In the centuries-old liturgical tradition of the Christian Church, the first Sunday of Advent is considered to be the first day of the year. Last Sunday we prepared ourselves for the beginning of the time of preparation of the celebration of Christmas, and today we begin the preparation itself. In other words, last week we got ready to get ready, and today we begin getting ready. The term “advent” means “beginning,” so you might say that today is the advent of Advent. If you followed all that then we can get on with the rest of this sermon! Are you ready?

Where shall we begin? To begin their accounts of the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew and Luke began with stories about Jesus’ lineage and birth. But Mark and John skipped all of that and went immediately to the beginning of Jesus’ actual ministry as an adult. They began with the story of John the Baptist. Matthew and Luke also tell us about John, and so all of them actually agree that John’s ministry and message were the “beginning of the beginning” of Jesus’ ministry. And so, that’s where we’ll begin today. Are you still with me?

John was a prophet of God. As a prophet, his calling in life was to speak a word from God to God’s people. Israel’s history was full of prophets, and many of them, like John, were very colorful people. Prophets often acted out their messages, and John was no different. To dramatize the seriousness of his message, he lived out in the wilderness and lived off the land; much like the wandering Hebrews had done when they left Egypt. The sanctuary where he preached was the bank of the Jordan River, on the side opposite the historic boundary of the nation of Israel itself. He had his reasons. The essential message John preached was that God’s people—the Jews—had gone terribly wrong in their relationship with God. They needed to start over. They needed to begin all over again.

Twelve hundred years earlier, Israel had begun for the first time. Under the leadership of Joshua, successor to Moses, the wandering Hebrew people had crossed the Jordan, conquered the indigenous Canaanite people, and established their own nation, fulfilling the ancient promise made to Abraham. John understood that the people needed a new beginning, and he called them to go through the Jordan all over again, in the rite of baptism, to wash away and drown their past, their sin, and to come out on the other side as brand new people, ready to live the right way, to live as God’s people: righteous, holy, loving God and loving each other. John spoke in concrete terms. The rich must share with the poor. Government officials must no longer be corrupt. The military should not abuse its power. The people in general should get over their pride and realize that they do not have favored status with God just because they are descendants of Abraham.

Starting over is easier said then done, isn’t it? To do that, you have to begin by admitting that where you are is not where you should be. In theological terms we have always called that “confession and repentance.” And generally speaking, you and I don’t like either of those things. Confession means telling the truth about who we are. Repentance means determining and planning to become someone else. At a party last week I met a guy who stands about as tall as me—you might say we saw eye to eye. He was a fighter pilot some years ago. Pilots love nicknames. His was “Slug.” He said it stood for “short little ugly guy.” The name was right on 3 of 4 counts: he is short, and little, and a guy. The ugly part I’m not sure about. How many of us would be honest about our nicknames?

John the Baptist preached the message that you and I have to be honest about who we are and where we are. He preached that you and I need to see that we need to start all over again and go a different way. And that sounds like a very hard and even an impossible thing to do, until you realize that John knew that God would give the people of Israel a second chance. Why tell people to start over if you don’t believe they can change? Why tell people to turn back to God if you don’t believe that God will forgive you and let you come back? Confession. Repentance. Forgiveness. All such important words, such important truths about the nature of the relationship between God and us. Tell the truth. Turn around. Be welcomed and loved by God. Begin again.

Our friend Scot McKnight, author of The Jesus Creed, the book that is our framework for study this year, emphasizes the point that one of the ways you and I can learn to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind and to learn to love our neighbor as ourselves is by learning from other people. There is nothing new about that, but the point bears repeating. As we love God and others we begin to become the people that God created us to be. We can learn to love from other people. Some of those people are in scripture, people like John the Baptist. From John we learn that we can come back to a God who loves us, tell him the truth about us, and receive both his forgiveness and his help for starting over. We also learn from John that the surest sign of how well we are doing in loving God is looking at how well we are doing in loving others. And when we start doing a better job of loving others we will then do a better job of loving God, too.

Learning from others did not stop with the few people we meet in scripture. Let me tell you about some other folks I’ve known. Sometimes we need to start all over again not because we have done something wrong but because something wrong has happened to us. The dynamics of starting over are the same, though. In the 1930’s, Walker and Alice Wilson were raising their new young family on a farm in Missouri. But then, Walker came down with tuberculosis. The only treatment available was to leave Missouri and go to the southwest, where the air was dryer and purer. But the family could not afford to move. And Walker had a very serious case. So he got in their old pickup truck and drove to Tucson, Arizona. Everyone, including Walker himself, expected him to die. They were so poor that he had to live in his truck. The family struggled back home on the farm. But, Walker didn’t die. He got better. And after a few years, the family moved out to Arizona and joined the husband and father they had given up for dead. They started over. In the mid-1990’s our church in Tucson helped Walker and Alice celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary. And in the last few years, both have gone to be with the Lord, both living to be almost 90 years old. Walker and Alice would tell you that his healing, and their ability to start a new life all over again, were a gift from God. And they were. Because when you entrust your life to a loving God and when you do your best to love other people, God takes care of you, one way or another.

And let me tell you about Phil Johnson. Sometimes, it is not life that puts us in a bad place from which we need to recover, but we put ourselves in a bad place. Phil was a rather rowdy guy in college. He often got into fights. He has the scars to prove it. Phil will tell you that his life was going the wrong direction. I’d like to introduce him to Slug the Fighter Pilot sometime, because I suspect that they would have a lot in common, and not just their stature. Phil doesn’t talk about it much, but he will tell you that sometime in his twenties he decided that his life had to go a different way, and it involved his relationship with God. And now my dear friend Phil—the hulky, scarred up Phil—is a nurse at the V.A. hospital. He is the most gentle, loving, kind person you’d ever hope to meet. He loves God and he loves people, and they love him for it. People can change. People can become better than they are.

John the Baptist is a good person to get to know, because he reminded us that we can become better than we are. He challenged us to get on with it. And he did that because Jesus was coming. The people around John thought that perhaps he was the long-awaited leader who would restore Israel to its former glory. But John knew better. “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” And now in our time Jesus has come and Jesus is coming again, but you won’t recognize him unless you begin to recognize the truth about yourself. You won’t be able to meet him unless you turn around and go a different direction with your life. You won’t learn from him and receive the blessings he is prepared to give you unless you trust that he loves you with Godly love that will forgive and restore you.

The great cowboy singer Gene Autrey used to sing a song about riding on the range, “out where a friend is a friend, where the longhorn cattle feed, on the lowly gypsum weed.” He extolled the joys of, “totin’ my old .44, where you sleep out every night, and the only law is right.” The title of the song and the lyrical refrain is, “back in the saddle again.” The song doesn’t say it, but I’ve always believed that the story behind that song had to do with falling off your horse. And what are you supposed to do when you fall off your horse? You get back in the saddle again. John the Baptist teaches us that you have to get back in the saddle again. You have to begin again, and again, and again. It is only when we do that that we can realize the promise of Isaiah, the words John preached again: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. 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.’” Whether life itself has put you somewhere you do not want to be, or you have put yourself there, the only way to get out is to get back in the saddle again, to begin again, and to trust that when you turn around there will be a loving God to meet you and lead you back. Then you will see the salvation of God.

Amen.