Fr. Tommy Thompson
Advent 2B 2017
December 10, 2017In the Name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
On this second Sunday of advent, the Gospel of Mark
calls us to come to grips with the great figure of John the Baptist. It’s really impossible to grasp the
significance of Jesus without passing through the cleansing bath of John the
Baptist.
John made his appearance in the desert of Judea. What is it about deserts in the bible
anyway? Moses spends years in the desert
before taking up his work...Elijah sojourns in a deserted place at a crisis
point in his ministry...of course the Israelites have to pass through the
desert forty years on the way to the promised land. Jesus himself spends forty days in the desert
before beginning his public ministry.
And throughout Christian history monks and other deeply spiritual and
committed Christians have secluded themselves in caves and primitive shelters
of the desert.
What is it about deserts?
Well they’re places of simplicity and poverty...where
everything is stripped down to the basics...places where distractions and
attachments are eliminated. Both of
those are important: distractions and attachments...because when distractions
and attachments are eliminated or at least limited, we hear the voice of God
calling.
You know, if we are honest with one another, much of
our lives are taken up by diversions or distractions....we are preoccupied with
so many things...only when those things are set aside, do the really important
things emerge.
Attachments: wealth, power, pleasure, honor...they are
shouting at us, luring us, tempting us all the time.
What is God saying?
What does God want?
Sometimes we need to go into a silent and deserted
place to hear. A place where the
distractions and attachments are set aside.
That’s why spiritual people have an instinct for the desert.
Advent for us is a kind of desert time...we are
preparing ourselves for the coming of Christ.
So we pray, we fast, we are called to simplify life. And this is so difficult and so radically
different than the culture around us. In
the world around us, the run up to Christmas is a time of enormous distraction,
where the attachments of wealth, honor, pleasure, and power are put before us
as much as ever before...
We are meant to strip ourselves down during advent...
So let us do that even now...let us quieten ourselves
so that we might hear what the prophet says in that quiet desert place void of
distractions and attractions. silence.
And what do we hear?
repent...reform your lives...it
cuts to the heart of all of us..because we all know our lives are not where
they should be...the quality of love that is supposed to be within us...i mean
a complete absolute self-forgetting love...its not there and we know it...we’ve
all fallen into patterns of self-absorption, greed, and attachment; So out of
the desert the Baptists’ voice cries...out of that place of clarification and
simplification come the words “reform your lives....repent...change.”
We all know it don’t we...if we go into the desert...if
we allow a stripping down...we know the voice that wells up from deep within
will have to be dealt with...the voice of God the Spirit.
The word “repent” here means “Go beyond the mind that
you have.” “Have your whole way of
perceiving the world transformed.” At
the most fundamental level, repentance means, “Stop thinking about your life as
your project.” And start thinking, “My life is not about me; My life belongs to
God and serves God’s purposes.”
You see, all of life’s distractions and attachments are
subservient to the basic position that “my life is all about me.” My life is a project of self-satisfaction...
John the Baptist calls us to turn around, to have a
complete change of mind, attitude, of thinking... “No my life is not about
me...my life is about God and God’s purposes.”
When true repentance happens, no longer do we care
about all the trivial matters we find ourselves complaining about all the
time...rather, a sense of purpose...mission...characterizes our lives...we
serve something so much greater than our own cause...and our lives become
characterized by gratitude and joy...not pettiness and complaint.
My life is not about me...it is about God. This is, truly, the call of John the Baptist.
In Mark’s Gospel, people were called to
repent...because what was happening was earth shaking...life
altering...something for which Israel and the world had been waiting to happen
for oh so long.
The text says, “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.”
The entire momentum of Jewish life was toward the holy
City and its temple. The temple, was the
dwelling place of God...where sacrifice was performed for the forgiveness of
sins...therefore you see what is going on here... a scene change is taking
place...an acknowledgement that something else is the case...a revolution was
underway...John was luring people away from the customary place of encounter...
Why? Because he was communicating to them that a new
and definitive place of encounter was arriving...in fact had already
arrived!
Everything temple represented: forgiveness,
reconciliation, union with God, instruction, judgment... was now fully
expressed in someone who was coming...someone who John was announcing.
And so we begin to understand some of the metaphors
John was using: “I am baptizing you with water, but someone who is coming after
me is mightier than I; he will baptize you with holy spirit and fire.”
Water baptism was a kind of cleansing...a preparation
for encounter with God. In the temple
you went through a special bath....a cleansing ritual to prepare you to
encounter the Lord. What John is telling
us is that “the one who is coming is so much more than another prophet who
speaks the Word of God. The one who is
coming is the Word of God! He’s
much more than a teacher who bears witness to the life of God...because He is
the life of God! And that’s why he can
“dip you” (that’s what baptism meant in the Greek...to “dip into”). This one can dip you into the very love of
God. In other words, “He can baptize you
in the Holy Spirit.”
What he is coming to do is to fill us up with the
divine life. He can set us on fire with
a whole new manner of existence. This is why they are coming out to the desert to be baptized by John. They are preparing for an encounter like
never before...they are preparing to encounter the fulfillment of temple -- the
long expected Day of YHWH...when the Lord would come to save His people.
And that’s just what we are preparing for – an
encounter with the incarnate God who came to us first in humility as a babe in
Bethlehem, who comes to us now as the risen and enthroned King of the cosmos
and who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
May our visit to the desert this day be the first of
many visits for the remainder of this advent season. May we prepare the way of the coming of the
Lord in our own hearts and most especially in community together so that when
the Lord does come, we may be gathered by God as citizens of the new heavens
and earth where wolf and lamb lie down together. And may the hospitable space that our lives
create for one another in grace, give the world a signpost of this new age even
now. Amen.
