Luke
3:1-6
In his semi-serious and
semi-humorous autobiography, My Life and
Hard Times, James Thurber tells about growing up in Columbus, Ohio in the
early 1900s, and some of the characters who, for better or for worse, were part
of his life. One of those was a man he
didn’t really know, but whom he could never forget. He called him the “Get-Ready Man”. Thurber says,
“The Get-Ready Man was a lank unkempt elderly gentleman with wild eyes
and a deep voice who used to go about shouting at people through a megaphone to
prepare for the end of the world, "GET READY! GET READ-Y!" he would bellow, "THE WORLLLD IS COMING TO AN END!" His startling exhortations would come up,
like summer thunder, at the most unexpected times and in the most surprising
places. I remember once during Mantell's production of King Lear at the Colonial Theatre, that the Get-Ready Man added his
bawlings to the squealing of Edgar and the ranting of the King and the mouthing
of the Fool, rising from somewhere in the balcony to join in. The theatre was
in absolute darkness and there were rumblings of thunder and flashes of
lightning offstage. Neither father nor I, who were there, ever completely got
over the scene…”[1]
There
is something both scary and funny about someone like the Get-Ready Man, always
warning about the end of the world. It’s
funny because they always seem to have no sense of the right time or place for
that kind of discussion (which the ushers at the playhouse clearly did
understand when they dragged him out).
It’s scary because there’s always that one little, tiny corner of your
mind that wonders if the Get-Ready Man of the moment might know something that
you don’t.
The Get-Ready Man has a long line of
predecessors and a good number of successors.
Thurber, who loved to write about things that worried him, would have
had a field day in 1999, when there was panic over the Y2K bug. For those who didn’t experience that fun, as
we approached the year 2000, computer programmers realized that a lot of code
was written using only two digits to represent a year. 1989 was “89”, 1993 was “93”, and so
forth. Someone realized that as of
January 1, 2000 a lot of programs might click back to January 1, 1900. That could potentially have messed up a lot
of financial programs that calculate by start and finish dates. There was worry that it would confuse
automatic data backups in nuclear plants.
I remember people being scared that computerized systems generally would
have hidden flaws and that cars would stop working and elevators would crash at
midnight on New Year’s Eve. At this
point it sounds silly, but there were people who had stocked up on canned food
and propane and bottled water because they were prepared for civilization to
come crashing down. The Get-Ready Man
and his progeny would have felt smug about that.
People believed it might happen,
though. There is often a sense abroad in
the world that a familiar way of life is threatened. It may not always be taken as the end of the
world, but it is often seen as the end of the world as we know it. What happens if we let those immigrants
in? What happens if we tighten up our
gun laws? What happens if the gays can
get married? What if … what if … what if
…? A whole new crop of Get-Ready Men and
Get-Ready Women are prepared to answer those questions.
John the Baptist probably looked a
lot like one of them in his day.
“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, as
it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
‘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.”’”
“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.”’”
[Luke 3:1-6]
There
was an important difference, though, between John’s message and the one that so
often comes to us from the television in the eighth year of President Obama,
when Tom Wolf is governor of Pennsylvania, and Paul Ryan is Speaker of the
House. The message we hear so often is
that of the Get-Ready Man, that the world is coming to an end. The message that John brought was that a new
world was about to begin.
Yes, that means that a good bit of
the old world will have to give way, and a lot that is familiar will have to
become history. The valleys are going to
be leveled up and the mountains bulldozed.
The crooked roads will be straightened out and the potholes filled
in. That was John quoting Isaiah. What it meant in less poetic ways is recorded
a little farther along by Luke.
“The crowds asked him, ‘What then should we
do?’ In reply he said to them,
‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has
food must do likewise.’ Even
tax-collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, ‘Teacher, what should
we do?’ He said to them, ‘Collect no more than the amount prescribed for
you.’ Soldiers also asked him, ‘And we,
what should we do?’ He said to them, ‘Do not extort money from anyone by threats
or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.’” [Luke 3:10-14]
We are still working on all of that, if you
haven’t noticed.
What
he saw happening was people getting ready, not out of fear, but with a sense of
preparation for the righteousness of God that would come with the Messiah’s
appearance. What he saw was people doing
their best to be able to welcome him without shame or embarrassment. He expressed some of that himself when Jesus
showed up on the banks of the Jordan and asked to be baptized along with
everybody else and John said that it should have been the other way around,
that Jesus should have baptized him.
We’re
not, obviously, in the same exact position.
The Messiah has already come, and by his life and death and rising from
death wiped out our sins. We continue,
though, in the position of people who are waiting for his kingdom to come in
its fullness. Part of that means that we
live in the sort of faith that can accept that endings do lead to new
beginnings. The loss of one way of life,
when the process is guided by the Spirit of Christ, leads into the beginning of
another and better way. Yes, we get
ready. But we get ready for the good to
come, not for catastrophe that needs to be feared.
A
woman named Betsy Ritchie left an account of John Wesley’s last days, where she
described how strange it seemed to her that on his deathbed a great preacher
had become a dying voice, and how he mumbled.
She wrote about how people in the room tried to understand him:
“though he strove to speak we were still unsuccessful: finding we could
not understand what he said, he paused a little, and then with all the
remaining strength he had, cried out, ‘The best of all is, God is with us’.”[2]
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