The Abbot with the Push-broom

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Third Sunday of Advent, December 15, 2019 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

Poor John the Baptist. When we first encountered John he was living in the wilderness, making curious fashion choices, eating bugs dipped in honey, and proclaiming the coming of the Lord. “The ax is at the root of the tree!” he said, to remind us that Advent is a time when all of our accustomed ways of seeking the happiness for which we are created in all the wrong places, need to topple down in order that we might realize that we already are in possession of that which we seek. That old habit of looking “out there” for fulfillment through deeply-ingrained patterns of seeing and being in the world needs to fall down in order that the true peace, happiness, and joy for which our hearts are restless might sprout, and the desert bloom and blossom in the realization that God has been with us all along, buried in the field of the heart.

Now, however, John is having some doubts. He’s been locked up. And perhaps while he’s in solitary confinement he starts to have second thoughts. Maybe he was wrong about this Jesus fellow. Maybe he isn’t the Messiah after all. One thing is for certain, Jesus isn’t behaving like the camel-hair wearing ascetic that John expects him to be. Jesus is eating and drinking, hanging out with all sorts of unsavory characters, healing on the wrong days, not observing the Sabbath. John bet the house on this Jesus and now he’s wondering if he hasn’t been entirely mistaken. It must have been a deeply painful and troubling time in John’s life.

So much of the Gospel is about the cleansing of our perceptions, the cleansing of our hearts, so that we might come to see clearly, to see with the eye of love, the same eye with which God sees us. Everything that is not love, everything that blocks, or hinders, the Divine Light from shining in and through us, is gently, lovingly, over the course of lifetime, purged if we consent to God’s presence and action within us, if we consent to journeying into love, to letting love by grace open in our hearts like Isaiah’s crocus.

And even a holy man like John is not exempt from this process. It’s a familiar story. John is looking for one kind of Messiah, and Jesus comes and blows that picture to smithereens. Now, John is thrown into the furnace of doubt. Surely, that voice spoke from heaven at Jesus’ baptism, right? Or was I just hallucinating? I was certain that Jesus was the Messiah, but now, after hearing about all his shenanigans, I’m not so sure.

This happens to all of us at one point or other on the spiritual journey. Our religious, cultural, family, and ethnic conditioning slowly starts to come undone under the gentle workings of the Holy Spirit—those old ways of seeing and being get challenged, and the call is always to see those old, limiting pictures for what they are—ways of boxing up the mystery in an effort to maintain control and security—and to let them go, to surrender them, that God as God is (not how we’d like God to be) might live God’s life in and through us.

There’s no question that John’s a rather odd duck. He doesn’t mince his words—“You brood of vipers!” is hardly a way to win friends and influence people. And perhaps, just perhaps, what John is confronted with is his over-identification with asceticism as the primary way to holiness. Perhaps, as the person of Jesus rolls through his life up-ending all his previous certainties, perhaps, John’s overly rigid adherence to asceticism is what God is targeting for demolition, perhaps that’s the last tree that needs to come down for John, so that he might welcome the Messiah however he appears, indeed in any way all—including eating and drinking sharing boundless compassion and indiscriminate hospitality.

I remember I went for spiritual direction for the first time as a twenty-year old to this little priory—a nondescript little brick building that looked more like a tenement house than a religious order. Not to worry, I told myself, at least I had an appointment with the abbot, a man of prayer and wisdom who would surely set my life on the right course. When I got to the door there was a shabby-looking fellow in blue-jeans and a flannel shirt, a ballcap slouched sloppily on his head as if to disguise his wild, unkempt hair ineffectually prodding dust-bunnies across the tile floor.

I knocked at the door and he graciously let me in. “I’m here to see the Abbot,” I announced triumphantly. “Yes,” the little man replied leaning on his push broom. “My name is Tyler,” I continued. “Yes,” he said stooping down to scoop dust into the dustpan. “Would you mind taking me to him?” “Certainly,” the little man said. “In fact, here he is now!” as he wiped his hands on his thighs and stretched out a calloused hand. “Welcome!”

Do you see what happened? Do you see all the different pictures of how things should be that had to be seen through for me to actually see things are they really were? I had to get past the building’s shabby appearance. I had to not rush past the little man at the door in order to recognize the true encounter. And I had to drop my automatic, unconscious, assumption that someone dressed like custodian and pushing a broom couldn’t possibly be a person of prayer, let alone an Abbot. Wrong on every count! Score one for the brood of vipers, I suppose.

When Jesus asks the crowds, “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at?” he getting at the exact same thing. Be careful, he warns, that what you expect to see, your prejudices and preconditions, don’t blind you to what’s actually happening right under your nose! Soft robes and royal palaces might be what you have in mind, but be careful that you don’t trade the Kingdom of God for nice little picture in your head!

That’s why, on this Gaudete Sunday, we hear from the Blessed Virgin Mary as well. If John is emblematic of the ways we can crowd God out with our fixed ideas, Mary is an icon for us of radical receptivity, openness to possibility, willingness to consent to God’s presence and action in her life, even if she finds it rather hard to believe at first—“How can this be?” Mary’s “yes,” her fiat—“Let it be with me according to your word,”—is a sign for us of a basic Advent disposition—openness, receptivity, willingness as opposed to willfulness, consent and surrender that Christ might be born in her.

You see John’s not just talking to the crowds about Jesus coming. He’s talking to us. That wilderness? It’s the wilderness of the heart into which we rush out, away from the hustle and bustle of the city, away from all the ways we normally use to navigate and take our bearings so that we might encounter Jesus as he actually is. And Mary’s “Yes,” is our yes, our consent to God’s healing, transforming, and transfiguring presence in our lives, that Christ be born in us. As Angelus Silesius, the 17th century Catholic mystic and priest writes, “Christ could be born a thousand times in Bethlehem – but all in vain until He is born in me.”

Listening to some of the impeachment hearings this week I was struck by how so much of what passes for dialogue these days on both sides of the aisle in the corridors of power is simply shouting in an echo chamber. There is so little true encounter with the other. When we’re stuck in our point of view, we don’t see a person; we see a party, a political affiliation, a position on an issue, and the reality of Christ in that person, Christ as that person, fades behind a dull, predictable scrim of prejudices and preconceptions. The difference that Jesus makes, that John the Baptist makes, that the ever-blessed Virgin Mary makes it that they show us how we are trapped, and how, by grace, surrender, and a healthy dose of humility we, and our nation might be healed, and our wilderness start to blossom.

When we watch and pray in the season of Advent, we make a little room for our fancy ideas to come undone. Like a stirred-up mud-puddle, we let the dirt slowly settle, we let the busyness the planning, the flood-tide of Christmas momentum come to stillness. And in that stillness, in that silence, once the waters get a little more clear, we start to see. Christ the blue-jeaned, ballcapped Abbot with the pushbroom. Christ the one who comes eating and drinking. Christ the one who’s present when we stop telling him what to wear. Christ the one who’s waiting to be born in the manger of each of our hearts that we might be his hands and feet in the world.