ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
Sermon preached by Fr. Gerald Beauchamp at Solemn Evensong and Benediction on the Third Sunday of Advent, 13th December 2009
Readings: Isaiah 35; Luke 1. 57-66
One of the things that made Shakespeare such a great dramatist was his ability to draw together the external world (nature and the seasons) and the internal world (feelings and moods). I'm thinking of Gloucester lamenting the reign of Richard III ('Now is the winter of our discontent'); and of Lear mad upon the heath during the raging thunderstorm. It's this correspondence of outer and inner that helps to give Shakespeare's plays their gravitas.
As with Shakespeare so with the Old Testament prophets: they too used the world around them to spell out their message. An overwhelming reality that everyone knew about was the desert. The Judean Desert is a harsh place: great walls of weathered rock hem in deep ravines. It's hot and dry by day and freezing cold by night. The wind can howl. The sand can be whipped up into a blinding fury. Not much lives. When Isaiah speaks of 'burning sand' and 'thirsty ground' people knew what he was talking about.
Isaiah also knew about the deserts of the human life, the waste that creates weakness: the feeble knees, the fearful heart, the blindness, the deafness and the lameness. The vulnerable and the sick were often on their own. Beggars were everywhere. Isaiah also knew that this was not how things should be. Not all the world was dried up. Not every person was disfigured. Even without his Israelite faith Isaiah's sense of justice and hope would have risen up within him but being rooted in a tradition that lauded God's workings in human history he was inspired to utter his profound belief that The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom.
For Isaiah God is a God of life not death. God is a God of flourishing not of withering. God is a God of abundance not of scarcity. So he looks forward to a time when the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped and the lame shall leap like a deer. Isaiah has a vision: a vision of how things are supposed to be and the path from the one to the other is to be to be 'obvious', 'easily recognised': A Highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way ... it shall be for God's people; no traveller, not even fools, shall go astray. This way will be safe (no lion shall be there). It will be a way of rejoicing: sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Isaiah was writing around eight centuries BC and we know from prophets who succeeded him that his utopia was unrealised (and still is). But his joyful, exuberant hope was remembered and treasured. All of us need a light in the darkness, a candle in hell. When things seem very bleak we need something to urge us forward, to draw us on. Isaiah's successors who wrote the latter parts of the book that bears his name never gave up despite the way in which Israel's cities were laid waste, her land plundered and her people exiled.
The prophetic voice seemed almost to die out a couple of centuries before the birth of Christ but it came back to Israel like a roaring lion in the person of John the Baptist. The freeing of his father's tongue at his naming seemed to be a foretaste of a tongue that would take the people by storm. His fearless preaching and his uncompromising way of life would leave their mark on his contemporaries. Here the church in its iconography points to an important paradox in the life of John the Baptist.
If you go into an Eastern Orthodox church and walk up the aisle towards the iconostasis separating the body of the church from the sanctuary you'll usually see from a distance what looks like a smudge on the ornate screen. The saints are depicted in a way that's highly stylised. They are decorously arranged: their robes immaculate and trimmed in gold. But John is always depicted wearing not soft raiment but a rough coat of camel hair. Nothing disguises his wild appearance and simple diet. Yet most icons of John depict majestic wings protruding from his shoulders. They seem very much at odds with who he was: this rough desert-dweller.
You don't have to go far to find the reason for giving him wings. John is described as a messenger by St Mark (1. 2). The Greek word is angelos which gives us the word 'angel'. John is 'God's angel' but he is far from the sort of angel that we tend to think about when he hear that word today. For us angels have become fantastical creatures. We know them from thousands of glittering pictures and stained-glass windows. John however told his audience a few home-truths. When he began baptizing as we heard in this morning's gospel he called the crowds (a) brood of vipers! He told them to Bear fruits worthy of repentance. He warned against self-justification: Do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'. (Luke 3. 7-8)
He went on to give some pretty straightforward teaching: 1'Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.' To the tax collectors he said 121'Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.' To the soldiers he said 'Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.' (Luke 3. 10-14). All this is a long way from gilded Christmas angels.
John's legacy didn't cease with his death. We know from the Acts of the Apostles that one Apollos of Alexandria who although otherwise well-versed in the Christian faith knew only the baptism of John. He was put right by that indefatigable duo Priscilla and Aquila (Acts 18. 24). It seems that a 'John the Baptist Church' continued well into the 6C AD appealing to those with a rigorist turn of mind and possibly paving the way for Islam. Where his voice was honoured within the church it was the monks of the desert who gave him pride of place. It was in the desert that monks battled against their demons and called upon the angels to help them. John's asceticism was an inspiration.
So what of John the Baptist for us, we who like soft raiment and would take up residence in king's houses if we could (cp Mt 11. 8); we who do not feel called to the desert? One way of answering that would be to wax lyrical about the deserts in our own lives and how these can be made to bloom. I fear, however that I'd soon start sounding like that spoof sermon so wonderfully preached by Alan Bennett at Beyond the Fringe
Life, you know, is rather like opening a tin of sardines. We all of us are looking for the key. And I wonder how many of you here tonight have wasted years of your lives looking behind the kitchen dressers of this life for that key. I know I have. Others think they've found the key, don't they? They roll back the lid of the sardine tin of life. They reveal the sardines-the riches of life-therein, and they get them out, and they enjoy them. But, you know, there's always a little bit in the corner you can't get out. I wonder is there a little bit in the corner of your life? I know there is in mine!
Better, I think to see John the Baptist as the one who draws the parameters, whose rough coat and angelic wings creates the frame within which we see the incarnation; and whose uncompromising message discloses to us the length, breadth and depth of God's concern for us. Catching something of that vision will draw together the inner and the outer. It makes us whole and makes us holy. Then we'll not shrink from one of Shakespeare's most famous challenges: 'O, what may man within him hide, Though angel on the outward side!' (Measure for Measure III ii)