So last Sunday I talked about my friend from seminary and her John the Baptist nutcracker. Well he sure seems to earn that rap today — Brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? And yet, he is surprisingly pastoral, meeting people halfway. And he has the passion of a man who deliberately chose not to follow in his daddy’s footsteps. In this slightly penitential season of Advent, a season of preparation for Jesus’s first and second coming, the Good News we hear from John the Baptist is that God will meet us halfway.

On this second Sunday of Advent in Luke’s year, we get as much of the soft cop side of John the Baptist as there is to get, and we get the hard cop side as well. “Look, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and suddenly the Lord whom you seek come to his temple…But who can endure the day of his coming…For he is like a refiner's fire, like fullers’ alkali…he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver.” That sounds painful. But in our Gospel, John is like the prophet Isaiah preparing the exiles of Judah to actually “see the salvation of God.”

When I hit adolescence, I found myself getting depressed, and the more I tried to analyze my way out of it, the deeper the hole in my heart got. No doubt some of it had to do with my increasing adult awareness that all was not well in my family. My father and mother couldn't agree on whether my drug-using brother needed tough love or not. In my 16th year, my father had a nervous breakdown four days before Christmas; and only then was it agreed that my brother had to move out of our home. Perhaps because, as the “baby” of the family, my early childhood was very sheltered, it was much harder to come to grips with the harder things of life. And in that new awareness, all the happy faces and tons of toys and tinkling bells around me didn't reflect how I felt as December 25th loomed larger and larger, and the pressure to feel happy got harder and harder to bear.

  As an adult Episcopalian, Advent was a divine gift. I wasn't obligated to put up the largest possible Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving. I could wait until the day before Christmas Eve. I didn't have to sing all the Christmas songs until Christmas Day. Unlike much of the world that is exhausted on December 26th, my celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas is just beginning.  Unlike much of the world that drags their tree to the curb on January 2nd, Laura and I can keep ours up until the visit of the Wise Men on the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6th.  Advent has been the cure for my Christmas blues.

It is from today’s reading in Daniel that Jesus claimed the title “Son of Man” for himself. The most literal translation of the Hebrew is “son of a human,” not son of a male, thus the NRSV’s “human being.” It is a human being that Daniel saw being brought to the “Ancient One,” who we rightly see as God. And it is to that human being that God gives authority over all peoples, nations and languages.

“What I say to you, I say to all, stay focused.” (Mark 13:37)

My Bible verse for today comes at the end of the chapter that today’s Gospel reading begins. We need the end of the chapter to understand what Jesus means at the beginning, “And when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must happen, but the end is not yet...This is the beginning of the birth pangs…you will be brought before governors and kings because of me, as evidence to them.”

Jesus’s Bible was what we call the Old Testament (Tanakh in Hebrew). Before Paul started writing his letters and the Gospels got written, the Church’s Bible was the Old Testament. Jesus’s God is Yahweh, for which the LORD (all caps) is usually substituted for the name revealed to Moses — I AM. And the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ lurks in the story of God’s relationship with God’s chosen people of the Old Testament, as it does in today’s Old Testament reading.

To be a saint is to be made new or in the process of being made new. To be a saint is to be hallowed, holy, set apart from those on the earth that don’t want to be made new, but want only survival and self-maintenance at all costs. To be a saint is to recognize that to become the person God made us to be, we must pass away, not to nothingness, but to the new person who is the same as the first but infinitely better. T

“What do you want me to do for you?” Twice we have heard Jesus ask that question. Last week, he asked James and John, “What do you want me to do for you?” Basically they answered by asking: When you inherit the kingdom we know that’s coming to you, we want the most direct access to your power. Today, Jesus asks that question again, “What do you want me to do for you?”

My New Testament professor at Virginia Seminary taught that each of the four gospels has a key verse. In his opinion, we’ve heard the key verse of Mark’s Gospel: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

In Jesus’s promise that his disciples would inherit a family beyond their imagining was a material reward — now in this present time — responding to the concrete things Peter reminded him they had given up. Family was one’s safety net.