Advent 2 and 3  Year of St Luke (C)  John the Pre-Washer

One of the routines that many use, who can afford it and the regular, routine washing of clothing in general, is the use of a pre-wash.  

And here the lavabo before Christ is chaliced, a loaf in the manger, is John and his baptism of repentance.  First the “shout out” (sounds like the name of one of the spray containers we keep next to the washing machine) to filthy sinners, “Repent!”   “Repent the straightener, the flattener, the leveler is at hand.”

Advent in most parts of the world gets gunked up, frosted with sugared lights, dripping decorations and oozing ornamentation.  What if it was a time when the wilderness of the world was allowed to be seen… unfruitful trees growing up everywhere not as yard shrubs or limbs for strings of lights but like after a storm, fallen on roads, branches breaking windows and trunks opening roofs.  In childhood tales and stories, the woods are where the wolves, lions, snakes and boars roam and hunt.

The one who follows John is opening a path, clearing the threshing, lighting an unquenchable fire.  This is a season in which God washes the world for the coming of his Son who will need a virgin mother’s lips on her fingers to clean the milk from his which will  soon speak peace, a time for the coming of The One who will need linens for the soil of his humanity, who will require Joseph's calloused hands to support his first steps toward, in the fearful forest, one particular tree of our wrath and his good love.