Thomas J Parlette
“Laying the Groundwork”
Luke 3: 1-6
12/5/21, 2nd Advent
Even if we dread deadlines, many of us would admit that we work better when we have a deadline staring us in the face. But few of us have to face the kind of deadline the White House Staff does when they welcome a new President to D.C.
Kate Anderson Brower has written a New York Times best-selling book titled The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House which shares a behind-the-scenes look at all the work that goes into a Presidential transition. There are only about 90-100 residential staff members at the White House, and it is their job to prepare the White House whenever a new President moves in. However, they can’t start their preparations until the sitting President moves out. That means they only get about 6 hours on Inauguration Day to clean, decorate and prepare the official residence of the President of the United States.
I can’t even get our house totally clean in six hours, so I can’t imagine trying to clean a place like the White House in that time. And that’s not all the residential staff does. They also move in and unpack the boxes of personal items for the new President and the First Family. They stock the White House kitchen with the new family’s favorite foods and fill the bathrooms with their soaps and shampoos. By the time the new President and First family arrive, every room should be perfectly cleaned, decorated, and stocked with their belongings. All the boxes should be gone. And all this is hidden from the view of the public and news cameras surrounding the White House on the big day.(1)
And if you think the White House residential staff has a hard job preparing for a new President, imagine how hard the U.S. Secret Service works to protect the President. Interviews with Secret Service agents describe the incredible amount of work that goes into laying the groundwork for a presidential trip.
It requires thousands of people to coordinate all the details of such a trip. At least three months before a U.S. President travels anywhere, Secret Service agents travel there first. They meet with local agencies, plan motorcade routes from the airport, and contact the nearest trauma hospital.
Agents also remove all phones and TV’s from the hotel rooms in which the President and his staff will be staying. They sweep the rooms for listening or recording devices, even taking apart picture frames to check them.
In the days immediately before the visit, agents close off the city streets surrounding the Presidents route and hotel. They even shut down highways for the Presidential motorcade. On the day of the President’s visit, they bring in bomb-sniffing dogs to check out all the stops along the way.
Finally, it requires 6 airplanes to transport the President and all his staff and equipment for a presidential visit. In addition to all the security agents and staff, the planes carry communication equipment, helicopters and the Presidential motorcade’s limousines.(2)
If you’re the President, it’s very impossible to slip into town unnoticed.
Which makes the Advent season, the season when we celebrate the coming of the messiah, so amazing. Because if it weren’t for John the Baptist, Jesus might have slipped into town unnoticed. Jesus didn’t have an advance team or security detail to prepare the way for his arrival. He didn’t have a public relations firm send out a press release. Instead, he had John the Baptist, a traveling preacher, who was chosen by God to announce the Good News.
Dressed in wild animal skins, eating locusts and wild honey, John the Baptist would stand out in any crowd. Yet this was the guy that God chose to announce the coming of his Son, the Messiah. “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
During this season of Advent, we are preparing our hearts to celebrate Christ’s coming. We are, in essence, laying the groundwork for Christ’s arrival. We are buying our presents, putting up our lights, and baking up a storm. The preparation and anticipation are a big part of the joy of Christmas. But all the stuff we do to prepare for Christmas, is it really enough? In light of John’s message, it could actually be a whole lot simpler and less-stressful. John points out today that there are some other things that need to be a part of our preparation.
First of all, there’s that word we love each holy season – repentance. Luke tells us that repentance was at the core of John’s message.
A few years back, a man named Frank Warren handed out 3,000 self-addressed, stamped, postcards to random people on the street. Warren asked the recipients to write their deepest secrets on these postcards. He warned them not to identify themselves, don’t sign the cards, he wanted everyone to remain anonymous. He only asked that they send the cards back to him. Words spread of Frank Warren’s project, and people from all over the country began sending him anonymous cards with their confessions, secrets, regrets and longings. Many of the postcards are featured on the website PostSecret.com and in Warren’s book, The Secret Lives of Men and Women: A PostSecret Book.
Turned out, lot of people really needed and opportunity to repent and unburden themselves of their shortcoming and mistakes.
Among the many anonymous cards Warren received was one that featured a pair of praying hands with the handwritten note, “I don’t know how to go back to God, and I want to more than anything else,”(3)
I want to go back to God, more than anything. That sense of longing is what leads to repentance. In a literal sense, repentance is changing your mind, turning it back in the right direction. In his baptism of repentance, John was offering people the opportunity to send an anonymous post card, to turn back towards God and align their mind with the mind of the Divine.
The second step in preparing for the coming of Christ is a commitment to right living. “Now,” you might think, “isn’t that kind of redundant.” Maybe and maybe not. Repentance does involve a commitment to right living, as opposed to the wrong way of living, but most people don’t think of repentance that way. Most of the time, we think of repentance as synonymous with being sorry for a mistake and promising not to let it happen again. And that’s part of it. But repentance is a bit more than being sorry. Repentance is a complete change of direction – a reshuffling of priorities.
