|
First
Reading
|
Psalm |
Epistle |
Gospel |
| Isaiah 40:1–11 |
Psalm 85: 1–2, 8–13 |
2 Peter 3:8–15a, 18 |
Mark 1:1–8 |
The area in Ellis Hollow where I live was once typical northeast forest before it was cleared for farmland. I know this because back in the woods bisecting all the houses in our loop, is an old rusted barbed wire fence marked by the slivers of driftwood-gray fence posts. With the exception of a few knar led and, twisted pines, the woods are all first growth trees and scrubs, none over twenty years old. Probably five or six decades ago, the old farm was finally abandoned and the meadow gave way to the shrubs of wild honeysuckle, fast maturing aspen and seedlings of white pines, until the land was divided into building lots and sold. Lack of plowing has made it totally unfit for crops or for grazing today. To farm the land again or even put in a small garden, one would have to start all over, cut down the trees, pull out the stumps, and plow out the rocks that have moved to the surface.
John the Baptist was never a New England farmer yet he would understand those stonewalls surrounding the fields along every old country road. The walls were really storage piles for rocks that the frost heaved up in the spring. A well-run farm meant a rock wall that was always getting larger. Rock clearing and gathering was as much part of farm labor as planting and harvesting.
John the Baptist was probably not the person most people would choose as their pastor, and he certainly would not have made an adroit politician. John was the plower of human hearts, who caused people to search their soul and turn over their life. He made people uncomfortable. Yet it was John, more than anyone else who served as Jesus' mentor and model of a preacher. It is no surprise when Jesus began preaching, Herod and others in high places thought Jesus was John the Baptist who had come back to life.
John who upset rulers and rabbis as well as revolutionaries, who would refuse to be kept in anyone's pocket, became the preparer for new birth. His images were neither comforting nor soft. Rather they were that of an axe cleaning out the dead wood, of a winnowing fork, clearing away the chaff, of the very stones of the road becoming Israel's children, all symbols of a profound transformation, reversals, and complete shifts of direction. Repentance means real change, not painless modification. It involves deliberately avoiding old haunts, forgoing to travel in the ruts of ingrained habits, and to stop licking the old sores, that give us more satisfaction we would like to admit. Minor adjustments are a lot easier and far more common, but they are no substitute.
Perhaps in outward appearance John the Baptist would fit right in at the Ithaca Commons, but his message definitely would not. Much of Ithaca would find his message disturbing, as did much of Jerusalem. John did not appeal to people's want lists. John did not offer an "I'm OK, but you need to be more sensitive to my wants" type of therapy. John didn't 't offer counseling on "how to negotiate and get your way every time." John spoke to the heart of what society needed, not what it hankered for. John saw through all the pleas of more research and prolonged discussion that serve as cloaks of procrastination and coats of avoidance.
How is John preparing us this advent? Behind all the arresting imagery and strangeness, John's preaching comes down to this: Repent! The need for change is now! The good news is that when God calls, we are able to change. God gives us strength to drop and leave by the curb all our baggage from the past we've had so much trouble to let go. We don't have to be trapped, going round and round in a squirrel cage. All the stuff about generational, sociological and psychological determinism is profoundly challenged if not completely refuted by the birth of the living Christ in our midst. When God calls our name, we are not defined like we once were, and to us who live in an age of bleakness, fear, and violence, that's certainly the advent of good news.
And
I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.
