was fully aware of who the so-called Important People were, and God just deliberately chose to take a detour around their capital cities and impressive institutions, in order to tell John the wildly dressed desert prophet to invite anybody and everybody to turn around and be a part of God's new thing.  

This is what God is really like, if we listen to the gospel-writers. This is how the Reign of God works, if we take Jesus seriously.  We should expect to find God's handiwork, not among the leverage-brokers of the empire or influence-peddlers in the palace, but as the left-out and left-behind are gathered in.  We should look for the presence of God, not in the center ring propping up whichever clown of a Caesar happens to be on the throne at the moment, but on the margins. And we will come to recognize the dwelling of God, not in the capital of the empire, but in the midst of our ordinary routines... in the wilderness... and on the edges.

Where might God lead us to look today?  Where have we been looking so far, with no results?

Lord God, let us find you where you choose to be revealed--away from the supposedly successful and important, and among the forgotten and forsaken.