Prophetic Forgiveness
John Wilkinson Third
Presbyterian Church
December 10, 2006
Malachi 3:1-4, Luke 3:1-6
I would encourage all of you, all of us, to be present for the
Advent Potluck and Ring & Sing. The meal will be great because
you will be furnishing it. The company will be great –
look all around. We will sing some very familiar carols of the
season and hear our bell ensembles offering wonderful holiday
music. This is for all ages and every constellation –
so please consider making Friday evening a part of your holiday
plans.
Additionally, you will note the stewardship update in this
morning’s bulletin. Thanks very much to those of you who
have already pledged. Please let this also be a reminder to
those of you who have yet to do so – perhaps the pledge
card got lost in the stack of Lands’ End catalogs or some
other thing. Nevertheless, we are deep in the process of planning
for the year 2007, and your pledges, made this morning or this
week, will help that process considerably. Again, thank you
for your support.
***
Legend has it that the working title of the Beatles’
classic song “Yesterday” was “Scrambled Eggs;”
it was only much later that Paul McCartney put words to a tune
and “Yesterday” was born.
When we established the December newsletter content several
weeks ago, this morning’s working title was as it is printed
in the bulletin. But things change, as do sermon titles. A new
title would have something to do with the notions of “prophetic”
and “wilderness,” though “Scrambled Eggs”
might work just as well.
The trigger for all this was a recent visit to the Memorial
Art Gallery – to which I would commend all of you –
to see the wonderful Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit. It is also
worth seeing the “My America” exhibit of Jewish-American
art that includes some wonderful older images of Rochester.
Georgia O’Keeffe, as you know, painted primarily two
things – flowers and desert scenes. Each evokes a kind
of colorful imaginative journey – as with any good art,
the longer one looks, the more one sees.
Born in the Midwest, O’Keeffe lived much of the first
half of her life in New York – Lake George and New York
City. In 1946, she moved full time to the very small town of
Abiquiu, New Mexico, actually, north of Abiquiu, to a place
called Ghost Ranch.
Not long after she moved to Ghost Ranch, the owner of the miles
and miles of property gave it all to the Presbyterian Church,
and for nearly four decades, the great artist co-habited very
happily with the Presbyterians, maintaining a fairly private
studio on the site and another house a few miles away from Ghost
Ranch.
O’Keeffe was a nominal Episcopalian and not much of a
church-goer. Every once in awhile she would share a meal with
the Ghost Ranch owners and interact every so often with Presbyterian
visitors. I like to think that the positive influence worked
both ways.
But even more so, I like to think that her extraordinary desert
vistas we see affect us in some deep way; that the wilderness
images O’Keeffe portrayed also portray something deeply
true about the human experience.
To visit Ghost Ranch and the high country of northern New Mexico
is breathtaking – literally and figuratively. It is exhilarating
and daunting, inspiring and potentially dangerous. Aware of
hydration matters, one drinks more water than one does typically,
does not hike alone, pays extra attention to what the sun can
do to you.
And yet the terrain, the colors, the shades of brown and green,
the colors of the desert blooms, all set against the blue of
the sky, is simply indescribable, though O’Keeffe did
a pretty fair job.
I remember an earlier experience, a college experience. I was
spending a quarter in Israel, studying biblical archeology,
studying the development of Judaism and Christianity, studying
the contemporary political situation. We were on a bus trip,
south of Jerusalem. We made a turn on a winding road, and there
it was – a desert wilderness so stunning in its beauty
and so vast and overwhelming, that the entire busload of college
students fell silent in awe.
One doesn’t have to look too hard to discover that the
story of God’s interaction with God’s people is
set against a wilderness backdrop. If all the Bible were transformed
into some kind of epic drama, the stage would look very much
like a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape.
What we now call the Middle East is that way anyway –
dry and rocky, without much water. The biblical witness uses
the wilderness setting itself to tell its most dramatic stories;
the Israelite people wandering 40 years in the wilderness before
coming to the Promised Land; Jesus being tempted by Satan for
40 days in the wilderness as he accepts his vocation and calling.
