Sermon for the Third Sunday in Advent
“What went ye out for to see?”
Jesus asks with threefold intensity, “what went ye out for to see?” He is speaking about John the Baptist, one of the outstanding figures of the landscape of Advent. About him Jesus says he is “more than a prophet.” He is the one sent “to prepare the way of the Lord.” Advent is all about the preparations for Christ’s coming.
Yet what a strange and a beguiling figure John the Baptist is! Angels and bells, culturally and certainly biblically, often signal messages and warnings. We had occasion this week past to bury Bert Galley, the long-standing and faithful bell-ringer of Christ Church for so many, many years. Yet, angels and bells, as it were, are here wrapped in “camel’s hair with a girdle of leather about his waist and eating locusts and wild honey”. For such is the rather forbidding picture which we are given of John the Baptist, the great prophet of the Advent of Christ. He is vox clamatis in deserto, a voice crying in the wilderness, even more a voice crying from prison, “art thou he that should come or do we look for another?” Somehow the Advent message of John the Baptist has a powerful and poignant intensity at the point where he is questioning his own life and ministry.
What is that life and ministry? He came, as Mark tells us, “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” He came, as John tells us, teaching that “I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.” His whole ministry is a ministry of deference: “he must increase, but I must decrease”, he says about Christ and himself. He is not the Christ. He is not the forgiveness of sins. But he is the essential preparation for the coming of Christ whom he identifies to us as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” We are, it seems, totally caught up in the motions and the mystery of God coming to us, in part through the ministry of John the Baptist.
He is the counter to the soft indulgence and easy complacency of our world and day, a world defined by material comforts and sensual pleasures or at least a desire for such things. A figure of ascetic rigour, he is defined by a fierce and uncompromising commitment to the things of the spirit, a figure of the desert who challenges us about the meaning and direction of our human lives. What do we live for? For our creaturely comforts? Or for the righteousness of God which perfects and gives meaning to our human lives? There is little that is comforting, perhaps, about John the Baptist in our modern sense of comfort. There is everything that is strengthening for us, perhaps, in his message; the older sense of comfort as strengthening us in the things that really matter.
