Where do we find hope these days? In things torn down, or in things raised up? According to Matthew, yes, and yes. The lessons of Advent seem so divisive, and the stakes seem so high, that I sometimes find it nearly impossible to see past the messages of judgment to the tender compassion of our God. And yet, that seems to be the whole point. The trustworthiness of our God is made known not in safety, but in the midst of conflict and crisis. Where God comes to us in the form of something as ordinary and extraordinary as a baby. It’s like a shoot that comes forth from what might have seemed like a lifeless stump. And within that promise of newness, the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. So prophesied Isaiah, some 2700 years ago.
Isaiah wasn’t describing any reality that his hearers had actually experienced or knew firsthand. He was describing the long awaited appearing of God—the eschaton—in terms that could only exist in a prophet’s imagination. Like Martin Luther King Junior who dreamed of the day when little Black boys and Black girls would be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers—even though he hadn’t ever seen it—the prophet’s job is to tells us of how things could be. How things should be. How beautiful is that day when the dream of God is realized! But what if the kingdom of heaven already had come near—as John prophesied—and we couldn’t see it because we were so comfortable with the status quo? What if the kingdom of heaven were as near as—for example—St James Park?
Actually, I’m quite sure that it is. By virtue of our location, I meet the most extraordinary people who drop by Trinity midweek, with both needs and hope. I meet people in trouble and I meet people who care deeply for our city and it’s unhoused residents. I even learned of a romance that sparked between two dedicated Park volunteers this week. And I know you are pretty sure that the kingdom has come near to us here too, or you wouldn’t be worshipping at Trinity. There are more comfortable places for Christians to tell our stories and break our bread and have a cup of coffee. But just like the people of all Jerusalem and Judea, we come to this place because we long for the God who promises to set everything right, and to do so right in the middle of everything wrong.
Who are we in John the Baptist’s high-stakes story of threat and hope? That’s a serious question. Because depending on our perspective, we may see heaven in the old order being torn down—like the tree that does not bear good fruit—or in the new being raised up, like stones becoming children to Abraham. Perhaps we are like the crowds who came out to be baptized by John: so very exhausted by the way things are in our lives, and in the world, that we’re ready to repent and welcome the utterly new. We may not be able to see it yet, but we are willing to have our imagination awakened by God.
Or perhaps we are like the religious leaders, brood of vipers that they were. Any of us who are tempted to value our religious credentials, more than the God who shows up in a manger, might play this role. But if course it’s people like me who are at the greatest risk. If I am guilty of domesticating the Gospel—that is, of proclaiming its comfort without challenging us—then the ax is lying at the root of the Trinity Cathedral tree. On the other hand, there are ornaments are hanging on the Giving Tree in our Parish Hall. Join me in taking a few home, and returning with gifts that deepen our relationships with vulnerable students and families, and with hungry neighbors.
And then again, we might identify with John himself, preparing for the coming of the Lord by telling the hard truths. Things are not what they should be! I think of the many among us who work for change locally: scholars and policy-makers and social workers. We may not agree on the means by which change should come, but that does not keep us from naming the problems of inequality and injustice, and working to change their root causes. Sometimes the old and the familiar really does have to be torn down in order to make room for the new.
This past summer, I spent what I’m sure was the longest and hottest week of my life at the annual Burning Man arts festival. Just to be clear—for those of you who don’t know me well—that’s not my usual jam. I’m not one to dress up in the 21st century equivalent of camel’s hair and eat locusts and wild honey in order to post my cultural adventures to Instagram. And most people wouldn’t think of Burning Man as being anything like the wilderness of Judea where John came baptizing. They’re not wrong: Burning Man is a world away, located on the dry bed of an ancient inland sea, which is why it’s informally called The Playa.
There’s plenty of shenanigans on The Playa, but there’s also a deep spiritual longing in the community that gathers there. You might say that hope for the kingdom of heaven flows through the unforgiving Nevada desert, like a barely-remembered Jordan river. My son Aaron has an art project called the “Talk to God” phone at Burning Man, where largely unchurched people line up at an old-school phone booth to express what can only be described as prayers. And people come from all over the world to build these fantastic installations: beautiful pieces of art and architecture, including infamous man and the temple that you may have seen pictures of. And then at the end of the week, they burn them all.
For the longest time, I couldn’t understand the burning part of Burning Man. I even shed a tear over one of sacrificial structures I visited in the Playa last summer. It was this lovingly handcrafted multistory shrine to the sun that did beautiful things with lenses and light… until it was consumed in flame at the end of the week. It seemed like such a loss of artistry and craftsmanship. But I’ve come to understand my grief as shortsighted. My imagination was not big enough to accommodate the new things—new artists, new art installations, entirely new creation—that fire makes room for.
Human-made monuments—and institutions and orders of ministry—do not last forever. In Biblical perspective, they’re really not supposed to. At their best, they provide a temporary shelter for what is beautiful and the sacred, but God… well, God is always on the move. So the sooner we get accustomed to the loss of antiquated structures, the faster we’ll be able to welcome what’s new and most needed right now. That is to say, there is hope to be found in both what is being torn down and what is being made new. But in order to share in that God-given hope, we have to forgo our natural resistance to loss and change. We may even have to repent of it.
This is nowhere more true than in church, especially in our post-COVID church. Things are different—we all know this—and God’s eternal Advent promise is that they will be made new. But we won’t be able to recognize and live into that newness unless we can let go of our longing for the old to come back. As a friend recently said, Jesus is surely returning, but the 1950’s are not. Or perhaps it’s more faithful to John the Baptist to say that the 1950’s are not coming back, but Jesus is. Coming back. Perhaps without parades or pomp or even without priests, but Jesus is always coming back. So stay awake, friends, forgo the familiar, and be open to the new that we have to imagine together with God. Because the prophetic word to the faithful is this: the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.