And this morning. In our journey to Bethlehem, John the Baptist
shows up. John, Jesus’ cousin, has accepted his own vocational
calling, that of a prophet. He would strike us as one of the
street-corner prophets we identified a week ago, and we might
give him as much attention as we do those purveyors of gloom
and doom.
John’s message, repeated time and time again to ever-growing
crowds was this: repent, change your ways, in order to receive
forgiveness from God.
Preparation is the key. John’s words echo words from
the 40th chapter of the book of Isaiah: “the voice of
one crying out in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord.”
And what such preparation looks like is a guidebook for how
we humans are to navigate and negotiate the wilderness, how
we are to live in the desert. The traveling is difficult, the
terrain rugged. So the preparations involve making the crooked
pathways straight and navigable, filling in the desert potholes,
smoothing out the bumps.
Isaiah first, and then John, used the familiar, terrifying
imagery of the wilderness to capture the essence of human life.
Another prophet, Malachi, did the same thing.
His call to preparation focuses on religious practice, and
his imagery evokes the process whereby a precious metal is refined
in fire, transformed from raw material to polished beauty.
Whether it is that purification or John’s repentance,
the process is similar – rugged and rigorous – and
the result as well – a transformed life.
Georgia O’Keeffe often portrayed animal bones in her
desert landscapes, cleansed by the strong wind and bleached
dazzling white by the sun. That is what is happening here –
an illustration that has its admitted shortcomings.
We live in our wildernesses: for Malachi it was religious practices,
for Isaiah it was political practices, for John it was individual
ethics. And we must enter that wilderness to prepare ourselves
for life on the other side. And we want to be able to do this
ourselves, though such thinking that we can has gotten us to
this point in the first place.
We need a messenger, a wilderness guide, to lead us through,
to journey with us, to welcome us to that new place.
We should not think the journey to be an easy one. “Who
can endure the day of his coming,” Malachi asks, in words
we’ve sung and said this morning. Who indeed?
And John’s persistent, insistent, in-your-face call to
repentance compels each one of to do with ourselves what Malachi
asks the community to do – and what all of us resist –
to look deeply inside our own hearts and spirits, to examine
closely the practices of the church, to determine what dross
needs refined out, what crooked things need straightened out,
what potholes need filled in to make traveling all the better.
I do not know what your wilderness is.
Perhaps it is some unmet expectation placed upon you by yourself
or someone else. Perhaps it is some relationship that once held
promise and now is fractured. Perhaps it is a pattern of living,
a lifestyle, a choice once made, or choices continually made.
Perhaps it is a broken spirit, or a broken body, or a broken
heart.
I do not know what your wilderness is.
Or what ours are collectively – a reliance on violence
and inequality to keep us apart, a belief in defining who we
are by what we do and how much we have, perhaps.
I do not know what your wilderness is, or what ours are.
But I do know this.
* I do know the promise there for us, and that the messenger
is waiting.
* I do know that as we present ourselves as raw material,
the rough preparation process will do its work on us and make
us ready.
* I do know that the wilderness can be navigated, but never
alone and never in isolation.
* I do know that the wilderness is not the destination, that
the destination is a promised land, flowing with milk and honey
and grace and love.
It may take a trip to New Mexico to appreciate fully the wilderness
of O’Keeffe’s imagination. My own wilderness, and
perhaps yours, is more local, white rather than brown, and more
than a few degrees cooler. We tasted it a bit this past week,
with more, certainly, to come.
But even then, I know that spring is on the way. For we are
in Advent.
Repentance and preparation. Difficult but necessary, the journey
through the wilderness, waiting for the messenger to lead us
through.
Rowan Williams writes:
“He will come like last leaf’s fall./ One night
when the November wind/ has flayed the trees to bone, and earth/
wakes choking on its mould,/ the soft shroud’s folding./
He will come like frost./ One morning when the shrinking earth/
opens on mist, to find itself/ arrested in the net/ of alien,
sword-set beauty./
He will come like dark./ One evening when the bursting red/
December sun draws up the sheet/ and penny-masks its eye to
yield/ the star-snowed fields of sky./
He will come, will come,/ will come like crying in the night,/
like blood, like breaking,/
as the earth writhes to toss him free./ He will come like child.”
(“Advent Calendar”)
May it be so.
Amen.
