Summary: In Advent, God subtly offers us hints of good news to come.
The year was 1809. All of Europe was living in dread of the armies that threatened to sweep the continent. Napoleon Bonaparte was on the march.
In every city of Europe - from the alehouses and marketplaces of the common people to the salons of the upper class - they were talking of little else but marches, invasions and battles. Newspaper headlines screamed out the latest atrocities of the emperor of the French.
Other things, however, were happening in the Year of Our Lord, 1809 - besides the campaigns of Napoleon. Quieter things. Subtler things.
In Shrewsbury, England, on the 12th of February, a medical doctor and his wife welcomed a baby into the world. It was a boy. They named him Charles - Charles Darwin.
As a young man, Darwin would spend five years sailing the coast of South America, then return home to write a book, The Origin of Species. That book would turn the scientific world on its head. No one to this day can study biology or geology, psychology or even religion, without reckoning with the world-changing theories of Charles Darwin. But on February 12, 1809, no one could imagine what sort of man this baby would become.
On that very same day, in a little backwoods cabin three miles south of Hodgenville, Kentucky, another baby boy was born. His parents were dirt-poor - subsistence farmers. They couldn't read or write. Yet their newborn baby boy - Abraham Lincoln - would grow up to become president of the United States. Not only that, in the eyes of many, he was our greatest president.
The influence on world history of those two babies, Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln - born, coincidentally, on the very same day in 1809 - is beyond measure. But back then, anyone in the know would have insisted that Napoleon's campaigns were the pivotal events of history. Nowadays, the names Darwin and Lincoln are household words; but who among us can remember the name of even one of Napoleon's victories?
Isn't it just like God to work through a baby, rather than a general? God deals in possibilities and trades in potentialities. Our Lord is a Lord of life, rather than death. A giver of hope, not despair. A God who, in causing the infant Jesus to be born - to quote the famed preacher, William Sloane Coffin - "hits the world with the force of a hint."1
Like the newspaper reporters of 1809, John the Baptist was seeking to read the signs of his times. John looked around him and saw that the world was not a happy place.
His people - the chosen people of God (though they scarcely remembered it) - were oppressed by the Romans.
Tax collectors swindled widows and children for all they were worth.
Roman soldiers were billeted in the towns - their very presence an insult to the proud Jewish people.
The king (if you could call him that) was a pampered oriental potentate, whose political instincts were simple: follow the gold, always the gold.
"Prepare the way of the Lord ..." shouts John - his voice crying in the wilderness, after the manner of the prophets.2
"Bear fruit worthy of repentance," he warns the pompous Pharisees - for "even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees."3
John looks around him, in other words, and sees it is not good, not good at all. He looks to God to break into history at that very moment and set things right.
Some time later, John is languishing in prison when he hears of the growing fame of Jesus of Nazareth. He sends some of his disciples over to investigate - to talk with Jesus.
"Are you the one who is to come," they ask - "or are we to wait for another?"
Jesus' reply is simple: "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them."
It's not the sort of answer John was expecting. John spent his life anxiously scanning the horizon for a Messiah thundering in with the reins of a chariot in his hand - a righteous general at the head of an army of insurrection. The Messiah John's expecting would cast the Roman overlords from the land, free political prisoners from their cells and re-establish true worship in the holy Temple.
Jesus' claim to prophetic authority is of a very different order. He speaks not of judgment and destruction but of health and peace, light and love. Go ask the ones who used to be blind, or lame or leprous, he's saying in effect; Go ask the ones who once were deaf, or dead or mired in poverty - they know who I am!
The sign of this Savior's coming is not the scorched earth of a vengeful army, as John imagines. No, it is - echoing the poetry of Isaiah - a fresh, green shoot sprouting forth from the stump of Jesse.4
In Jesus Christ, God does indeed hit the world with the force of a hint. A hint of new life for those hungry to hear good news. A hint of new life for you and for me.
Jesus, as we all know, was born in a stable, not a palace. Who could have predicted that the little boy playing in the wood shavings of Joseph's carpentry shop is God's own son? Who indeed but Mary, his mother - Mary, who talked with the angels? It's Mary who first comes to understand the full force of God's hint.
That day in the Temple at 12 years of age - as Jesus stands there astounding the learned scribes with his wisdom - that's another hint of what God has in store.
When the grown man Jesus sets off on his three-year ministry, he walks the dusty roads in battered sandals like anyone else. He breaks bread in the cheap inns and humble roadhouses of the common folk. "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"5 they ask in derision.
Then comes that day on the "high mountain apart," when Peter, James and John gaze in wonder at their Lord and master. His clothes have become "dazzling white, such as no one on earth could brighten them."6 When the vision of Transfiguration is over, everything returns to normal - except for their memory of the force of God's hint.
After his resurrection, there's the time a few of them are walking with a stranger to Emmaus. As the stranger breaks bread at supper, "their eyes were opened, and they recognized him."7 When you're suddenly hit by the force of a hint, you know - somehow, you just know.
God still speaks to us that way: in hints and whispers, in glimpses out of peripheral vision, in dreams and intuitions. The touch of our Lord's hand on this earth is exceedingly subtle. God's call comes, most often, not with a trumpet's fanfare, but with a gentle beckoning - a call to come home.
What hints of God have you been hearing this Advent?
For all the glitzy commercialism we love to hate, Christmas is still the time of year that brings a bounce to the step and a twinkle to the eye - for all but the most jaded cynics. This time of year is positively laden with hints of Christ's presence - if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
Christmas, quite simply, brings out the best in a great many people. Statistically speaking, we're all more likely to give, more likely to attend worship, more likely to reach out to neighbors at Christmas than at any other time.
Sure, there's such a thing as commercialism. Sure, there are times when tempers fray and people are nasty. Sure, there are plenty of profiteers, eager to pocket our hard-earned dollars - to siphon off some of that peace on earth, goodwill ... to them! But these things aren't Christmas, are they? Not really.
So many frenzied Christmas shoppers are trying to buy happiness. But the one thing that makes a human life complete is not a thing at all. It's a person - the person born under a star in Bethlehem long ago.
It's not so helpful to spend these Advent days perpetually taking our own spiritual pulse, asking ourselves, "Are we having fun yet?" So many of this season's joys are quiet ones - suggestions, hints - of a greater glory yet to come!
Listen carefully this week. You just may sense the force of God's hint!