Advent 2 - Isaiah 11:1-10
Well, look who’s crashing the Christmas pageant again!
Just as our 4th and 5th graders here at St. Paul’s are getting ready for next week’s Christmas pageant -- with rosy-cheeked Mary and fresh-faced shepherds and gently baa-ing lambs and feathered angels, we get grumpy John the Baptist sporting camel fur and eating locusts. You can almost smell the fumes coming from this man who has been living in the wilderness too long.
There’s no escaping John the Baptist in the season of Advent, and every year it feels funny to me that he’s the one helping us get ready for Christmas. He was born only a handful of months before Jesus. This part of the story, with him screeching out “You brood of vipers!” won’t come for another 30 years after the nativity story. Couldn’t we stretch out the lovely stories of the angel coming to Mary and Joseph’s dream that told them of the impending birth instead of this grumpy prophet? Or maybe we could spend a little more time with Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth and honor John the Baptist that way -- leaping in his mother’s belly as he acknowledges Jesus in utero? Couldn’t we keep humorless, accusing, doomsday John the Baptist in his wilderness until Lent where it seems like he would better fit?
Or maybe this is precisely where we need him.
My family put up our Christmas tree last weekend. It’s already twinkling with pretty lights and ornaments that remind us of all kinds of happy memories. The paper snowflakes that we cut out as part of our annual tradition are already hanging from our ceiling beams, making neat geometric shadows on the floor. We’ve already started shopping for presents. (In fact, we’ve already had to find a new hiding place for the big comfy bed we got our cats for Christmas because they already discovered our first hiding place.) My daughter has been playing Christmas music on the piano for weeks. And, I’m embarrassed to say, we’ve already eaten our way through 4 batches of our favorite holly cookies.
So maybe it’s the perfect time for John the Baptist to make his dramatic entrance. He’s raw and confrontational. He shocks and disrupts us and makes us completely uncomfortable. He is the exact opposite of the merriment and shininess and fluff of our Christmas preparations. John the Baptist forces us to look into the darkness when we’d rather just be gazing at the twinkling lights.
A friend of mine says John the Baptist always reminds her of her AA sponsor. Someone a little grumpy, a little smelly, a little too serious. Someone that wouldn’t let her lightly skip past her wrongdoings and faults, or joke her way out of amends that needed making. But someone that she always turned to in her moments of greatest need and temptation and darkness nonetheless because she knew that person had been there too. They had reached the bottom, hit the depths of despair, been mired in darkness too. And they’d made it out. They were living proof that out of pain could come wholeness and growth.
I think when John talks about the ax lying at the root of the tree he too is speaking from experience. I bet he had some branches of his life cut down because they weren’t bearing good fruit. And I’m guessing he’d had some chaff burned by unquenchable fire because it was getting in the way of the wheat. John the Baptist is preaching and baptizing not because he can’t relate to the struggles of the people but because he can. But John has seen the light shining in the deep and overwhelming darkness of his own life, and knows the darkness didn’t overcome it. And so he is pointing to that light with all that he is -- locusts, grumpiness, smell and all. He is preparing us to see what comes next. Helping our eyes get used to the murky darkness so that we are ready when the light begins to dawn.
John the Baptist gets pulled out every year in Advent to force us, like an AA sponsor would, to acknowledge the darkness. To feel the pain of a world full of suffering. To grieve what we have done and what we have left undone. To feel our longing for the world and for our lives to be made whole.
But look what comes next once we get used to the darkness -- this mystery of Christmas that we are preparing ourselves to enter -- it’s right there in the prophecy given by Isaiah.
Isaiah points to a stump. Once it had been a great tree -- reaching up to heaven, full of life and leaves, stretching out its magnificent branches to provide shade to the creatures below. But then came the ax. And now it was just a stump. A symbol of death. Now it was cut down and useless, seemingly at an end.
But out of what appears to be finished comes a total surprise. A tiny tendril emerging in an utterly unexpected place. The breathing of new creation from a painful end; life emerging from death; a sign of hope in impossible circumstances.
This is the mystery of Christmas that we are preparing ourselves for this Advent. A shoot coming out of the stump, A branch growing out of the roots. A new and impossible beginning.
A poor girl receiving a mysterious messenger. A child growing in a womb. Immigrants on a long road to an unfamiliar place. A baby born in difficult circumstances.
Or maybe words of forgiveness. An arm stretched out in welcome. A healing prayer. A candle lit. Another day on the road to recovery.
God comes to us -- again and again -- and it is almost never in a way we expect. More often than not God comes hidden in weakness. We have to be very loving and very alert to perceive it.
And so John the Baptist’s ax is at our roots. Not in violence or vengeance or retribution. That ax lies at our roots in order that a new shoot might begin to grow, and we might begin to notice. Amen.
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