A sermon for St. John's Lutheran Church, Arlington and St. Sebald Lutheran Church, Strawberry Point
In the Mark year in the lectionary, Advent is contained exclusively in these 8 verses. The next verse after this passage reads: “In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” We fast-forward straight to adult Jesus baptized by John. In Mark’s Gospel, there is no baby in a manger, no shepherds in the fields, no kings bringing gifts; and before that, no Mary wondering what these things mean, no Elizabeth, no Joseph, no angels. There is no Christmas at all, and the entire season of Advent is distilled into this single passage about John, the baptizer in the wilderness.
Now you know why the Christmas pageant is never read from the Gospel of Mark.
So, while we have none of the Christmas story to contend with, we do have themes—whispers you might call them. We have John the Baptist, and we have this opening salvo from the book of Isaiah,
‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight”
One of the great loaded themes in the Bible is: “The wilderness.” Because the wilderness is meant to be scary and vast and dangerous, but the wilderness is also a place of retreat and respite. It is where Jesus goes to pray. It is where God speaks to Elijah in the silence. It is where Jacob wrestled with God and became Israel. It is also where the nation of Israel would wander for forty years. The wilderness is a place to fear and a place of curiosity. It still is today.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot lately, because I see a lot of fear in the world. Against these particular fears I also have found it is becoming increasingly hard to act courageously. Even if we can summon the requisite gumption to act courageously, we don’t even agree with our neighbors about what courage looks like anymore. Courage is still important in a world of fear, but when we are afraid, it is also not a simple solution. After all, if being courageous was as simple as choosing courage, you wouldn’t have been afraid in the first place!
No, the more critical opposing force in a world full of fears is what I believe to be the greatest spiritual gift—that is, the gift of curiosity. A mind that is curious will resist fear, because a curious person does not immediately distrust things that are unfamiliar. John the Baptist is a bit of a scary dude out in the wilderness, but a curious person may yet be capable of looking at John and pausing for a moment to think: “Hmm… I wonder what is happening here!” And that wonder is the bedrock for the Advent season. That wonder is the cure for fear.
In the Christmas story that I suspect most of you know well from Luke’s Gospel, the shepherds are met by the angels while tending their fields, and do you remember the first thing that the angels say? “Do not be afraid!” Once upon a time—in the book of Proverbs—we were told that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but with the coming of Jesus we are met with a common refrain, “Do not be afraid!” Again and again in the Gospels, he says it, “Fear not! Do not be afraid!” Because the time for fear has ended. Now is a time of wonder—and wonder begins with curiosity.
When I turn on the news—and, let’s be honest, I’m a millennial so I don’t turn on the news—I mean, I don’t even have live TV. I get my news is bite-sized content from apps and I see stories on social media—but news comes to me, as it does to you, in one way or another—and so much of this news is presented in a way to evoke fear. And, of course, I’m talking about polarized and politicized news channels, but I’m even talking about your run-of-the-mill middle-of-the-road news station, who will always cover wars and rarely cover bake sales, because one of those is must-see news. Because fear sells.
Fear hits us deep in our survival instincts. Worse, it’s much more complicated than it was a few thousand years ago when human beings only had to determine if that person or that animal constituted a threat. Today, we are constantly assessing whether that system, or that economy, or that political party or allegiance poses a threat to us. These are abstract things—things that folks who are yelling at one another about often cannot even define. For example, I have a master’s degree, a decade as a parish pastor, and several years as an executive in camping ministry—and in all of those fields I took some kind of anti-racism training—and I still cannot for the life of me tell you what critical race theory has to do with anything happening in any K-12 school in America. It’s an abstract fear that means a thousand different things to a thousand people, and it is the kind of thing that tears us apart from one another. You can’t solve that with courage.
It is so much easier to identify, “That wolf is a threat to my cows” than it is to say “that economic system is a threat to my existence,” which makes the fear all the more encompassing. We are so easily overwhelmed because we know deep-down that so many things are outside of our control, but the honest truth (and this isn’t going to make you feel better at first) is that they always were outside of our control. You and me can do nothing to stop wars on the other side of the world—we can do very little to impact violence closer to home. Our individual impact on our economy and politics is similarly small and seemingly insignificant. How can we influence an economy that creates so much disparity? How can we tackle large, complex problems that affect everybody—whether it be health care, or climate change, or energy needs, or inflation?
