Scripture: Matthew 3:1-12
It may seem like I am contradicting myself this morning. It may seem like the sermon this week is saying something that is pretty much diametrically opposed to what I was trying to say last week. It may seem like in saying what I am going to say this week, I must have completely forgotten what I said last week. I hope in the end that I will convince you that it only seems that way, that I’m not really contradicting myself, but I do have to admit that it may very well seem that way.
I considered not mentioning this, pointing out my own seeming inconsistency. Some of you weren’t here last week and so you wouldn’t know whether I am contradicting myself and maybe the rest of you wouldn’t notice. But then I decided I needed to mention it because I really mean for the two things I want to say to go together, the thoughts about quietness from last week and some thoughts about urgency for this week, even if they do seem to be very different from each other.
To back up for just a moment, I am reflecting on gifts this Advent, non-material spiritual gifts that I may need, and I guess I should say—I didn’t say last week—that I am wanting to branch out from your usual spiritual gifts that are part of Advent: love, joy, hope, peace. Those are your common advent virtues that often get lifted up, many people identify the four candles of the advent wreath with those four qualities: peace, hope, joy, love. And don’t get me wrong. I’m in favor of all of them: love, hope, joy, and peace. Those are good qualities. I’m just wanting to branch out a bit and ask whether there are other good qualities we might need or whether there might be other words that would give us a slightly different slant on things. So anyway, that’s how I came to talk about quietness last week and why I want to reflect on urgency this week.
Urgency as a gift. There are several places this idea comes from. One of them is Biblical, and let me start there. It ties in with last week because I was talking last week about Zechariah and the silence that was imposed on him during his wife Elizabeth’s pregnancy. Zechariah and Elizabeth were to become the parents of John the Baptist and John the Baptist is always an important figure during Advent because he is described as one who announced the coming of the messiah and who prepared the way for the messiah’s coming. And so he fits into Advent rather nicely, since it’s the time we are supposed to be anticipating the coming of the messiah and preparing ourselves for his coming into our lives.
Problem is, John the Baptist doesn’t fit rather neatly into much of anything else. I guess a positive way to spin John the Baptist would be to say that he was counter-cultural. “Now John,” scripture says, “wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist and his food was locusts and wild honey.” But of course it wasn’t just his appearance that was counter-cultural. His message was threatening enough to people in positions of power that he eventually ended up in jail, which led a little later to his ending up dead. Though he seemed to attract crowds, I think it would be fair to say he was not in general well received in his own time, at least by mainstream culture. He was, if not threatening to everyone, probably to a lot of people just plain weird.
Now I do consider counter-cultural to be a positive term. It’s something I aspire to be, in a positive sort of way, so that part of John the Baptist I’m ok with. But when you listen to what he has to say, it’s a little jarring to say the least. If he was a threat to people in his own time, he’s rather difficult to deal with for us too. He is not, to say the least, a warm fuzzy person. He does not give the impression of being the good listener I referred to last week. He calls the people who came to hear him and be baptized a “brood of vipers”, not what we would think of as a welcoming, inclusive, embracing attitude appropriate to Sojourners. He suggests that trees, i.e. people, who don’t bear fruit will be thrown into the fire—sounds a bit like if you don’t do good you will burn in hell. It’s not a message I particularly want to associate myself with.
So I ask myself: Is there anything good about this guy? I can do without the abrasiveness. I can do without the insults. I can do without the threats of burning in hell or anywhere else. I can do without the locust-based cuisine. I can do without the apparent lack of any sense of humor whatsoever. But there is this sense of urgency about him that maybe I can’t do without, or that I at least need to think about. Along with all the other things he has to say, he seems to be saying that since the messiah is coming, in fact is almost here, we should be acting not the way we do when we know we are having company a month from now, but the way we might act when the company is about to arrive. There is an urgency here, he seems to be saying. Now is the time to act. Now is the time to repent. Now is the time to change. Now is the time to prepare the way of the Lord. There is this urgency about John the Baptist and maybe that is something positive about him. Maybe it’s his gift to me.
Truth to tell, I do think about urgency some on my own. I don’t really need John the Baptist’s encouragement, though this part of him does reinforce some of my own thinking. Let me use an example from the area of anti-racism work. One of the key concepts in dealing with racism as a structural part of our society is the notion of white privilege. There are many privileges associated with being white in our culture, and one of them is the privilege of not having to think about racism if we don’t want to. We can ignore it. We can put off dealing with it. We can be casual about it. We can be content with being well meaning and good hearted. After all, racism has been around a long time and it’s not going to go away anytime soon. And there are certainly lots of other things that demand our attention and we would certainly burn-out quickly if we acted like everything was a crisis that demanded our urgent attention. And even if racism is all we think about, if we are always in a crisis mode we will burn out that way too. And it’s such a huge reality there’s not a whole lot we can do that’s going to make a dramatic difference in the short term. Much better to prepare for the long haul. And so on. There are all sorts of good reasons why being in a constant state of urgency may not be necessary, may not be helpful and in fact may be counter-productive, may lead to burnout, may not be a healthy attitude for the body, mind, or spirit—to live in a constant state of crisis. To say nothing of the practical matter that few of us probably can sustain that kind of state of mind for very long, even if we wanted to.
