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Advent Cycle b December 4, 2011
Is.
40:1-11 Psalm 85:1-2,8-13
Does anyone know what an Advent police
is? An Advent police is a person who is
so liturgically correct, they will bust you if you try to celebrate Christmas
too early. Advent police get very upset
when Christians treat the season of Advent as a mere inconvenient speed bump as
they are rushing into all things Christmas.
Advent police just despise the commercial world because they start
celebrating Christmas right after Halloween.
Advent police remind us that Christmas is for 12 days only, from
Christmas Eve until the feast of the Epiphany.
Your Christmas tree should be put up on Christmas Eve and taken down on
January 6th. You shall not
cheat and have poinsettias on the altar until Christmas Eve. You shall not sing Christmas songs during
Advent. You shall not have a Christmas
Festivals of Lessons and Carols; if you want Lessons and Carols before
Christmas, it has to be an Advent Lessons and Carols when we sing all of those
songs about John the Baptist and they are much less familiar than the Christmas
carols. You kind of get the feeling that
an Advent police is a bit of a Scrooge yelling bah humbug when we want to start
celebrating Christmas early.
Well, I’ve been busted by the Advent police
of liturgical correctness many times.
But if we think that the Advent police are a little stuffy, we only have
to be introduced to John the Baptist.
John the Baptist makes an Advent police look
like a child. Just as we are getting all
ready for Christmas, shopping, planning for great excess, going to parties,
suddenly from the Advent lectionary, pops out a Man with the charisma of an
angry grizzly bear. As we are about to
“don we now our gay apparel” and sing “fa la la la la” for Christmas festivities, this grizzly man is
dressed in camel’s hair and it is not a Bobby Brooks camel hair brown blazer.
As we are about to drink our spiked egg nog
and eat our sweet meat pies, Christmas cookies, and divinity, we are suddenly
reminded about the diet of John the Baptist: grasshoppers and honey. I don’t know if you could eat enough honey to
rid the after-taste of grasshoppers. No
wonder that poor man was such a grizzly bear! It’s his diet! If you and I forced ourselves to eat
grasshoppers, we’d probably be in a world-denying mood too.
We, Americans, probably would not like John
the Baptist, unless he were mere entertainment on some television Sit-Com. Then we could laugh because comedy is created
by contrasting extremes: Our extreme excesses and John’s extreme asceticism.
But in the genealogy of salvation history,
John the Baptist is an important figure.
He figures prominently in the Gospels, the writings of the Early Church.
Some of the most prominent early Christian leaders had once been followers of
John the Baptist, and they made their transition to follow Jesus; but they
never forgot John and his role in setting the stage for Jesus Christ. They never forgot John the Baptist as their
friend and mentor.
John the Baptist was an unbribed soul. He could not be bought off. He would not say pleasant things to please
the crowd or do some fundraising. He confronted
the rich and the powerful with strong opinions and that’s what got him
killed. He told Herod what he thought
about his divorce, so he got thrown in jail, and his head on a platter became
the party favor for the dancing Salome.
As much as we are not in the John the Baptist
mode, let us endeavor in this Advent season to make peace with John the
Baptist. He is an icon, an image of the
ascetic principle in life that we all need to learn in order to be true to God
and to ourselves.
The ascetic principle is this: We have to give up harmful things and even
good things, to take on better things for our lives and the life of our
world. That’s the meaning of repentance.
John the Baptist was trained in the lonely
place of the wilderness, where he listened for God’s voice and God’s will
alone. He did not a have a social
context that demanded that he compromise his principles to please the crowd.
So John the Baptist confronts us with this question: What good things must I give up so that I
might take on better excellence in my life and in the life of my family, my
community and my world?
You and I are unlike John the Baptist in that
we are fully co-opted by the situations of family, job and social conditions in
our lives. Does it ever feel like you
and I are perpetually dancing to please someone else in our lives, even to the
point of compromising some important principles of excellence? There just seems to be too many demands on
our time and resources truly to bring a manifold excellence to everything in
our busy lives.
So what are you and I to do? Jump out of our lives, and “get thee to a
nunnery?”
The monastery is no solution except for a
very few who have the calling. For you
and me, we need to find the inner wilderness, the inner place of
quietness. During this Advent we need to
take time to find that inner place of peace, tranquility and solitude. It is a place underneath all of the emotions
of the Christmas season. It is a place
underneath, all of the deep feelings that we have about people and friends whom
we have lost and whom we miss at Christmastide in a special way. It is a place, where we know that we please
God and that God is pleased with us, so we don’t have to worry about whether
everything was perfect or whether everyone was totally pleased with us at
Christmas.
John the Baptist invites us to that “living
wilderness” of being alone and silent with God, so that we can have the
spiritual fullness to embrace the fullness of our daily lives.
Don’t make excuses about not having
time. Make time. What about that daily commute? Are we using it to pray for spouse, children,
family parish, friends, our community, the poor and needy in this world? Are we using it to pray for peace in our
world and for social and economic justice in our world? It is harder to be disappointed by the people
for whom we are praying, because when we pray we cease to ask that they be
adequate or omni-competent to our needs. In the solitude of our prayer and
meditation wilderness, we find God to be most adequate and competent to our
needs, so we need not demand that sort of perfection from anyone.
Let us find, like John the Baptist, that
place where we can give up this world, so that we can take up again our daily
worlds with better spiritual preparation.
Advent is a season of repentance. It is when we give up what is bad and even
what is good, so that we might take up what is even better, even the
manifestation of the birth of Christ in our lives by the baptism of God’s Holy
Spirit. Amen.
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