Advent 2c 2024; 8 Dec.
Luke 3:1-6; Jack Hardaway
FERAL HOPE
John the Baptist and Mary the mother of Jesus, they are the two Advent Saints who embody the anticipation of God’s arrival.
They are both inhabited by the holy to deliver God’s presence into human history.
They are portrayed so differently, John a Wildman in the wasteland preaching hard truth, and Mary a young woman whose life is not her own, she is exchanged and on the move, compelled by forces beyond her control.
John preparing the road.
Mary preparing to be the mother.
The angels and arch angels quake and tremble before John and Mary, in awe and fear and reverence.
Three weeks of Advent we attend to John and Mary and their preparations.
Preparing for the Arrival.
Today we begin with John, who is inhabited by the word of God, who is in labor to deliver the message of preparation. Get ready to be set free.
You know that old children’s story by Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things are?
The young child, Max, gets sent to his room, which becomes a wild forest, then he hops on a boat and sails to where the wild things are, these crazy giant creatures, and they begin the wild rumpus through the wilderness, page after page of running, and jumping, and swinging through the wild.
John the Baptist would have fit right in with Max and the wild things as they went on their wild rumpus.
John was like an old beat up tomcat, who wandered without constraint, no telling when he might show up.
Feral and free.
He would have made people uneasy.
He wasn’t crazy.
He was just simply and truly free, free to love, free to trust, free to hope, without shame or restraint.
And he expected everyone to be that free, and he made the invitation and challenge to start over and begin again.
He made people uneasy.
And that got him in trouble.
People flocked to him, to be baptized, to repent, to be forgiven, to start again.
They were fed up with how their world worked, fed up with what they had become.
The world was owned, everyone was owned and controlled, and they lived in a land in distress and decline and abuse, people did horrible things to get by, they were owned by their abusers and they were owned by their complicity in that abuse.
Start over. Be free.
Only God can own you.
And what God owns becomes free.
Prepare for that.
John had to stay way out of the way, and people had to go way out the way to find him, to leave behind being owned.
In the wilderness, in the wasteland, John gathered with his followers and the fed up, those who came to start over.
He wasn’t a loner. His life was crowded with people.
He just wasn’t domesticated.
He was feral.
He had a feral hope, and he was in labor to deliver the message, the word of that hope.
It was beyond his control and it carried him.
Hope is an interesting thing.
It gets misused and dismissed.
“Hope isn’t a strategy”, is still a common response, mistaking denial for hope.
Strategy based on hope is very different than strategy based on fear.
They engineer different worlds.
A world of indifference and despair before the power of greed and violence. It is a world of fear inspiring strategies of owning or be owned. Devour as long as you can and then be devoured.
The politics of damnation.
A world pregnant with the hope of God’s kingdom is a world of strategies that set us free to love. The politics of redemption.
Prepare for that arrival.
Dream on that.
Build on that.
Pattern your lives on that.
Or else. That is John’s message. The word in the wilderness.
Expect opposition.
Those entitled to devouring will be disappointed to lose their meal.
Are you fed up with this world of devouring? What it has turned you into?
John invites us to begin again.
The Advent is coming.
Wild and feral hope invites, challenging and threatening our cozy slavery.
Join John the Baptist where the wild things are, begin the wild rumpus.