December 5, 2010
Text: Matthew 3:1-12
John, the Baptizer, was a man of the earth, clothed in elements of the earth, taking sustenance from the earth. From the scripture’s description of him, he seems not to have been one to put on airs. He wasn’t invested in “social networking” or “moving on up.” He wasn’t trying to impress folks, yet something about his manner drew people to him—from the rural areas and the city, temple insiders as well as outsiders. Why did they come? His message was not the ever-popular “God wants you to feel good about yourself/you’re better than you think you are and deserve ever-increasing bounty/God loves you just the way you are.”
John doesn’t preach health and wealth and gentle blessings raining down. He shouts at them, “Clean up your life!” And he baptizes them, not at the temple in a ritual of purification, but into the dirty living waters of the Jordan. It’s surreal, the masses coming to be shouted at, to make confession and be taken under the waters. Could the sacred movements of God be happening through this wild man in the desert? Does the Holy One sometimes show up in our lives outside the boundaries of appropriateness?
What are the sacred movements these days in your wilderness places, where the untamed and undisciplined parts of you still hold forth? What’s crying out from those desert regions, warning you, “You’re not prepared for all that God is about to do!” What is uniquely yours to confess? Once and for all, can you imagine admitting it out loud to God and another human being—that this is what keeps you in bondage? Is this a turning time in YOUR life? Are you going to be ready this year for the birth?
Advent is a good time to ask questions like these. If we can find our next right questions, we have a shot at some next right answers. So I invite you to listen for a question or two this morning that might be the ones for you to carry this season as you journey toward Christ’s birth. Like Mary, who quietly pondered all that had been told to her, it isn’t enough to have questions—we also need some pondering time as we wait for our next birth.
What might we learn from John? He cried out to an occupied world, to an oppressed people: “Turn!” We, too, 20 centuries later, are overly occupied and oppressed. What, other than God, occupies and oppresses you these days? (Responses.) It’s helpful to be able to say from what shall we turn—and toward what, or whom, shall we turn?
On Friday morning, Gordon showed me the plastic wrapping that held his Washington Post. Maybe you saw it, these words: “LOOK INSIDE FOR HOLIDAY INSPIRATION...the Tyson’s Corner Center gift guide is inside.” And then in smaller print at the bottom: “For all of the inspiration you need this season, visit ShopTysons.com.” ALL the inspiration we need? I didn’t check into the web site, yet, but the gift guide in the newspaper said that Tyson’s has prepared, for each one of us, “the ultimate gift”—which, in case you wondered, is not Jesus. It’s an American Express gift card that, once you purchase it, will let you buy anything you want in the entire mall! (For “the girl who has everything,” they suggest a cosmetics set that “delivers infinite options.”)
I couldn’t help noticing that this ad was for the same shopping center where a two-year-old “…was on a five-story walkway on Monday when her grandmother suddenly grabbed her and allegedly threw her over the side. She plummeted 50 feet to the ground and died hours later at a hospital” (The Washington Post, Dec. 3, 2010, Metro section). The juxtaposition of these images on the same day, referring to the same shopping center, the very place that promises to give us ALL the inspiration we need this season, created a disturbance in me not unlike the one John the Baptist was creating for folks in first century Palestine. The insatiable “gotta have more” meets up with the horrifying lostness of a two-year-old girl and her likely mentally ill grandmother, and in the meeting our own sin is revealed—which is anything that causes us to be out-of-alignment with God and one another. Reading those two pieces in the Post, I felt the light already beginning to shine on the path, and there we are as a society, caught in its searching beam. Of course, the problem isn’t at Tyson’s Corner. The problem shows up whenever we seek inspiration—which is, literally, the very breath of God—in places that cannot ultimately satisfy.
