I live out in the area called Ellis Hollow. Once it was a broad valley of forest and wetlands, amply watered by the surrounding hills, and providing the aquifer for Cascadilla Creek whose waters eventually flow over Ithaca Falls on their way into Cayuga Lake. In 1799, the land was bought by two brothers by the name of Ellis who built their homesteads and laid out their farms, cutting down the trees, pulling out the stumps, draining some of the wetlands, and removing innumerable boulders and rocks. It must have been hard to make a go of it for so much of the soil is like a gravel pit. I suspect around the turn of the 19th century, much of the land became pasture, and then was abandoned altogether as first milkweed and burdock, then larger shrubs and first growth saplings took over. Some three or four decades ago, a developer surveyed the area for housing lots, and gradually some the land was bulldozed and leveled for new houses, one of which became mine.
The woods behind our house shelters the remains of a rusty barbed wire fence running parallel to the street, reminding us of past toil. There are a few scattered white pines, but most trees are like the slender Aspen that have a tendency to bend and snap in a winter’s ice storm. One could attempt to make the woods farmland again, but by now, lack of plowing has made it totally unfit for crops or for grazing. One would have to start all over again, cut down the trees, and pull out the stumps. Before you could ever plant any seed, wait for the miracle of growth, and expect the harvest, you would have to be willing to turn over the rough ground and lastly pick up hundreds of rocks deposited by the glaciers of yet another era.
John the Baptist was never a pioneer farmer, yet he would understand the meaning of those stonewalls surrounding the fields along every old country road in the Northeast. The walls were really storage piles for rocks that the frost heaved up in the spring. The walls of a well-managed farm were always getting larger. There is harsh truth in the old saying that in Maine, the crops were potatoes, men and rocks, and not necessarily in that order.
John the Baptist was probably not the person most people would choose as their therapist, and he certainly would not stand a chance of getting elected to high office either in the secular or sacred realm. John had the power to plow the debrie away from human hearts, who caused people to search their soul and turn over their life. He made people uncomfortable even if he helped them to grow. His eyes seemed to pierce through the phony coverings and facades of duplicity. It is doubtful John would have ever been described as “plays well with others” and “anxious to please,” yet it was John, more than anyone else, who served as Jesus’ mentor and model of what it meant to announce good news that was news, not propaganda. It was no surprise that when Jesus began preaching, authorities feared that Jesus was John the Baptist who had come back to life.
In the midst of a violent and harsh world, John appeared. His clothes of rough skins and his wooden walking staff served as a mocking rebuke of the opulent robes, crowns, and sticks of authority of the crushing imperial power of Tiberious, Pilate, Herod et al. John, who upset rulers and rabbis as well as revolutionaries, who would refuse to be kept in anyone’s pocket, became the cultivator of the ground for new birth. His images were never comforting nor soft. Rather, they were that of an axe cleaning out the dead wood, of a winnowing fork clearing away the chaff, of fields reclaimed from deserts, all symbols of profound transformations, reversals, and complete shifts of direction.
Repentance always means change. We have all heard the old joke many times. How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, of course, but the light bulb has to really want to change. Yes, it is difficult to let go of old haunts, to forgo the ruts of ingrained habits, to stop licking the old sores, than we would like to admit. Minor adjustments are a lot easier and far more common, but they are no substitute, just as one pass over with an iron rake would not prepare the woods in back of my house for any sort of decent garden.
How is John preparing us this advent? Behind all the imagery and strangeness, John’s preaching comes down to this: When God calls and we listen, we change. In the winds of new birth, we are able to let go of all our baggage from the past. We don’t have to be trapped to go ‘round and ‘round in a squirrel cage. All the stuff about generational, sociological and psychological determinism is challenged by the birth of God’s reality in our midst. Advent is the ultimate tipping point. When God calls our name, we are not defined like we once were, and to us who also live in an age of darkness and violence, that’s the advent of good news.
And I offer this to you in the name of the Living God, Amen.
