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That was some preaching we just heard in our Gospel reading this morning: God's bringin' his axe, 'cause he's coming to cut out the dead wood! You brood of vipers, you need to repent! Those of you who have two shirts need to share with your poor neighbor. Those who've been cheating your neighbor need to stop it. I will baptize you with water, but the Lord will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. There's a new world on the horizon! William Willimon says that as a teenager he used to hear preachers like that, but he had to go to the edge of town to find them. In his own family's big downtown church, they didn't preach like that. So for amusement, he says, he and his friends used to drive to the outskirts of town about nine o'clock on Saturday nights where a great tent was pitched, and where the field hands used to sit on folding chairs, and where sometimes they would stand and whoop and shout and sometimes handle snakes, and where the mill workers went to talk to God and to hear a word of truth and a word of hope. If you wanted to hear preaching like that, you had to go out to the margins of society; you wouldn't hear it in the big church downtown. You had to go out to where the poor and the dispossessed and the rednecks were, out to the edge of town, out by the river, out where John the Baptist was, in the wilderness. Sixty-two years and seven days ago, on a Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, students at Duke University filed out of the University Chapel. They had just listened to the poetry of the prophet Isaiah, the annual performance of Handel's Messiah. They had heard, once again, Handel's rendering of Isaiah's news: "Unto us a Child is born. Hallelujah!" One of the students remembers the afternoon well. As they left the chapel, he recalls, they were surprised to see people gathered around automobiles, listening to car radios. They had just come out from the poetry of the Bible and the music of Handel to the cries of war. Their lives would never be the same after that day. After all, what match is poetry and music, even the poetry of Isaiah and the music of Handel, when set next to the facts of life? At the very moment that the chapel choir had been singing that every valley would be filled and every mountain made low to make way for the salvation of God, cities in China and Europe and North Africa were being leveled for the kings of Gog and Magog, and civilization was marching back into the wilderness. It is only against the backdrop of wilderness that Handel's Messiah can speak. Israel had been invaded by a foreign power, and the people had been conquered and forced into slavery, driven into exile in a foreign land. The psalmist (Psalm 137) describes their plight: By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, And the exiles answered: '[But] how shall we sing the Lord's song This was the lament of a people in the wilderness who could not bring themselves to tap-dance and sing the old Gospel songs of home for the amusement of those who held them captive in a foreign land. Isaiah's poetry, too, was the poetry of exile and wilderness. But his was the language of hope: The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, And Isaiah's hope was matched by that of the prophet Zephaniah: Sing, O Daughter of Zion; The word of God came to John the Baptist as it came to Isaiah and Zephaniah and the psalmist. It came in the wilderness. It came to one who lived in a land that was far from God, far from home. Tiberias Caesar had ruled for fifteen years. Pontius Pilate was doing Caesar's bidding in Jerusalem. Herod was tap-dancing for Pilate in Galilee. Annas and Caiaphas were in charge of the Lord's Temple, but they had long since had little to do with the Lord himself; the temple priests preferred to let Pilate and Herod and the gods of Rome call the shots instead. John preached on the edge of town, in the Jordan valley, and in the countryside of Judea, and in Jerusalem, but he may as well have been in Babylon. It was there, in the wilderness, in the wilderness of Judea, and in Jerusalem, that the word of hope came to John through the poetry of Isaiah. And if you are not there in the wilderness with John and the psalmist and the prophets, their language will not speak hope to you. "Repent! The Lord will come...once again. To set the captives free...once again." Such words were not language that Caesar and Pilate and Herod and Caiaphas would have left their palaces to go to the chapel to hear. What could such words mean to them? What should they repent of? For what should they hope that they didn't already have? But to John, and to all who sat where he sat -- at the edge of town, in the wilderness -- it was the language of life itself. What is the address of wilderness? Forget your modern, romantic views of wilderness. Wilderness, in the Bible, is not the place of Boy Scout hikes and A-frame condominiums. Biblical wilderness is the place where Israel lost its way and couldn't find home, the place where they bowed before alien gods. Wilderness is the place where the Adversary, the priest of wilderness, tempted Jesus to forget the Lord, tempted him to make his way in the halls of Caesar instead. Biblical wilderness is the place -- either in Babylon or in the mind or in the soul, either in Judea or in Florida or in Washington or in Colorado Springs -- biblical wilderness is the place where there are no clear paths and where wild beasts lurk, the place where chaos and temptation and bewilderment reign. Many of those in exile in Babylon tried to assimilate themselves into the life and values of the wilderness, tried to sing the songs of Babylon, tried to believe that Babylon was their true home, tried not to see the conflict between the reality of their life in slavery and the memory and promise of life in Zion. Are we not familiar with this same address? Are we not familiar with the address of wilderness -- at the intersection of comfort and ease, or at the crossroads of ambition and power, or at the corner of fame and fortune -- where we live in our day and in our world, sensing no conflict between cultural values and Gospel values? Do we not eat the foods of our culture: alcohol, drugs, and cholesterol -- or lettuce and sprouts -- and jogging -- but little soul food? Caesar's armies move over the earth at will while we pay the bill. From Ireland to Afghanistan to Iraq, from Africa to Asia to the Americas, North and South, they march, offering human sacrifice to the gods of consumption and war that would make the hungry gods of the ancients blush. AIDS in Africa and