Judgment in the Wilderness

A sermon preached at St. Margaret's Anglican on Dec. 9th, Second Sunday of Advent.

Scriptures:

-         Baruch 5:1-9

-         Malachi 3:1-4

-         Luke 3:1-6

Prayer: “We are made for you, O God, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in thee.” (St. Augustine)

Intro (Background)

On the 2^nd of September, in the year 31 BC, Gaius Octavius finally defeated the armies of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Over the next couple of years, Octavius would go on to finish pacifying the realm, and in 29 BC he closed the Gates of Janus in Rome, and naming himself Caesar Augustus, signaled the beginning of a peace that would last for the next two centuries and become known as the Pax Romana.

Critical historians have repeatedly pointed out that the “peace” of the Pax Romana was, at best, an imperial and hegemonic peace. It was a peace guaranteed by the complete collapse of internal political resistance. It was a peace of a people who had been forcibly stripped of their allegiance to anyone save Caesar.

Thus it was that, in the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.

Civilization

In Luke’s description of the political geography of John’s ministry we get a highly bureaucratic account of the imperial structures that determined the geography of first century Israel. Gone are the tribal allotments we read about in the latter half of Joshua where Yahweh grants land to each family of Israel as their special inheritance. Gone too are the petty fiefdoms that Israel’s kings had managed to eke out in this tumultuous region. Gone are the descriptions of Israel’s neighbours, both friends and foes. In this Pax Imperium, space is demarcated by two poles – the ordered provinces of imperial civitas and the wilderness of barbarism. In the imperial mind there is only ordered “somewhere” and chaotic “nowhere.”

Turning our attention to the list of strange Latin place names that Luke gives, we should notice something new and foreign intruding into more familiar Hebraic geographic language. The place names of Israel, like the place names of many indigenous and land-based peoples, often told the story their history in the land. Throughout the Old Testament we are introduced to many of these places, for example, "Bethel” literally, the “house of God” and a major site of worship for the Patriarchs of Israel. Another more vulgar example would be, Gibeath-haaraloth, the site where Joshua circumcised all Israel upon entering the land, thus earning it its name, “the hill of foreskins.” While not all place names are narratively significant in Scripture, it is not surprising that the Israelites, in keeping with the practice of land-based peoples throughout the world, tend to describe their geography in relation to their lived experiences in those places.

The imperial mind, on the other hand, operates on a plane of abstraction and alienation. The provinces named in Luke’s itinerary are Latin titles for conquered peoples. Judea is the region in which the conquered Jews or Iudaeum live and are technocratically kept in check. The capital of the region was Caesarea – an official imperial name that served to remind the conquered people who their sovereign was. This is a concept we in Canada are well familiar with, for if you pay attention as you drive across Canada, you will find the same handful of British imperial names marking territory from coast to coast; Albert, Edward, Elgin, Elizabeth, Regina, Rupert, Selkirk, Victoria, etc.

Wilderness and Judgement[1]

Today is the second Sunday in Advent – the Sunday that the ancient church reflected upon God’s judgment. And our texts today are full of divine judgment for a creation that refuses to acknowledge the place of its creator.

As in the days of old, the Word of the Lord comes to John, son of Zechariah in the wilderness. If the effect of Roman political geography was to subdue nations under a hegemony of forgetfulness, Luke’s introduction of John the Baptist heralds Rome’s doom with the full force of Israel’s prophetic imagination and messianic expectation. After Luke’s lengthy list of abstract imperial titles, John is introduced in a way that a people formed by the stories of the Scriptures knows all too well.

Who is this John? Starkly put, he is the son of Zechariah. John is not introduced to us here by his later title, “the Baptist” but rather, is introduced through the family matrices that constitute the covenanted tribal life of Israel. Knowing whose son one is in ancient Israel is intricately linked with knowing the geography of the land of Israel. Consider the lectionary readings from Ruth last month. The drama of that book is centred on the familial and kinship bonds that locate particular people in particular tracts of land. The land of promise is always given and received as a sacred inheritance, thus knowing who your family is locates you within the stories that make up the just distribution of that land.

So John is identified as the son of Zechariah, but we find him in the wilderness. Luke’s description here is incredibly subtle. On the one hand, we find John located in the family matrix that should locate him in a tribe and therefore in a particular place in the land, but just as that description gets going, it is derailed by the revelation that John has been cut off from the placed existence that family bonds have traditionally guaranteed and is instead residing in the wilderness. The abstracting power of the Roman provincial system has severed the traditional Israelite connection between kinship and land that has shaped Israelite life from time immemorial. John is in the wilderness, he is without a place in divinely ordered structures of the Promised Land, and so we find him in the middle of nowhere.

Yet hope is not lost, for here is where Luke’s narrative prowess reveals itself fully. Having led us to believe that John is a victim of imperial placelessness, we find him in the wilderness. Now the wilderness motif is used in a variety of ways throughout Scripture. In its most basic form, wilderness represents chaos and the complete lack of any articulable “place.” Wilderness is simply nowhere. According to Mircea Eliade, the spatial logic of the ancient world is centred on sites of cultic activity.[2] The defining centre of a given “place” is the temple, shrine, or tabernacle that provides the thin point of connection whereby people might hear the deity’s voice. The camp, or city, or kingdom is set up in relation to this site. If the centre represents the sacred “hot spot” the peripheries belong to the profane life of our regular human economy; but beyond the periphery, outside of the divine ordering of creation lies the wilderness. The wilderness is the region of pre-creation. It exists in a state of being formless and void. Form and order are properties of creation proper; the wilderness represents those corners of the cosmos that have yet to be brought into the ordered creation. The wilderness is all the land that Genesis Two describes as being outside of the ordered and fruitful Garden of Eden. The wilderness is the adamah (ground) that awaits its adam (human).

