Lift up your voice
Matthew 3:1-2
The Rev. Sara Fischer
In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness. I often wonder what kind of people went out to the desert to see John, and what was going on with them. I’ve been in the Judean desert where this scene takes place. It’s dry, rocky, windblown—like parts of eastern Oregon without so many rivers and forested mountains in the distance. One can only assume someone would need to be searching or suffering for rumors of someone like John in the desert to pull them out of their comfort zone.
We have all had our time in the wilderness. Perhaps over and over again. Sometimes our wilderness seems silent. Other times there’s a voice crying out. Or several. Sometimes the voice in the wilderness is ours. Sometimes the voice should be ours.
My divorce, when I was 30, was a wilderness experience. I had to let go of a whole lot of long-held dreams and expectations, and get used to a new life I’d never planned on. I moved into a tiny studio apartment in Northwest Portland. A friend helped me, and when he left I noticed that he’d cut out a few words from a card that had the serenity prayer on it. He had slid the little strip of card into the space where people used to put their names, above the doorbell. It said “Courage to change.” Those words were the voice that called to me in that wilderness.
Navigating the days and months after the death of my father when I was 45 felt like a wilderness experience. I was unmoored, the way we get when we lose someone whose very existence is part of how we understand the world. I wandered around in a fog for a while, getting used to the cosmic shift that is familiar to all of you who have lost parents. In that wilderness, the voice I heard was his, usually in dreams.
The wilderness is often where we encounter the holy. Think about who has gone before us into the wilderness:
Hagar and Ishmael find God in the wilderness, and are led to safety and new life.
Moses and Aaron lead the people of Israel out of Egypt into the wilderness. There, according to Moses, God carries them as a mother carries her child.
Isaiah proclaims that God is doing a new thing in the wilderness.
The people of Judea go out into the wilderness to hear what John the Baptist has to say. Like many wilderness experiences, the encounter with John may seem to the Judeans like bad news, but it’s actually good news.
John the Baptist, firmly planted in a particular time and place, calls out in the wilderness, using his own colorful language, and calls for a response: Repent! Change your ways and change your mind! If you read through the wilderness stories of our tradition, you’ll find that the wilderness experience is almost always one of call and response.
Not only is the desert a place where we encounter the Holy One; it is also a place where the Holy One asks something of us.
The call in the wilderness, not just in John the Baptizer’s moment in time but most of the time, is God’s call reclaiming us as God’s own. What will be our response?
Sometimes, it takes time in the wilderness to find our voice and our response. In this season which may seem so hard and so full of bad news, I’d like to suggest that repentance, bearing good fruit, and responding to God’s claim on us, are all about finding our voice and using our voice as God’s people. This, in the midst of bad news, is Good News.
Here, too, we follow a long tradition.
Jesus finds his voice in his wilderness experience and says “no” to evil. He emerges from the desert to proclaim good news to the poor, the Year of the Lord’s Favor.
In the 1300s Julian of Norwich experienced wilderness in the form of profound illness, and emerged to write Revelations of Divine Love. Her voice continues to be heard.
In 19th-century London, the first Anglo-Catholics emerged from a wilderness of white-washed, legislated liturgy and found their voice in the beauty of holiness, in worship that spoke to the very poor through color, and flowers, and incense—all things against the law at the time.
In 1914, Paul Jones, Bishop of Utah, had to resign his post because he was the only member of the House of Bishops who opposed what we now call the First World War. He found his voice for unrelenting pacifism in the teachings of Jesus, and would not be silenced. After leaving the House of Bishops he continued to be a voice for peace, social reform, and racial justice.
These witnesses crying in the wilderness had to go out into their own wilderness to find their voice.
What will our voice sound like? Perhaps it’s time to reclaim the word “Christian” as our own, to boldly proclaim our identity as Jesus-followers who live out our baptismal promises every day as we worship, proclaim justice, fight for dignity, share fellowship, and work for peace. Our baptismal promises are themselves a call-and-response. Our response is always: I will, with God’s help. The cry of “We will!” is our collective voice in the wilderness.
We need to reclaim the word “Christian” and I believe we need to reclaim the word “Evangelical”! We do have good news to share. Our good news is that God comes into the world as a human being to remind us what being made in God’s likeness looks like. We can raise our Christian voices to say what God’s likeness doesn’t look like. It doesn’t look like hatred, fear, injustice, or exclusion. We can raise our Christian voices to say what God’s likeness doesn’t sound like. It doesn’t sound like racism, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, or hypocrisy. In the midst of all of that, God’s likeness sometimes sounds like a voice crying in the wilderness. Our voice.
We have a voice. And more importantly, we have a voice to combat the brokenness in our world. Sometimes, we don’t know what to do or say. The wilderness can feel like that. There’s a Taize chant called “In the Lord I'll be ever thankful.” It includes the words “look to God, do not be afraid, lift up your voices, the Lord is near.”
Let us lift our voices. Let us not be afraid. The Lord is near.
