Rushing towards Christmas ... An advent reflection.

This week I've been thinking about what it is we are preparing for in advent and what it means for us to repent.

This is based on my sermon from the Second Sunday in Advent, around Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 3:1-12. It begins with my attempt at how I think one of the Pharisees may have responded to John's words:

"He is exactly as the stories say: a wild figure wrapped in rough camel’s hair, a leather belt hanging crooked about his waist. His hair was uncut and tangled, and his beard looked as though it had never known a comb or oil. The wind caught the hem of his garment and blew dust and reeds against his bare legs as he stood in the shallow water, as one of the ancient prophets dragged bodily out of our Scriptures.

His voice was worse than his appearance, loud, raw. It carried across the water, and the crowd fell silent under it. When he saw us, he did not lower it. He lifted his arm, pointing, and cried out, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?”

The words struck like stones. People turned to look at us. US, the teachers of Israel, as though we were the unclean things crawling through the dust.

He spoke of fruit, of repentance, of an axe laid to the root of the trees. Behind him, the river moved steadily, and people stepped down into it, confessing their sins aloud as if this were some new kind of temple.

I do not know what he thinks repentance is. We know how to repent, fasting, prayer, almsgiving, returning again and again to the Law. Are these not fruits? He spoke as though being sons of Abraham were nothing. As though lineage, study, and discipline count for dust.

I wanted to despise him completely: the locust-eater, the wilderness fanatic, eyes burning out of a sun-darkened face. And yet, disturbingly, I could not dismiss him. There was a terrible clarity in him, like the old prophets rebuking kings.

Tonight, I wash my hands and repeat the prayers, but I still hear his voice in the wind, and I cannot tell whether it was merely the shout of a madman or the echo of God."

There's something here about John baptising people in the river Jordon. They've gone out to John at the Jordan, on the edge of the inhabited and cultivated lands. Once you cross the Jordan, you are heading into the Wilderness. This is where, when we read about the Exodus, the old identity of Israel had been stripped back. Where people were forced to rely on God for everything.

So, John was not just shouting on the edge of the desert. He was, in some ways, calling Israel back to the place where they first learnt how to be the people of God. It was also a place that was definitely not under the control of the Temple.

It is a place I don't think we spend enough time in. The wilderness is a really uncomfortable place to be. While there is a certain beauty there, it is also quite scary when you have to completely rely on someone else, on God, for everything.

So John is calling people back to the edge of the wilderness and calling on them to repent.

The Greek term metanoia used here for 'repent' denotes more than simply feeling sorry; it is a change of mind, a fundamental transformation in outlook, of the way we see ourselves and the world, and a new way of loving others and God. 

Repentance. I think, is something that is visible, that shows up in our choices, in our relationships, in the priorities we set ourselves as individuals, and as a community. And John's challenge to the Pharisees and Sadducees here not to rely on their heritage, or their status or on their religious observances echoes for us today. It's not enough for us simply to be in church on a Sunday, saying the right prayers in the right way at the right time, unless our lives also show something of that change in heart in the way we talk to our neighbours, or to a homeless person asking for help on the street.

If we were to look at the reading from Isaiah, we have a promised future depicted. It's a future with a promise of Hope, the stump of Jesse. With hope emerging from a place that looks ruined. I think if we were to rewrite this for England today, it might be the stump of a Sycamore tree. It is a reminder that God's not finished, even when we're looking at things, going, oh, that's dead and gone, that's finished, there's nothing more that can happen there and then a new shoot comes up from it. The ruler that's promised is completely different to the rulers of this world. Ruling with wisdom, justice and righteousness; judging with equity, especially for those who are the most vulnerable.

The next section of the Isaiah reading is either the world's worst or best petting zoo, with wolves in amongst the lambs, children playing with snakes and scorpions. A picture of some kind of universal peace that is difficult for us to imagine.

It's a healing of the world and a restoration. To what it should have been. So, when John calls people to repent, it's so that we become ready for that world. When repentance bears fruit. I think that fruit becomes the seed of the peaceful Kingdom promised in Isaiah.

Maybe our repentance is part of how God prepares the ground for Christ to come again.

We don't repent in order to earn the kingdom. There is nothing we can do. That will enable us to earn God's love. But we repent because that kingdom is already here. It's already coming among us, and God wants us to be part of it.

John stands in the wilderness and calls us to repent, not to shame us, but to wake us up.

Isaiah lifts our eyes and shows us the future God is bringing: a world of peace, justice, and restored relationships. Repentance, then, is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of it. As our lives are changed, as our hearts are turned, we begin to bear fruit, and that fruit is not just for ourselves. It becomes part of God’s healing of the world.

We are not blessed for our own comfort. We are blessed so that we might become a blessing, people through whom God’s peace, mercy, and justice can take root in our homes, our workplaces, our neighbourhoods.

In Advent, we are reminded that we are not meant to rush past the wilderness. Even as everything around urges us to hurry, to skip the waiting, to drown out the silence, to get to Christmas as fast as possible. But to listen for God's voice, God often speaks most clearly in the uncomfortable places: in the quiet, the longing, the spaces where we feel stretched and unsettled.

John did not preach in palaces or grand temples, but in the wilderness. And it is there, in the waiting, the discomfort, the honest silence, that God prepares hearts for what he is about to do.

So this Advent, resist the rush. Stay a while in the wilderness . Let God do the slow, necessary work of preparing our hearts.

Because we are called to live a love that looks more like sacrifice than shopping, more like giving than grabbing, and through that costly love, to become a blessing to the world God so loves.