By the Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan

Promises, promises.
We’ve all heard promises that we know are more likely to be broken than kept. The promises of politicians who offer simple, painless solutions to thorny problems. The promises of commercials that just one more purchase will make us happy, healthy, and wise—all for a low, low price paid in three easy installments. The promises of instant weight loss, a higher credit score, straight A’s, perfectly white teeth, and an immaculate home, somehow accomplished without effort or sacrifice.

Promises, promises.

We have learned, with good reason, to be wary of people who make promises—especially promises that seem too good to be true, delivered by slick and smooth-talking salesmen.

I doubt that anyone ever accused John the Baptist of being slick, or of making things sound easy. Nonetheless, the fulfillment of promises is the dominant theme in his life story, especially as told by the Gospel of Luke. The first chapter of this Gospel begins with a promise that God makes to Zechariah, a priest in the Jerusalem Temple. Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth, also from a priestly family, are getting on in years and have no children, a situation that would have been a source of shame at that time and in that culture. The angel Gabriel comes to Zechariah and promises that soon they will have a son. Zechariah’s difficulty in believing this rather farfetched promise leads to him being struck dumb for the duration of Elizabeth’s pregnancy.

The beautiful song of Zechariah we recited together a moment ago is the old man’s response to a promise fulfilled—the miraculous birth of his son, John. It, too, is a prophecy, a prophecy about a prophet, in a way, filled with promises of John’s role in ushering in a new age of salvation.John was a child of promise, a promised child, and one who believed passionately in the promises made by God through the prophets who preceded him.

His own time in the wilderness seems to be pivotal to his faith in these promises. Luke tells us that he “grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel.”

Why, we might wonder, all that time in the wilderness? Well, from a literary and theological perspective, Luke’s message is clear—the Word of God will not be limited to the elite or cordoned off in the circles of power, whether secular or religious. Rather, the prophet of the Most High, the one who will prepare the way of the Lord, comes to us from the margins. To paraphrase Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, when we want to see Jesus we must look in the neighborhoods where he is most likely to be found—and those neighborhoods are not necessarily the ones we would choose for ourselves.

Unlike most of us, John is fearless about going into those inhospitable places, in fact makes himself more at home there than he will ever be anywhere else. One commentary notes that throughout the Old Testament the wilderness is portrayed as a “place of vulnerability and danger” and thus is “where (and how) God’s people learn to depend on God.” In other words, John is following in a long and storied tradition and by spending his first 30 or so year in the wilderness, he is in the right place for an encounter with God. His time in the wilderness helps him to become someone who has can happily, even eagerly, set aside all earthly prestige and privilege to focus entirely on the promises God has made and is making to any who will listen. He has learned that he can depend on God without reservation.

John, the child of promise, becomes a man engulfed in the love of God, almost incandescent with it. His time in the desert, on the margins, has brought him so close to God that finally he must bring those words of promise to the people of God. There is something natural and inevitable about this progress. The closer we get to God, the more we come to care about other people and the world, about everything created by God. John’s caring takes the form of a call to repentance, inseparable with the promise of forgiveness and salvation.

To understand how promise and repentance are related, we need to understand that God is not withholding God’s salvation until we have repented. It is simply that repentance, properly understood, is a necessary step in our own preparation, our own ability to connect with God and others. Repentance is a change of mind and heart, a change in orientation and perspective; perhaps it is best characterized in today’s terms as a shift in consciousness. The promise of God is always there, patiently waiting for us. Put another way, God is never not offering forgiveness and salvation, healing and wholeness—the sticking point is whether or not we are ready to receive these gifts.

Perhaps in this season of Advent we can pray for a shift that will help us dig deeper into our faith and become more able to trust in the promises God is making. We know that broken promises can break our hearts, and it makes us afraid. Too often, we paper over that fear with skepticism that looks like wisdom and detachment that feels like safety. But invulnerability is neither wise nor safe—in the long run, it is synonymous with death.

Prophets like John call our bluff, and in doing so offer to bring us back to life. Hannah Malcolm astutely observes, “The words of prophets can help us learn to talk about our apocalyptic fears. They teach us to be honest about the realities of sin, greed, and grief. […] And they teach us how to be absurdly hopeful, painting visions of a peaceful future when that seems impossible.” The vision that John paints is a beautiful one indeed—a vision of a world where every barrier between God and us is broken, and all of us will be swept up together in the tender compassion of the Beloved.

Promises, promises. What about that last line in John’s prophecy: “And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” This is the ultimate promise, the promise to which all other promises are pointing. It might sound too good to be true, but it isn’t. We have a say in when and how this promise comes to fulfillment, but because it is a promise made by God through John, we can be sure that it will be kept. This is a promise worth working and fighting for, and even a promise worth changing for. Surely there are some crooked pathways in our hearts that need straightening, and some rough patches in our relationships that need smoothing over with tender compassion and loving attention. How else might we prepare the way?