2nd Sunday of Advent Year A

2nd Sunday of Advent Year A December 4, 2022 It’s the 2nd Sunday of Advent. Do you know what that means for this day? It means it’s “Grumpy John the Baptist Sunday!” Every year on this Second Sunday of Advent, we get a picture of John the Baptist, who is a key figure in all four gospels, quite unusual. And boy, is he in rare form today. There is something strangely compelling about John the Baptist; all these different people are going out into the wilderness to hear what he has to say. And today, he targets the Scribes and the Pharisees, two competing segments of Judaism of the day—not unlike how Christians in the Republicans and Democrats of our day are at odds. So, it’s interesting that in Matthew’s gospel, which we know was written to a primarily Jewish audience, John goes after the most religious people who have come out to hear him. “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance….Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” It’s an interesting challenge: open yourselves and your religion up to God’s transforming work or God is going to make of you…a stump! When we lived in the rectory at our first church in McComb, Mississippi, we were haunted, for a season, by a stump in our front yard. The stump was the remnant of a tree that had fallen on the rectory during Hurricane Katrina, and every time I looked at it, even after the damage to the home and our possessions had been repaired, it felt like a reminder of a wound. Eventually, I was silently grateful when the church had someone come out to grind up the stump and make it disappear, so I didn’t have to look at it every day. So, I can certainly relate to stumps having some negative connotations. Our Old Testament reading for today, the passage from Isaiah, also talks about a stump in Isaiah’s vision of a peaceable kingdom. “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” For Isaiah, the stump is a hopeful symbol; as long as the roots of the stump are intact, it is still a living, growing thing. This image of the stump in Isaiah shows that all is not lost, that there is still a rooted foundation for new life to grow, even when it seems that disaster has struck, and the tree has been chopped down. When we moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, I was intrigued by an artistic phenomenon there. A chainsaw artist named Marlin Miller had carved a number of beautiful wooden statues of native creatures—dolphins, birds, fish—out of stumps; trees that had been cut down because they were so damaged by the hurricane. These statues dotted the coastline of the Mississippi sound. I saw them as beacons of how hard change and transformation can be and also a reminder that beauty and new life can come out of the hardest and worst things. These old, seemingly-dead stumps were transformed by the artist’s skill and loving attention into signs of hope and even joy. I have certainly known this reality in my own life, over and over again, and I wonder if you have, too? Have you experienced times in your life when change was inflicted upon you or even when you gave yourself willingly over to transformation and what felt like an ending became a source of new life, beauty, and hope, what seemed like a stump became a source of new life? I can’t help but wonder if the people who were flocking out to hear that grumpy John the Baptist preach in the wilderness weren’t longing for some of this, sensing that God was already at work in the world around them, in the foundations of their faith, as John prepared the way for Jesus the coming Messiah. Did they sense the shifting foundations? Were they hopeful for the dramatic transformation that was coming? At our diocesan convention a few weeks ago, our Bishop Frank Logue and two of his canons all spoke at length about the seismic changes that have happened in our greater Episcopal church since Covid. They spoke about the shock and dismay that they felt when they compared attendance and budget numbers for the diocese from 2019 with those of 2021. Those numbers would suggest a rapid decline across the diocese. They also shared stories of new life, new hope, of God’s continued faithfulness in congregations across the diocese, and they shared stories of how God was bringing new life out of stumps. I will confess that I felt a little disconnected from all of this at diocesan convention, and I have wrestled with it since then. While the decline in numbers was certainly true for us in 2021, it is not where we find ourselves here and now, as we close out 2022. In fact, these days, I’m pleasantly surprised to find that our attendance numbers are close to where they were in 2019, and our finances are in pretty good shape. And yet, we find ourselves dramatically changed from the pandemic. While it might seem like things are “back to normal” here, we’re different. We now have three Sunday morning services instead of two. We find ourselves living into slightly different rhythms; we have the addition of a virtual congregation, which we never had before; and weekly attendance rhythms have changed, especially for our families with children still at home. There is still a sort of stumpishness (through this change that has been inflicted upon us) clinging to us after Covid, that may never dissipate. I invite you to join me in contemplating this and praying about it. In this season of hope and expectation, may we, too, be curious about the invitation from grumpy John the Baptist, a challenge to be open to God’s transforming work. May we be visionaries like Marlin Miller, looking to see the beautiful new creation that God can reveal to us in the living scars of the stumps of Covid. May we trust in God, who gives us strong roots of faith and tradition to anchor us even as God calls new life forth in, through, and among us.