Sermon — December 11, 2022

The Rev. Greg Johnston

Lectionary Readings

Have you ever felt like you’re wandering in the spiritual wilderness?

I don’t mean the kind of wilderness people mean when they talk about finding God in nature, a wilderness of mountains to climb and pine trees to smell and babbling brooks in which to cool your feet. I mean the wilderness as Jesus knew it: the dry, rocky hills to the east of Jerusalem, a desert with barely enough in it to sustain life. By “spiritual wilderness” I don’t mean the kind of wilderness in which you feel God’s Spirit—no. I mean the place in which you thirst for a drop of life-giving water, and find none.

The wilderness goes by many other names—spiritual aridity or exile, burnout or the dark night of the soul—but whatever you call it, it is a kind of absence: the absence of the feelings of joy or peace or comfort you once found in prayer or work or life, the absence of a long-lost sense of meaning or of God’s love or presence. It’s very similar, in a way, to what (in a marriage) might be called the “after-the-honeymoon” period. It’s very similar to what happens in a friendship or a new job when the shine has worn off the apple. The wilderness is a time in your life where you feel, as Bilbo Baggins once said, “like butter scraped over too much bread.”

And this is what I mean when I ask: Have you ever felt like you’re wandering in the wilderness? You understand what I mean.

The startling message of our reading from Isaiah today is that God has promised to transform this wilderness—this most unenjoyable place—into a place of unimaginable joy.

Now, Isaiah doesn’t come up with the image of the wilderness. The people of God have known the wilderness for as long as there’s been a people of God. Their ancestors were nomads who spent their lives wandering through the wilderness. Generations later, after Moses led them out of slavery in Egypt, they spent forty years wandering in the wilderness before they entered the Promised Land. And a millennium later, when Isaiah wrote these words, they were in exile again. Their city and its Temple had been destroyed. Many of them had been separated from their homeland by a literal wilderness, living as hostages and refugees with five hundred miles of desert between them and the world they once knew. They are in desperate need of consolation, and Isaiah consoles them with the promise of a future in which the wilderness, literal and metaphorical, will be transformed.

“The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,” he writes, “the desert shall rejoice and blossom.” (Isaiah 35:1) God will transform the dry place into a flowering field, and “everlasting joy shall be upon [your] heads; [you] shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” (35:10) In the very midst of the desert you will see “the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.” (35:2) “Here is your God; he will come,” Isaiah tells the people. “He will come and save you.” (35:4)

Just… not quite yet.

This is, without a doubt, one of the hardest things about Christian life. God promises us incredible things—peace and joy and life everlasting—but in this life, we only get a glimpse. Isaiah promises that “sorrow and sighing shall flee away,” (Isaiah 35:10) but still we sorrow and sigh. It’s comforting that God makes these promises to us… it’s better than having no hope for the future. But it’s undeniably frustrating having to wait around for them. “Be patient,” the apostle James wrote two thousand years ago, and we are, and we have been, waiting quite patiently for quite some time now for “the coming of the Lord.” (James 5:7-8)

Think how John the Baptist must have felt. I think of him sitting in prison, hearing the stories of what his cousin Jesus was doing, wondering whether he was just another prophet or whether he was The One about whom John himself had prophesied. And Jesus tells John’s messengers to go back and quote these exact words from Isaiah to John the Baptist, to tell him that the moment had arrived: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear.” (Matthew 11:5; Isaiah 35:5) The day has come when the desert will blossom, and the wilderness will be transformed from a place of desolation into a place of joy.

And yet John remains in jail. And he will not make it out alive. But neither, of course, will Jesus.

So we’re left with this conundrum: God has promised us, on the one hand, abundant joy, a world in which sorrow and sighing are transformed into joy and singing. And God has left us, on the other hand, in the wilderness, where we continue to roam. And there’s a sense in which we will always be in the wilderness in this life, a sense in which—however much joy and peace we may have—there will also always be suffering and pain, until our wandering is over and we reach that promised land of eternal life with God.

But at the same time, the wilderness is not the desert it once was. It is already being transformed. Water is already breaking forth in the desert, streams of water are already flowing in our world. God has not left us comfortless, but is working now in and among us, even if that work is still incomplete.

There’s an image that James uses that I find to be a helpful one, at least for me. “Be patient,” he says, but that’s not all he says. Be patient, he says, like a farmer who “waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.” (James 5:7)

James talks about our lives like plants, growing over time. And eagerness and abundance can spoil a plant’s growth as easily as caution and patience. You can flood it with too much water, scorch it with too much sunlight, pick it before it’s fully grown. God waits instead, James said, until we have grown in the ways we need, until we’ve received “the early and the late rains,” but God is present all the time with us, like that careful gardener. And one day, we will finally be ready to bloom.

God is with us, even and maybe especially in the wilderness. God is with us in rainstorms and in droughts, in the driest desert and the greenest valleys. God is with us, whether we wait impatiently or patiently, whether we are singing or sighing. Whether we realize it or not, God is with us—in this short season of waiting in Advent before the joy of Christmas, and in our longest seasons of waiting and wandering in the wilderness, before the desert finally rejoices and blossoms. God is with us, and God is watering us, and God is waiting for us finally to bloom.

