Sermons Preached at Church of the Redeemer

The Rev. Dorsey W. M. McConnell - December 5, 2004

A prophet may be best thought of as a guide.  I don’t mean a guide in the sense of a counselor or teacher.  I mean the kind of guide you want when you go into dangerous or unfamiliar country:  someone who knows the landscape, can show you its possibilities, and can begin to teach you to live there.   In this story about John the Baptist from St. Matthew’s gospel, we have heard a narrative in three movements about such a guide, the landscape he knows, and the country he would like us to discover.  A prophet is one who sees the world that is to come, not as an event far off in time, but as something very near to us, at our fingertips, shimmering just beneath the surface of the things that are.  A prophet takes us to the brink of that world, brings us so close to it that we can almost think we live there, that we can taste and touch and see it, and then he invites us to act as though we had made the leap into the world that might be, could be, will be: an unsettling gift indeed. 

John the Baptist has this uncanny gift, and the first movement of this story makes that clear. When the report goes out that he is doing something extraordinary in the desert, people flock to him from the whole region around Jerusalem.  They do it because, in his presence, they get a taste of what human life could be like, is supposed to be like. They go out to him to be baptized, and find themselves quite spontaneously confessing their sins, freely admitting to God and to one another the shame and guilt that have kept them enslaved.  As they do so, and as the cleansing waters are poured over their heads, they taste a new freedom that they have never felt before, a lightness, a joy.  No wonder the crowds keep coming.  Even if, when they return home, life hardens again, even if they fall again into bad habits, their expectations lowered under the weight of every day, for a few hours they have had a glimpse of an alternative, and that surely is a wonderful thing in itself. 

Or is it?  In the next movement of this story, John is confronted with a delegation of Pharisees and Sadducees, religious leaders who have come out to the desert for reasons of their own.  They want to be seen to be on the side of a figure as popular as John, while privately doing everything they can to get rid of him.  Their commitments are mainly to a vision of God who works within the confines of things as they already are, a low-yield sort of religion.  The Pharisees, at least, believe in the resurrection of the dead, but apparently not in the resurrection of the living – in the phenomenon St. Paul would later describe as dying to sin and rising to newness of life, exactly what all those other people at the Jordan were getting a taste of!  Beyond their political motives, perhaps they want to take this venture and turn it to their own ends – to go back and tell the people that they had gone through John’s baptism and this is what it really means.  John responds with indignation: you tangle of snakes he calls them, mainly to get their attention.  And then he tries to instruct them.  Don’t you see? he says, This isn’t about a religious experience of some kind, that you could seize by force, then twist into whatever you wish to make of it.  It is about a way of life:  people are glimpsing, here, some other way of being human.  It’s a rehearsal, a dry-run, for what is to come: a genuinely changed existence in which mercy and love and truth have become the ordinary currency of everyday living.  Don’t you see?  And John can tell, sadly, that in fact this particular group of Pharisees and Sadducees do not see, and they don’t want anyone else to see either! 

And that is where John comes to the end of his rope as a prophet.  In the third and last movement of the narrative, he turns his prophetic insight on himself.  He understands that he can do nothing more than give people a taste of what could be, but he cannot bring it about. That will require One much greater.  His words are spare, but they are very full, and if we were to lay out all that they contain, they might sound like this:  I threw water on you, John says, but the One who is coming, whose name is Jesus, will wash you with fire, inside and out, and give you the Holy Spirit.  By His grace and constant presence with you, the things to come will be so woven into the things that are, that you will find yourselves talking and behaving as though you already lived in heaven; whenever you speak and act in this way, the Kingdom of heaven will be sown, and nothing – not malice, or shame, or fear, not even death - will be able to destroy it.  The glorious world that has been shimmering just under the surface of things will be made real; you will learn to trust it; you will live there, and by your love, you will show others how to live there as well. 

I am thinking of this now as I prepare to bury our godson, Andrew Kehoe, who died a few nights ago in a car accident near Milwaukee on his way home from a wedding.  Andrew was a remarkable young man, intelligent and gentle, with a deep faith, and a unique and quirky sense of humor.  He was headed for graduate study in philosophy and showed great promise for being a truly original Christian thinker and writer.  As I write this, the sun is coming up on the rolling Wisconsin farmland where he was raised; the gentle hills and delicate bare trees extend for miles in every direction; there is a fresh blanket of snow, and it is so beautiful.   As I look at it, my eyes fill with tears.  Andrew once brought a friend home from college; they arrived here at night, and in the morning the friend woke up, looked out the window, and saw what I am seeing for the first time.  “Dude,” he exclaimed, “Hey, Andrew!  Have you ever looked at your back yard?  It’s awesome!”  He was exactly right.  But as awesome as this countryside is, it pales in comparison to the landscape I have found here in people’s hearts – the house is full of family and friends, and most of them are believers.  They believe that every wrong has been forgiven, that healing is real, that we die only to be raised to new life.  They believe in the reality that John was pointing to and that Jesus inaugurates.  By grace, they act and speak as though they lived there.  Oh, there are tears, yes.  Buckets of them.  There is grief, but there is very little despair.  As folks who loved Andrew, and who know the love of God, pour forth what is in their hearts, this new country comes into being, so that even the bad moments are enfolded in mercy and peace until they subside.

What is so remarkable is the feeling I have, that this awesome landscape is the same as the one I left behind in Chestnut Hill.  For, the kindness and mercy and blessing, with which you sent us off on Thursday, come from the gift of Jesus, the message of John.  In this time leading up to Christmas, I wouldn’t be surprised to find many people coming through our doors who are looking for this country.  Perhaps, as we reach out to them, and extend ourselves to others far beyond, who may not even know about the Redeemer, and may not care, as we dare to show them by our words and actions what we know of this landscape, we may help them find it, and in the process, we may discover it more deeply ourselves.

Amen.