I love Advent. It is my favorite season, the one in which the rhythms of the Christian life first made sense deep in my soul, and so it made me begin to understand and love living by the liturgical calendar. In many ways, Advent is the season that best represents how we live all of our lives - both knowing that the Incarnation means that God is involved in our world and deeply in longing for the dream and kingdom of God to come among us fully.

But the truth is, I love the Advent of the expectant Mary and Elizabeth - the waiting for a new child, a new hope to be born. But there is another figure that is always present in Advent, and I struggle with him: John the Baptist.

Every Advent, we confront John the Baptist, out in the wilderness, eating his locusts and honey and calling us to repent. This year his message is even more stringent. He calls out the Pharisees and Sadducees, the religious folks of his day who come out to see him. He calls them a brood of vipers. They are told that what they care for most about their identity, being children of Abraham, means nothing, and that God could replace them with mere stones.

It’s not a warm welcome for these men. These are the ones who have even come to see him - others have surely stayed back at the synagogue and temple and not even bothered.

John is not exactly the easiest character to love, and he is always in Advent. It’s one thing to wait for the joy of Christmas with Mary and the child to come, but it is hard to choose John the Baptist over the holiday cheer that we long for around this time of year, hard to choose the man yelling in the wilderness over Christmas carols.

The truth is, I’m not sure I would have even been one of the folks who went out into the wilderness to meet John. And I would have missed out, which makes me wonder what I am avoiding and missing out on today.

The first thing we hear in our passage about John is the one that keeps us away. He appears in the wilderness. And he stays there. Many of us here, myself included, love to get out in nature, but the wilderness means something different in this passage. The wilderness was the place that the Israelites were lost for 40 years. It would have been full of wild animals and short of food - which is why John survived on locusts and the honey he found. So the wilderness was dangerous, but it was full of meaning.

For Israelites, it was where their ancestors were lost for 40 years. It was the place where they went when they escaped slavery in Egypt. After some time in the wilderness, they cried out and feared that God had brought them there to die because there was no food. And God gave them manna to eat and provided for them.

The wilderness is also where Moses met God and they were given the Torah - for Jews, the greatest gift of God. The wilderness became a place of transition for the Israelites, the place where they were prepared to live in the promised land; it was where they were prepared to become the people of God who were a light to the nations.

The truth is that we all have a wilderness. It is a place we do not go voluntarily, a place that we fear, where we doubt we will survive. And it is the place that we learn that God will not leave us, that God will provide. It is the place where we meet God and are prepared for what God has for us to do.

In many ways, this rings true today. We are definitely in a time of transition in our world - old ways of stability are falling away and we see the world changing faster than we could have imagined. And we are in a time of transition in the church as well. Much is changing, and so many fear death of life as we know it, realizing that the the way the church has been will not look the same. And we wonder if God has left us alone, as the things that structured and stabilized life as we knew it disappear. You here at St. Matthias are in a season of transition, considering new ways of being, particularly as you consider joining with St. Philip’s in new ways.

These times of transition in the wilderness can feel daunting. But it is in the wilderness that God meets us, and so rather than fear all of these changes, perhaps there is something we can learn about it in this season of Advent.

We learn a lot when we are told that John is out in the wilderness, and the people go out to him. Something new is coming. John represents a time of transition, a time to prepare for what God has next for us.

On the surface, John can easily sound like a doomsday preacher saying “Repent for the end is near!” But the truth is, John is saying, “Repent for a new beginning is near!” John is announcing something new to come and calling people to prepare for it. Repentance is not purging oneself of all sin for the coming judgment. Repentance is preparing ourselves to live in the world God dreams for us, changing our lives and joining the work of making our world a place of justice and peace and love.

And this is why we turn to John in Advent. Our work this season is to prepare ourselves for the coming reign of God. We turn to the prophets to develop our sight, to hone our vision of what that coming kingdom looks like, and then we examine our own lives to discover ways that we are not in line with that vision and work to change ourselves and our world.

Our reading from Isaiah is one of those incredible visions of the world God intends for us. This passage was written after the northern kingdom of Israel had been conquered by Assyria and the southern kingdom of Judah, the portion that had retained the line and tribe of King David, was near defeat as well. It seemed that all was lost - that the chosen people of God, the nation God had established, was about to die, like a tree cut down to a stump. And that is the image the prophet uses - even though the tree may be cut down to a stump, a young shoot will grow out of it.