John is not suggesting that, if it suits us and isn’t too much bother, we might consider tweaking our path a bit, make slight modification of our “sort of sinnish” ways. No, he shouts at us to STOP. Like a person would shout at a child about to step into traffic. STOP! You’re headed toward destruction! TURN AROUND! WALK ANOTHER WAY! Each of us—and all of us together—turning from our selfish motivations, our greed, our unloving actions and responses. I don’t know about you, but I resist letting John into my personal life. When I was a child, I was relieved when I was told I could ask Jesus into my heart—because it could have been John the Baptist instead. I like reading about him, the wild prophet of God, but I don’t know if I want him up close and personal. Will he start ripping things out of my life? Will he shine a light of justice on my familiar unjust ways?
And besides, WE—those of us here in this room this morning—WE have already turned toward God, haven’t we? Would we be here if we hadn’t? We have read books and prayed and been in mission groups and given our financial resources…. We might not be perfect, but surely we’re safe from God’s wrath…right? Well, John makes me uncertain. When he sees the good church folk (the Pharisees and Sadducees) coming, he doesn’t say, “Oh, thank God. At last here are some ‘got-it-together’ people from the temple who have devoted their lives to God.” No, he yells at them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you about God’s wrath? You thought you were safe, didn’t you? But where’s the proof? Show in the way you live that you’ve really turned from your sins and turned to God.”
Our good intentions. Our prayer and study. Even our long-haul commitment—none of these seem to matter to John. WHERE’S THE PROOF, he asks? Luke’s recollection of John is that when people asked John what they should do, he said things like: “If you have two coats, give one to the poor. If you have food, share it with those who are hungry. Be honest. Don’t cheat people. Don’t accuse people of things they didn’t do.” In other words, get specific in your own particular life. Stop saying you’re pretty much in favor of the concept of loving your neighbor and start applying some love in the life of your neighbor. Start going against the flow of your own cultural tendencies, whatever current occupation/oppression you’re living under. What will you start to do, today, that you haven’t been doing? What will you stop doing?
John urged those who came to him to confess, which meant to change their life, and then to be baptized in the water, not as a rite of purification—he would have sent them to the temple for that—but as a way to go public. Confess, turn, go public. This gives accountability. It’s how we start to make crooked ways straight and get ourselves, all together, ready for the Lord’s coming. Confess, change your life, go public. (Repeat as needed.)
Once, sitting right here at the Potter’s House, with all the noise and activity of a busy day, I asked Dot Cresswell if she would hear my confession regarding a sin that was clogging my inner “pathway for the Lord.” A few days before, a mentally ill woman had shown up at Andrew’s House and even though she didn’t fit the purposes of Andrew’s House exactly, I let her stay overnight. Well, she liked the house a lot and wanted to stay on longer, but I asked her to leave. I already knew her need was greater than I could help her with on my own, and I just didn’t want to get as involved as it would have required. So I made some phone calls and found her a place at the House of Ruth. She didn’t want to go, but I insisted she go, and at last she did. My sense now was that she had been Christ at my door, as Dorothy Day would say “in one of his many distressing disguises,” and I had failed Christ pitifully.
I kept confessing my failure to God, but no relief came. Sometimes you need God with skin on, so I decided to confess it to Dot. I chose my confessor carefully, knowing how kind and non-judgmental Dot could be. I expected her to say something like, “Oh, hon, all of us do things we wish we hadn’t done, and leave undone other things we wish we would have done. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” But what she said was more like this: “I hear you. That woman represented Christ to you, and you turned Christ away.” The reality of my sin sank in deeper. And then she said, “And I love you, even knowing that about you. Do you think, if I’m able to love you, God might be able to love you, too, and loves that woman, too, and knows exactly what each of you needs?”
To prepare a path for the coming of the Lord is to turn—turn from our sin, which is all the little and big ways we fail to let love flow in and love flow out—and to go public with our turning...or our failure to turn. To prepare is to go into the wilderness of our own lives and to let others know our sin and to proclaim together that we want the way of justice and love to become real in our lives. Not just the outer wrappings of our lives, but the whole of us. May it be so! Come, Lord Jesus!