Advent 3A--John the Baptist and Walter Anderson

Advent 3A December 15, 2013 Sometimes he would dream of the wilderness. The blazing sun. The stark landscape. The wildness. The certainty. He would dream of the people who would come out to see him, and he would dream about the way of the Lord. And then he would wake in his cold, dark prison cell, with the bitter taste of disappointment in his mouth. He had never known before that disappointment had its own unique flavor, but now, it had become his constant companion. What is a wilderness prophet to do once he has been contained, restrained? How does one prepare the way of the Lord in isolation and darkness? Perhaps it was his lowest moment, his moment of greatest doubt of himself and all that he had proclaimed? Perhaps he felt that he had lost the way that had once seemed so certain? Perhaps he was disappointed in what he heard of Jesus, because he was not what John was expecting? Or perhaps it was the culmination of all that he had pointed toward when he finally sent his disciples to ask the question of Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" And I can’t help but wonder what John made of Jesus’s answer: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me." What did he do when he heard those words, all alone in his prison cell? I suspect that he did what all faithful are called to do, even in the midst of our disappointment and our frustration. He waited. But perhaps his waiting took on a different quality than it had before? Where before he had been waiting for the Messiah, now he waited for fulfillment. I had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Walter Anderson museum in Ocean Springs for the first time this past week with Mary Margaret’s class. I found it to be both a whimsical and mystical place, and I was amazed to learn of similarities between Walter and John the Baptist. In two different videos, we learned of Walter’s life, about how he struggled to be a part of this world while longing for escape into his own wilderness on Horn Island, where he would have mystical experiences and live a life of deep meaning and deep connection with nature. We learned of how Walter, at one point, was institutionalized at MS State Hospital at Whitfield, and how he drew a tortured self-portrait during that time of his imprisonment and separation from the wilderness. We learned about how his family never really understood him, until after he died, when they found the little room in his cabin that he had always kept locked, the little room that was covered on all sides with his art in the form of mystical murals and which, to this day, emits a profound sense of peace. We learned how they found hundreds of his paintings, his journals, and it was only then that they felt like they began to know him, to understand him. After Walter’s death, his family, who I daresay, had lived with their disappointment with him as a most untraditional husband and father, found fulfillment with him through the discovery of his art and writing that they had never before experience during his life. Disappointment is a lonely burden to bear, and yet we all know something of it. People disappoint us. Life disappoints us. The choices that others make that directly affect us disappoint us. It is tempting to attempt to run from our disappointment, to try to leave it behind (whether through ending the relationship or situation), to allow it to morph into anger or bitterness, or to try to pretend that our disappointment does not exist, that everything is great. But the work of the faithful disciple of Jesus, the work of a mature spiritual life, is to offer our disappointment to God, and then to wait patiently for God’s fulfillment to come, because come it will. Here is what Frederick Buchner writes of this waiting: “I think we are waiting. That is what is at the heart of it. Even when we don’t know that we are waiting, I think we are waiting. Even when we can’t find words for what we are waiting for, I think we are waiting. An ancient Advent prayer supplies us with the words, ‘Give us grace…that we may cast off the works of darkness and put upon us the armor of light.’ We who live so much of the time in darkness are waiting not just at Advent, but at all times for the advent of light, of that ultimate light that is redemptive and terrifying at the same time. It is redemptive because it puts an end to the darkness, and that is also why it is terrifying, because for so long, for all our lives, the darkness has been home, and because to leave home is always cause for terror. So to wait for Christ to come in his fullness is not just a passive thing, a pious, prayerful, churchly thing. On the contrary, to wait for Christ to come in his fullness is above all else to act in Christ's stead as fully as we know how. To wait for Christ is as best we can to be Christ to those who need us to be Christ to them most and to bring them the most we have of Christ's healing and hope because unless we bring it, it may never be brought at all.”i.

The darkness of our own disappointment is dispelled when we allow the incarnate light of Christ that is within us shine out and inspire us to do his work in the world. We find fulfillment and hope when, in and through us, Jesus’s work is continued: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. In closing I leave you with a quote that is said to be from Walter Inglis Anderson: “I am responsible. Although I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life. Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have--life itself.”ii i. Excerpted from Frederich Buechner’s sermon Waiting from Secrets in the Dark. Found at http://www.frederickbuechner.com/content/weekly-sermon-illustration-be-patient ii. http://www.searchquotes.com/search/Walter_Inglis_Anderson/