Advent 2a 2025; 27 Dec.
Matt. 3:1-12; Jack Hardaway
GOD’S STAMPEDE
When I was a child we moved to the edge of, what was then, the suburbs of Greenville, where the subdivisions suddenly became pasture land and peach fields. There were old stores, old country gas stations, old farm houses and barns, collapsing share cropper homes.
Years later, when I was first ordained a priest, I was the assistant at a church in that same neighborhood, and there was still one large hunk of pastureland across from the parish. The old gas station on the corner was gone.
The pasture would become overgrown and periodically it would be tilled under. When that happened there was a stampede of wild life escaping from the bushwhacking and the tilling.
They would tumble across the street into the church yard, a surprising abundance of critters of all sizes: moles, voles, mice, rats, wood rats, possums, raccoons, fox, deer, even a weasel, black snakes, king snakes, garter snakes, copper heads fleeing the encroaching wrath, running and slithering across the road, making a run for the church.
I only witnessed it once, a suddenly bizarre wonder, all creation on the run, the peaceable kingdom making an exodus.
John the Baptist interrupts us today like a surprising stampede out of nowhere, suddenly bearing us down.
The last prophet of Israel.
Off the grid. Primitive. Fearless. Beholden to no one. Holding the powerful to account.
Proclaiming an urgent message of conversion.
In need of a haircut.
A truly shaggy man as St Jerome later declares.
Repent. Start life over. Have a change of mind, a change of knowing, know things differently.
Have a fruitful life that comes from seeing and knowing the world differently, that God is involved and that God is bringing everything to completion.
And that completeness is almost here.
Like a wild fire blowing across the world scaring up the snakes who don’t have that change of life, stampeding vipers.
The wrath to come.
The Advent of God’s judgement.
And that approaching fire is Jesus.
Not the baby Jesus of Christmas, but the Jesus who returns as judge, setting everything right side up, the judgement that restores, that suddenly sweeps across the world, that clears the threshing floor.
So be set free now, in preparation, in anticipation, in hope.
In Matthew’s Gospel what follows after this is the ministry of Jesus.
I think John was disappointed.
The beginning of Jesus ministry is the beginning of the judgement.
And what we get is love, love of neighbor, love of the enemy, healing, forgiveness, liberation from unclean spirits, sacrificial service for the poor, judging the powerful mostly by ignoring them, nothing there to pay attention to, it is too late for them. Ouch.
God’s kingdom is being made manifest through the broken, the rejected, the forgotten, the crucified.
Jesus walks onto the scene, and John probably wanted something more belligerent.
John never became a follower of Jesus. He proclaimed Jesus as the one renewing creation, bringing the purifying fire, but it was a fire that burned differently. John died never becoming a disciple. Some of John’s disciples became followers of Jesus, but not John, not the one who proclaimed to get ready for the Advent.
God is different than we thought, John must have wondered.
Baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire.
The image is that of life giving breath blowing an ember into flame.
A dim burning coal breathed upon, waking into flame shining in the dark.
Fanning the spark into life…
That kind of baptism.
Get ready. All creation is about to stampede.