Preaching on my first Sunday at St. Paul’s, November 27, 2022.
This morning we have another present to open, waiting for us underneath our proverbial Advent tree. Last week we opened the first one, wrapped elegantly by our ancient Christian forebears of the first century. (In my imagination, they used fine blue and purple paper and a handsome silver ribbon.) Their First Sunday of Advent gift to us was the insight that even when the world is falling apart, the shared work of cultivating a faithful community, right here, just here, is one powerful way that God mends the world.
Cultivating community is one powerful way that God’s dominion dawns.
We now turn to our second Advent gift. This gift is wrapped roughly, in brown shipping paper and gnarled twine. It does not shine; it doesn’t seem to be cheerful. But it is a gift, nonetheless, so let’s open it.
And here is what we find inside: an image of a desert landscape occupied by a lone figure, someone who is … awful. He is shouting as he steps out of the desert to preach to us. He is dressed shabbily in animal skins. He smells like someone who lives, eats, and works in the ancient desert.
This is not an attractive gift.
John the Baptist is repulsive, off-putting, even obnoxious. He says angry, harsh things. He compares respectable people of faith to a roiling nest of snakes. The best I can say about him is that he is bracing: he tells people what they need to hear in a blunt way that somehow helps them. And as harsh as he is, he clearly cares about his people.
Do you know the type? Maybe there is a truth-teller in your life, someone who says what needs to be said, and sometimes with their fist in it. You don’t really like the person, and yet you can’t just write them off. They’re awful. But they are — infuriatingly — on to something.
But let me be clear: I’m not talking about someone obnoxious in an unredemptive way, like a neo-Nazi, or someone who shoots up a school. These persons are worthy of our prayers, but they are not prophets, or at the very least not God’s prophets.
No, this is a specific type of awful person: they are annoying, they are exasperating, maybe they are deeply troubled and prone to bad behavior — but they are right; they are correct. They’re on to something.
Maybe that’s why John the Baptist, irritating as he is, draws crowds. “The people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him,” we are told today, “and all [the people in] the region along the Jordan [River].” This means people are willing to travel over desert landscapes, along perilous roads, away from the comforts of their cities and villages, just to see this repulsive, off-putting, obnoxious person.
Because he is right about something, and it’s something they need, something they want.
It might be helpful to look at John the Baptist as a human incarnation of the wilderness itself. Imagine the wilderness walking into this beautiful, serene space in the form of a rough, wild, and uncompromising prophet. John the Baptist is a lot like Edward Abbey, the 20th-century writer, environmental activist, and iconoclast – one of the off-putting, obnoxious ones. Edward Abbey adored the desert wilderness and did not — ever — spare the feelings of his human audiences. He ranted about the dreadful damage humanity has inflicted upon the earth. In his book Desert Solitaire, this is what Edward Abbey has to say about human tourists who disturb the wilderness:
“The tourists have gone home. Most of them. A few still rumble in and ramble around in their sand-pitted dust-choked iron dinosaurs but the great majority, answering a mystical summons, have returned to the smoky jungles and swamps of what we call, in wistful hope, American civilization. I can see them now in all their millions jamming the freeways, glutting the streets, horns bellowing like wounded steers, hunting for a place to park. They have left me alone here in the wilderness, at the center of things, where all that is most significant takes place. (Sunset and moonrise, moaning winds and stillness, cloud transformations, the metamorphosis of sunlight, yellowing leaf and the indolent, soaring vulture.…)”
He’s right! But … wow.
Edward Abbey is, by his own report, a “desert rat.” He writes, “There are mountain men, there are men of the sea, and there are desert rats. I am a desert rat.”
Yet somehow these cranky, judgy desert-rat prophets are irresistible. People are drawn to them, repulsive, off-putting, and obnoxious as they may be. As resistant as we may feel, we know that we need to hear what the desert rat has to teach.
The wilderness prophet – the desert rat – is a gift under our tree from the ancient Israelites, who became a people – God’s people – in the desert wilderness. Elsewhere in his writings, Edward Abbey reflects on the indifference of the wilderness to human beings and our attempts to build what we call “civilizations.” A friend of mine, Alissa Newton (who is also a friend of St. Paul’s), once said that our spiritual tradition is easier to understand in a harsh climate because that is where it evolved: God’s people were formed in a place where nature was indifferent, or worse, the enemy. “Our faith makes much more sense in Texas,” Alissa said, “than it does in the Pacific Northwest, because everyone enjoys nature up here with all of the rivers, mountains, and hiking trails; but in Texas, nature is trying to kill you.”
The ancient-Israelite desert rat is a gift then, because the wilderness in all its harshness, indifference, and danger is a powerful way to be formed as God’s people, but we need a guide; we need help from one of God’s prophets to do it right. The wilderness limits our options, and it right-sizes us: it reminds us that we are finite, and mortal. And it takes many forms. (We need not move to Texas.) Think of the pandemic as a form of wilderness: it is wild, relentless, witless, uncompromising, and potentially lethal. And it forms us. It changes us.
When we wrestle with it, we become God’s people.
The pandemic formed us in faith: it taught us that we need to rely on one another, care for one another, draw closer and work harder to safeguard the health and lives of our most vulnerable companions. But it also formed us in fear, for both good and ill: there is healthy fear and neurotic fear, and I think it’s fair to say we’ve felt – and continue to feel – both kinds during the pandemic. A dangerous pathogen can sometimes make us dizzy with fear, and so we often turn to wilderness guides like Anthony Fauci to sort things out for us, to make sense of the conflicting data, to engage our sharp minds, to guide our anxious hearts.
And as we slowly, ever so slowly, emerge from the worst of the pandemic, we – like those same ancient Israelites who gave us this dubious Advent gift – we enter a friendlier land, a somewhat easier life, but we enter it warily, more than a little exhausted, unsure of ourselves. We still know – and we learned this from that harsh teacher, the wilderness – that we depend fully on God’s grace and God’s power to continue living peaceably together, to continue safeguarding the health and vitality of this community, to continue our work of ministry in the here and now.
The wilderness forms us in fear, and it forms us in faith. Now, not all of that fear is neurotic: some of it makes good sense and we should listen to it. But some of it needs to be confronted, and carefully set aside. And while not all of our fears are healthy, not all of our faith is necessarily healthy, either: sometimes we place our faith in the wrong persons. Like the ancient Israelites, we sometimes turn from God and trust false gods, false leaders, false answers. The wilderness is a rough teacher, and it’s easy to learn the wrong lessons.
And so, we continually leave our comfortable homes, our easy civilizations, and we join the crowds that are trudging down to the muddy Jordan River to listen to this desert rat, John the Baptist, who is our guide in the desert wilderness, our gift from the Isrealite desert nomads. John says dreadful things, but he bracingly challenges us to confront ourselves, to repent, and to change how we live, how we think, how we act. He helps form us in healthy fear and strong faith, so that life can flourish, even in the desert; so that God’s righteousness and God’s justice will come down like rain upon the mown field, like showers that water the earth.
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Preached on the Second Sunday of Advent (Year A), December 4, 2022, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 11:1-10
Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
Romans 15:4-13
Matthew 3:1-12