Asia, and also in America, has transformed what the gurus of a few years ago used to call sexual liberation into a loaded gun. Right here in Colorado Springs, how many will sleep under a bridge tonight, or find their only meal at the soup kitchen, or live in anxiety or loneliness as deep as any ocean? How many of our children here live without fathers, or without mothers, or without both? How many of our citizens will be abused or murdered this year? Is this home? Or is it wilderness? A prophet preaching on the edge of town offers no truth that City Hall downtown cares to hear. Isaiah's poetry makes no sense to Caesar on his throne, or to Pilate in his comfortable palace, or to Caiaphas in his temple, or to the kings and priests of a "do-your-own-thing, feel-good" society. Isaiah's poetry and Zephaniah's poetry and John's preaching and Handel's music make sense only to those who read their own address as wilderness. The language of repentance and hope -- John's preaching and Handel's music -- is language that liberates. It is the language of truth because it is the language of honesty. It speaks only to those who are lost, and who know they are lost. It is preaching from the edge of town that enables those who have ears to hear to recognize that it is we who live in wilderness; it is poetry that provides a way out of wilderness. John's preaching and Handel's music give hope to those who are honest about their situation, hope to those who know they are not where they want to be, hope to those seeking a way home. "Repent!" came the Word of penitence to John in the wilderness. And we are reminded by Frederick Buechner that repentance means "to come to your senses." To come to your senses about where home is and what life really is. "Repentance," Buechner says, "is not so much something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying 'I'm sorry' than it does looking to the future and saying 'Wow!'" Like the "wow" the tax collector Zacchaeus must have experienced when he did quit gouging the people and then paid back four-fold to those he had cheated and then, on top of that, gave half of what he owned to the poor. Or like the "wow" any ordinary person might experience when he realizes that the song, "More is always better," is a foreign tune sung in a foreign tongue and then takes his third and fourth cars to the soup kitchen to be cashed in for food. Or like the "wow" of someone who just finally realizes that she can trade in her daily complaints about the world's going to hell in a hand basket for a commitment to teach her children, and her children's children, and her neighbor's children, to read and to love, and who realizes that life actually gets better when you do that. And "Rejoice!" came the Word of hope to John in the wilderness: "Prepare a way for the Lord. Because we cannot find our way out to God, he finds his way in to us." Whether spoken by a goofy man like John or sung by a tenor in Messiah, the poetry of repentance and hope is revolution, a revolt against the status quo of life lived in wilderness. The God the prophets and the psalmist know, the God John sees and hears, bulldozes his way through the jungle to get to us because we cannot get to him, bulldozes his way through like a Father running toward his son who is lost and bewildered in a far, far country, but who has turned his heart toward home. "I have a dream," said Martin Luther King, Jr. "I have a dream" is what Isaiah says as well. And Zephaniah. And John the Baptist. And Handel. Those who don't dream or sing songs or preach the poetry of Isaiah become trapped in the wilderness of whatever reality and life are offered by the politicians and the talking heads of the evening news and the entertainers and the other prosaic masters of wilderness language. Much of the time we are good soldiers, docile and obedient clerks who use the tunes of the old Gospel songs of home to tap-dance for the masters of Babylon, deceiving ourselves into believing that wilderness is home. We listen to the language of Washington and television that flattens everything to prose, language descriptive only of what is, rather than to the poetry of Advent that is evocative of what can be, because we believe that poetry, after all, is no match for "the facts of life." We are a people who commit the one unforgivable sin. We forget. When we have no Handel or John the Baptist to remind us, we write and read only flattening prose which absolutizes the present, and we content ourselves with the belief that the wilderness we live in is the only world there is, or is at least the best that is possible. "In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberias Caesar, Pontius Pilate became governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee.... In the third year of the reign of George W. Bush, Republicans and Democrats slug it out on the political circuits trying to get the inside track for grabbing Caesar's throne next year, and John Paul and Rowen Williams and Frank Griswold are the high and low priests of the Temple...." And this is how we tell the facts of life: a list of who is in power in Rome or Galilee, in Washington or New York or Denver. Wait for another administration, or for a new bishop, or for an improved Medicare program, or for a tax break or entitlement, or for the Dow and the NASDAQ to recover. Wait. Adapt. Punch, jab, and weave. Keep your head down. Look out for lurking beasts. We are reluctant to question Caesar's arrangements, because, after all, one might lose a government grant. Few of us make big moves. Even little moves scare us. But in a bold act of creation, Zephaniah and Isaiah and John the Baptist and Handel offer us poetry instead, the language of revolution, the language of repentance and hope. From 2,600 years ago, we in our wilderness today hear the words John heard in the wilderness of first-century Roman-occupied Judea: The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, Into our pedestrian "facts of life" world comes the voice of one crying in the wilderness: "Prepare a way for the Lord. Fill in the valleys. Level the mountains. You don't have to call wilderness home or stumble in the dark. God is coming, and you and all flesh will see his salvation." Or so, at least, we will sing later this morning -- that even in the midst of "the facts of life" we can welcome him "who comes the prisoners to release, the broken heart to bind and the bleeding soul to cure." Again this Christmas, the angel multitudes will sing their songs to shepherds in their fields, out in the wilderness. Will they speak to you and me as well? In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |