Today, the 3rd Sunday of Advent, is traditionally called Gaudete Sunday, from the Latin for “rejoice”. The New Testament begins “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say rejoice”, and the Old Testament reading starts “Sing aloud, O daughter Zion”. But when we turn to the gospel the sound of rejoicing seems rather muted. John the Baptist starts by calling his hearers a brood of vipers trying to escape from a fire, yet at the end we hear that what he was doing was proclaiming the good news to the people. That’s not quite the way we expect to be addressed if we are being given good news, is it?.

We must remember that John is clearing the decks. He is the warm-up man. Those who have been shaken up by his preaching will be in the right frame of mind to hear what Jesus has to say. What John says about repenting and fleeing from wrath is not the whole story of the good news, but only the preamble. It is sometimes said that before you can hear the good news, you need to believe the bad news. If we don’t feel hungry, we won’t going looking for food. If we don’t acknowledge our sin, it will be impossible to receive the forgiveness that God so willingly offers us..

It’s fatally easy to buy into the modern gospel that everything is all right. If you are of a certain age, you may remember a bestselling book called I’m OK, You’re OK. It stormed the charts in the 1970s, and it did a lot of good in helping damaged people accept that they were of value. But to use that phrase as a summing up of the human condition would be very far off the mark.

Because at a very basic level we are not OK. We all, without exception, share the human condition of brokenness. From very early on in our lives we have a tendency to look after ourselves first, to take and try to hold onto much more than we need. The behaviour of any group of children in a playground will remind us of this universal fact. When we are left out we are quick to cry “It’s not fair!”, but when we have the upper hand we see our good fortune as perfectly natural. The pain of others and the unfairness of a world that means they have less and we have more are things we try to anaesthetise ourselves to.

Last week Lucy Winkett reminded us to heed the voice of our inner prophet, the voice of unease with all the greed and wastefulness of the modern holiday season. There is a deep longing within us for a simpler and more just life, and when we are most attentive to that longing we can begin to make changes for the better.
This past year of recession and downsizing has in some ways been an opportunity to prepare the way of the Lord. For some it has been extremely costly, a time of anxiety and fear. Young people have not been able to find work or accommodation. Workers have lost jobs. Companies have gone under.

For others the costs have been much less – just a little belt-tightening, perhaps a few second thoughts about spending on luxuries or a slight worry about long-term job security.

But no one can have missed the sober mood of the past twelve months. And on top of that, gloom about the future of the planet has deepened. Many of us are praying daily and earnestly for an outcome from the Copenhagen summit that will give new hope both to the people of the developing countries in our own time, and to our unborn descendants in the centuries to come. But there is no certainty that human ingenuity and determination to do the right thing will combine in time to save the lives and environments of millions of people. God allows us to reap the consequences of our actions. There is no absolutely no guarantee that we can continue to live greedily and not have to pay the cost – and to our shame it will probably be the innocent who pay.

We are not OK. The world is not OK. We are born into a condition of fallenness. We are flawed as individuals, as a human race and as a planet. Sometimes we need to be reminded of this fact. We need a John the Baptist calling us fleeing reptiles to wake us up to the unpleasant truth.

Note how he addresses himself to different groups, zeroing in with precision on the besetting sins of each category. Tax collectors, quit lining your pockets. Soldiers, stop intimidating people into paying bribes. Religious people, don’t rest on your ancestral pride. The evangelical churches like to remind us that God has no grandchildren. Each of us must commit our own life to the path of righteousness and not assume that God is an Englishman and a gentleman and so we must be fine as we are, just as the Jews can’t simply point complacently to Abraham. And to the crowds in general, John points out that when we have twice as much as we need and someone else has nothing, it doesn’t take a genius to do the ethical maths.
It is fascinating that all this is considered by his hearers to be good news. Perhaps deep down they are longing to know that life can be better than the dog-eat-dog scramble to get to the top of the heap? Perhaps their inner prophet responds to the whisper of something better?

If you love the old film of West Side Story as much as I do, you’ll remember Tony singing “Could it be? Yes, it could./Something's coming, something good… Who knows? It's only just out of reach,/Down the block, on a beach,/Under a tree./I got a feeling there's a miracle due,/Gonna come true,/Coming to me!”

My hunch is that a very universal human feeling is captured in this song. We are trapped in conditions of unfreedom, participants in sin. Perhaps we are not quite as helpless as the Sharks and the Jets, endlessly cycling through rivalry, violence and retribution. But on a smaller scale we all know that things are not how they are supposed to be. And we long for the miracle that’s due, coming to me.
Luke will go on to tell us about that miracle. We are waiting to celebrate it – it’s only just out of reach, twelve short days away. The news really is good, even better than the puritanical John dreams of. Behind him walks his cousin: a man who feasts where John fasts, who laughs where John weeps, who brings words of comfort and welcome and challenge rather than warnings of wrath. Jesus is not just a messenger but the message itself: the true good news that though we are not OK in and of ourselves, by God’s grace we are forgiven sinners.

Advent is the opportunity to savour that moment of waiting for something good. We don’t need to celebrate it prematurely, all unready, so that by the 25th of December we are sick of the whole business of eating, drinking, spending and going into debt. Instead we can continue to focus on the inner voice that says, Prepare the way of the Lord. Repent of your sins. Get ready to meet the one who is coming to save you.

That voice may just cause us to celebrate Christmas, especially this year, with a little more mindfulness and a little less cash. Or perhaps, if we have been fortunate in this recessionary year, with a little more cash, but not for ourselves and our privileged friends and family. Those who have two coats, give to those who have none. Those who have food enough, feed the hungry. It is the people who heeded these words who were eager and ready to meet the living Word of God when he arrived with healing in his wings.

Amen