Even from this image, we learn a lot. A shoot is new life, hope that not all is lost. But it is not a large, stately tree. It is not the same as what was cut down. It is something growing from the life of the old life, but the new will also be different from the old.

Our passage goes on to talk about this new life that springs up. The new ruler will be engulfed with the spirit of the Lord and he will be full of righteousness and justice, especially for those who the prophets had proclaimed were not being cared for - the poor and the ‘meek of the earth’ - those who were vulnerable, especially widows, orphans, and immigrants.

And after the first few verses about this new ruler, we are given an even more incredible image of this new world. In one of the most famous passages, we hear how predatory animals will live peacefully with domesticated animals. The wolf with the lamb, the leopard with the kid, a calf and lion, cow and bear, and little children will play near poisonous snakes.

As crazy as these sound, I realized as I read this list over and over that I had seen things like it in videos that are often shared on the internet. These generally do not interest me, but sometimes as I scroll through a social media feed, I can’t help but be drawn in by a video of animals that is so bizarre because of the unnatural combination of animals, or the incredible care for something vulnerable shown by an animal we consider wild -  a bear playing with dogs and people with tigers and lions.

This passage reminded me why I am drawn in by such videos that I often consider a waste of time - I believe that they are a picture of a world we long for deep within us, a world so different from what we know to be true. They give us hope that maybe things can be different even when what we see around us makes that seem impossible.

This picture given by Isaiah seems utterly impossible. How much must change in order for it to be true? The truth is, when I imagine the coming kingdom, there are some things that I don’t even imagine changing, such as the circle of life. Each of the wild animals mentioned is a carnivore naturally. We are told that the lion eats straw like the ox - my first question when I thought about this passage was if they could even be healthy this way. It was so foreign to me. For us, integral to the identity of lions and bears is their power - power that is usually expressed in killing, in destruction. It is a destruction we accept as the circle of life, not evil but simply the way life is - but it seems that even this will be changed. Even that power has been transformed into something new.

And there must be change for the lamb and cow, and the child as well. They see animals that could kill them as companions they can trust. In this vision of the prophet, no vulnerable creature is afraid. Fear is no more.

And we are told a little child shall lead them. This young, new shoot of Jesse is a leader that is as far from what we expect as the king of the jungle grazing with farm animals. In those days, it was common for a king or ruler to be depicted killing lions, shown as a sign of one’s ability to rule.

We still see this today, with poachers threatening endangered species in Africa simply for the show of power and might of killing a large, powerful beast. And while killing trophy animals is not as common among our political rulers today, we are often swayed by visions of power and might that is essentially destructive.

This has become our vision of power so much that it is what we have come to expect God to do as well. How often do we associate the return of God with the destruction of the earth? It is why we associate fear with “Repent for the end is near,” perhaps why we fear John the Baptist and his message.

But this is not at all the vision that is set forth by Isaiah, not what John was announcing, not what we look forward to in Advent. The whole idea of power and leadership has been transformed. This new ruler will not kill lions - he will walk among them. He will not destroy all that had been a threat. Instead, everything we fear will be transformed into something new and more beautiful than we imagined.

This is the vision of new life we turn to in Advent. It is truly new life, not simply an improved and upgraded version of what we already know. I wonder what this will look like here at St. Matthias. I am not here to suggest that it will all be smooth and easy.  Because the truth is, new life can be hard. We don’t always want new life because new life, like the kind that grows at Advent, can only grow where something else has died, where we have lost something, and the grief for what was lost is real.

But what we are promised is that new life is possible, and that God will provide as we make our way through the wilderness from the old to the new. A shoot grows from the stump of a toppled tree. Former slaves near dying in the wilderness grow into a nation. One child is conceived in the womb of a barren woman past childbearing years, and another child is conceived in the womb of a virgin. Over and over, the story of Advent is that new life is born where we believe it is impossible. God does not arrive just in the place, in the time, in the people we least expect. God comes among us where we are sure that it is impossible.

And so if we want to see this new life, if we want to it come in our lives, then we must venture to the places that we believe God would never be born. We must make space in our lives and communities for new life to grow. We must go to the wilderness in our nation, in our neighbors, in our own souls, the places where hope has died and we are sure that God has abandoned. We must walk out into the wilderness and get ready for God is coming near.  Amen.

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