© 2022 Evan D. Garner
Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video of the entire service can be seen here with the sermon beginning around 20:45.
Imagine that you are getting ready to take a trip—the trip of a lifetime. You’ve been talking about it forever. You’ve spent years saving up. You’ve made all the necessary arrangements. The time has finally come, and you couldn’t be more excited.
On the day of your departure, you wake up extra early, full of anticipation and a little nervous. You get to the airport in plenty of time. Your first flight takes off and lands without any trouble. You make it to the connecting gate, board the plane when your group is called, and sit down into your seat, allowing yourself to imagine what it will feel like to stick your toes into the sand and feel the warm, tropical sun shining on your face.
But then you are jolted back into reality by a loud cracking sound and a sudden lurch to one side by the plane. Everyone on board looks around anxiously. After a few seconds, which feel like an eternity, the pilot comes over the intercom to inform you that there has been a mechanical problem and that the plane will need to land at a nearby airstrip. He assures you that everything will be ok, but he tells you to prepare for an emergency landing just in case.
It is a rough landing, but everyone is ok. The flight attendants tell you to leave your carry-on luggage behind and make your way to the door, where you are told to cross your arms over your chest before sliding down the emergency slide, which has been inflated below. The first thing you notice when you get to the aircraft door is how cold and windy it is. “Where are we?” you ask the flight attendant, standing above the slide. “Somewhere in far-western Russia,” she says, nudging you down the ramp. “A long way from Phuket,” you think to yourself.
At first you allow yourself to think that you’ll be on your way in a few hours, but pretty soon you realize it’s going to be longer than that. There are no significant hotels in this tiny town—no where to put the two hundred or more passengers—so some local officials set up a makeshift shelter in the school gymnasium. Pickup trucks, apparently driven by volunteers, come to the airstrip to get the passengers and carry them to the shelter. You are greeted warmly by your driver, who seems as fascinated by this whole adventure as you are frustrated by it. Using gestures for eating and sleeping, you discern that your driver is offering to put you up in his house. At first you decline, but, when you get to the gymnasium and see what the shelter looks like, you reconsider and take him up on his offer.
Sitting at his family’s table, sharing a goat that they have taken from their own yard, you are overwhelmed by their generosity. One of the children at the table has been studying English, and she helps you communicate in the simplest terms with your host. She describes in broken sentences what life in that community is like—simple, honest, family-centered living. You are drawn in by her words. You see in the way that the family members treat each other and in the way that they welcome you a holiness of life that is most compelling. A strange and totally unexpected thought comes to your mind: maybe this is better even than being on a secluded beach. Maybe it is a good thing that this has happened.
One day in this Russian village becomes two and then three. You’re told something about the airstrip being too small for a replacement plane to land except in an emergency and something else about the only road in and out of the town being washed away in a flood. What surprises you most is that you don’t really mind. You’ve found a deep sense of peace and restoration. All that had worn you down over the years is being washed away not by the tropical waves you’d been searching for but by the ice-cold mountain water that you never expected to find. In a strange way, the life you have found in this village is the life you’ve always been looking for. You don’t know when you will be able to leave, and a part of you hopes you never will.
***
The strange and beautiful thing about God’s reign—God’s great restoration of all things—is that, even though it has come close to us, we must turn aside from our life’s path in order to find it. That’s why John the Baptist is out in the wilderness—out beyond the edge of civilization, out where no one has any business making a home. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” he proclaims—not near the palace, not near the temple, not near the market or the houses or the village square—but near to that place where survival is anything but a given, where the comforts of everyday life disappear. It’s out there, where grasshoppers and wild honey are our only sustenance, as far away from the table scraps of the rich and powerful as you can get, where God and God’s way of being are found.
We can’t get there without taking a detour. That’s what repentance is all about. Repentance isn’t going through the motions of being sorry for the mistakes that we’ve made but turning aside from the direction our life would naturally take in order to embrace a different way of being. We repent when we let go of our dependence on the ways of this world and embrace instead the ways of God. We repent when we forsake our attachments to the comforts of this life and instead hold on to the values enshrined by God’s reign.
John the Baptist isn’t calling us out to the River Jordan in order to make a big show of how sinful we have been. He’s calling us out to that place where life is wholly dependent on the mercies of God. He’s calling us to embrace a life that centers on what God is doing and what God is promising to do in this world. He knows that we won’t find that life of deepest fulfillment as long as we’re chasing after the comforts of a self-secured, self-insulated lifestyle.
But the call to repentance is more than a temporary diversion. John the Baptist knows that a weekend away on a spiritual retreat will not be enough. Just hear what he has to say to the Pharisees and Sadducees—those religious insiders who presume that their ancestral pedigree is their ticket into God’s reign: “You brood of vipers—you children of serpents—who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance.” If we are going to embrace the reign of God, we must belong to God not only with our lips but with our lives.
It's hard to imagine new life springing forth in the desert. It's hard to imagine a life rooted in something other than the wealth, status, and power of this world. It’s hard to imagine that our best life is found not by getting ahead but by stepping aside. But that’s what John wants us to see—that the very best possible life, the life that God has prepared for just for us, is found not on the path that we’ve always taken but by turning aside to accept an entirely new trajectory.
Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Turn aside, for the life God has in store for you is just around the corner. John the Baptist’s message is the same one that Jesus brings to the earth. He is the one whom John is calling you to meet—the one who will fill you anew with God’s Spirit—God’s breath of life. A great multitude of people has gone out in search of that new life. They have learned that the ways of this world lead only to burnout, emptiness, loneliness, and death. They seek the ways of God, which are ways of true flourishing, fulfillment, and peace.
We know that we cannot get to that life on the path we’re already on. We must turn aside—we must repent—and embrace the life that God has promised us. That life may not be easy, but God has brought it so very near to us. It is a wonderful, beautiful, way of living. It is the life God calls us to live. All we must do is turn aside and accept it.
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