Every year, on the Second Sunday of Advent, John the Baptist appears in the wilderness with a stark message: “Repent!” he says, “for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 3:2)

John is the cousin of Jesus, sometimes called the “forerunner.” He’s often depicted in art literally pointing the way to Christ. His prophetic ministry comes right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and it’s clear that many of John the Baptist’s followers soon became followers of Jesus as well. But John’s message in our gospel this morning, is hardly about Christ at all. He doesn’t mention Jesus by name, or say that he is the Messiah. He makes this vague reference to the “one who is more powerful than I” simply to increase the urgency of his message: if you don’t repent now, you’re going to be chaff, not wheat, when the Messiah comes. Like everything else he says, his messianic prophecy is another variation on a single, simple, theme:  “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven has come near.” (3:2)

Except that simple theme of “repentance” is not that simple, because this is the Bible, and when we read the Bible, two thousand years later, things are almost never quite as simple as they seem.

In the modern American Christian tradition, when we hear this message of repentance, we often assume that John is addressing us as individuals. In our culture, we tend to think that “sin” means an individual moral failing. So it sounds like John’s message is that you and you and you should repent. John says to the crowds, I baptize you and you and you with water for repentance, so that you will be saved from your sin.

Depending on your exact spiritual orientation and your own beliefs, you may either love this or hate it. Some people find an emphasis on individual sin, repentance, and forgiveness to be incredibly life-giving. Other people can’t stand it. So if you love this idea that you as an individual need to repent, and if it draws you into a time of reflection and self-examination during Advent, then that’s wonderful; and I want to invite you into another, broader way of looking at it. And if you hate the idea that you, as an individual, need to repent, if it makes you shut down and write John off as yet another crazed street preacher, yet another Puritan consumed with “the haunting fear,” as H. L. Mencken put it, “that someone, somewhere may be happy” … then I want to invite you into another, broader way of looking at it.

Because when John the Baptist calls the people to “repent,” there’s a sense in which he’s addressing each individual. But there’s another, very real sense in which the call for repentance is not addressed to “you” and “you” and “you,” but to “you,” to us, to all of us, humankind as a whole.

The whole story, after all, is told in collective terms. Matthew doesn’t say that “many people from Jerusalem” came to him, but that “the people of Jerusalem and all Judea” came, and were baptized, confessing their sins. (3:5) And he actually doesn’t say “confessing their sins.” He says “confessing their sin,” in the singular; and our translators translate it “sins,” plural. It’s easy for preachers to make too much out of this sort of thing, but I think in this moment it’s important, because it fits with the story. It maintains that same focus on the collective. It suggests that what John the Baptist is out there preaching about is not only individual sin. It’s a collective, social state of sin.

Jesus and John lived in a society continually wracked by violent revolution, by attempts to establish or reestablish the kingdom of God on earth through the force of arms, by rebellions whose leaders often turned against one another as much as they did the Romans. Jesus tried to teach another way to establish God’s kingdom, a way of peace and love. And John was trying to tell the people that the kingdom of heaven had come near—not through their attempts to create it by force, but through the coming of one who was more powerful than he was, but whose power would turn out to be a paradox: whose moment of greatest strength would look like weakness, and whose greatest success would look like failure. The kingdom of heaven was coming near, not with the sword but on the Cross, and that made all the difference.

We, too, live in a world that’s full of violence. We live in a world very unlike Isaiah’s vision, a world in which we do still “hurt” and “destroy,” in ways small and large. (Isaiah 11:9) We do not live “in harmony with one another,” as Paul writes to the Romans. (Romans 15:5) We—as a society, as a species—need to repent. We need to turn away from the path of hatred and violence and turn toward the way of reconciliation and love.

But that doesn’t mean the burden is all on you.

My favorite thing about this passage from Isaiah—and the one thing to remember from this sermon, if you remember nothing else—is that peace is not a compromise between predators and prey. Peace is a world of vegetarian wolves. It’s not the armed peace of mutually-assured destruction we have in this world. It’s not that the wolves eat the lambs on Mondays, and the sheep eat the wolf pups on Wednesdays. No. The wolf and the lamb live together. The leopard and the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling, dwell in peace. The bears graze, and the lion eats straw like the ox. (Isaiah 11:6-8) It’s the predators who need to repent, not the prey.

So what are we to do, we little lambs in a world full of wolves? Is it safe yet to stick our hands into the adder’s den? Maybe not. But we can recognize and cherish the power of the lamb. We can build communities of peace. We can live with one another as if the kingdom of heaven had not simply come near, but had already come. We can “welcome one another…just as Christ has welcomed us.” (Rom. 15:7)

And we can recognize, as well, that there is within each one of us a little bit of wolf, and a little bit of lamb; a little bit of cow and a little bit of bear. We are not either chaff or wheat, but each one of us is a grain, consisting of both. The threshing process that John the Baptist foretells doesn’t happen between us, as if “you” and “you” were chaff and “you” and “you” were wheat. It happens within us, not only as a whole society but within each one of us as well. We all have wolves and bears within us who need to give up meat. We all have chaff that needs to be burned away.

It sometimes feels like there is nothing I can do about the violence and anger of this world, nothing I can do to bring us closer to Isaiah’s vision of peace. But I know that there’s a little bit of the wolf in my heart, too, that would sometimes rather growl at the lamb than lie down with it in peace. I pray that the Holy Spirit may come and thresh us all, to burn away the chaff that is within my heart and your heart and our world, allowing us to live with ourselves and one another in something a little more like peace. So “may the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant [us all] to live in harmony with one another,” and “may the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Amen. (Rom. 15:5, 13)