God of the living word, give us the faith to receive your message, the wisdom to know what it means, and the courage to put it into practice. Amen.
Isaiah 11:1-10
Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
Romans 15:4-13
Matthew 3:1-12
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts, be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen
Just this September past, I traveled with others on a pilgrimage to Brittany, France. This was my third pilgrimage, following the path of the ancient Celts, those people who lived long ago on the sea coast, on what could be described as an ocean highway that ran between northern points of the British Isles, along the coasts of France and Portugal, to the southern coast of Spain.
Let me give you an image from the trip to describe what I want to say today. As some of you may know, I like to take photographs. While I was standing in the middle of a city square in the city of Avignon, a city steeped in the Middle Ages, I took a picture of a busker, this one standing perfectly still and dressed from head to foot in a bright, red, velvet medieval costume that shimmered in the light. His face and hands were painted with silver (a busker is essentially begging, but entertains you while doing it.) I watched him for a while but the busker was apparently not going to move, so my attention drifted, and I spied a medieval castle outlined against the horizon in the distance. I quickly zoomed the castle into focus with my camera lens, which magnifies 10 times, and I was able to see the crenellations pretty clearly. I took the photograph.
Just then, I became aware that a small child was holding a coin out to the busker, who in an exaggerated gesture, put his two hands together and leaned down to take the coin from the beautiful and earnest child. With only a second to catch the exquisite moment I looked through my lens only to realize that it was still in zoom mode and I was too close to get the full view. I tried to back up, but there were people all around me, and I could not get far enough back, or switch my zoom to a normal view fast enough. My finished picture shows the busker leaning down, but only a portion of the child. The picture does not tell the whole story. If only I had watched and waited for a few moments. Even my picture of the castle came out a little fuzzy and is not among my best shots.
This morning we are looking at a zoomed in shot of John the Baptist, so lets walk into his life for a little, by telling a story.[1] A young Galilean teenager is walking from her home in Nazareth to the nearby city of Judah, just over the hills and for most of the walk, in sight. When she arrives, she moves quickly to find the street and the house where she hopes to be welcomed. We see her knock on the door of a dwelling and when it is opened, there is great squealing and laughter and she is swept inside. The teenager is named Mary and the woman inside is her cousin Elizabeth and while they share some tea they learn of the tremendous things that have recently happened to them, and that they share a time of pregnancy. Both carry a child waiting to be born in them.
Mary goes home to her family after staying awhile with her cousin, steadier now, and it comes to pass that the boys are born, first John, and a six months later, the infant, Jesus. John’s parents had gradually gotten used to the idea that their fondest hope for a child would not come true, so they were full of wonder when he was born. They followed all the religious customs of the day, except that instead of naming the child after his father Zechariah, he is named John, which means ‘gift from God’. People talk about this and many people wonder what to make of this child.
Time goes on. John is a solemn child, troubled by what he learns about being an oppressed people in an occupied country, tired of the hopelessness. Outraged by the situation, and by the immorality of those governing, he goes out into the desert where others are gathering.
There were all kinds of different cults and groups you could join in those days, Essenes, Zealots, and others, we do not really know what groups may have influenced John, but he lived the life of the desert. When we meet him in this passage in Matthew, he seems sort of a wild man, someone not too many of us would have the courage to invite off the street to the pot luck supper in the Great Hall. He has spent a lot of time by himself and he has come up with a vision of how to overcome the oppression, how to make the world better, and he starts talking about it. People start to gather around him. As they do, he begins doing something that everyone starts to talk about. As we have learned in our drought stricken time, those without water soon very quickly become alert to the value of it, and they rejoice in it. John started to suggest people immerse themselves in it, to cleanse themselves, to think of their immersion as a new beginning, where from that day forward they could begin again. And more people came. When someone is drawing crowds, the authorities like to keep a check on this sort of thing, and John is not careful with his words. He calls them hypocrites, opportunists, he makes threats. John soon realizes that name calling is going to limit how long he will be able to do this work, that it is going to catch up to him. Someone else is going to have to carry on his work. And then he looks up the hill, across the crowds, and sees his cousin, Jesus, coming down that same hill, walking towards him and the River Jordan. And at that moment, John sees the future walk into his life.
