The Rev. Canon Mariclair Partee
Today in our readings we have dueling images, and at first it might seem that they are meant to contradict each other. I think instead they are meant to be parallels, across the millennia between the writing of the Old Testament and the New, and between the times of Jesus and the times we live in, today, now, in this Advent. In the midst of this time and space travel from prophet to prophet we find hope, and we find encouragement.
Isaiah gives us the literal family tree of the Messiah- an almost cinematic picture of a slender green shoot emerging from a dried brown tree stump, a sign of life and strength from a thing thought long dead and gone. We know that this bit of green hope is King David, and the branch that springs from the roots will grow broad to support a series of limbs linking him to Solomon to Jehosaphat to Uzziah to Amon to Zerubbabel and all the patriarchs and matriarchs in between and eventually to Jesus, with some variation depending on which of the numerous genealogies one finds in the scriptures is used.
So there we have an earthly sign of the groundwork being laid for the coming of the Lord, but then we get into the more supernatural, though still of the earth. Isaiah lays out for us a scene of the world righting itself back to Eden, the enmity of nature that started at the fall disappearing, and a scene worthy of a Christmas card taking its place- fierce beasts and gentle lambs existing peacefully, side by side, the vulnerable interacting with the predator with impunity, the small child subverting the normal way of things and ruling from a place of gentleness. This small child has come to represent Jesus for us Christians as we read this Old Testament prophet, and the picture created is a comforting one, a warming one- all the instinctual feelings a baby brings about in us, plus the knowledge that this child will grow into the one we follow to this day.
It is a soul-warming image and one that gives sustenance during the bitter cold of winter, but it can be almost too sweet, too simple, and to counteract any chance of us sentimentalizing the life that Jesus lived by reducing him to just that babe in a manger so many years ago, we have the gospel, and we have John.
We have John, scary John, with his camel hair and locusts and honey, John who really doesn’t fit in anywhere, who is an outsider and antisocial and has claimed the wasteland of the desert as his own, is in our readings today, I believe, to remind us of that other side of Jesus, the one who drove out the moneychangers from the temple with a lash made of ropes, the one who spoke truth to power, the one who is coming again with a winnowing fork to separate the wheat from the chaff, who will tear down the trees that bear no fruit, who can purify all of us with the waters of baptism and with the unquenchable fire of the Holy Spirit.
This is not the Jesus of the Christmas card, unless you send very bizarre Christmas cards.
In talking to other sermon-writing friends this week, I found that we all struggled with talking about this triumphant, apocalyptic Jesus, and instead were all hedging our bets with the little child who led from Isaiah. It felt almost rude, one fellow priest said, to spoil the party and the fun of Advent and the celebration of Christmas with the dread of judgment, that was what Lent was for, and though he was only half joking, the temptation is very strong to worship the baby and neglect the reality of the man. These images are dueling and difficult sometimes, but complementary.
Isn’t that the great miracle we await in Advent, that we celebrate on Christmas day, the birth of a homeless child to a family of immigrants, a child both fully human and fully divine?
We see in the biblical life stories of Jesus, before he becomes the Christ at Easter, a very human person, struggling against injustice, trying to teach his followers, trying to get this thing he was born to do right before the death he knows is coming. This is a struggle we can all identify with, I think. And then we also have Jesus, the fully divine, who can see history spreading out behind him and the future before, and holds us, lovingly, in the tension of the present- we can identify with this as well, having turned to this Jesus once and again for comfort, for strength.
And so this, I think, is why we have John the Baptist in our readings today. He is sent in all his locusty fearsomeness to make straight the path, to prepare, truly, the way for the Lord, who will come to us in a few short weeks, but also to remind us, along with Isaiah, that our Lord is not one dimensional. Just as Jesus shares our humanity, he shares our human condition.
We all have in ourselves bits of power and powerlessness, and at one point or another we have all taken advantage of our positions of power in a way that we knew we should not have. In a way this is the most basic definition of sin- we’ve acted in a way that has separated us from God, and from each other. Luckily, as Christians, we are able to confess our sins, to beg forgiveness of our community and our Lord, and return to God, again and again.
This, I think, is why John was castigating the Pharisees and Sadducees, the ones who went out from the city and the temple into the desert to be washed in the waters of baptism by him. He thought they were there as a precautionary measure, covering all their bases without really believing, just in case this John guy was right about the coming Lord. The Greek used in the gospel doesn’t shed much light on why the Pharisees and Sadducees were out in the desert in the first place. It could be read that they came to be baptized, or to protest against the baptizing going on. Either constructs a narrative that is believable, preachable, but I think it was the former, that they came to be baptized by John. I’ll even go a step beyond John himself, I think they truly wanted the life that he offered, truly wanted to be free of the burdens and postures of their lives, and saw that chance in the purification that he offered them. They understood that in every one of us there is good and bad, and even through the hyperbole of John’s preaching in the wilderness, they saw a chance for unification of those sides, for salvation and wholeness in God.
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