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What Are We To Do?

3rd Sunday of Advent, Year C

Zeph 3:14-18; Phil 4:4-7; Lk 3:10–18

The gospel focuses on John the Baptist. John the Baptist is called the precursor, the one who runs before to prepare the way. This was a very common Oriental custom and Mid Eastern custom. When the local potentate was going around visiting his domains, such as they were, the precursors went ahead and cleared the roads and literally straightened out all the rough paths.

If you want an idea of John the Baptist, there were thousands of them when Gorbachev came to New York. They were playing John the Baptist roles--straightening out the streets, keeping the traffic away, causing the “Gorby Gridlock”--that sort of thing. But that’s exactly what they were doing. A potentate was coming--a leader of state--and they prepared the way for that.

One of the interesting things in the Scripture here that you can read easily between the lines is this: one of the rough ways for a lot of people is the past. People who have done things that were minor to major. People like any one of us here who can look back over our shoulder and see some of the less than gracious things we’ve either done or we’ve said. Things that have hurt people, and in some instances, things that were enormously evil. Spouses betrayed. Deaths in the family. Dishonesty. Embezzlement. Fraud and lying. Murder. Drugs. Addictions. The catalog is as endless as there are people. For you and for me, they’re there.

So for some people, the past is an enormously rough way. They turn and they dwell on it, and they do not make progress because they’re always looking back. And so when these people with a past came to John, they asked him that question that was repeated several times in the gospel: “What are we to do? What ought we to do?”--the people, the tax collectors, the soldiers. But you noticed John’s answer. Not in any instance did John advise them to review or dwell on the past. John’s idea was that “Look, here you are, here and now, asking for baptism, renewal, something in the future to expect, a better life.” And so John answers them not in the past--he answers them in the future.

So to the tax collectors: “From now on, I’m not caring what you did in the past, whatever evil, and how much you’ve hurt people; but from now on, in the future, here’s what to do. Don’t extort more than what you’re supposed to collect.” And to the soldiers, no matter how much brutality and pillage and rape they had done in the past: “You’re asking me ‘what are we to do?’ Look to the future. Do not bully people and do not hurt others.” 

I was reminded of that because I came across a little saying the other day from a Dr. Loomis who wrote an article. He was near the end of his own life and he wanted to leave some kind of wisdom from his twenty-five years of practice. What inspired him was a line from George Eliot, a line that says, “It’s but little good you’ll do watering last year’s crops.” 

And Dr. Loomis wrote this. He said, “Watering last year’s crops is exactly what I have seen hundreds of my patients doing in the past twenty-years. Watering with freely flowing tears things of the irrevocable past. Not the bittersweet memories of loved ones, which I can understand, but things done which should not have been done, and things left undone which should have been done. Moaning over what cannot be helped is a confession of selfishness and cowardice. 

The best way to break this morbid circle, to snap out of it, is to stop thinking about yourself and to start thinking about others. You can lighten your load by doing something for someone else. By the simple act of doing an outward, unselfish act today you can make the past recede, and the present and future will take on their true perspective. As a doctor, I have seen it tried many, many times, and nearly always it has been a far more successful prescription than any I could have ordered at the drugstore.” 

I think we find this in the gospel. What are we to do? And I think if John were here he would say, “Look, all of us here right now are sitting in this building. Everyone of us has a past--mild, benign, comfortable, indifferent, horrendous, or sinful.” John would say, “But the thing you want to look at is this: you’re here, aren’t you? You’re sitting here in order to worship God and to hear the good news and break bread together as a community of faith. Whatever has been in the past--hurt or death, or divorce, you name it--it’s the past.” 

And if you’ve come here to say “Lord, God, what ought we to do?”, the Lord God will look at you and say, “Well, the first thing, you are here, and that’s a plus.” And you can’t undo the past, and what can we say about that? But if you really believe in the future, if you believe in the expectation, and the coming of Christ, what Advent is all about, then the only way to live is to start today to do the good deed. Because once you move out of yourself, and once you stop looking over your shoulder, that’s the only way that you can grow. Let the past bury the past. There are a lot of things you and I have not liked seeing in the paper--some things we’re ashamed of.  Okay, but it’s gone.

But the prophet would say, “If you’re asking me what you want to do, there’s the future. God has allotted you so many days--use them for other people. It doesn’t have to be a magnificent gesture; it just has to be an everyday kindness.” 

I was reminded of that because in doing a little Christmas shopping, I came across a Chris Williamson album. (Some of you may or may not know her name; she’s a songwriter and recording artist.) And I was reading the jacket of her Christmas album and I didn’t want to read all of it, but something caught my eye. She was just telling the story of when she was a little girl and lived in Wisconsin, out in the wild boondocks there in a little place called Moonlight Ranch. It’s very cold there--if you’ve been out in that part of the Midwest, you have an idea of thirty-foot snows and all that sort of thing. 

She was telling about near Christmas time when they were getting ready, and the great treat was to put the angel on the top of the tree. She was sitting in the kitchen for her annual haircut. It’s a small cabin and she’s sitting there and there’s newspaper on the floor and her mother’s cutting her hair to shoulder length. Here’s the way she described it. She says, “It was a great honor in our family to be chosen to place the Christmas angel on the very tip of the tree. Dad would hold the chosen child high in the air and the angel would slip over the tip until it shone high above the room. That Christmas, as the afternoon gave way to gradual darkness, Mom cut my hair. My long braids had been shorn to shoulder length and the hair was all around me on the floor. I remember feeling sort of small as I sat there on my hard chair in the kitchen. Dad came in out of the frosty cold with an armload of stove wood. He put it in the wooden box beside the stove and looked over at me, sitting so pensively on my chair. He knelt down beside me and picked up all the hair, newly shorn from my head. The next thing I knew he was calling us to the front room where the Christmas tree stood in all of its shining splendor. I watched him as he carefully placed bits of my brown hair on the tree beside the tinsel and the glittering glass balls. He turned and smiled sweetly down at me and said, ‘This year we will have real angel hair on the tree.’” 

It’s as simple as something like that, isn’t it? The good deed, the kindness. It was St. Paul who said that charity overcomes a multitude of sins. And charity in the future overcomes the mistakes and the sadnesses and the necessary losses of the past.

So picture yourself in line. The people--“What are we to do?” The soldiers--“What ought we to do?” And you and I--“What ought we to do?” John would say, “Don’t look at the past. It’s gone. If you look for the expectation of Christ in your heart, you’ll see a road ahead paved by good deeds.” 

You can’t obliterate the past. But you can make it recede. You can learn to live with the scars. You can learn to live with the disappointment that your children have given you, the hurt that they’ve given you. Or a former spouse or whatever. You can learn to live with that--if only you get out of yourself and do the good deed, and in turn, become John the Baptist and pave the way for others so that they, too, may have the opportunity to look into the face of the Messiah.

(Source: Rev. William J. Bausch. Timely Homilies. Connecticut: Twenty-Third Publications, 1998, pp. 74-78).

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