It’s great to be back at St. John the Baptist Church again. I have been here a few times over the past number of months which I am delighted about. I am grateful for Father Matt’s ministry here in the parish but also in the Diocese as a whole. He is well known and respected in the Diocese. I am grateful as well for the ministry of this parish as a whole, as you reach beyond these four walls to spread the good news of Christ. It is good to be with you.
A few years ago, I took some time away from ministry and walked a few pilgrimage routes in different parts of the world. One of those was a portion of St. Cuthbert’s Way in the north-east corner of England. The final leg of this pilgrimage walk began with the sun rising at dawn and then waiting at the seashore for the tide to go out. It is then that one can make the way across the exposed sand to reach the Island of Lindisfarne or Holy Island as it is often called. Many go barefoot, as that just seems the best approach in wet sand, making your way to historical sites on this Holy Island. Sites that once the great saint, Cuthbert, would have known and prayed. And many people make this pilgrimage. They head out wanting to… wanting to… well many walk for different reasons. But I think the key reason is to recognize holiness in this world and in our lives. A holiness, or a presence of God, or a beckoning of God to draw nearer. For God is with us and sometimes we do not realize that we, like Moses, walk on holy ground. St. Cuthbert was once described in this way: Cuthbert washed the feet of others and served them with wonderful humility and meekness, always remembering that Christ himself is served in his followers. Saint Cuthbert knew the presence of Christ in the world of his day.
The Advent Series that I am offering in the Diocese is focussed on this very thing: knowing the presence of Christ in the world of today. In the first session, we stopped to consider what it might have been like for John the Baptizer and try to understand the experience that he had. In Luke’s version of the gospel story, we hear these words: “the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” The word of God came to John in the wilderness. Now many an artist has tried to consider what that might have been like for John. Was he simply waiting in the wilderness for this particular moment? Did he fully know all that he was to do?
Or, I wonder, if John’s experience was the same as our experience and actually much more like a pilgrimage out to a holy island, across sand or in forest or by a lake or in the wilderness. I wonder if he suddenly discovered something that he had been searching for all of us his life. Again, just like us. For in the silence, in the searching, in the prayers, in the seeking, the word of God came to him. And I wonder if that word of God also comes to us.
For John it meant that he discovered that God was with him. God was known to him. God was not distant and removed from him but near. He could feel God’s presence, know God’s presence, almost touch God’s presence as he had not seemed to notice it before. I wonder if he, like us and St. Cuthbert had an epiphany that he was standing on holy ground. And so he wanted to tell everyone about it.
Sort of like we heard in the reading from Isaiah this morning. Hear these beautiful, poetical, encouraging words again:
A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse,
And a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
The spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and might,
The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
Back to John the Baptist. He did not seem to share this poetic vision at all. He had experienced the nearness of God and I wonder if he was frustrated that other people didn’t seem to see and notice this same thing. And so he wanted to get people’s attention in a very different way. He wanted people to wake up and recognize that indeed God is with us. And John, well John is not the most patient person. He gets rid of the soft lights and gentle music. Instead he chooses insults to get attention, I am sure you noticed.
“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance!” he shouted at the religious leaders. “Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
But as I let his angry words simmer in my mind for much of this week. As I pondered his approach and his prose, I started to realize that John knew that he had a job to do and people needed to listen, for he had been called by God to prepare the way. And so when he says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” he knows with his heart of hearts that this is very serious business. God is near, God is standing among us, the kingdom of heaven, the holy presence of God is right here, re-examine your life and turn some things around.
“Almost forty years ago… Rabbi Kenneth Berger rose to deliver the sermon,” began a recent article in the New York Times. “He spoke to his congregants about a tragedy many of them, including his daughter, had witnessed eight months earlier in the Florida sky: the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
“Rabbi Berger focused on one particular detail, the revelation that the Challenger’s seven astronauts had remained alive for the 65,000 foot fall to the ocean. He called the homily “Five Minutes to Live.”
“’Can you imagine knowing that in a few moments death was imminent?’ he asked his congregation. ‘What would we think of if, God forbid, you and I were in such circumstances? What would go through our mind?’
He went on to touch “on the ordinary ways that people forget to express love for their families, blithely assuming there will always be another day. He recounted the story of a Jewish father, facing imminent death during the Holocaust, who bestowed a final kiss on the young son he was sending away to safety. ‘That scene still haunts me,’ Rabbi Berger said as his sermon closed, returning to the Challenger. ‘The explosion and then five minutes. If only I… If only I… And then the capsule hits the water, it’s all over. Then you realize it’s all the same – five minutes, five days, 50 years. It’s all the same, for it’s over before we realize… ‘If only I knew’ – yes, my friends, it may be the last time. ‘If only I realized’ – yes, stop, appreciate the blessings you have. ‘If only I could’ – you still can, you’ve got today.”1
Those were the words of Rabbi Berger. Bizarrely, three years after preaching these words, Rabbi Berger was flying from Denver to Chicago and the plane’s tail engine exploded. Forty minutes later both the rabbi and his wife died in the crash. The words of his sermon became his reality.
I think for John the Baptizer this is what he was really talking about as well, this kind of urgency, this kind of clarity. God is near he was saying, if you have five minutes or five years or fifty to live how will you live in response to God’s incarnational presence in Jesus? How will you live in response to God’s love and grace showered upon you. How will you live aware that God walks with you, beside you, amongst you? Tyler, you are being confirmed this morning with these questions in mind, for you but also for all of us, as you deepen your walk with the Christ known amongst us.
This is the Second Sunday of Advent, the theme for this morning is peace. Despite John the Baptizer’s seemingly angry tirades I think he was really inviting us to go on the same pilgrimage that he was on, to draw closer to God and know God’s peace in our lives. He was trying to break into people’s apathy to the coming of God into our world, the coming of the Messiah, the coming of God’s Son into our world. That God had become incarnate and was known amongst us, walking in our world not in some heaven light years away but this world, our world, our home. So wake up he wanted to shout and pay attention. Draw closer for the Prince of Peace is here… right here. The prophet’s voice still echoes in this world inviting us to abound in hope as St. Paul wrote. How do we now prepare for recognizing once again the coming of Christ to our world, our lives, our prayers? How do we recognize that even here, even now, Christ, whose birth we celebrate at Christmas is amongst us, incarnate God, Emmanuel, God with us?
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(photo: Kalisa Veer/Unsplash)