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"Greetings from the Desert" by Rev. Charles Hoffman

Second Sunday of Advent
December 9, 2001
Isaiah 11:1-10 Matthew 3:1-12

Last Sunday I bragged about being prepared for Christmas and named the things that are already done at the Hoffman household. I should have known that I was setting myself up for a fall. After the service one of the faithful reminded me that I hadn't mentioned the greeting cards. Had I taken care of the greetings cards? With a look of triumph she said, "I've got mine mailed already." She got me; I should have known something like that would happen.

Indeed, the greeting cards have been arriving this past week and I have to tell you that I was premature in my announcement of preparedness.

This morning we receive a card of sorts from our old friend John the Baptist. It's not the sort of greeting you would expect in this season when we wait for a joyful birth announcement. The card is a little rough; probably homemade. There's a hand drawing of a prickly pear cactus on the front and one word on the inside: REPENT! It's signed, "As ever, John."

Well, you can always count on John the Baptist. He appears each year about this time as part of the cast of characters who make up the drama of Advent. In fact, the list of prescribed readings for this season gives John top billing on both the second and third Sundays of Advent.

It's easy to get carried away in describing John. He's a strange character, wearing course clothes made from camel's hair and all held together by a great leather belt around his waist. I saw him one time back in about 1969. I was playing golf and there he was standing bareback and waist deep in a water hazard. He wasn't playing golf; he was just looking for lost balls.

Of course, it wasn't really John. It was what we called in those days a hippie. This guy had the long hair and the wild beard. And as we walked by one of my friends said, "Look at that. It's John the Baptist." It was a perfect description. It was as though John was down there in the water calling wayward golfers to repentance. I can imagine that John looked something like that man. In fact, someone I read said that he always had a bad hair day.

I'm sure any depiction of John would have to say something about the dark eyes that looked right through your skin and into your soul. I think those eyes must have peered out from hollow sockets. And as for his body, it was at least lean and lanky, maybe even gaunt. He wouldn't have carried much weight with a diet of grasshoppers and wild honey.

He must have been the sort of man that people admired but greatly preferred to do it from a distance. John wasn't at home in polite society. And polite society wouldn't have tolerated him either. In fact, it didn't. When John pointed the finger of judgment against Herod, the ruler of Galilee, he ended up paying for it with his life.

I suppose one of the best ways to describe John the Baptist is to say that he was an Old Testament prophet in every sense of that tradition: eccentric, strident, uncompromising, self-sacrificing, single- minded, focused, and absolutely committed to voicing the word of the Lord. That's what those prophets were and that's what they did.

When John spoke people listened. How else could you explain all those city folks streaming out to the desert? I can tell you it wasn't for the casinos or the shows or the inexpensive food or the sand dunes. They went to hear the prophet.

Matthew says that people came to him from the city of Jerusalem and all the surrounding places, from the whole province of Judea. And I can imagine that these people went back home and told their ministers about this evangelist down there by the Jordan River.

Eventually, even the Sadducees and Pharisees showed up at John's riverside church. It says that they came to be baptized. But John treated them as though they had no business being there. He treated them with contempt.

At this point you have to believe that John has crossed the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. I mean, these were important people, not nobility but certainly people of class and distinction.

A little over a year ago Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell came to our church and worshipped with us. I guess they'd heard about our choir. Anyway, I remember some of your comments prior to the service. And I knew that many of you were wondering how Hoffman would handle this one. You were not only watching our two distinguished guests, you were also watching me. And I can imagine that some of you were a little concerned about what I might or might not say. Well, all I can say now is, just be thankful that John the Baptist wasn't the preacher that day.

"You brood of vipers, you snakes, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come!" That's how John treated those VIPs from the capital. It's awful. But that was our boy John.

Now I'll come back to that later, but first let me say something about the place where John preached. Matthew describes it rightly as the desert and this location for his preaching is significant.

The desert or wilderness has special meaning in our sacred history. The wilderness was where John preached and where Jesus was baptized and where he faced temptation. It was where the children of Israel went in the formative years after the Exodus. And over the centuries it has been a place of retreat for many who seek its stark solitude as an arena for spiritual quests.

The desert is more than a physical location; it is a metaphor for that moment when we are stripped of all pretense and stand before God in naked honesty. The desert is a place for intimate reflection, where we discover the dryness that characterizes the landscape of our own soul. It is that moment when we hear what Malcolm Muggeridge called "the wilderness crying in a voice."

Suzanne Guthrie relates a story from her past. She was only seventeen years old at the time. Listen as she tells what happened.

"Once in the deepest part of the night I heard the voice of my own loneliness." She doesn't remember exactly where it happened. But that night she heard "the sound of a lone jazz saxophone," and it was like the sound of a loneliness that she felt within herself.

It reminds me of what one jazz musician said. He said that a jazz player might put on a big smile and act as though life is cool. But, he said, once he starts playing his instrument you can hear the hurt (Attributed to Jonathan 'Jo' Jones in Homiletics, January/March, 1992).

Suzanne Guthrie goes on to describe what she heard that night on a nameless street as a "sound of beauty and sadness, [of] perfection and longing" and that it resonated with her own emptiness. The music of the saxophone was "a prayer rising to its god" and whomever it was that was making the music was carrying every inexpressible desire that she could feel.

Music will do that, and it doesn't have to be jazz music.

