This sermon was preached at Christ Episcopal Church Eureka on Sunday December 6, 2020.
Readings for the Second Sunday of Advent (Year B)
We have begun a new liturgical year; and with a new liturgical year comes a new Gospel. Last year (Year A), we read from the Gospel of Matthew (the most Jewish of the Gospels in which Jesus sounds most like the rabbis of the time). In Year C, we read from the Gospel of Luke, which emphasizes Christ’s role as a healer and liberator of the oppressed. In Year B (this year), we read from the Gospel of Mark, the shortest and likely the earliest of the four Gospels.
You might be wondering, “What about the Gospel of John in our three-year lectionary?” Well, don’t worry, we read quite a bit of John’s Gospel every year, during Lent and Easter, because the lectionary organizers believed that we need a healthy dose of John at least once a year. And because Mark’s Gospel is relatively short, we actually get to read a lot more of John this year to help fill in some of the gaps in Mark, which we begin reading today. And notice in our reading today how the author cuts right to the chase by bypassing the genealogy and birth and childhood of Jesus and bringing us straight into the desert wilderness where John the Baptizer is preparing the way for the Lord. This desert wilderness will remain an underlying theme throughout the Gospel of Mark.
An author and friend of mine Alexander John Shaia sees the four Gospels as each expressing and exploring the different stages of the hero’s journey. And he sees Mark’s Gospel as an expression of the inevitable trials that the hero must endure in order to grow and mature and receive the boon of spiritual wisdom. The question that Mark’s Gospel explores and invites us to ask is “How do we move through suffering?” How do we move through the deserts of life, the seasons of internal dryness, when God seems to be silent and when we feel empty and arid inside, like a desert?
According to legend, the traditional author of Mark’s Gospel (St. Mark) became the founder of the Coptic Orthodox Church, the church that began in the deserts of Egypt and still exists in deserts around the world today. Several years ago, I spent about a week at a Coptic Orthodox monastery in the Mojave Desert. We had to wake up at 4 AM each day for a three-hour long liturgy that involved standing and bowing and not much sitting at all. Their liturgy made me appreciate the Episcopal church liturgy a lot more. But they were trying to emulate the spiritual discipline of their founders: St. Mark as well as a group of radical ascetics from the fourth and fifth centuries known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. These were Christians who opted out of mainstream Christianity when it became the imperial religion of Rome and thus a tool of the empire. Christianity is still being misused in that way today. These ascetics lived countercultural lives in the silence and solitude of the Egyptian desert, praying and fasting all day and often all throughout the night. They were pious insomniacs. They emulated the eccentric behaviors of John the Baptist and Jesus himself who spent 40 days in the desert because they believed that God was waiting to be discovered in the silence of the wilderness.
According to Trappist monk Thomas Merton, “The Desert Fathers believed that the wilderness had been created as supremely valuable in the eyes of God precisely because it had no value to men. The wasteland was the land that could never be wasted by men because it offered them nothing. There was nothing to attract them. There was nothing to exploit. The desert was the region in which the Chosen People had wandered for [decades], cared for by God alone. They could have reached the Promised Land in a few months if they had travelled directly to it. God’s plan was that they should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone.”[1]
As we enter more deeply into a dark and difficult winter, facing the overwhelming tragedy of a global pandemic and the painful loneliness of isolation from family and friends, may we learn to love God in new ways in the midst of this wilderness, even when God seems to be silent or absent. Although we are struggling and grieving and often feel like we are wandering aimlessly, I hope that we can look back at this season as an idyllic time with God alone.
There are these pithy stories about the desert fathers and mothers that have been preserved over the centuries. They sound like stories of Zen masters who offer wisdom in sometimes curt and cryptic ways. The stories are laconic much like the Gospel of Mark, very frugal with their words. According to these stories, people would often travel long distances, deep into the desert, to meet the abbas and ammas and to receive a word of wisdom from them. They would say, “Abba, give me a word.” In one story, we learn that the great Archbishop of Alexandria Theophilus came to the desert and asked the desert father Abba Pambo to give him a word. The people who had assembled grew very concerned when the abba remained silent. So they said to Abba Pambo, “Say something to the archbishop, so that he may be edified.” The old man Abba Pambo said to them, “If he is not edified by my silence, he will not be edified by my speech.”[2]
This Advent season, I invite us to carve out some time each day to slow down, and to pray, and to listen to God. And if God seems to remain silent, may we be edified by the silence. The Gospel of Mark reminds us, within its first few verses, that God remains present in those times and places that feel like the desert, like emptiness, like darkness, like silence. The truth which the prophets cry out in the wilderness is that God waits there patiently for us to experience his peace and comfort. As Peter says in his letter, “The patience of our Lord is our salvation” (2 Peter 3:15a).
Much like the desert, this pandemic has forced us to figure out what is most essential and to strip away the non-essentials. In this way, the pandemic has actually helped us to make room in our hearts for the arrival of the divine among us. The pandemic has also helped us to enter more fully into the Advent practice of waiting. We are all waiting for the arrival of Christ’s healing power in the form of a vaccine. We will continue this spiritual practice of waiting beyond Advent, but this season calls us to intentionally strengthen those spiritual muscles by not running away from the darkness and the silence and the desert. Advent calls us to discover God in and be edified by the darkness and the silence and the desert.
Finally, there’s another short saying of the Desert Fathers that I find especially cryptic, but also potentially profound. It goes like this: “A brother asked Abba Poemen, saying, ‘Is it good to pray?’ The old man said that Abba Anthony said, ‘This word comes from the mouth of the Lord, who said, ‘Comfort, comfort my people.’ (quoting from today’s reading from Isaiah 40).”[3] The abba responds to a surprisingly obvious yes-or-no question about prayer by quoting another abba (the great Abba Anthony) who quotes the prophet Isaiah, who speaks on behalf of God. I hear this desert saying inviting us to see that our motivation in prayer ought not be so much about attaining some sense of goodness, but rather about meeting and receiving the God who longs to comfort us and who will comfort us, when we take the time to listen as God speaks to us through others, through Scripture, through song, and through the darkness and the silence and the desert.
When we finally move out of this season of pandemic (which has felt like a prolonged Lent and extended Advent), when we have finally “served our term” to use Isaiah’s language, my hope is that we can look back on this time as a season when we all slowed down and listened in the silence to God’s promise of peace and comfort, a time when we let God break open and expand our hearts wide enough to receive more fully the abundant joy that he has in store for us all.
May it be so. Amen.
[1] Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, 5.
[2] The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward, Theta: Theophilus the Archbishop: 2 (Cistercian Publications, Trappist KY, 1975), 81.
[3] The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward, Pi: Poemen (called the Shepherd), 87 (Cistercian Publications, Trappist KY, 1975), 179.
DANIEL DeFOREST LONDON 