Two weeks ago, I looked at the first of two couples who are essential in telling the Advent story:  Zachariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist.  Like several other crucial couples in the Bible, they were unable to have a child.  They were faithful people so this wasn’t some “divine punishment.” Luke goes out of his way to tell us this. Our deepest longings sometimes go unfulfilled.  Zachariah and Elizabeth accepted this and moved on with their lives. This is what really faithful people do.

Here is a popular notion that I don’t buy: “Life is fair and God is in charge of making sure it stays that way.”  The underlying conviction is that people get what they deserve.  If you do good things, good things will happen to you.  If you do bad things, you will be punished.  God keeps the score.  It’s not that God wants to punish you…but God will…to teach you a lesson, to get you to be better, to get you to change your ways.  It’s not that God wants to punish you.  It’s more like God is that reluctant parent who looks at you and whispers, “Now, look what you’ve made me do…”

Most Christians spend a lot more time thinking about Jesus than we spend thinking about John the Baptist.  We remember John when Jesus is baptized, get a little taken aback by his appearance and his diet, and move on.  After all, we know who the main character of the story is:  Jesus of Nazareth.  If anything, we move out into the wilderness with Jesus and, glancing over our shoulders, we think, “Well…that guy was a character.  Kind of weird though.”

The story of our earliest ancestors in faith is a story of liberation.  They had been slaves for generations.  Across generations, they had become very good at one thing:  making bricks, the basic building blocks that the Egyptians needed.  It wasn’t that other people couldn’t have made them, too.  Bricks are not fine art.  However, these people had made them for so long and their bricks were so reliable.  Why change a good thing?