On this pilgrimage to France we saw many magnificent cathedrals, visited the mystical island of Mont St. Michel, we saw religious paintings and sculpture, and many ruins remaining from a thousand years or more ago. I left those places full of wonder. We talked of legends of the Celts, their resistance to the rule of Rome, and their ultimate profession of Christianity, but on their own terms. The Celts added Christianity to their own religion, without really giving up their own spiritual way of living. They held on to a spirituality for which they left us no language. And again, I wondered, about my own church and the future of Christianity in my own culture and time.
Later we traveled further back in time, when we walked among the menhirs, the massive granite stones, some three feet, some as large as seven or eight feet, erected by people at Carnak, 5500 years ago, hundreds and hundreds of them in formations. As we listened to our guide, we sensed her consternation that there was no language from Neolithic times. We cannot conclusively say what these people were doing, what these stones meant, and I left that place full of wonder. We boarded a ferry to cross the wild water of the Gulf of Morbihan, on the far southwestern coast of France, cold pilgrims lashed by the wind, as we made our way to the island of Givrinis, where we were able to visit a passage tomb, a cairn as they are called, a mound that ancient people built with stones and which captures the winter solstice light through the entrance on certain days of the year. We ducked our heads under the huge stone lintil, only 12 of us at a time, it was not large inside, and our guide showed us with flashlights what those Neolithic peoples had made. With granite chisels these artists sculptured with pointillism, on a most unforgiving canvas. There were discs and furrows, rainbows, and oxen horns. This language needed no translation for me. At last I wondered no more. These etchings said praise, praise for the fields yielding food, praise for the sun’s warmth, praise for the magic of the arc of prismatic color that fills the sky after the nourishing rains come. And I realized then, that this is what was happening in all of the places we visited and the stories we heard, that these long dead ancestors were, in their lifetimes, sending the story forward, building a story, to leave for their children, to point the way, to describe gratitude, to us.
Why did I tell you the long story of John the Baptist? Because we don’t always hear the whole story and the story is the story of our lives too. We are a part of the Cairn at Gavrinis, part of the menhirs at Carnak, and built on top of them is the story of the Celts, and we are part of that too, and in the desert tradition there is the story of Moses, and Elijah and Elisha, and on top of that is the story of John the Baptist, and the story and the life of Jesus Christ. And in our age, we know those who have built on the way of Jesus Christ, in Nelson Mandela, in Martin Luther King, in Sister Helen Prejean, in Dr. Paul Farmer, people who have changed or are changing the way of the world. We have been given the gift of that story, the gift of knowing how stones are placed on top of stones until a new order, a new way of life rises up. As Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, and to us across the generations in the epistle this morning, “For whatever was written in former days, was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope.” These stories of hope continue in every one of us.
We are in the midst of building the markers of the story of this generation. We are, all of us, always moving into a world we have not seen before. When our jobs change, when our children are born, or grow, when our parents or spouses age or die, when our bodies do things we were not prepared for them to do, we move into a world we do not know. During Advent things stand still for a little while in our church year, ignoring the distractions and occupations of what happens outside. The timing of our pictures, like mine of the child giving alms to the busker, may not be ready yet. It is only partial, only beginning to come clear. And though we delude ourselves into thinking it remains clear, the picture from our own past is getting fuzzy too. John the Baptist did not know what a messiah would look like or how the new world would look. He had hope though, even in a hopeless situation. And then he stepped back, gave up a little of his own self, and “love” walked down the hill, and the world was brand new once again.
Amen.
[1] Much of my writing about John the Baptist in this homily was influenced by the experience of a course at the Cathedral College of Preachers called the Art of the Homily, taught by Herbert O’Driscoll. I would be hard pressed to say which parts of it I could claim as my own.
The Episcopal Church of the Holy Comforter, a parish of The Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina
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