In the Desert, a Way (Advent 2A)

In the Desert, a Way
Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
Second Sunday of Advent (Year A)
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish Ashland (Oregon)
8th December 2013: 8:00 a.m. Said, 10:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

I grew up in the scablands of Eastern Washington, the tortured basalt and stone rubble landscape scooped out by the massive floods near the end of the last ice age.  Giant ice dams broke and let loose torrents of water that caused at one point the largest waterfall in the earth’s history combining more than ten times the flow of all the earth’s current rivers combined.  In a matter of weeks, the whole face of the land was changed, and hundreds of meters of soil had been scoured away, leaving the lava outcrops, coulees, mesas, and braided pothole lake valleys I used to camp in as a young boy scout.  Lying in the middle of the rain shadow of the Cascades, it is a desert. 

 

As a boy, I thought of it as unchanging, a drab brown and gray pale shadow of what the earth is supposed to be.  Oh to be in Seattle, with its rich rainfall, verdant forests and ferns, and flowers!   Only when I began to hike in the desert, and camp there at different times of the year, did I realized that the colors of the desert were amazing.  We may not have had the mosses, trees, and ferns of the more habitable areas to the West, but nature’s palate was rich indeed in the desert.  Thick lichens clung everywhere to the basalt, presenting an amazing rainbow, and the creosote bush and sagebrush constantly changed from light gray to a pale whitish green occasionally with lavender overtones with the seasons and the little rain we did manage to get. There were even joyous bursts of wildflowers if you looked at the right time!  The fox grass and burr-weed changed through the year, from golden and brown to barely green, to a full, but short-lived brilliant emerald tinted verdure highlighting the rocks and the scant loess soil that I only many years later learned had blown in from the North China Plain.  

One late spring day, camping with my friends in a pothole valley after a sudden downpour and thunderstorm, we found ourselves in the middle of a sea of newly sprouted mushrooms, easily identified by one of my camp mates, which we sautéed and devoured with freshly caught trout from the pothole lake that only weeks before we had crossed on foot, over thick ice.

Hiking in the desert made me acutely aware of how much water we need.  Even back then, drinking water from the streams and lakes presented the risk of giardiasis, and high-tech micro-filters did not exist yet.  So we boiled our water and carried it.   And when the weather turned hot in the afternoon, usually the two-quart bottles or canteens we carried for each of us ran out and we went thirsty until we could find and purify water again. 

The desert is solitary place, understated, and generally quieter that other terrains, a place of extremes—burning hot in the day and freezing cold at night.  It makes you feel your need, your contingency, or at least your discomfort at heat, cold, thirst, hunger.  It forces you to see with new eyes, and note how little you had actually seen when you first looked.

Today’s and next week’s Gospel readings are about John the Baptist., introduced as the voice of one crying in the desert.  Matthew is  quoting from second Isaiah, who imagines the return of Jews from exile in Babylon as a speedy highway built over the harsh and difficult terrain between Mesopotamia and Palestine:

“A voice cries out:

‘In the wilderness, prepare Yahweh’s road;

in the desert, make straight a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be lifted up,

and every mountain and hill be made low;

the uneven ground shall become level,

and the rough places a plain.’

Then shall Yahweh’s glory be revealed,

and all people shall see it together,

for the mouth of Yahweh has said it.” (Isa 40:3-5)

John lived and worked just a few kilometers from the north end of the Dead Sea, within easy walking distance of the Dead Seas Scrolls Community at Wadi Qumran.  They had fled what they saw as the corruption of the Temple establishment of Jerusalem and set up a community there to fulfill the prophecy in Isaiah.  Their Manual of Discipline says, “[we] shall separate from the habitation of the ungodly and go into the wilderness to prepare the way of Him; as it is written, ‘prepare in the wilderness the way of , in the desert make straight a pathway for our God’” (IQS 13.12-14).    

Why was it to the desert that the Essenes and John fled? That obscure prophecy in Isaiah can’t be the whole reason. 

In the Hebrew Bible, it is in the desert that a bush burns and is not consumed, that  Moses puts off his shoes, and that God reveals his Law on the Mountain and feeds his people after they flee from Egypt.   It is there that he gives them water from the rock, bread from heaven, and shelters them with a pillar of fire by night and cloud by day.  It is the quiet solitude where God speaks to Elijah in the “sound of sheer silence,” a “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12).   

