Thursday, December 21, 2017

The Voice Crying in the Wilderness


A sermon preached Advent III, December 17, 2017 at St. Richard’s Episcopal Church, Winter Park, Florida. Lessons include Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 and the Gospel of John 1:6-8,19-28.

I am the voice of the one crying out in the wilderness, Make straight the Way of the Lord!” May I speak in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN.

The Call to the Desert

Our Gospel reading takes place in a location known today as Bethabara, Jordan. It is on the Jordan River not far from Jericho and just above where the river dumps into the Dead Sea to the south. 

To get to Bethany across the Jordan as the writer of the Gospel of John describes it, one must descend down long winding mountain paths nearly 3000 feet in elevation from Jerusalem to place nearly 800 feet below sea level. Bethabara is in the heart of the Judean Desert, a rocky, inhospitable place for human habitation. There are no fast food or convenience stores and cell service does not extend that far into the desert. To the modern eye, it is, indeed, a wilderness.
           
Like most deserts, the Judean Desert is barren, quiet. There are no distractions. And there is a reason that many who find themselves on spiritual journeys come to the desert. They come to be alone with themselves, alone with the lives they bring with them and the callings they sense, alone with the G-d who created them and seeks so earnestly to make his presence known to them.

Jesus spends much time in the desert during his lifetime. Between rounds of healing and teaching, Jesus routinely replenishes his spirt in the desert. He knew that it is there one can most readily hear the small still voice that always calls to us even when we are too distracted to hear it. 


Advent calls all of us to the desert. Our lives are marked by noise and constant distractions. We are told by telecommunication advertisements that we should “Talk all the time!” And we often take that seriously without considering the obvious: 

If we are talking all the time, when do we listen? When do we have time to think about what we’re going to say? Indeed, if we talk all the time, what do we have to say worth hearing?


I sometimes ask my Valencia students “What does it tell us about the quality of the lives we are living if we are so resolutely unwilling to spend time with our own company alone?”

Advent is the time to think long and hard about that question.

Giving Up on a Brood of Vipers

But there are other reasons John the Baptist has come to the desert, to become, in the words of John’s Gospel, “a voice crying in the wilderness.” He has given up on the institutional religion of his time. The Baptist observes that the Sadducees who operate the Temple are in bed with the Romans, allowing the collection of taxes in the Temple courtyard. They can’t be trusted. Worse yet, they operate an exploitative system of sacrificial offerings that effectively shut out the poor.

He observes the Pharisees, obsessed with control issues based in purity codes, codes that determine who is in and who is out when it comes to G-d’s favor. Their reward is a feeling of self-righteousness.

And he observes the poor, the vast majority of the population in Roman occupied Judea. The poor cannot afford the offerings in the Temple. Their desperate scramble for survival does not permit them the means of meeting the daily demands of the Pharisees’ purity code. Everything in their lives suggests that G-d could care less about them. There is a reason Jesus will feel the need to tell them “Blessed are the poor…” and repeatedly remind them “You are the light of the world, the salt of the earth.” Everything else in their lives suggests just the opposite.  

John looks around him and sees religious leaders who have sold their souls for access to power and privilege. He sees sectarian bodies who create walls around themselves, declaring those inside the tribal walls to be the elect and everyone outside to be the damned. All the while the poor and the homeless languish in misery, waiting for someone to remind them of their humanity, demonized as lazy and undeserving by those with full stomachs, clean clothes and secure roofs over their heads. I fear that John the Baptist would find himself strangely at home in 21st CE America.

The Baptist spares no words in his criticism of the religious leaders of his day: “You brood of vipers!” he screams. He has given up on Jerusalem and Judaism as then practiced. He believes that G-d has as well and that an apocalyptic event is now required to set things right. And like all apocalyptic thinkers, he’s pretty sure that those who are the targets of his outrage will get theirs. The god of John the Baptist is decidedly a punishing deity.

