But John did not want his hearers to emulate him. He did not call others into the desert to join him. That would have been the easier way out. John the Baptist wants people to listen to him, to hear his call and meet his challenge where they are. And that may be the harder thing to do.
Because if you try to meet his challenge almost immediately you discover problems. For example, John appears every year. Does that men every year God who sends the prophets wants us to go through a complete conversion of life, do an about-face, a 180 degree turn? If it does it is a very pessimistic outlook, because it means every year we slide so completely into the ruts of error and sin that we have to go through a total spiritual transfusion. That to me sounds like that melodramatic doomsday kind of Advent Bp. Andrew warned us about last week. Most of us may need to make an abrupt about face once or twice in a lifetime, but certainly not every year. John’s repentance, like Baptism, sounds like it is intended to be once and for all, not a repeatable sacrament like Confirmation (by the way I believe Confirmation is repeatable but I got that one from Bp. Grein, so I invite you to direct any questions, if you don’t believe, it at him).
But then again, every year I can indeed profit from a little adjustment. (Analogy with driving: how often do you change direction? Not just big turns of the wheel, you actually are changing direction constantly just to drive a straight line). Every Advent and every Lent, and every Sunday even when we have the General Confession, is an opportunity for self-examination and a re-directing of the work of art you make of your life.
Then there is the question of feeling sorry for sins. Repent seems to mean feeling sorry for sins. Maybe I don’t. I believe God prizes honesty more than remorse. In fact I believe that very often God would not want us wallowing in any such feeling. I believe that we are often driving strongly in a good direction, and should in fact rejoice. So what relevance can he have?
The problem is simply word choice. The word repentance is simply not a very faithful word for the word that the 3rd Gospel has here, which is metanoia. Repentance suggests reforming your life but it also suggests feeling sorry and guilty; metanoia just does not. It means something very strong: change your mind. Now I know people say "I’ve changed my mind" all the time–some people do it as a kind of daily practice. But what we really mean normally is “I have changed my opinion.” We have left our minds very much the same. Metanoia means it more literally: alter your mind, change the way you think. Not simply change your opinions, but change the way you reach opinions.
That may or may not involve sorrow. Either way, that is something stronger by far than simply mending one’s ways. Mending one’s mind might make it less likely that one would need to mend one’s ways. It would bring us closer to that blissful state the Collect asks for, to desire what God desires. To enjoy what is right: that’s Paradise. John after all is giving instructions for the Kingdom of Heaven.
Now the question remains. What should my metanoia involve? How shall I alter my mind? Or even better, why do I need this adjustment every year? Why do I have to keep adjusting my direction?
Luke borrows that great passage from the prophet about making a road for the Lord. The prophet was thinking about a return from the captivity in Babylon, but the Gospeller raises it to a new meaning. He turns the Prophet’s words into four great metaphors: let every valley be filled in, every mountain be leveled, every crooked way straightened, every rough road made smooth. If you were building a road through the wilderness, these are the things you actually would have to do. But imagine a road that leads into your soul, your life. That’s clearly what the Gospel invites us to do. What then are those four actions? There is a traditional answer to that question. And I believe the traditional answer resounds very strongly today. It will be painful to discover what our valleys and mountains and crooked ways and rough roads might be. But we can gather courage from the wisdom of the bravest of Saints, Athanasius: an unmasked demon is no longer dangerous.
The mountain is that has to be leveled is arrogance and pride. Imperial pride and arrogance are probably the worst dangers of all at this moment. Entitled to a level of luxury unknown to the Pharaohs of Egypt and the Sultans of Persia. Driving outsized automobiles, etc, etc. No one is an island, says the poet and priest John Donne, and this means that even though you may be the humblest of persons, self-effacing and shy, the fact is you live in a culture of arrogance. It is better by far to confess that: as Athanasius says, unmasked demons are not dangerous.
Filling in the valleys then becomes supplying what we lack – in the midst of luxury and abundance we are sorely and ironically lacking in a number of things. Metaphor: internet = communications. We all use it, it is enormously helpful. But I also notice it has like the television fifty years ago crippled the art of communication in person. And filling in the valleys has to do with what we used to call the sins of omission–things we should have done, things we should do, but do not. We should be doing much more than we are doing to care for others. The prophets from Jeremiah to John all say it: when pride is the obverse, neglect is the reverse. The poor, the orphan, the prisoner, and the stranger: these we should be caring for every day. Not to do so is the great sin of omission. A culture of indifference. It is painful to face, but a demon unmasked is no longer dangerous.
Straightening the crooked ways suggests one thing above all: honesty versus deceit. We inhabit a system of lies. I often ask people to notice how often they are lied to in the course of a day. How many advertisements contain lies? All of them, I suppose. You think that is trivial? We are saturated with advertising, everywhere we go, you cannot escape it. So we have lies plastered and blasted everywhere. Or ask yourself how much lying do you yourself do every single day. Lies got us into trouble with the whole world: the lie that I’m sure some of those who told it thought they were dong good with it. How often do you do that–imagine you are telling a lie for a good reason? Careful. Better confess that ours is a culture of deceit. An unmasked demon is no longer dangerous.
And the rough roads: what is rough in our culture and our lives? I am not by nature a very delicate person. But I believe we are becoming coarser and coarser. I further think that is just the surface symptom of a much deeper and more important problem. We are losing our regard and respect for one another. Courtesy in the past often misused, which is why it has been played down in recent decades–used for example as a way to preserve male superiority. But just because it was misused does not make it worthless. Courtesy at its core is just that surface expression of the inner regard we have for other human beings–seeking Christ in them. Our human world is quite rough today, much rougher than it has been in anyone’s living memory and that is dangerous. We need to smooth that road. Because ours is a culture of crudity. It is painful to confess it. But an unmasked demon is no longer dangerous.
A culture of arrogance, indifference, deceit, and coarseness. John the Baptist wants us to hear his challenge where we are–and that is where we are. I wish we could have cultural metanoia, and change direction 180 degrees: that, as Lewis says, is progress, when you’re headed the wrong way.
We can’t have that. But the good news is, we can experience metanoia. And for most everyone in this space, the turn should not be 180 degrees. Just a slight adjustment, and we find ourselves on the right path.
No, this is no time for sorrow, for feeling remorse. It is a time for hard work and joyful hope. That’s the great secret of the season. Look at calendar: this is not a penitential season. Some thought, trendy, softening of teaching when we did that. Not so, we were restoring something ancient, as usual. Advent began as a blend of two things. One was the joyful anticipation of Christmas in the western church. But the other – slightly different – was the preparation for baptism in the eastern church that took place on January 6, the great feast of the Epiphany. From that we get the hard work, the challenge about the way of the Lord , the teaching and the person of John the Baptist. From the other we get Baruch, the hope for Jerusalem restored, and beyond that, paradise regained.
If you retain any words at all today, retain these words from our first lesson. Take them home on the insert, learn them. For in this lesson Baruch the Prophet has taken the vision of Isaiah-Luke-John and transfigured it. The warnings become Good News; the Desert becomes the Kingdom of God.
