Nativity of St. John the Baptist - Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bob Pierson, OHC
Nativity of St. John the Baptist - Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Isaiah 40:1-11
Acts 13:14b-26
Luke 1:57-80

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

In the first volume of her three volume work on Religious Life, entitled Finding the Treasure, Sister Sandra Schneiders says that the call to religious life, centered in love of God and love of neighbor, is a prophetic vocation.  I believe that to be true, and I want to look at our scripture readings for this feast of one of the greatest prophets, John the Baptist, to see what we can learn about what it means to be prophetic today.

First, we heard that wonderful passage from Isaiah, chapter 40: “Comfort, O comfort my people.”  Isaiah says the prophet's call is to “prepare the way of the Lord” by announcing the good tidings that the Lord “comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him.”  It's not a message of gloom and doom, but rather one of hope and joy.  “He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”  Being a prophet is announcing God's love and mercy to the world.

In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul says that before the coming of Jesus, “John had already proclaimed a baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel.”  In announcing the coming of the Lord, John's message was not gloom and doom, but rather a call to get ready, and pay attention.  It was an encouragement to leave behind our old way of life so that we can receive the New Life that Jesus has to offer.  Being a prophet is telling people to wake up to the presence of God in their lives.

And in the gospel passage, St. Luke's “Canticle of Zechariah” which we pray every day at Matins, we hear that the “holy prophets of old” announced that “we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us.”  God “has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, we might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.”  Being a prophet is reminding the people of God's promises for protection and deliverance, for mercy and forgiveness.

Like John the Baptist, we are called to “go before the Lord to prepare his ways.”  We are called to “give knowledge of salvation to God's people by the forgiveness of their sins.”  The “tender mercy of our God” will break upon us, giving “light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death;” guiding “our feet into the way of peace.”  Being a prophet today is reminding the world that Jesus came “not to condemn the world” but that through him “the world might be saved.”  And the world desperately needs to hear this good news because for some reason too many people have proclaimed the bad news that “God's gonna get you,” and that's what people have believed.

You may have heard me relate the story of how I came to understand God's love for me in a church in Toronto, where I heard a verse of a familiar hymn that I had never heard before.  The hymn is “There's a Wideness in God's Mercy,” and the verse I had never heard before goes like this:

But we make God's love too narrow, by false limits of our own.
And we magnify God's strictness with a zeal God will not own.

As prophets today, we have the wonderful task of teaching people that, in the words of Richard Rohr, “We do not become good so that God will love us.  God loves us, so that we can become good.”  That is the Good News we are called to proclaim by our lives today.