The Classic Prophet

The Baptist is also a rather classic prophet. He articulates the vision he feels compelled to pronounce. He knows that few people want to hear it, he says these things to his own peril and yet he feels he has no choice but to proclaim them.

No doubt John has no small sense of the precariousness of his situation, a well-founded fear that soon proves right on target. Within months he will lose his head to King Herod whose incestuous and bloodthirsty dealings with his own family would make him a target for the Baptist’s critique. In the days before Twitter made midnight slandering of one’s political enemies possible, tyrants took out their revenge in blood.

But the Baptist is also insightful. He recognizes in Jesus something new. “Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me.” A number of biblical scholars believe that Jesus was likely a disciple of John the Baptist before realizing that John’s message was not the Good News that Jesus was called to proclaim. John’s message envisions a justice cast in terms of vengeance. Such is the besetting sin of all sectarian thought – we’ve got it right and if you don’t agree, you can go to Hell – quite literally.

To be sure, Jesus does not pull his punches. He is also very critical of the self-righteous Pharisees. And Jesus is contemptuous of the Temple cult, turning over coin changing tables, disrupting business on the Temple Mount because of its exploitative practices that limit access to sacrifice by those perhaps most in need of it, thus desecrating that holy place. It is this act of righteous anger that will cost Jesus his life.

The truth is, we need our prophets. We rarely like them and often avoid their pronouncements by choosing to shoot the messenger rather than heed their message. But we almost always need to hear what they have to tell us, even if the implications for our lives are dire. Perhaps *especially* if the implications for our lives are dire.

Even as we badly need to listen to our prophets, we most often reward them for their gut wrenching words and examples by putting them out of our misery. Consider John the Baptist, Jesus. Consider Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. Oscar Romero. There are two things these prophets all hold in common. The first is that we remember their names and the second is that we remember them because they ended up martyrs.

A Calling to Transcend Our Lives, Transform the World

But Jesus’ Good News is more than a critique of the status quo, the calling of every prophetic voice. I think it is no accident that Luke will put the words of the prophet Isaiah from today’s Hebrew Scripture lesson in the mouth of Jesus in his first public appearance in the synagogue in Nazareth after his 40 days in the desert:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor….to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

In effect Jesus is telling people “This is who I am, this is what I am called to proclaim and live out. This is what the kingdom of G-d is about and this is the Way my followers will engage.” In short, this is the Standard Operating Procedure manual of the Way of Jesus. 

It is a way of being the people of G-d here, now in a manner that has the potential for its followers to transcend their default ways of being human – ways of living that cause us to avoid our own company with a constant din of electronic distraction and noise. And it is a way of being human that – if engaged collectively and consistently – has the potential to transform the world in which we live.

Advent is a time of waiting and watching, a time that is intended for reflection, for reconsideration of our lives, a process that is known as repentance.

So, how are we doing this Advent?

·         Can we embrace the quiet of the desert?

·         Can we put down our electronic play things long enough to hear what G-d may be desperately trying to communicate to us all year long but finding it impossible to get a word in edgewise when we “talk all the time?”


·         Can we spend the time alone with just our own company and the presence of G_d who is always present with us but rarely recognized?

·         Can we consider the reasons we avoid our own company alone, the things we have said, done, thought of which we are not proud, things we might – if we are being honest with ourselves and resist the temptation to rush in with self-justification – actually call sin?

The voice crying out in the wilderness calls us to take this time of Advent to examine, reflect and be present with ourselves and G-d. Because, like John the Baptist, Advent is pointed toward the coming of the Good News, a Jesus who will call us to a Way of being the people of G_d that has the power to transcend the lowest common denominator of our lives and to transform the whole world. If that sounds familiar to you, it should. We hear it each week in our mission statement:

We are here to discover G-d’s grace, change our lives and change the whole world.

Advent is a time to prepare for that task.

How will we respond?


Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us, through Jesus the Christ, our Lord, to whom with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory, now and forever. AMEN. (Collect for Advent III)
         

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Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida

 frharry@cfl.rr.com

harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

 © Harry Coverston 2017
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