Voice Crying in Wilderness

Voice in the Wilderness

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness” John 1.23

Advent is almost passed. Christmas is nearly here. The last penitents are queuing at the confessional. The purple vestments will soon rest from their labours until lent. The Christmas trees are in church but not yet bedecked. The shops are advertising their New Year Sales.

And on this last Sunday before the nativity of our Lord, that strange and uncomfortable cousin of our Lord comes crying in the wilderness. With prophetic vision he calls on us to understand rightly what we are about to enact.

With all the intuition of an artist, pursuing his lonely vocation from God, he draws men and women into the unimaginable purposes of God.

A former Dean of Westminster, Michael Mayne, in his latest book, Learning to Dance, (DLT, 2001) suggests three abilities of the artist:

*they can show us what the world discloses when we learn to give it our full attention
*they can remind us of the hidden power of the transcendent
*and they can enable us, in Auden’s phrase, ‘to break bread with the dead’

In other words, they use the natural world, the supernatural world and our collective memory; to transform the here and now. And if this is true of the work of artists as I think it is, then it is also true of the ministry of John the Baptist.

He calls people out of the cities and villages into the natural world - the wilderness. He is a man of nature, with his camel hair clothes, leather girdle and his diet of locusts and wild honey. John somehow realises that his message of repentance and heart religion is better heard in the grandeur of God’s raw world.

Landscape and barren waste, raging seas and mountains, flowers and stars, the river Jordan in which John’s disciples are baptised - all are charged with greater significance, and all disclose deity. In the words of St Paul:

“Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” (Rom 1.20)

And even the beauty of man-made things can point to their divine Initiator if we will listen to our hearts. Here is CS Lewis:

“The books or the beauty in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing... They are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” (The Weight of Glory, SPCK, 1954, p8)

Secondly John reminds his followers of the hidden power of the transcendent. Matthew tells us that the voice cried in the wilderness: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." (Matt 3.2)

The fabric of the temporal world is to be ripped apart by the birth of a baby. The virgin conceives; the supernatural invades the natural; the dawn from on high breaks among us and John declares he will baptise, not with the natural water, but with the transcendent fire of the Spirit.

Finally, John allows his disciples to break bread with the dead. Although what he preaches is in some ways new, he sees it only as a fulfilment of all that has gone before. The fullness of time has come and that spoken of by the prophets will surely come to pass.

This herald of Christ understands the present because he is soaked in the past. Sadly, the Christian voice is often a voice in the wilderness because so few in our society understand our roots. They do not break bread with the dead, they merely raid their tombs when it is convenient.

I read the little explanation on the back of a Celtic cross that hangs on my wall the other day. It is a copy from the original in St Kevin's Church Glendalough, in Ireland.

“A cross is the meeting of the horizontal and the vertical, yin and yang, feminine and masculine. In the Celtic cross the circle spins this union into infinity, into the cosmos, from the profane to the sacred.”

And there I was thinking it was something to do with Christ and Christianity! This is not breaking bread with the dead, it is breaking faith with the dead. Our collective histories and traditions are an essential part of responding appropriately to the present. It is impossible to appreciate where we are without acknowledging where we have been.

This is true at an individual level as well, and whether it’s sitting with friends and family this Christmas reminiscing, or telling our therapist, or reliving our past through Friendsreunited.com - these all enrich our present and help us to see more clearly where we really want to go.

Of course these three categories of Michael Mayne that we have been exploring in the ministry of John the Baptist, all find focus here at this altar in this mass.

These Holy Mysteries also

*show us what the world discloses when we learn to give it our full attention
*remind us of the hidden power of the transcendent
*and enable us, in Auden’s phrase, ‘to break bread with the dead’

In our Catholic tradition, the mass invites us to give our full attention to the physical world. It provokes our five senses of sight, taste, smell, touch and hearing. There is a physicality about the mass: about movement and eating, and gold and purple, and polyphony and pungency - which draws us beyond itself, and leaves us longing for Another Country and for the Beloved.

And then the Bread and the Wine remind us of the hidden power of the transcendent, mysteriously present in them - a power to transform us from mere animals scraping about the planet to survive; to spiritual beings made in the image of God; capable of beauty and heroism; of friendship and wonder.

And here we break bread with the dead: with the innumerable company of the saints all gathered around the altar. Our liturgy brings our collective memory of God’s saving acts into focus. It incorporates the truths grasped by those who have gone before us in the faith.

So we are called by God, in our turn, to follow John the Baptist as voices crying in the wilderness, always preparing the way for Christ, heralds of his coming; pointing men and women to the transcendence which is all around them if they will but turn and see; opening their hearts and minds to hear

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness”