John the Baptist in despair | a sermon

A sermon by Jamie Howison for the 3rd Sunday in Advent

Contrary to what someone might have told you on the day that you realized you were meant to follow Jesus, the life of faith isn’t always a straight or easy road. Maybe you’re someone who had a powerful moment of coming to faith—a conversion experience of some form or another—and in that moment and over the initial days and months of this Christian faith it was easy to think that it really was now all startlingly clear. Or maybe you grew up in the faith and never really didn’t believe, but then there was a point along the way where you really came to own it for yourself? That was more my story, and I well remember just how good it all felt to embrace my identity as one of Jesus’s own people.

It can be exciting and invigorating to discover that one truly belongs to Christ’s Body. There’s a sense of meaning, purpose, and security, right? No need to fear anything anymore, because in life and in death I am held safe in his presence. And there is a lot of truth in that sense of being utterly safe. In his landmark book Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace, Robert Farrar Capon caps off both the long opening parable of the book and the searching closing section with a line from Paul’s epistle to the Romans: “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1) Now Capon’s book is anything but superficially rosy, as he plunges the reader into some of the rather deep messes and morasses of life, and yet—and this is very typical of all of Capon’s thought—in the end he throws everything back on the heft of being “in Christ Jesus.”

That’s “the outrage of grace,” you see, and to be clear, I’m utterly with him on that!

But you know, along the way the terrain can change, sometimes without us quite noticing it until it feels stunningly late. In this reading from the prophet Isaiah, we hear those familiar Advent words of promise:

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
   and streams in the desert;
the burning sand shall become a pool

But what about those times when it feels like the streams in the desert have begun to dry up, with the pool of water returning to dry, hot sand? It happens. It truly does. Sometimes it happens ever so slowly, without us realizing that a deep aridity has settled into our spiritual life, and sometimes it is occasioned by a crisis, but either way the deep confidence and secure joy of an earlier faith seem to fall off to the side.

Maybe I’ve been putting too much stock into something that isn’t going to deliver, we might wonder, or maybe I’ve just been chasing some elusive fox down the wrong trail in the woods. Or maybe I’ve lost my way in those woods, and now as the darkness falls it is hard to sort out which way home lies. That can be a terrifying thought, and particularly if one has convinced oneself that being a Christian is a thinly personal thing, and not something shared in community; in the Body.

For anyone who has been connected here since 2016, you will remember the days that I discovered I was lost in the woods. The marriage I thought was going to last into old age was gone— abruptly and painfully gone—and I felt lost. Oh, I didn’t stop praying, and in fact if anything I prayed more. But that prayer alone—and I mean praying alone, on my own—wasn’t enough. I needed to reach out to friends, because I needed them with me each and every evening of that long, hard summer. I needed friends to listen, friends to pray, friends to slow down my misguided thinking, friends just to be with me.

And yet there was one other grace moment; something that spoke to me of Robert Capon’s “outrage of grace.” Let me read to you my description of that grace, from my little book, A Kind of Solitude:

Along with the remarkable support offered by friends, family, and the church community, there were other small graces that summer. The house had a lovely screened back porch that overlooked a landscaped yard filled with perennials, a pond, beautiful old shade trees, and a large patio made with reclaimed brick. That porch had long been my favorite place to read, write, and simply “be,” and over those months it became the very safest of spaces. There were three different kinds of lilacs in the yard, each of which had different cycles for blooming, which meant that there were flowering lilacs from the second week of May right through to late June. One day in the middle of August as I walked through the side yard, I noticed a single purple bloom on one of the lilac bushes. In August? Lilacs don’t bloom in August. And as that bloom began to fade, another one appeared, and then a third, and I cherished each one as a little consolation. I’m sure that a botanist would be able to explain why it is lilac bushes occasionally put out a few blooms in August, but I actually didn’t much care. That summer it was a three-fold gift, utterly gratuitous in the best sense of that word. Each time I walked that path through the side yard, I offered a prayer of thanks for the small graces. (A Kind of Solitude, Resource Publications, 2021)

When things become hard, when faith seems to be slipping, when life throws us an unexpected crisis we need one another in this Body of Christ, and we can be sustained by such small, simple graces. It simply is the way.

Well, this all came to mind for me when I read the gospel appointed for this evening, which opens with this picture of John the Baptist.

When John the Baptist heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to Jesus, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’

John is now in prison, having shouted out once too often how King Herod was morally corrupt and in violation of the torah for having married Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife while Philip was still very much alive. That prison would have been dank and bleak, and if Herod didn’t just execute him John probably would have died there of some disease or another. Occasionally Herod would call for John to be brought out his cell, because, as Mark puts it, “When Herod heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him.” (Mark 6:20)

So there’s poor John, who had been so vigorously clear in his message out in the desert—“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals”—now languishing in prison, being hauled out for Herod’s entertainment, and wondering if he’d maybe been wrong about Jesus. That’s a hard, dark night of the soul, if ever there was one.

Looking at John’s disciples, Jesus answered with a stunning sort of clarity:

Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.

And here Frederick Buechner comments,

Nobody knows how John reacted when his disciples came back with Jesus’ message, but maybe he remembered how he had felt that day when he’d first seen him heading toward him through the tall grass along the riverbank and how his heart had skipped a beat when he heard himself say, “Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world” (John 1:29), and maybe after he remembered all that and put it together with what they'd told him about the deadbeats [being turned around] and [the lame freed] from their aluminum walkers, John decided he must have been right the first time. (Buechner, Beyond Words)

In short, maybe those words of Jesus carried back to his prison cell by his disciples were enough, such that when he finally faced his own death at the hands of Herod, they couldn’t quite take the light from his face. John needed the reassurance of Jesus, and he needed his own disciples to carry his question for him. I suspect he also needed them to return bearing not only Jesus’ words, but also coming with compassion and friendship for a mentor who was suffering.

If this story tells us anything, it tells us we need one another, particularly in those hardest of times. And we need to catch a glimpse of Jesus, in his healing, compassionate, sight-restoring, death-defeating promised presence.

And occasionally, a lilac tree blooming months out of season doesn’t hurt either.

“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.”