The Nativity of John the Baptist - June 24, 2020

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

The Nativity of John the Baptist

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

Click here for an audio version of this sermon.

Where there is death, there is hope.

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.

Nativity of St John the Baptist - Jun 24, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
The Rev. Matthew Wright
Nativity of St. John the Baptist, Wednesday, June 24, 2015

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

John the Baptist preaching

“Come people, praise the prophet and the martyr, and the Baptist of the Lord, for he is an angel in the flesh.”

These are word from an Orthodox liturgy dedicated to John the Baptist, whose nativity we celebrate today.  And it’s significant to take note that we are celebrating the nativity of John the Baptist.  This isn’t what Christians do.  We honor saints, whether martyrs or not, by observing their death anniversaries.  Beyond Christmas, the Feast of THE Nativity, the birth of our Lord, we observe the nativity of only two saints—the Blessed Virgin Mary and Blessed John the Baptist.

And this is in recognition of the special place these two hold within the sacred world, within the spiritual geography, of Christianity.  Next to the Mother of God, St. John the Baptist is given the highest place of honor of all the saints.  So high indeed that he gets his own “Christmas”—his own nativity feast.  And this feast traditionally, like Christmas, was honored with the celebration of three masses; one in the dead of night, one at daybreak, and one in the afternoon, symbolizing John’s preaching before the coming of Jesus, his baptism of the Lord, and his own sanctity and martyrdom.

So why such a high honor?  What’s so important about John?  John’s mission and ministry was greatly remembered by early Christians, and it’s obvious from the Gospels and from the Acts of the Apostles that some of Jesus’ own disciples, and many of the first Christians, actually started out as disciples of John.

We often call him the forerunner or the harbinger of Jesus, and the reading we heard from the prophet Isaiah gives us those familiar words remembered as a prophecy of John’s own preaching: “A voice cries out in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord!’”  John was the voice preparing the way.  Now we know from history that he started a religious movement in his own right, and there’s at least one living religion today—the Mandaeans, mostly in Iraq and Iran—who trace their beginnings back to the preaching of John the Baptist.

And so John’s preparation wasn’t just a pointing to Jesus, and some scholars would go so far as to say that he didn’t simply prepare for Jesus, but that he actually prepared Jesus: that when Jesus sought out John and received his baptism, he was actually apprenticing himself to John, taking John as his teacher, his rabbi and mentor, and essentially joining John’s movement.  Of course, time is greatly compressed in the Gospels, so things seem to move very quickly, but perhaps Jesus’ time spent in the wilderness was actually his tutelage under John.

The reading we heard from Luke’s Gospel comes from Luke’s first two chapters, where he actually parallels the births of Jesus and John.  And he sets them up so closely together that John almost becomes a second Christ, and John will later be believed by some to actually be the Messiah.  Now most scholars will tell us that Luke’s parallel birth narratives are less history remembered and more history stylized in service of the Gospel proclamation.  But what’s clear is that John’s and Jesus’ ministries were remembered as being very closely related.

And the Gospels remember that it was around the time of John’s death that Jesus’ own preaching mission really caught fire, as if the torch had been passed.  But what becomes clear is that the ways of John and Jesus—the style of their preaching and mission—began to diverge.  John lived in the wilderness and waited for the people to come to him; John was remembered as an ascetic who fasted and refused strong drink; while Jesus was remembered—by his opponents, at least—as a drunkard and a glutton who hung out with sinners.  But while Jesus moved in the world and among the people, he never seems to have forgotten what he learned about solitude in the wilderness with John, and we see him returning again and again throughout his ministry to the wilderness, to a deserted place, to a quiet place, to be alone.

            So I sometimes think we can overemphasize the differences between Jesus and John—John was the harsh, ascetic separatist in the desert while Jesus embraced the world out in the marketplace.  It’s not entirely untrue, but we shouldn’t lose sight of their close similarities, and particularly that John, like Jesus, embraced all manner of people in the wilderness, whoever came to him, and generally speaking he seems to have sent them back into the world.  Perhaps as Jesus’ mentor, it was even John who gave him the instruction to begin carrying the message into the towns.

            And so as we celebrate the birth of John the Baptist today, we’re celebrating the great “hinge of history” within our Christian sacred world.  John is remembered as the last prophet of the old covenant and the first prophet of the new.  He has a foot in both worlds, and we essentially don’t get Jesus without him, much in the way we don’t get Jesus without Mary.  These two above all others are the preparers of the Way.  Mary as his mother and first teacher, John as his rabbi and mentor—they prepared the Way; they literally prepared Jesus.

            In that great icon called the Deesis, the Supplication, which you can see at the very top of the Icon Cross above the altar, it is always John and Mary pictured on either side of Christ, offering supplication on behalf of all humanity, always these two great saints whose nativities we celebrate, these two saints who are the two great hinges of Christian history.

Jesus says of John in the Gospels, “there is none greater born of woman” and Luke tells us that John was filled with the Holy Spirit before he was born.  And so just like Scripture’s understanding of Mary, it’s a pretty high view, and one that shouldn’t be taken lightly.  Traditions even developed around John, as they did around Mary, that he was free of the taint of original sin.  And more than that, that he was actually an incarnate angel, preceding the incarnate Word.  The words of the prophet Malachi, “See I am sending my messenger [angelos, angel, in Greek] to prepare the way before me” were taken literally as a reference to John.  John was the incarnation of an angel.  And this, too, is often reflected in iconographic depictions—you need only take a look at the icon of John above the holy water stoup as you enter the church to see his wings unfurled.

            I’ll leave you with one final image of John, since we are at Holy Cross Monastery.  St. John Chrysostom called St. John the Baptist “the prince of monks” and St. Jerome called him “the true founder of monasticism.”  He wrote: “Realize your nobility, monks!  John is the first one of our calling.  He is a monk.”  We can see monastic life, then, as that witness within the Church most closely tied to the vocation of John.  That witness which is continually preparing the way of the Lord and pointing the world most clearly to Christ.

And so, on this feast of his nativity, “Come people, praise the prophet and the martyr, and the Baptist of the Lord, for he is an angel in the flesh.”  Amen.