Homily for the Second
Sunday of Advent 4 December 2016
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector
“The voice of one crying out in the
wilderness.” Matthew 3:3
What if we were
to have a “close encounter of the third kind”?
What if, as the 60s
cavalcade of schlock blares, “Mars Needs Women”?
The stuff of
sci-fi: “What if?”
But in ‘Tapestry,’
rated among the top 5 episodes of the seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, you have a “what-if” personal drama ─ a riff on “the road not taken” ─ wrapped in the requisite futuristic “what if”
bells and whistles of wormholes and warp drives.
Picture this:
Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Federation Starship Enterprise, takes a direct phaser hit to his heart ─ his artificial
heart. He dies and awakes in just what might be the after-life, only to be
greeted by his perennial antagonist, the omnipotent god-of-sorts Q.
How did Picard
acquire an artificial heart? The unintended consequence of a bar brawl decades
before, when he and two of his fellow cadets unadvisedly took on a trio of aliens:
the thuggish Nausicaans.
Nausicaans: Literally,
head-and-shoulders-above the human cadets. They’re menacing, confrontational,
cheating, overtly racist, big-mouthed, and misogynist (they threaten to
sexually assault the female cadet in the group).
Bottomline: The Nausicaans
are bullies. Armed bullies.
In the scuffle,
one impales Picard with a jagged Nausicaan blade right through his heart. Jump
to triage and a new, artificial heart for Picard.
But that was
then, this is now. A natural heart, Q points out, would have survived the
blast. Consequently, Q provides the now quite-dead Picard with the “what if” opportunity
to rewrite his history, to write-over the bar brawl. Only this time, make peace,
make nice, stand down. Q’s pitch? Appeasement is the way to keep your heart,
not resistance.
And that’s the
route Picard 2.0 takes: appeasement. The upshot? He never becomes captain of
the Enterprise … just a dead-end junior officer majoring in mediocrity. Q
concludes that the revised Picard “learned to play it safe. And he never, ever,
got noticed by anyone.”
Picard’s reaction?
“I can’t live out my days as that person. That
man is bereft of passion and imagination. That is not who I am!”
How does the
episode resolve? No spoilers, except to note Picard’s admission. “There are
many parts of my youth that I’m not proud of,” he says, “loose threads. But
when I pulled on one of those threads, it unraveled the tapestry of my life.”
The tapestry of a
life, with its threads of recklessness, risk, and resistance. It’s a story that,
in its basic contours, is the story of John the Baptist.
That’s because
John is reckless. He bets on risk. He resists by standing up to bullies, chief
among them his archnemesis, Herod Antipas. John takes on the corruption of the
top one percent that fattens the “haves” and damns the “have-nots.” Up and down
the economic ladder, John calls out behaviors that treat neighbors as
throw-away objects.
Read: John’s
project is to create a dwelling-place, a nation, a planet fit for God: God with
us … right here … among us … neighbor-to-neighbor … neighbor-to-God …
God-as-neighbor.
But that’s so far
from the way things stand, John digs in his heels … with calamitous consequences.
Herod jails him in the bowels of his fortress palace, where John is destined to
be eliminated as an “enemy of the people.”
As forerunner of
the Messiah ─ as herald of God’s New Order ─ this is not the end John has been risking
life and limb for. And Jesus doesn’t appear to be the street brawler John has
been paving the way for.
It gets to the point
that skeptical ─ highly
skeptical ─ John (in Herod's dungeon) sends emissaries to the considerably kinder
and gentler Jesus with the challenge: “Are you the Messiah we’ve been expecting or
not?” Unspoken message? “The evidence indicates you’re not.”
It’s all the
language of disappointment and the posture of despair. And ─ Q or no Q ─ it’s not hard to
imagine that, imprisoned and with no exit in sight, John might conjure up “what
if” shades of John the Baptist 2.0. The one who plays it safe … whose head
doesn’t end up on a platter … whose dead eyes don’t stare accusingly at his
gloating tormentors … the do-over John, who doesn’t get noticed … doesn’t
resist … the forerunner who doesn’t run before … the preparer who doesn’t
prepare the way … the voice that doesn’t cry out in the wilderness or anywhere else.
“What if” result?
No advent of God’s reign, because resistance itself is its first sign.
Meaning: Appeasement
has consequences. Pull on one of the loose threads of John’s real life ─ his recklessness, his risk and resistance ─ and what happens? Not much.
And that’s a
problem, because then the tapestry of John’s life unravels. The tapestry of
God’s kingdom unravels. And we’re left with a question: Without John ─ the predictably menacing John that we have
come to know as John the Baptist ─ would Jesus be possible?
That’s because,
if we’re in the business of God’s kingdom ─ if we’re in Jesus’ business ─ we have to be willing, like John, to court what Georgia Congressman and
civil rights pioneer John Lewis calls “necessary trouble.”
Pointing, then,
to a factoid. We are followers of Jesus, shaped by the tradition of John. The
thread of resistance is woven ─ without apology and by design ─ into the tapestry
of the faith we claim. And now, more than
ever ─ as in John’s day ─ now is our
time to resist.
Because it is not
who we are to allow the twisted faces of bigotry against our Muslim neighbors …
the rants of racists ... the violence of white supremacists … the "America First" hostility toward immigrants in our midst … the homophobic “religious liberty”
(so-called) of the evangelical right … it is not who we are to allow these threats to God’s kingdom to become the “threads of normal” enabled by our
appeasement.
For Picard … for
John the Baptist … for each of us, then, to consider this hour: What “necessary
trouble” are we being called to court?
In other words, knowing that “not every battle can be won, but every battle
must be waged,” what if our moment has come?
What if our moment has come to resist?
What if?
Amen.