On the second Sunday of Advent, we hear once more the strong, strange, insistent voice of John crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord!

I am intrigued by many of the ancient and rather obscure traditions and customs of the church. In studying the history of the church year, we find within the season of Advent what are called Ember Days. These were days set aside as special days of fasting and prayer within each season of the church year, days of spiritual discipline. An early Pope decreed that ordinations would take place on the Saturdays of these Ember Days, since the new ordinands were instructed to fast and pray in preparation for their ordination.

Over time, these Ember Days became a time of prayer for the whole ministry of the church, ordained and lay. It was a time of prayer for Christian vocation.

Now you’re probably thinking that this has nothing to do with you and certainly nothing to do with preparing for Christmas. Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Because, this very passage about crazy John the Baptist out in the wilderness preparing the way of the Lord is the Gospel read on the Advent Ember Day when ordinations are performed. John the Baptist, you see, is intended as a model for Christian ministry. All of us—clergy and lay—are called to “prepare the way of the Lord.”

Just to remind you: We United Methodists believe that all of us are ministers by virtue of our baptism, not just the few ordained among us. It’s confusing, because we use the word “Minister,” capital M, to refer to the clergy. But we really believe, as our Book of Discipline puts it, that “all Christians are called through their baptism to this ministry of servanthood in the world to the glory of God and for human fulfillment.”

All of us are ministers, by virtue of our baptism. All of us are John the Baptists, with the job of preparing the way of the Lord.

Not many of us would sign up for John’s job, especially if it meant living in the desert, wearing weird clothes, eating locusts and wild honey, being that sort of crazy character announcing that Jesus is coming. I’ve seen a few of those guys on street corners and they’re no one we want to be like. Far from shouting about the Lord, most of us are in fact afraid to even mention religion to our friends or at work, lest anyone think we’re some sort of fanatic.

So what do we do with John the Baptist, our ultimate role model in ministry, in Christian living, doing all he can to prepare the way of the Lord? How might we each, in this Advent season, ponder our vocational calling to seek to be like him, finding ways to prepare the way of the Lord in our time and place?

Advent means that God is coming to this earth, to this world, this here and now, in all of its particularity and specificity. Luke makes this clear by the way he opens his story: naming the emperor, the governor and all the Roman rulers under which his people were enslaved. The Lord is coming, John dares to proclaim, and every valley shall be filled, every mountain made low, the crooked made straight and the rough ways made smooth, and all people shall see the salvation of our God.

John speaks of what is coming through the power of the Lord and begins living it out immediately. We prepare, we make ready, by beginning to live now the Kingdom that God intends.

We can think of this on three levels, at least. First, we consider our personal lives. John calls us to prepare the way of the Lord in our own hearts, to make the royal highway straight and smooth that God may enter in and find us at the place of our deepest longing and need. In our prayers, we lift the valleys of our disappointment, doubt and fear. We bring down the mountains of our pride, our idols, our self-satisfaction. In our prayers, we confess the rocky and rough places of the turmoil and tension of our daily life, the relationships twisted and crooked from jealousy and mistrust.

John the Baptist calls us to repentance for the forgiveness of sins and this work we must do in our own heart of hearts, to make ready a place for the Lord’s Messiah to come and make a home within us.

All this, you see, is the personal and challenging work each of us must do in Advent to prepare the way of the Lord, for we’re surely not going to convince anyone else of the truth of God’s Messiah if our own lives do not witness to the life-saving power of the Holy One.

On a second level, we must work to prepare the way of the Lord in all our relationships as well. In the interpersonal worlds of our lives, the valleys must be lifted and the mountains brought low. John calls us to prepare the way of the Lord into and within and between and among us. In our closest relationships, our friendships, our marriages, our families, our workplaces, our social groups, and our congregation—we must lift the valleys of bitterness, competition and deceit. We must lay low the mountains of resentment, prejudice and exclusivity. We must work to make the highways that connect us one to another straight and smooth and safe. We must work to make the world free of hurt and violence of any kind, violence of word, deed and heart.

To increase our love for one another, our respect for one another, our honoring of one another in all that we do and say is to prepare ourselves, is to prepare the way for the one who comes to us from the love in the heart of our God.

Thirdly, on the social and global levels, we must prepare. Luke is unabashedly political, isn’t he? The Lord is coming, he says, into a world ruled by emperors and governors, this world, these rulers, this time, this place. It’s too tempting even now to make Christmas purely sentimental and generic, sugar-coated and cloyingly sweet, but not for Luke. “In the fifteenth year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius…” Can’t get much more specific and real than that.

In those days, just before the Emperor was to come to town, workers would scramble to get all the rocks out of the road so it would be smooth for the royal entourage. Not so different now. When a President or king or the Olympics are coming to town, roads are repaired, trash picked up, the homeless moved out of sight, a fresh coat of paint put up. Luke quotes the words of the prophet, Isaiah, to describe John’s work of preparation, but he means something quite different, doesn’t he? Not this superficial prettifying, but real justice and reconciliation and peace. For when the Lord comes, the blind will see and the lame will walk and the deaf will hear and the prisoners shall find release and the poor, the poor will hear Good News.

A very disturbing study was released this last week on poverty in LA County. Maybe you saw it. The number of poor neighborhoods in the Los Angeles region has more than tripled over the last thirty years, through the boom years of the 90s when so many did so well. The tired and cynical parts of our hearts and minds take in the story and keep right on going, consigned to resignation and not knowing what in the world can be done.

But Advent reminds us that God still has something different in mind for this world, a design for creation in which all people shall live in harmony and unafraid, in which none shall lack for anything, when the fullness of the Lord shall be revealed and all people will see the salvation of our God.

Our vocation as John the Baptists in this world, as preparers of the way of the Lord, is to never give up on that larger vision, never become complacent with what is, never to assume that the same old same old is all the future will hold. It is our calling to work even now, in this time and place, for the righteousness and the justice of the coming Reign of God to begin to take shape in our midst.

The annual appearance of John the Baptist in Advent calls us to reclaim the ministry we each receive in our baptism, the ministry to which God has called us, the ministry with which God has entrusted us. John baptized with water, a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. But we, who are baptized in Christ, are baptized with water and the Spirit, and that Spirit gives power and hope to both repent and then turn to the new, to lives that proclaim the Kingdom of God here and now.

For the light of Christ is coming into the world, thanks be to God. We now bear witness to the light--in every prayer for forgiveness, every act of healing, every word of hope shared, every act of justice and mercy offered. Remember your baptism, people of God, and witness to the coming of the Lord.