December 5, 2004
Matthew 3:1-12
Let us pray.
Praise and honor to you, living God, for John the Baptist,
and for all those voices crying in the wilderness
who prepare your way.
May we listen when a prophet speaks your word, and obey.
In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.
In this morning’s Gospel, we are faced with the formidable
figure of John the Baptist. The impression we get from Matthew is of someone we
probably wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. He comes across to us through
the ages as a man crazed. Certainly it would be difficult for any of us to take
the words of a man like this seriously. Especially when he’s saying things
like, “prepare, for the Kingdom of heaven draws near” “the axe is being laid to
the root of the trees” and “the chaff will be burned in an unquenchable fire. “
Somehow, in the way John the Baptist proclaims it, this is
not so much hopeful as frightening. It is a message that startles us and jolts
us at our very core.
But this is the true message of Advent. Like John the
Baptist and those who eagerly awaited the Messiah, this time of waiting was
almost painful.
When we look at it from that perspective, we see that maybe
John isn’t being quite as difficult and windy as we initially thought. Rather
his message is one of almost excruciating expectation.
If you notice in the Prayer Book, the Latin heading for
Psalm 40 is Exptans Expectavi. Used
within the context of that particular psalm, it can be translated as “I waited
and waited for you, O God.”
That phrase really suits, in many ways, everything we
experience in this season. Like John, we are waiting and waiting for our God to
come to us, to appear to us as one of us.
Recently I’ve been reading two very fascinating books. One,
by an Australian writer, James Cowan, is entitled Desert Father: A Journey in the Wilderness with Saint Anthony. It
is story of Anthony of Egypt, one of the first of the desert fathers. The other
is a book called The Forgotten Desert Mothers. Both of these books are about those
early Christians who tended to take the words we heard this morning from the Baptist
as literally as they could.
These desert mothers and fathers have a lot to teach us.
Like, us, they lived in an age of uncertainty. Many had suffered dearly during
the persecutions against Christians.
Others had previously been pagans who lived lives of excess.
It was a time when nothing in the world seemed too stable. Governments
gave way to stronger governments. Differing religions battled each other for
what each perceived to be “the truth.” And so too did many Christians.
It sounds familiar doesn’t it?
In the face of all of this uncertainty, these men and women
heard the call of the Baptist. “Prepare, for the kingdom of heaven draws near.”
In response they did something we might find unusual. We, as
modern Christians, are taught that we must not only live out our faith, but
also, in some way, must proclaim our faith to those around us.
We take seriously the command to go out into the world and
proclaim what we believe.
Certainly that is what we will do this morning when we
recite the creed. It is what we do when we go out to feed the hungry or to tend
the sick. We do it when we reach out to others in the name of Christ.
These early Christians, however, did the exact opposite.
They retreated from society and went off to the desert, in this case usually
the deserts of
Oftentimes, coming from wealthy homes and positions of authority,
they sold it all, gave the money to the poor and went off to live alone.
And we’re not talking about a few individuals here. We’re
talking about people leaving in droves.
The deserts were literally populated with men and women who
tried to leave it all behind. More often than not, they formed loosely-organized
communities, usually around a church, in which they lived and prayed alone for
most of the time, only coming together to pray the Psalms or celebrate
Eucharist.
Their lives in the desert weren’t, as you can imagine,
comfortable lives by any means. Some
walled themselves up in abandoned tombs. Others lived in caves. One went so far
as to crawl stop a tall pillar and live there for years on end, exposed to the
elements.
Even then they couldn’t completely escape what they left
behind.
Many of the stories tell of these poor souls being tormented
by demons and temptations. It’s not hard to imagine that, yes, alone in a dark
tomb or cave, one would be forced to face all the darkest recesses of one’s
soul.
Part of the process of separating one’s self from the world
involved finally wrestling with all those issues one carries into the desert.
Few of us in this day and age would view this kind of existence
as the ideal Christian life. In fact, most of would probably look on it as a
sort of insanity.
But at the time, in that place, people began to see this as
the ideal. People, I imagine, were tired of the day-to-day grind of working,
slaving, fending for themselves in a sometimes unfriendly society. They felt
distant from God and they were not able to find God in the society in which
they lived.
The idea of going off and being alone with God was very
appealing.
Of course, even this seemingly simple and pure way of living
was soon tarnished by another form excess.
Some of the people who went off to live in the desert were simply
mentally unsound to begin with. Others went insane after years of living alone
in a tomb or a cave.
They abused their bodies, sometimes to the point of death,
by whipping themselves, by chaining themselves to walls, by not taking care of
themselves physically, or simply starving themselves to a point close to death.
Some even went so far as castrating themselves for the
kingdom of heaven.
But despite these abuses, the message of the desert mothers
and fathers to us is still a valid one.
The whole reason they went off like they did was to shed
everything that separated them from their waiting for God.
They sought to make their very lives a living Advent.
They were waiting expectantly and anxiously for Christ. And
by mortifying themselves, by chastising their bodies and fasting, they would be
prepared for his coming again.
Although I hope no one here is called to a life quite that
extreme, I think their message speaks to us clearly in these days before
Christmas.
We should find ways to prepare for the Incarnate God’s
coming to us.
We should shed some of those things that separate ourselves
from God.
We should find our own deserts in our lives—those places in
which we can go off alone and be with God.
A place in which we can wait for God longingly.
In Cowan’s book, Desert
Father, he relates an interesting story—one I never heard before—about how
the early desert monastics used ostrich eggs in their worship.
In some of the churches that they built, they hung ostrich
eggs from the ceiling as a “symbol of spiritual dedication.”
Father Hansel, a visitor to one of the monasteries, wrote
later about this practice:
When it intends to
hatch its egg, the ostrich sits not upon them, as other birds, but the male and
female hatches them with their eye only; and only when either of them needs to
seek for food, he gives notice to the other by crying; and the other continues
to look upon the eggs, till it returns…for if they did but look off for a
moment, the eggs will spoil and rot. [1]
Whether this is scientifically true or not, this is a
perfect illustration of what we, as Christians, are doing during this Advent
season and, really, during all of our spiritual lives.
Like these ostriches, which gaze almost agonizingly for the
hatching of the egg, so too should we be waiting, with held breath, for the
realm of heaven to break upon us.
So, yes, John’s message in the wilderness is a frightening one at times.
But it is also a message of hope and longing. It is a
message meant to wake us from our slumbering complacency. His is a voice
calling us to sit up and take notice.
The kingdom of heaven is near. In fact it’s nearer than we
can probably ever hope or imagine.
So, be prepared. Watch. Wait.
For this anticipation—this expectant longing of ours—is
merely a pathway on which the Christ Child can to us as one of us.
[1] Cowan,
James. Desert Father: A Journey in the
Wilderness with Saint Anthony. 2004. Shambala;
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