It’s difficult to think of 2020 and 2021 as being thought of as anything but the time we dealt with an unprecedented pandemic – but in addition, 2020 will be remembered as a time when our nation once again confronted systems of inequality and racism in many different forms. One sign of this reckoning was the number of cities and institutions that decided to remove Confederate statues and symbols from their buildings and public spaces. And during this same period, tattoo artists across the country reported a surge in the number of clients asking them to transform and remove racist tattoos.
Billy White, owner of Red Rose Tattoo in Zanesville, Ohio, offers his services for free to clients who want to alter or cover up racist tattoos. Some of his clients weren’t aware of the implications of their tattoos when they first got them. Other clients are former members of white supremacist groups. Before White will agree to cover up or remove a racist tattoo, he spends a lot of time with the client. He wants to make sure the client has had a sincere change of heart and mind. Once he is sure that this is what the client truly wants, he does what he can to cover up or remove their tattoo for free. And Billy White is not the only person helping people to repent in this way and live differently.
Atlanta Redemption Ink – that’s spelled with a “k” – is a non-profit organization that provides free tattoo removal for victims of sex trafficking. In 2020, they reported that a significant number of people contacted them asking for help in covering up or removing racist tattoos. Corey Fleisher is founder of the nonprofit Erasing Hate, which organizes volunteers to remove or cover up racist or hateful graffiti in public spaces. In 2020, he has also served as a middleman, helping connect tattoo artists with those who want to rid themselves of such tattoos. Fleischer says of the people who reach out to him, “I don’t care what the back story is, I care about tomorrow. You want to erase it, then I’m going to be here for you… And we’re just going to move forward and I’m going to help give you a new way in life.”(4) That is repentance and changing your life. Sounds like a modern day John the Baptist to me.
A commitment to right living is a commitment to move forward into a new way of life. Maybe not a comfortable life, but a new way of life.
Finally, we prepare for the coming of Christ by receiving God’s grace. We are not disciples of John the Baptist – as much as we might admire him and as much as we try to heed his words. We are disciples of Jesus. We do repent of our sins. We do try to live the right kind of life, what the Bible calls a righteous life. But we acknowledge we don’t have the power within ourselves to succeed at this on our own. So we throw ourselves on the mercy of God.
I know that might not sound too “christmasy” – but it’s the truth. Guilty people need mercy. Broken people need mercy. Unworthy people need mercy. But we have a God who loves us and is willing to meet us right where we are. That’s why God sent Jesus to walk in our shoes. Immanuel – God with us. We depend on God’s grace to supply us, unworthy as we are, with a righteousness that only God can give.
On July 26th, 1987, while Rev. Walt Everett was preparing to leave for a mission trip with Habitat for Humanity, he got the call that his son, Scott, had been shot and killed by a neighbor, a drug addict named Mike Carlucci. Understandably, Rev. Everett struggled with a horrible anger toward his son’s killer. After meeting other parents in a grief support group, however, he realized that his anger was poisoning his life. He prayed that God would help him to forgive his son’s killer.
One year after his son’s murder, Walt Everett sat down and wrote a letter to Mike Carlucci, who was now serving a five- year prison sentence. In the letter, he offered Carlucci his forgiveness. Mike Carlucci wrote back, and the two men began a regular correspondence. A few months later, Mike asked if Walt would visit him in prison. And by the grace of God, these two men created a friendship on the foundation of heartbreak, forgiveness and faith.
When Mike Carlucci’s father died while he was in prison, Rev. Everett preached his funeral sermon. When Carlucci came up for parole, Everett spoke on his behalf. When he was released from prison, Carlucci and Everett began traveling to churches and schools and prisons to share their story of forgiveness and faith.(5)
When the two men were on the Today Show, the host asked Walt Everett if he could ever look at Mike Carlucci and not think about his son’s murder. Everett replied, “I can never forget what happened to Scott… But when I look at Mike, I don’t see the person who harmed Scott. I see somebody who’s been changed by God, and I celebrate that.”(6)
That’s what John the Baptist was sent to announce. That’s what he is offering today – a chance to be changed by God. Laying the groundwork for Jesus to be born into this world is more than twinkling lights, Christmas trees and cocoa with cookies. It’s about repentance, committing to right living and receiving God’s grace.
So I invite you to gather around the table today and prepare your hearts for the coming Messiah.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. Dynamic Preaching, Vol XXXVII, No. 3, p61.
2. Ibid… p61.
3. Ibid… p62.
4. Ibid… p62.
5. Ibid… p62-63
6. Ibid… p63.