Guthrie continues: "This sound taught me to recognize the cavern of emptiness within myself. . . Especially that unnamed and infinite longing that eclipses all other longings, the longing for God. . ." (Suzanne Guthrie, The Christian Century, 11/11/92).

What she heard was the wilderness of her own heart crying in the voice of that plaintive music.

Now I believe that something like that was happening to those people who went out to the desert to hear John the Baptist. He was calling them to repent, and in that call there was a ring of truth for them. They went to him because they could hear the wilderness crying in his voice. John didn't spell everything out for them, just as we modern-day preachers can't spell everything out. But he said enough. John left some of the theme unsaid just as a jazz musician does when he plays around the edges of the melody. But they could fill in the blank places for themselves.

You know, it's marvelous what happens when someone has the courage to state the truth. When a person speaks the truth people are given an opportunity to face up to their lives and to move ahead. Sometimes it means that they make a radical turn in a new direction.

Of course John had a word for that; it was the word repentance. And repentance means that we do whatever it takes to beat a straight path to God. John said, "Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight."

For the Christian, repentance is about letting the God of the Bible be our only God. And that's not easy; it never has been. There are always other gods vying for our attention.

Tony Campolo wrote a book under the title, Who Switched the Price Tags? The idea is that we live in a world in which it appears that someone did that very thing. They switched all the price tags so that cheap and tawdry things are given high value while important and valuable things are ignored.

But if we truly worship and put God first then our values and priorities will reflect that fundamental relationship. Of course, it doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes we find ourselves out of kilter, out of step with our own faith. Sometimes we fall by the wayside. Sometimes we awaken to the reality that we are lost.

That's why repentance is more than just a once and for all action. On the contrary, repentance is something that we engage in during all the course of our lives.

The garage where I have my car serviced really looks after me. I'm sure yours is the same. Every so often I get a card from the garage telling me that it's time for this or that to be done to the car. The greeting that we get from the desert this morning is like that. It's a reminder that it just could be time for a tune up, a spiritual tune up.

Now let me come back to those Sadducees and Pharisees that went out there to see John. Spiritually speaking, they thought they had things wired. They came from the right background, they were children of Abraham, and they devoted themselves to keeping the rules. In some ways I suppose they were not unlike you and me. But the way in which John got after them (remember he called them snakes) would lead you to think that they were sinners of the worst magnitude. Really, I don't know if they were or not. O I know that they were guilty of spiritual pride, i.e., they tended to flaunt their religious achievements. And of course that was wrong, but I don't think they'd committed any heinous sins.

But in some ways that's all beside the point. And the point is that all of us have a tendency to drift away from the straight path. We all let down our guard from time to time. We all fail. We all sin. So this morning John offers this call to repentance which in reality is an offer of grace. Yes, even from John the Baptist with the tangled hair and the blazing eyes and the flared nostrils and the spittle in his beard. What met those people down there at the river was nothing more nor less than the grace of God. It was unrefined grace but grace nevertheless.

I don't know very much about birds but I read something about a little bird called the Manx Shearwater that caught my attention. I'm sure it was part of a scientific experiment. They took one of those little birds from its nest off the coast of Wales and sailed it across the Atlantic to Boston where it was released. I guess the little Manx Shearwater had heard about the Boston Tea Party because in twelve days it was back on its nest in Wales.

It's amazing. Somehow it was able to stay the course, to make allowances for winds that might steer it off course, and finally to go home.

Now in the field of navigation, whether on the sea or in the air or in space, there is something known as drift. Drift is caused by water or air currents and perhaps by other factors as well. And in the art or science of navigation there is always the need to correct for drift. If you don't make the correction you'll never get back to your little nest on the coast of Wales or wherever else it might be. You'll miss the target.

It's another of those things that most of us take for granted when we sit down in an airplane or set off on a cruise. But if the instruments, designed to make these corrections, fail then you can imagine what happens.

You have to correct for drift. The same is true as we set out in life to follow the Lord. We know where we want to go. We set our course. We drift. It's inevitable. We don't mean to; it just happens. Now listen to this: Drift is defined as a gradual shift in attitude, opinion, or position. You aren't aware of it at the outset but one day you wake up to the reality that you are off course, sometimes seriously off course.

"I didn't set out to be this sort of person."
"I never intended for things to go this far."
"I can't believe I allowed this to happen."
"I didn't think such a small thing would make any difference."

Those are the laments of those who woke up to the reality that they had drifted from where they wanted to be. It's the painful song of those who have not corrected the shift in attitude or position that has quietly taken place in their lives.

And that is why every year on the Second Sunday of Advent we come to church, open a greeting card from John, and get our reminder: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. . .Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. . ." Amen.

Pastoral Prayer by Melanie Silva

God of great love, we offer our gratitude for the Child for whom we wait. Help us, we pray, to prepare the way for His coming by being open to receive the hope of this season; help us to prepare the way by making time with family and friends a priority and by giving gifts that encourage togetherness or enhance the life of someone less fortunate. Help us to prepare the way by working for peace through prayer and the gift of our service.

And grant us the grace, O God, to prepare the way for the Christ Child by being present to those who journey to Bethlehem with trepidation:

• the ones who face uncertainty as they confront illness
• those who fear the manger because of the loss of loved ones
• and those who have lost their jobs and now look to the future with insecurity.

Be with us, most gracious God, as we watch and wait and make ourselves ready for the Child who would be King. Amen.