Preached on the Second Sunday of Advent (Year B), December 10, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by the Reverend Stephen Crippen.
Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8
St John the Baptist drinking water from a spring, by Guercino
Turn.
Turn!
Turn around. Go back. Take yourself off this path. This way lies destruction, even death. This is not the path of life.
Turn from the path of anxiety, the path of depression, the path of despair. On this path, you are likely to throw up your hands in helpless exasperation. On this path, you will read about war, seemingly endless war, and you will start to feel numb. The news will stop informing you for action, and simply dull you into defeatism, into complacency, and finally into quiet collusion with the very forces of dreadful violence that you once found so outrageous. Turn from this path. This is not the path of life.
Turn toward a better path, a lively path, a verdant and hopeful highway, a rising and royal road. On the better path, you don’t stop reading the news or listening to others, but you listen for insight, you search for solutions, and yes it has become something of a cliché, but you look for the helpers. On this better path, you understand that anger and anxiety are helpful emotions, but only when they are acute. When they become chronic, they lead you back onto the dreadful path. So pace yourself; breathe; embrace and give voice to your good and righteous anger, but do not let it destroy good things, or good people; clasp the hand of another person, even a bitter enemy; and remind yourself that few good things have been accomplished by one person alone.
When it rains in Seattle so relentlessly, I run on an absurd and literal “path” that is not a path, really, as much as a human-sized hamster wheel: I run indoors, warm and dry, on a treadmill. But even on that bizarre machine, even there, I can ride the waves of my emotions, and even there, the metaphor of “path” or “Way” — a metaphor beloved of the prophet Isaiah — still goes to work on me. As I run on the treadmill, running and running but never getting anywhere, I notice my progress on the path. I notice that my pace quickens unwisely when I am upset, and my footfalls are more aggressive (and harder on my knees) when I am angry. I notice that if I am sad that day, or fruitlessly anxious, I get sluggish, and my feet start to scrape each other.
But then I notice once again that my treadmill is located in a small gym crammed with ten other treadmills, and that means I have friends. I am not alone. Now, I also confess that, due to my own personality that was forged in a large family, these companions on their nearby hamster wheels inevitably become my competitors. But even when I am competing against a complete stranger, running flat out just so that I can edge ahead of her in mileage, heart rate, or some other absurd metric, even then, I feel better knowing that I am not alone.
And these friends remind me, in turn, of a more subtle drawback of the dreadful path, a problem that we might not easily notice, because when we’re on that awful path, we’re usually preoccupied by all of our deep, and deeply miserable, feelings. On the path of death, we might not realize it at first, but we have no neighbors. Others may be on the path, but they’re always up ahead, over the next hill; or they’re always lagging far behind, at best a dot in the dust of our own wake. The Anglican writer C.S. Lewis imagines hell as a vast, lonely, gray town: vast because nobody in hell can stand to have neighbors, so everyone builds their hellish little house miles away from the nearest person.
And yet, from the perspective of heaven, that whole gray town of hell is no bigger than a speck, a tiny, nearly microscopic smudge of gloom at the far edge of God’s lush Paradise, where hordes of pilgrims climb the mountains together, rejoicing, as the sun is about to rise.
Oh, do not take up residence in that dull, tiny-yet-vast, hellish gray town! Turn. Turn! Turn around. Go back. Take yourself off that path. That way lies destruction, even death. That is not the path of life. Turn back toward Paradise. Turn back toward God’s snow-capped mountains.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen to John the Baptizer, the forerunner, the cousin of Jesus of Nazareth who bears on his rough shoulders the vocation of the prophet Isaiah. John calls out — or maybe screams out — a dreadful warning to turn, to turn around, to turn away from the path of death and destruction. I encourage you to listen to John, but first you may have to work out where he is in relation to you. He may not immediately be easy to identify.
John comes to you from the “wilderness,” the wild land that stands beyond whatever you perceive as your safe civilization. John is a wisdom source from somewhere just outside your comfort zone, somewhere beyond your area of expertise, somewhere you feel awkward, or frightened, or helpless.
Speaking only for myself, I have noticed a couple of these wilderness zones in recent weeks, encroaching on my consciousness. When she learned that my father died, a friend of mine texted, quite gently and in an authentically lovely way, a grim but empathetic message. She said, “Welcome to the club.” She was referring to my new status as a middle-aged adult whose parents have both died. I had shared with this friend in past years about the deep pain she and I had suffered when our mothers had died, but when her father then died some years later, I did not notice or appreciate how, for my friend, one plus one equals wilderness: one parent dies, then the other parent dies, and you found yourself in a brand-new experience of disorientation and discomfort. On top of your sweet grief for each parent’s departure from your earthly life, you perceive a new layer of existential anxiety. It is still early for me: my father has only been gone a little over a week; but I think I am slowly beginning to discover this wilderness for myself.
John the Baptizer may appear in that wilderness, for me. If so, I can hear him saying, “Turn! Turn from all that would isolate you further, or delude you into thinking that nobody else understands what you’re feeling. Turn from easy entitlement that could lead you to harm others by wallowing in your grief, or denying your grief. Turn back. Turn toward life.”
But all of this is happening while I wrestle in another wilderness these days, one where I have found a few of you, too. The war in the Land of the Holy One has opened new fissures in what I had casually assumed were solid rocks. This is true for many people in many walks — on many paths — of life. College students and faculties are grappling with new dilemmas about free speech and campus security as protests get intense, and tempers flare. Trust is fraying between lifelong friends, between neighbors who had marched together for the same causes, between people of good conscience who find themselves on opposite sides of a terrible line in the sand.
If you are in this wilderness, listen for John the Baptizer. “Turn!” he cries out to you. “Turn back! Turn from all that would isolate you further, or delude you into thinking that nobody else understands what you’re feeling. Turn from easy entitlement that could lead you to harm others by indulging only your own perspective, or deciding self-righteously who is good and who is evil. Turn back. Turn toward life.”
Now, please understand: John the Baptizer is no pollyanna. Nobody who tells the truth will try to sell you on a path of life that contains no pain, no anguish, no anxiety. If I turn from the dreadful path and embrace my friend who, like me, has lost both of her parents, I will still be left with deep grief for my mother, and for my daddy; and I will still slowly — ever so slowly — take my place as a member of the oldest living generation. And if I resist easy answers and futile fights, and delve more deeply into the vexing dilemmas of a terrible war, I will most certainly be choosing to enter into conflict. We preach Christ crucified: our faith is not a picnic in the park.
But I am not alone. You are not alone. On the path of life, we enjoy the embrace of Christ when we break bread alongside one another. On the path of life, you will often feel sorrow and fear, but mercy and truth will meet together; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. On the path of life, your heart will be riven by conflict, but righteousness shall go before you, and peace shall be a pathway for your feet.