I suspect that if you’re anything like me, even hearing this stuff sends signals to your brain to be defensive, to perceive opposition as a threat, and to live in a state of fear. You’re probably wondering why the camp guy is coming here to preach this stuff during the time of year when we are avoiding all of it with Christmas lights and Amazon shopping lists. So, here’s the point: You are not wrong for reacting out of fear—you are trained to be this way—but you need to know something this day and every day—something that changes everything: You cannot sent to save the world, but there is one who already has. If you try to fix everything broken in the world, you will quickly get overwhelmed. You will perceive everything as a threat—fear will drive you. But—and this is a big BUT—you are also not free to ignore the problems of the world. Instead, what we all need is a mindset shift. Instead, as followers of Jesus Christ, we are to act simply, as the prophet Micah says, “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” And Micah can speak from experience! He wrote these words in an insanely unjust period in the history of Israel. He recognized that doing these things was going to fix the problem of injustice, but yet, they were what God called us to—and that is all we can ever do. And that is how we overcome our fears. As David Mitchell wrote in one of my favorite books, Cloud Atlas, “My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”
Therefore, in the spirit of John the Baptist and all the other weirdos in the Bible who spend time in the wilderness, I would like to suggest a better way forward in a world drenched in fear: Be curious. Live in wonder. Chance to see beauty in the thing that others tell you to fear.
And I can hear the devil’s advocates in my ear already, saying, “That’s not the real world. The real world will spit you out and stab you in the back.” And to them I say: Yeah, it might. Bad things do happen. Worst fears occasionally come true. But to give up curiosity for fear of what might happen means that fear has already won—it has already robbed you of the life you might have led—it has already taken from you the most essential thing to your humanity—it has robbed you of your joy. This is the central challenge of parenting—for those of you who are parents or grandparents—in order to let your child experience joy you have to allow them to live beyond your fears—and we have to acknowledge that living out there might kill them, whether because of their bad choices or mere happenstance—but to be a follower of Jesus is to understand that in those darkest possibilities, that is precisely where God lives. We have a God—who we know in Jesus Christ—who headed straight into death so that we need not live in fear any longer. Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?
When Jesus says, “Fear not!” all those times in the Gospels, it is not because he is promising you won’t get hurt. Rather, “fear not” because death no longer wins the day—death is in fact the only path to new life, the only way to resurrection—so what are we so afraid of?
So, I feel I have said quite enough about fear. Instead, I want to bring this home with more words about curiosity, because I represent a ministry in Ewalu that is absolutely drenched in the waters in curiosity—where kids explore the river bottom looking for fossils, and rocks, and other hints of what once was, and discovering new fish and invertebrates, plants, and other hints of what is, and then they look off into the vastness of space to consider what will be. Ewalu is a place where campers who are afraid of heights experience the exhilaration of leaping off a zipline, where names of trees are learned and owl calls discerned through the darkness, where the still spirit of God meets countless young people when it all slows down and they have time to sit under the trees or the open skies—to reflect. It all seems more possible out there. Of course, it does! The story of God comes alive under the open skies with expansive images not to be cloistered in stale studies but to be explored in nature.
Better still, Ewalu is just one place with fertile ground for curiosity. We can be curious wherever we are, though it does require something from us. In order to be curious, we must leave behind the mindset that tells us to go-go-go—the words we often say—that we are busy; that our time is so important; that what matters most is the quantity of things we accomplish is a day. Curiosity requires us to slow down and consider things deeply—to ask better questions—to get at the quality of things, not their quantity. To be curious about people is to see every individual as a reflection of the image of God, because that’s what they are.
This is hard work, because curiosity opens us to a certain level of vulnerability—whether we are curious about a person, or the natural world, or some particular thing that we love that few others seem to care about, curiosity inevitably leads us to question who we are, and that can be scary! But curiosity is also a great unifier in a world that is seeking to divide, because when you look more deeply at other people, you will also discover your common humanity. And your common humanity demands a common creator.
So, this Advent I beg you to slow down, as the season demands of us—when you have a million things to do and the world around you goes by in swirls of obligation, instead pay attention. Be curious. Wonder about others.
I’m going to close this morning with a story about a moth. That moth (the one in the picture on this blog post). I wonder if you realized it was a moth? There over the “a” in “Campsites”?
I took that picture four years ago on the 3rd week of a thru-hike of the Superior Hiking Trail, but the real story of that picture is how long it took me to realize that moth was there. I’d say it took me 5 minutes of looking to see what it really was, but the honest truth is that it took me at least three weeks. Because if I would have passed that sign on the trail on day one of my hike I would not have stopped to look at that moth. By day 22, my curiosity was only just starting to pay dividends. It took 22 days to see that moth. And it changed me. Not only to notice it, but to ask questions about it—to wonder about it. I mean, it’s just a moth. But so is anything if you are going to be cynical. You are just a person. This is just a life. John the Baptist was just a weirdo out in the woods. There’s plenty of fire here for cynics. Don’t be one. Instead, be on the lookout—for me, it was a moth, but for you, I wonder what it might be. What is that thing you will notice for the first time that will change you? I don’t know what it could be, but I bet it will be something unexpected and simple.
Like a baby in a manger.
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