Br. Aidan Owen, OHC
Isaiah 40:1-11
Acts 13:14b-26
Luke 1:57-80
So goes the often flippant, yet no less true snippet of folk wisdom. Everything changes. Everything and everyone dies. Systems fall apart; empires collapse; churches empty; winter comes, burying the desiccated petals of the summer rose under clean, white snow.
Death, as much as anything else, is a sign of God’s promise to make all things new again.
John the Baptist, the great forerunner of the morn, who leaps for joy in his mother’s womb to be near God’s incarnate Word is also the great and wild prophet of death. The scriptures point to him as the new Elijah, calling Israel back to faithfulness in God. Like Elijah and all of the Old Testament prophets, John is the archetypal wild man, the holy fool who subverts religious norms and in so doing highlights the hypocrisy and shallowness of the religious and political elites of his day and of ours.
Dressed in camel’s hair, calling his fellow Israelites to repent, eating locusts and wild honey—he is, to use Native American imagery, the coyote figure, the trickster who intentionally upends the sanctimonious behavior of those in power to expose the emptiness within polite ways. If we don’t find John offensive, then we aren’t paying attention.
John calls the people of Israel to the borderlands of their becoming. He draws them out of the city—Jerusalem—to the River Jordan. This geography is more than symbolic. As we’ve been hearing about in our Matins readings the last few weeks, the Israelites wandered in the desert, just the other side of the Jordan, for forty years. As they wandered in the desert, they encountered again and again the wildness and the wiliness of a god who demanded nothing less than their total submission. With the manna, with the water from the rock, with the giving of the law on Sinai, and in countless other small, daily movements, God provided for the necessities of God’s people.
And when those people complained and lamented that life had been better in the slavery of Egypt, God came to see that that older generation could never enter the land of promise. Their spirits still clung to the shackles. Only the death of that generation could free the people of God to be the chosen people, living in the land of promise. In death was their freedom.
God led the people through the Jordan, baptizing them into the life of the covenant, and leading them into the freedom God had promised them. And so it is, when the people have once again taken up the shackles of empire, when they have begun to forget whose they really are, when greed and power and oppression infect their spirits, God raises up John to call the people back to the place where they were transformed from a wandering band of former slaves into the people of God.
John calls the people away from the structures of civilization to the border of the wilderness. In so doing he entreats them to leave behind the dry husk of the domesticated gods they have been worshipping, the idols they have put in the place of God, and to open themselves once more to the transforming fire of the living God, whose wild love will not be contained within the houses we build for her.
The world around us is crumbling. We are experiencing collectively—and many of us individually as well—a breakdown. The structures that held our beliefs about who we are, where we were headed, what was true about the world—these structures are collapsing. We are seeing—some of us for the first time—that the American dream has always been a nightmare for our black and brown brothers and sisters; that there is no capitalism apart from the enslavement of people and of the earth; that our society and our church are broken in fundamental and irreparable ways. And that more often than not we are the Egyptians, not the Israelites, more often Judas than Peter, a revelation as destabilizing to our sense of self as any that can be imagined.
We are also, many of us, finding in this season of instability, that the God we thought we knew was her own kind of idol. This revelation may feel like a betrayal, as if the life we had signed up for has suddenly, seemingly all at once, evaporated around us, revealing a wilderness of dry rock and dust where once we had a garden. And our thirst, and our fatigue, and our barrenness threaten to overwhelm us. All many of us want is to return to the warm comfort of ignorance, denial, and fantasy, to nothing less than the tender caress of numb oblivion.
John breaks into our lives today, as he did the lives of his contemporaries. He calls us away from the crumbling city, back to the place of encounter with our wild God. John calls us to slip once more into the cool and muddy water, to be washed and renewed, to die so that we can be reborn.
“Comfort, comfort, my people. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,” begins the passage from Isaiah John quotes at the River Jordan. But what shall he cry out? “All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever.”
God’s faithfulness does not depend on ours. God’s love does not come to us as payment for a life well lived, or for commandments followed, or in recompense for our constancy. What a mercy that is! For we are not constant. Our lives are like the grass, sometimes lush and green and sometimes withered away to stalks. But God’s word, God’s very life, which is our life, will stand forever.
John comes, even today, as the prophet of the morning, to testify to the ever-faithful life of God, the life that comes not in spite of death or instead of death, but through death. John beckons us all to enter the dark chasm of the abyss, to take the hand of the angel of death, to lay down our lives so that God can take those lives up again.
At a certain point, we are all called to surrender to an unknown and mysterious God. In this surrender we come to learn that betrayal is a handing over from death to life; that the silence of the grave gives way to the rhythmic heartbeat of God; that the shadow of death brightens into dawn. In the surrender of all we are, or thought we were, or hoped to become to that unknown and mysterious God, God gives birth to new life within and through us, and to a life that is fundamentally God’s life even as it is our own.
May we heed John’s call. May we leave the ruins of the city and make our way, however painfully or slowly, to the borderlands of our faith. May we enter the cool and cleansing River. May we die so that God can live once more.
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