Have you ever heard John the Baptist preach in here? The great preacher Fred Craddock asks that kind of question in the title of one of his sermons on this lesson: Have You Ever Heard John Preach?^[1]  As I think about it, it’s a really good question. “Have you ever heard John’s preaching -- preaching that is so powerful as to point a clear, straight way through a blank and blind desert of confusion or anger or grief?  Preaching so life-changing in its effect that chasms of discouragement and loneliness somehow become filled with meaning, and vast valleys of pain become filled with relief, and pain subsides more than just momentarily? Preaching that levels the uneven ground of varying degrees of intellect, sensitivity, physical strength, or beauty, or sophistication, or any of the other things that are disparate in their dispersion among humankind” (and aren’t gifts of God, therefore)?

 

Preaching that powerful! Preaching that whacks the tops from the gargantuan mountains of estrangement that separate people who once loved and touched one another? Have you ever heard anyone preach so powerfully as to make every mountain and every hill low and surmountable? Have you ever heard anyone proclaim that genuine repentance -- change -- is possible now because all sin is forgiven by the only one qualified to do it? Have you ever heard anyone proclaim that so it’s believable? Have you ever heard John preach in here?

 

Not in here you haven’t! Not in here! Not in here because the truth is John doesn’t ever preach in here. He preaches in the wilderness, which is to say, beyond the accouterments and entrapments of religion, way beyond. Even given all of the beauty and grandeur and capacity to lift us to at least a taste of the transcendent that the entrapments of religion have, John’s preaching is beyond that, outside of that, in the wilderness.

 

 

In here, you’ve heard Bernie Nord and Alice Geils and Kristy Forbes and Bill Poe and Howard Reed and Greg Han and Guinn Blackwell-Eagleson and Fairfax Fair and a bunch of other really good preachers. But…you haven’t heard John because John’s been in the wilderness all along and still is.

 

You see, John the Baptist is Mark’s statement about all that was wrong and of what was about to happen. Over the centuries the covenant the Lord had made with the Lord’s people had broken, and faith had become a matter of ritual and of proper words spoken and of following rules, some without purpose. It had become a matter of the spiritual pursued ritualistically, a matter of private activity rather than corporate responsibility. Faith had become a matter of religion while God’s first and second commandments went wanting, and lesser gods became greater gods than the Lord God and human compassion, charity and justice were sacrificed on the altar of doing things right, regularly and ritualistically.

 

John, I think, was how Mark was announcing that enough was enough...and that the Lord was about to change things -- cataclysmically, powerfully, through one who would come after John and would be more powerful, the thong of whose sandals John, by comparison, wasn’t worthy even to stoop down and untie.

 

So…John, in Mark’s telling of the Gospel (and also in Matthew’s, incidentally, but not as much in the other two gospels) didn’t go where things were right, regular, and ritualistic. He was the alternative to the temple and its incense, paraphernalia, and customs. Maybe he was Mark’s way of saying that the Lord wasn’t to be found at all in the temple anymore. The holy of holies, unbeknownst to the priests and the scribes whose interest was vested, was empty, devoid nowadays of God’s spirit. It wasn’t that the spirit had left creation. It’s just that it was elsewhere, not where they had thought it could always be found. So Mark doesn’t have John going to the temple seat of religious practice and custom. Rather Mark has him where there’s nothing but a void, no clutter, no trappings, nothing, just the dryness of emptiness...wilderness. No presumptions, no assumptions, no preconditions, no qualifications, no credentials are necessary. There is nothing where John is, just wilderness.

 

And he calls the people to come there – to the wilderness -- to hear of God’s forgiveness and to repent. And they go...in flocks and droves and from the whole Judean countryside. All Jerusalem goes, Mark says, to hear the word of the first prophetic voice in 300 years, the voice that was opposite the expected paradigms and profiles of religious practice, the voice of a prophet/priest whose trappings were mere camel hair with a leather belt to hold it together, whose sacramental food was tasteless locusts dipped not in the blood of a sacrificial lamb but in wild honey.

 

So, best we assume John simply doesn’t come here…ever. We haven’t heard him preach here…ever Still, we may have heard his message reflected in the other voices that have been heard here. Like voices that cry in the wildernesses of creation, there are also voices other than John’s that cry within the cities and the structures of civilization, even of religion, I think. I haven’t given up on religion and religious custom and ritual. They can be the carriers of God’s good intention, too.  Absolutely, they can. But we’ve got to watch ourselves. It’s possible to sacrifice fundamental values for other values. We need to keep checking constantly.