As I learned as a boy, the desert teaches us to feel our needs, pay attention to minute differences, and see things never before noticed.  It is a place of dryness, where we see more clearly the dryness of our souls. 

Further, the desert is the “periphery”, “margins”, or “edge of the world.”   It is where you go to flee the confusing corruption in the city, in the center. For Jews, the center was Jerusalem and its Temple.  If the center had become corrupted, it was only from the periphery that reform could come.

It is in the desert that John appears, nearly as a wild man, clothed in camel hair and a leather belt, eating wild honey and locusts. He preaches a “baptism of repentance unto the forgiveness of sins,” or, better, “a washing signifying a change of heart that results in your sins being set aside.”

He charges the people to “go out and produce fruit worthy of repentance,” that is, “Go and produce tangible evidence in your acts that you have indeed had a change of hearts.” 

John gives examples of what he is talking about—if you are a soldier, don’t commit unnecessary violence and take advantage of people; if you are a tax collector, only collect what is required and don’t skim the proceeds.

I wonder what John the Baptist would say today if he gave us examples of tangible evidence of a change in our hearts. You can be sure that it would challenge our assumptions of what is necessary and right.   Most people of his day thought family and national backgrounds were the major thing in being close to God.  But John, speaking Aramaic, ridicules this with a pun, “Repent!  God can raise up children benayya of Abraham from the very rocks abnayya if he needed to! What is needed is a change of heart!”

John knows that judgment and turning from our sin is not the whole story. In all the Gospel accounts, he points to the One who will follow him, greater than him, who will baptize not just with water but with fire and the holy spirit.  The phrase of John’s lips, “he carries a winnowing fork in his hand” is a mistranslation.  The tool mentioned is not the large pitch fork used to throw threshed wheat into the air to let the wind separate the kernels from the husks.  Rather, the word used actually means a winnowing shovel, used to scoop up the wheat or the chaff after they have already been separated, and place the wheat into a silo for storage and the chaff into a disposal fire.  That’s why he mentions a baptism of fire.  John sees himself as a forerunner, one who separates wheat and chaff.  The one who is coming will dispose of the results: the good for the purifying and empowering fire of the Spirit, the ill for destruction. 

The traditional Christian ritual explanation of this passage is that while John baptized, Jesus confirmed by sending the Holy Spirit as a gift.  That is the reason, I believe, that the people who put together the Lectionary paired this Gospel passage with the Isaiah passage about the Jesse Tree and the Coming Ideal King of the Future:  

“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.

His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD.”  (Isa 11:2-3)

We often hear at ordinations or at Pentecost hymns to the Holy Spirit that refer to the “seven-fold gifts” of the Spirit.  These seven gifts of the spirit in classical Christian theology are all taken from this very passage:  1) wisdom, the capacity to rightly order our loves, 2) understanding, to comprehend how to put rightly-ordered love into practice, 3) counsel, actually to know the difference between right and wrong, and choose to do what is right, 4) courage, to overcome the fears that block our way in following God and taking risks for him, 5) knowledge, to perceive with certitude the meaning of God and the universe, 6) reverence, a deep respect for and humility before the Holy, and 7) fear of the Lord, a sense of wonder and awe at the beauty and majesty of our Maker. 

The sevenfold gifts of the spirit in church lore are similar to the fruits of the spirit mentioned by St. Paul: "the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control" (Gal 5:22). 

These gifts of the spirit are indeed offered to us by Christ.  But we must be willing and ready to receive them as gifts. 

It is here that we must be willing to go into the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord, into the desert to make his path straight.  We must accept the dryness of our souls, and the long periods of silence when the voice of God is muted for us.  We must be still, and know that he is God, and start seeing greens and lavenders in what we had thought was the unmixed gray and brown. 

This week sometime, find a period for silence.  Put away,if only for 20 minutes, the Christmas and Advent music, the frantic holiday preparations, and the warmth of chatting and talking.  Find silence, and sit or walk in that silence.  Listen.  Within the desert there are colors and joys.  Within the silence, God’s voice.

In the name of God, Amen.