Holy Trinity Episcopal Church

 Second Sunday in Advent

Year A, RCL

December 8, 2019

North Fork Ministries

Gospel:

Matthew 3:1-12

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,

"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:`Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'"

Now John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, `We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

"I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."

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Growing up in the Baptist church, I can remember how one preacher, known for his colorful brand of hell fire and brimstone sermons, read today’s gospel lesson with damning enthusiasm.  Gazing out over the congregation, sweat dripping from his brow, he literally spat the words of John the Baptist from his lips, 

“You brood of vipers!”, he would say, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?... every tree that does not bear fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” I don’t know about you but that bit of name calling from the voice that cries out in the wilderness is enough to cause me to squirm.

Many of us have come to the Episcopal Church to avoid the heavy hand of judgment present in many churches.  Among us are people who are divorced, gay, enjoy an occasional beer, or maybe sinful enough to think that health care is a right and not a privilege.  And we don’t want to be condemned on Sunday morning for what we chose to do on Saturday night.  

 But if we imagine a God that doesn’t care about what we do, it’s also easy to imagine a God that doesn’t care about us either.  And I assure you, God does care about us all.

 It was typical, in John the Baptist’s time, as it is today, for people to travel to the city to discover new ideas and experience new things. But in today’s gospel, the people left the city and went into the wilderness to hear John the Baptist.  I like the idea that when we enter into this worship space on Sunday morning, that we have wandered into the wilderness. I like to think that Sunday morning is a kind of wilderness experience.  

I suspect that the people of John the Baptizers time, left their homes in Jerusalem and the villages of Judea, and traveled to the wilderness around the Jordan River for all kinds of reasons - just as we gather here on a Sunday morning with a variety of things in mind.  I imagine that those travelers 2000 years ago came to the wilderness out of curiosity, seeking entertainment, desiring community – but Matthew tells us that they also came to be baptized with water, seeking repentance, desiring transformation.

European immigrants first settled here on the North Fork some four centuries ago.  True wilderness seems very distant from our populated towns and villages.  

But for much of my life I sought refuge amid the forests, mountains and streams of the western United States, often requiring a place of solitude and restoration.  But contained within the wilderness experience is the also the opportunity to be transformed into something different.

That was the hope of a program that I was a part of when I first got out of college. The Texas Youth Council had determined that it would be good for the kids who had found nothing but trouble on the streets of Dallas and Houston, to spend some time in a wilderness setting.   So into the piney woods of East Texas, in the heart of the Davy Crockett National Forest, every few weeks a battered school bus would drive round and round down the endless dirt roads and logging trails of the forest, and eventually deposit a dozen, confused, scared, and angry young teenage boys at the trailhead of the orientation camp where I awaited them.

For a few days, the novelty of living outdoors amidst impenetrable pine forests, gathering wood and cooking on campfires, kept my young charges entertained. But eventually, the behavioral problems that had arisen in their urban homes, would become manifest in the wilderness as well. And so arguments and fights would inevitably ensue. Boys, desperate to get high, huffers we called them, would steal lanterns and run away to the woods where they could inhale the toxic Coleman lantern fuel. Runaways were common. And more than once, I had to grab an axe from a young boy intent on splitting open the head of a fellow counselor.  

The mission of the wilderness camp was to change the behavior of these troubled youth. But the only change I could see was that at the beginning of the four days a week I lived with these kids, I was energetic and optimistic - and at the end of the week, I was frustrated and exhausted. And the boys, they just learned new and creative ways to express their anger and hurt.

Until…one afternoon, as the campers and I stood in an uneasy circle, in yet another “huddle-up”, a kind of group time-out that we would call whenever some disagreement or infraction of the rules occurred.  All of us were cold, dirty, bored, and tired of talking – when a project presented itself, one more engaging than preparing meals and endlessly sweeping the trails around the camp.  

Surrounded by tall and straight pine trees, possessing saws and axes, it didn’t take a lot of imagination to realize, as had countless pioneers in the wilderness, that we should build a log cabin. And so we did. For weeks on end the forest was filled with the industrious sounds of building. The boys were busy clearing land, felling trees, notching logs, chinking the gaps between the logs with mud and ash, and crudely thatching a roof.  Our work was inevitably interrupted by more huddle-ups, where we tried to solve problems with words instead of fists, but the huddle-ups were shorter, and more productive, because we had a shared project, and we were eager to return to our work. 

I don’t ever see those kids. And I don’t know how their lives have turned out. But I am confident that each of them remembers with pride, a time in the wilderness, where together, they built a log cabin.  And there was something about the landscape surrounding these boys that was transforming as well. The wildness, the mystery, the fearsome nature of the forest worked some magic on the jaded hearts of these boys – and they emerged from the wilderness, a little different.

We too are called, here on the North Fork, to be a part of a project – God’s project. We are called to revitalize a church, and we are doing that.  But more importantly, we are called, by a voice crying in the wilderness, to “Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.”

Our work here is a divine project.  We are called to create a place of transformation, and in the process, to be transformed ourselves.  And we are certainly called to bear good fruit.  

This morning we heard the psalmist pray for a king that will,
“…defend the cause of the poor of the people,

Give deliverance to the needy,

And crush the oppressor.” 

And, as citizens of the kingdom, we have an important role to play in God’s project of justice and peace as well.

In the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, he prays that, “the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another”. I think, here at Holy Trinity and the Church of the Redeemer, we do a rather good job of living into Paul’s urgings that we live in harmony with one another.

But I think that, like the Pharisees and Sadducees that went out to the wilderness to be baptized by John, we are looking for more than a harmonious existence. In the wilderness there is a good chance that we will experience the mysterious, wild, and otherness of an encounter with God.  In the wilderness the landscape speaks of mystery that is not to be solved, wildness that is not to be tamed and a sense of transcendence that cannot be leveled. My hope is that our budding Center for Spiritual Imagination will provide a path for us to into the wilderness of mystical union with the Divine, a path that civilized religion is so ready to pave over.  

My prayer is that as a congregation, we will retain the wildness that characterized this little sliver of land four centuries ago.  and, like John the Baptist, we will be clad in camel’s hair, cinch our waists with leather belts, feast on locust and wild honey, and together cry out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”