 

For example, it’s possible in a place like this to hear from someone like me that the repentance that follows God’s forgiveness is mostly something that just naturally happens to people as they move along the journey of life muddling through. You repent a little here and a little there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real repentance (to be a little “Dirksenesque”). It’s like repentance is some kind of an educational process where you take baby steps at first until you can take repetitive giant steps. It’s the kind of repentance that happens in one form or another to everyone. It’s the kind that’s a reformulation of values or a little alteration in the ways we cope with life and make our key decisions. It’s the kind that comes through the power of positive thinking or practicing only happy talk morning till night. But is it the powerful, mountain leveling, valley filling repentance that John, standing in the wilderness, called to the people of the city to come and be baptized with, letting the fact of God’s forgiveness rush over them like flood waters only to burst forth fully re-made into new human beings? Is it? I wonder. We need be cautious, I think, of any insipidness in our understanding of what repentance actually is.

 

By the same token, I don’t think John called the people that St. Mark tells us about to a repentance that was a mid-course correction. I don’t think so. And he isn’t calling us to that kind of repentance. He’s not calling us to live differently as a New Year’s resolution might call us to change our habits from here forward, useful though it may be. A pound shed here, a pound shed there; a cocktail or two less here, a cocktail or two less there; and pretty soon you’re talking about a real diet and real moderation. Useful as that may be, that’s not the road-straightening, hair-straightening, volcano-erupting, valley-filling, forever-after-changed repentance that John calls his people and us to experience. Have you ever heard John preach?

 

Rather, what John calls us to and what Christ when he comes incarnate in the person of Jesus makes possible is a repentance that calls for a revision of the past, a consideration of the past and a revising of how we understand the past, a revising of our interpretation of the past. That’s completely different. When John stands by the River Jordan and calls us to the wilderness that lies east of its water, he calls for us to look behind before we dare to move ahead...to look behind. The true repentance that John offers calls for us to encounter the past we have lived through, both long term and more recently, the past that maybe we’ve lived through but haven’t fully experienced, the past we’ve inherited but not inhabited, and to do it before we enter a future we don’t yet comprehend. A repentance that is genuine repentance, the kind that the scraggly, skinny camel-hair and leather clad baptizer offered and that the people flocked to get, Mark says, is a repentance that calls us to look behind before moving ahead. Stop. Look. What’s back there? What does it mean?

 

Tom Long, in a sermon entitled What Do You Mean, Repent?^[3]tells the story of a business executive who was on the verge of implementing what he thought to be a shrewd business plan. The scheme involved temporarily dropping prices below the level of profitability in order to starve a smaller competitor out of the market. Then, with the market all his, prices and profits could rise. The fact that the competitor was a struggling family-owned business, not really a major factor in the market, but the sole livelihood of a family with three small children, was known to the man, Long says. But, technically, the plan was legal, and all competitors are fair game since business, after all, is business.

           

Well, just as the arrangements were about to be in place, the executive was called back to his hometown for the funeral of a cousin. Long says that during the graveside service, as the man sat under the funeral tent that was stretched over the family plot and looked around, his eyes settled on his grandmother’s gravestone.  She had died when he was only a boy, but she had made a huge impression.  There were words from the Book of Proverbs inscribed on the headstone:  “She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.”

 

“The teaching of kindness...” Long says the words seemed to the man to be written in fire, and they burned in his heart. He had read them many times before on nostalgic visits to the cemetery, but now they leapt from the past into his present life. “He hadn’t merely recalled his grandmother,” Long writes, rather, the man “was confronted by memory and judged by the commitments he vaguely knew she held but hadn’t considered to have any claim on his life.  It was a strange and disturbing experience for the man, and he returned to his city with no will to destroy, but to seek somehow to know and live “the teaching of kindness.”

 

To answer the question that Tom Long asks in the title of his sermon, What Do You Mean, Repent?, this is surely what John meant as he preached deep in the wilderness of confusion and anxiety and guilt and grief and fear and sadness and pain, all of those wildernesses that are our day to day experience except in here where John isn’t to be heard. To repent means to acknowledge the past, gaze at it, bring it in and wrap it around our hearts and our spinal cords, and then move into the future changed beings, move into God’s future as God’s forgiven-in-spite-of-our-indebtedness-beings.

 

Have you ever heard John preach? He’s worth listening to. I propose that this Advent we go to where we can hear him. He levels the rough places of our common ground. He backfills the vast chasms of pain and emptiness that otherwise draw us in and down and down and down.  He whacks the tops and vast middles from the gargantuan hills of our estrangement from one another, he makes every mountain low that otherwise would keep us separate from one another and from the creator God who made us and loves us. I propose we go to where John is preaching. And let’s listen for him to tell us the fullest meaning of Christmas.

 

Amen.

 

 

---