The Advent Revolution: So Much for the Status Quo
Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
December 6, 2009 The 2nd Sunday of Advent
Malachi 3:1-4; Luke 3: 1-9
A pastor shares this memory: “I cherish a vision of what could have been a great moment in American poetry. One day my American literature professor told our class about Emily Dickinson, the quiet and reclusive woman who was satisfied to live in a circumscribed world in Amherst, Massachusetts. Then he told us about Walt Whitman, the wild man of American poetry whose energy and sensuality and wide experience of the human condition were dramatically different from Emily Dickinson’s.
“My professor gave us two facts: the Dickinson family occasionally went to the beach for picnics; and Walt Whitman was fond of going to a beach, stripping off all his clothes and running in the sand while yelling his poetry into the wind. My professor then said, with a mischievous smile on his face, ‘What if, one day at the beach, just after Emily Dickinson had finished spreading her picnic basket on the sand, suddenly, flying over a sand dune and landing right in the middle of the Dickinson picnic, came a wild and naked Walt Whitman? Who would have spoken first? What would that person have said? What poems would have been written by each of them afterwards? What a moment that would have been!’”
Well, it occurs to me that the appearance of John the Baptist is rather like Walt Whitman landing on the beach – a wild and surprising character shouting his prophecy all over the wilderness and howling his message into the wind. He must have shocked many people even as he attracted others. Was he crazy or was he onto something big. Either way, an encounter with John the Baptist was not something soon to be forgotten. We remember him still. Reflecting on this fascinating Biblical personality, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “Every Advent of our lives, we have to go by John the Baptist to get to Jesus. Drawn by the light of one particular star, we are heading through the cool blue night, minding our own quiet business, when a red glow appears just over the rise ahead. Reaching the top of the hill, we look down and see – you guessed it – John the Baptist, hopping mad, preaching in front of a bonfire with pitchfork in one hand and an ax in the other. He is the last person in the world most of us would want to see…But there is no getting around John. He is God’s appointed messenger, sent to prepare the way of the coming of the Lord.” Well, you heard what he had to say. Luke calls it good news. How did it sound to you? Herod decided to throw John in jail. And maybe that’s where he belonged…out of sight, out of mind, shut him up once and for all. But Luke calls it good news.
John’s preaching and the reaction to his preaching remind me of a Dave Barry column from a few years back. He wrote, “People always ask me: How come the newspaper prints so much bad news? How come the front page always has negative headlines like, ‘Freak Espresso Machine Explosion Destroys Crowded Starbucks?’ Why don’t you print stories with a more positive slant, like: ‘Destroyed Starbucks was Popular Gathering Place for Lawyers’?” Or feel free to substitute your own favorite profession – maybe Congress – any punch line you want. But that’s what I would like to say to John. “Lighten up, it’s Christmas, can’t you try to be a little more positive?” And yet, Luke calls it…”good news”. How is it good news?
A story told by UCC minister, Elizabeth Myer Boulton: “Our guide told us that it wasn’t very far, only about 15 minutes or so up the road… maybe 20. We were on our way to Bassin-Blue, one of Haiti’s most magnificent waterfalls. The sight of it, our guide assured us, would take our breath away. It was early in the morning. We filled up our water bottles, lathered up with sunscreen, topped it off with insect repellent, laced up our hiking boots and hit the trail. I settled into a good pace and after an hour of hiking up the steep mountainside, I asked our guide as politely as I could, ‘Are we getting close? Are we almost there?’ He assured me the falls were not very far, only about fifteen minutes or so up the mountain. Maybe twenty, he added, and smiled sincerely.
“Two hours later, with no waterfall in sight, my lungs were burning, my feet were blistered, my water bottle was bone dry. I couldn’t go any further, even though our guide insisted that the falls were very close now, no more than fifteen minutes. (That guy must have worked in customer service somewhere.) I sat down with my back against a tree, totally spent. That’s when I saw the woman who had been walking some distance behind us with a basket of 20 or 30 pounds of oranges balanced carefully on her head. She smiled when she saw me, gracefully swung the basket down into her arms and sat down. Then she cut one of her oranges in two and offered me half. She said, ‘We have a saying in Haiti: After mountains, more mountains.’”
Well, Haitians certainly know the truth of that saying. The life expectancy of a Haitian man is 55 years. Haitian women are 60 times more at risk of dying in childbirth than are American women. The people of that poverty stricken country know well the experience of, “After mountains, more mountains.” But not just them.
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness…prepare the way of the Lord.” Perhaps John uses such strong, fiery language because he knows that is just what we need. What our world needs. You see, when the Bible speaks of wilderness, it is not speaking of a place for Boy Scouts, for A-frame cabins, or for ballads by John Denver. Biblical wilderness is the place where Israel lost its way, couldn’t find home, lost its faith, turned to other gods. Wilderness often isn’t a place. It’s a state of mind, a metaphor to describe a terrifying situation where there are no clear paths, and where chaos, temptation, and bewilderment reign; where as we look around all we see are more mountains; where we begin to feel only depressed and powerless because it begins to feel that there’s no way out. Sound familiar? Ever been there, in the wilderness?
I suppose no one knows wilderness any better than good old Charlie Brown. Did you see the Peanuts strip just a few days ago? Charlie Brown and Linus are sitting together on the couch. Linus says, “You need a new outlook, Charlie Brown. Try to look at your life as if it were a book and each day as if it were a page in that book.” “I’ve tried that,” Charlie Brown responds, “But there were too many misprints.” Ever feel that way? A life story full of misprints? Oh, I suspect we have all spent time in the wilderness, maybe some of us are there even as we worship here today. When all we see are more misprints, more mountains, somehow a friendly, “Smile, God loves you,” just doesn’t quite do it.
And John knows that. And so he uses strong language. He says, the Kingdom is coming, and the rough places will be smoothed out and the crooked places will be made straight. This isn’t highway maintenance – this isn’t a Cal Trans manual. This is no new road; this is a whole new creation of a whole new world, a world of safety and justice and compassion, a world where the curves of injustice, immorality and inhumanity will be changed into smooth paths so that all can see and be a part of God’s new realm. And we had better be ready – get ready to receive it and ready to proclaim to a weary world, even to our own weary hearts, that the wilderness will not have the final word. People get ready, for change is comin’. That’s part of what our Advent waiting is all about.
But I want to add a word about another strong image in John’s preaching…fire – unquenchable fire. There is an old story about a saint named Abbot Joseph, one of the spiritual masters of the 4th century who were known as the desert fathers. Abbot Joseph was in charge of a large community of monks living in the desert, and his main job was to instruct the young monks who came to him for spiritual guidance. One day one of those monks came to see him, clearly forlorn. He had followed all the rules, done everything right, but still felt something missing. “Father,” he said to the Abbot, “As I am able, I keep my rule, I keep my fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence. Now what more should I do?” Abbot Joseph rose up, stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire as he said, “Well then, why not be totally changed into fire?”
Indeed. The fire spoken of by John is not necessarily safe. It’s a fire that burns through our defenses and our pretensions. It’s a fire that leaves us standing before God without our armor, our masks, our possessions, our excuses. It leaves us with nothing but our beating hearts and the slim volume of our lives to commend us. It leaves us pretty open and vulnerable before God, this consuming fire. And that can be dangerous, even frightening, as John is only too happy to remind us. But in the words of Taylor, “Never forget, it is God’s own fire, the fire of God’s presence, fire that wants to speak to us, guide us, instruct us, save us. It is the fire of a potter who wants to make useful vessels out of damp clay. It is the fire of a jeweler who wants to refine pure gold from rough ore. It does not have to be the fire of destruction. It may also be the fire of transformation, a fire that both lights us up and changes us, melting us down and reforming us more nearly to the image of God.”
Could that be the fire spoken of by John, the fire of this Advent season? Could that be what we’re waiting for…the fiery, transforming power of God to create sons and daughters of Abraham out of stones, or out of any one of us? Says Taylor, “God does not need much in the way of raw materials – not a chest full of merit badges or an unsullied reputation or even a clean conscience. All God needs to create a human is a hand full of dust willing to be transformed, willing to be caught on fire for heaven’s sake.” So what do you think? Why not be totally changed into fire? Might be just what people lost in the wilderness most need. And it’s coming, most assuredly it’s coming. You just never know when God and God’s transforming fire will leap over a sand dune and land smack dab in the middle of our lives. John’s right – we had best be prepared.
Remember Elizabeth Boulton and her seemingly endless quest for that waterfall in Haiti? Here is how she concludes her story; “After I finished my orange, I got back up on my feet and I was refreshed. Fifteen minutes more, I said to myself. Soon I heard the whisper of rushing water in the distance. I couldn’t see Bassin-Bleu yet, but I could hear it and it sounded like justice rolling down. It sounded like God had just created a world…We don’t know how far away we are from that new world, but we are called to live and to pray and to preach as if it were right around the corner – and to keep on walking. Because after mountains and more mountains, we will come up over a rise and catch sight of that mighty waterfall, and it will take your breath away.