The trouble is that reasons can so easily slip over into being excuses, and we white folks can find ourselves, without hardly even being aware of it, exercising that privilege of not having to think about it, and therefore feeling not the slightest bit of urgency about the need to do something. This is a place I find myself all too often. And so when John the Baptist comes along with his wildness and sense of urgency and his prophetic spirit announcing that the messiah is coming and this is no time for business as usual and that this is a time for repentance and action and change, I often respond by thinking something like, “uh-oh, he caught me again.” And I receive that part of John, maybe not enthusiastically, maybe more reluctantly and sheepishly and guiltily, but I receive it as a gift. I know in my heart it is part of the wholeness I want the messiah to bring.
I mentioned guilt just now. And I’m not sure there’s no place at all for guilt in the life of faith—that’s a topic for another time—but let me say quickly that I don’t think in general guilt serves us very well. So this is not a matter of beating up on ourselves for all the good we leave undone in our lives. There is no end to that syndrome and it mostly doesn’t lead to anything good. Maybe it’s just a difference in the way of looking at it, but it’s an important difference, I think. Wouldn’t it be a gift to have a greater sense of urgency about at least some things in our lives? Wouldn’t that be a gift that would move us in the direction of a greater human wholeness? Speaking for myself, the answer is yes.
How does this all fit in with what I was saying last week about the need for quietness? Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s just that we need both, no matter how much they may seem to pull us in different directions. There is still a need I know in myself for the kind of quietness of spirit that allows us to listen for God and to listen the deep voices of other human beings. There is a need to be free of the oppression of the need to be productive and to get things accomplished and to move on to the next thing, a need for a quietness at the center that resists the kind of constant agitation that can so easily take control of our lives. I don’t need to repeat last week’s sermon, but I don’t take it back either.
At the same time, I know that I am also not whole if I do not have something, more than something, of the spirit of that weird, counter-cultural baptizing fellow who wants us not to get comfortable with the world as it is or ourselves as we are, who sees something urgent in our situation and wants us to know that in the light of the messiah, there is no such thing as business as usual. It may be just that we need both—somehow—even if they don’t fit together very well, even if they’re in tension with each other, even if they clash or compete with each other sometimes, these two different spirits of quietness on the one hand and urgency on the other.
But I think there’s another possibility. Maybe urgency is not all about activism and getting things done and the need for change and the seeking of justice and the push to speak and do. It’s partly about all those things but partly about something else. Frederick Buechner, an author I know some of you are familiar with, tells the story of his being in Rome on a Christmas Eve at St. Peter’s and seeing the Pope arrive—it was Pope Pius at the time—and how the Pope passed by within a few feet of him and seemed completely unaware of the crowds or all the pomp and circumstance that surrounded him but how he was looking out into the crowd with an intent stare as though he were looking for someone who he couldn’t find. It made a lasting impression on Buechner and came to represent for him an image of faith—looking for something, maybe he wasn’t even sure what.
It was the intentness of the look, I think, that fixed itself in Buechner’s memory. The urgency of it, if you will. A peering into the dark, symbolic of much of the life of faith. And, Buechner says, if the Pope looked hard enough that night he would have found perhaps part of what he was looking for in the faces all around him, faces which in their very human contours carried nevertheless the image of God. But you do have to look, to look with your heart to see it. And you also have to look with the heart to see beyond the present world to a world that is different, a world where, for instance, the structures of racism embedded in our history have crumbled. It is not a matter first of all of doing, rushing ahead to address this issue or that issue. That comes later. It is a matter of looking with an intensity of spirit beyond the present. And whether it is in the face of the neighbor or in a world that is yet to be, in all of it, at the center of all of it, we are looking for God, urgently looking for God.
That anyway is the gift I am thinking about this morning. It is not a gift so very different from the gift of quietness. That gift is necessary for us to have spirits that are calm enough and receptive enough to listen. The urgency comes in all the ways we find ourselves looking for God, which is not after all an idle pastime. We listen with a quiet heart and look with an intense and urgent heart for things we scarcely know how to describe. To do so I believe would make us doubly blessed. Amen.
Jim Bundy
December 10, 2006