A Magic Wand | A Sermon on the Coming of Christmas and John the Baptist
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin for the people of Saint Michael’s Episcopal Church, Arlington, on the Third Sunday of Advent (B), December 17, 2023.
John 1:6-8,19-28
The poet W.H. Auden once wrote, “Nothing that is possible can save us; We who must die demand a miracle.” Or, in other words, only what is impossible will flip the script and make all things right. In Advent, we prepare for an impossible intervention.
An intervention heralded, of course, by John the Baptizer in this morning’s appointed Gospel:
Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” And John the Baptizer said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’” (John 1:19-23).
Peculiar, isn’t it, that on this the Third Sunday of Advent, we are greeted not by references to the anticipated peaceful birth of a pure and perfect Christ child but by an unruly and unrefined man shouting testimony to, what we might now deem, the end of days. The end of days before an impossible intervention will come to pass.
John the Baptizer, the wild watchman, the peculiar prophet, the harbinger of heaven, always left out of nativity scenes, never seeing the sort of action that the elf on the shelf does, and yet a fundamental player in the drama of Advent and the coming of Christmas.
In the words of one theologian:
John’s self-effacing ministry of preparation and witness, which emphasized the pre-eminence of Jesus (even before he was this side of heaven, mind you), included a stupendous pronouncement. Christmas is about something far more radical than a baby born in a barn, tired cliches, or sentimental stereotypes. The birth of Jesus foreshadows something unspeakably joyful, even cosmic. John says that Jesus is the one on whom all the pain, sins, and sorrows of the world have been laid [1].
Recently, I found myself in a store surrounded by all the trappings of Christmas (with John the Baptizer notably absent I should add), and I noticed the following quote written in fancy script on a decorative pillow.
“Christmas waves a magic wand over this world, and behold, everything is softer and more beautiful.”
Christmas magic. That’s what we all long for. It’s certainly what retailers, advertisers, restaurants, and entertainers sell us at this most wonderful time of the year. A magic wand —waved so that we might forget the realities of the world as it is right now.
This is an understandable sentiment; and yet it is so far from W.H. Auden’s bold claim and a world away from John the Baptizer’s apocalyptic proclamation.
This pillow might look good in your living room, but detached from the Christ child, it has no real place alongside the atrocities being perpetrated in the world this very moment; no relationship with the fear and grief playing out in the lives of so many children of God.
This is why I cling to Advent so fiercely —a time of preparation in which we look clearly at the world, the evil and the good, even as we anticipate a yet more glorious day. Advent does not shy away from the realities of this world and wants nothing to do with a “magic wand.” And I say thanks be to God for that.
I have been called many things for my devotion to Advent: a scrooge, a member of the Advent or liturgical police, a purveyor of a theology of sorrow (that’s a good one, and not incorrect), and, my personal favorite, a poop in the Christmas punchbowl.
But I believe fiercely in the impossible intervention of a Savior, born of the Spirit one otherwise normal day in Bethlehem, who is come to defeat evil conclusively and forever. Anything made softer and more beautiful in this season is down to that –an echo of the original impossible incarnation.
And for those for whom this season is anything but soft and beautiful –those walking the way of grief, for example—well, Advent is a season for you, a journey, if you will, into an ever-deeper awareness of our shared situation, of the pain of this world, and of the reality of sin and death.
Because the beauty of Advent lies in its honesty: in its unflinching eye directed toward our human condition and its uncompromising investment in the redemption of it all. Hallelujah, anyhow, Advent punctuates.
Nothing that is possible can save us, Auden reminds us; and John answers, He is coming; He who is the lamb of God who comes to take away the sins of the world.
Here is the Christmas magic that Advent anticipates. Here is the Christmas miracle.
That God has chosen and is still choosing to be God with us; in the midst of our joy and pain, in the midst of the world’s beauty and it’s ugliness, God came down at Christmas.
This is the truth to which John the Baptizer testified and embodied. Consider him, this unique figure standing at the juncture of the ages, at the hinge of it all; the one who, according to Fleming Rutledge, “even before his conception, was called into being by the divine purpose to declare the apocalyptic arrival of God on the world scene.” A very real person, and a prophet. One who was certain of his mission, and yet who also doubted and got it wrong. One foot very much rooted in the dust of the Jordan Valley and the other, somehow, boundless and unconfined by time and space. One hand dipping into the waters of the Jordan and the other pointing at us.
Like all prophets, his very personhood evidences the tensions of the Christian life and faith; the tensions we draw near in Advent, calling into stark relief the distance between the way things are and the way things are meant to be, and yet also asking that we bind them together, knowing that they are all held within the embrace of Our Lord, already and ultimately redeemed.
This is the truth to which John testifies; this is the truth to which our joy is bound.
A joy made all the more potent by paradox.
My friend Sarah Condon wrote an article recently titled “Put the Sad Back in Christmas: Enough With the Forced Holly Jolly” [2]. Sarah lost both her parents recently in a tragic accident. Never one to mince words, she writes:
It seems a ridiculous expectation that the day we remember the birth of our savior is the same day that we expect some sort of euphoric joy. Jesus comes to us in the ruinous trenches we dig and decorate. He comes to us in the most broken parts of our hearts. And so to experience some kind of mandated electric happiness feels like it misses the point entirely.
The truth about Christmas is that it holds everything all at once. Yes, you can be thankful and depressed about spending Christmas with your relatives. Yes, you can want to buy your kids gifts and become utterly put out by the energy the task demands. Yes, Jesus was born to save us. And yes, there is death on the horizon.
The light of the world has come to save us from our sin, but we have to be willing to really see it. Which means we need to admit to our ever-present darkness.
Today, the Third Sunday of Advent, is known as Gaudete Sunday, taking its name from the Latin word Gaudete, or Rejoice. To look at our readings this morning is to see a theme: “an announcement of a joyful and celebratory message that most anyone would love to hear, namely, a promise and a proclamation that God sees, he hears, and he will act for those who most need his help” [3]. With the birth of Jesus, God is with us. For the prophet Isaiah, Saint Paul, the psalmist, and beloved John the Baptist, this announcement comes, not in the midst of peace, but in climates of uncertainty, instability, brokenness, war, and sorrow; it is “a Christmas proclamation of hope amidst the despair, a testimony of light in the darkness” [4].
“Nothing that is possible can save us. We who must die demand a miracle.”
And that is just what God has provided. Impossibly, God has intervened. We have not gone towards God, God has come to us, delivering a Son who is our hope and our comfort. Jesus, the Messiah, in whom that which plagues us, that which haunts and horrifies, that which deeply grieves us, is redeemed finally and for all time.
This is the real magic of the season; this is where our truest hope lies; this is the reason to rejoice.
In him was life; and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not [and will not] overcome it (John 1:4).
Amen.
[1] Dan Clendenin, “This Single Truth” in Journey with Jesus, 10 Dec. 2023, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay.
[2] Sarah Condon, “Put the Sad Back in Christmas: Enough With the Forced Holly Jolly,” 14 Dec. 2023.
[3] Clendenin, “This Single Truth.”
[4]. Ibid.