Venturing into this wilderness region is both a punishing and purifying experience. Jeremiah is particularly partial to the threat of a coming wilderness to the land of Israel. The disillusion of Israel’s nationhood in the Babylonian conquest was represented by Jeremiah as the complete collapse of ordered places as such (Jer. 4.23). He looked across the land and all that he saw had become formless and void. The fertile fields, vineyards, and orchards of the Promised Land had become barren. In Jeremiah’s prophetic vision, the punishment of God had been meted out in the form of an all-encompassing wilderness. Baruch’s prophetic consolation undoes this chaotic collapse. In the eschatological return, the trees are not wild, but shelter giving. The valleys are not dark and the mountains are not steep, God will push back the wilderness to create a straight path back to a particular place, Jerusalem, the place where God’s glory sits (Baruch 5.7-8).

Wilderness and the Purification of Ecology

By now, the more ecologically conscious among you may be appropriately squirming in your pews. Ecologically enlightened moderns have learned to embrace wilderness. The notion that wilderness is pre-created space awaiting human dominion has become too painfully intertwined with the colonial stories our ancestors told about this land that allowed for the doctrines of discovery and terra nullius to do indigenous peoples in these lands what Roman imperial provincialism had done to Israel and the family of John the Baptist.

Yet wilderness as a place of pre-created chaos, a land to be feared or avoided is only one of the wilderness motifs that Scripture offers us. Wilderness can also be a place of purification. Wilderness as locale of purification has a long tradition in the Christian tradition. First experienced by the wilderness wandering of the children of Israel in the Exodus, there is a long and celebrated prophetic tradition of retreating to the wilderness to be rejuvenated. Moses, Elijah, Elisha, and even Jesus himself retreated to the wilderness to be formed and renewed for the difficulties of their ministries. The understanding that wilderness is a locus of purifying energy has been so powerful that it has given birth to two of the most ecologically enriching traditions of the Christian faith. St. Anthony was led into the deserts of Egypt to purify his soul and founded a monastic movement that would give Europe many of its best land practices for the next millennium. Indeed, even Lynn White Jr., who infamously proclaimed Christianity as the root of our current ecological crisis, saw St. Francis, an inheritor of this great wilderness-spawned tradition, as a potential guiding light by which our society may yet avert the worst effects of global climate change.

In addition to monasticism, the biblical tradition of wilderness as a site of purification also influenced the work of the great Protestant environmentalists of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, most notably, John Muir. Muir’s experiences in the Sierra Nevada mountains convinced him that the wild places of America lay yet in a state of innocence. The wilderness had yet to experience the full effects of humanity’s fallen depravity. In the wilderness, humanity might yet grasp the good and innocent parts of ourselves and through the purification of our senses in these pristine landscapes, become the kind of people who might give fitting love to both creature and Creator. It was through the efforts of Muir and others that the American (and later, Canadian) national parks system was born.

Unfortunately both these wilderness inspired traditions have led to a further destruction of the very places that both traditions found to be so beneficial to the human spirit. The conservation movement that Muir and his followers inspired has created a problematic dichotomy between “nature” and “culture” that has led to a certain post-humanist streak to develop in modern ecology. In efforts to preserve wilderness against human corruption, the temptation can be to see humanity as such being the problem. We are the ones poisoning our planet and desecrated the sacred wilderness, so the solution is to remove the humans in order that “nature” might run its course. The worst impulses of this preservationist conservation work are seen in the protests of annual seal hunts by Inuit hunters.[3] Because seals belong to the spaces that settler society have deemed “pristine wilderness” there exists an inability to account for the economic lives of indigenous peoples who have called these spaces home from time immemorial.

The monastic tradition may yet have some life in it, yet its complicity in the residential school system of Canada marks a failure of this tradition’s best insight regarding the deep interconnectedness of peoples and the places they inhabit. The fact that the very tradition that gave Christianity some of its greatest ecological insights could not tolerate the existence of a people that existed in the liminality of wild places is a contradiction that has done much to destroy the cultural prestige and legitimacy of holy orders in our own time.

Today we celebrate the recovery of land-based ways of life. Indigenous peoples are setting up “land-schools” wherein their people can recover the land-based ways of life that were stripped from them by the forces of Canadian imperialism. For many victims of inter-generational trauma, these times out in the bush are incredibly healing and purifying. Indigenous nations are recovering their strength and dignity by recovering their place in their traditional lands. It is the purifying force of the wilderness that is returning life to a people that were forcibly removed from those far-flung locales.

In these indigenous led “back to the land” movements, settler society is learning that human dominion in wild places is not necessarily a domineering activity but can in fact bring forth a healthy ordering of creatures and creator. The Church is privileged to behold the indigenous re-appropriation of a land-logic that our own Desert Fathers and Mothers discovered in the wilderness of Egypt and Sinai.

Wilderness and the Revelation of Place

If the first use of wilderness in the biblical imagination is as a place of danger and punishment, and the second is that of healing and purification, the final use of wilderness is the revelation of God. And it is in this third use of wilderness that we come to the rest of our gospel reading today.

The Word of the Lord came to John, in the wilderness, via the words of the prophet Isaiah,

'Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.

Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,

and the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough ways made smooth;

and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'

Again, the ecologically sensitive amongst us may be cringing. Why must the language of God’s coming salvation be accompanied by such a violent upheaval of wild places? In a world where we can see the devastating effects of industries and weapons that can level mountains and fill valleys, this language doesn’t land with the same note of hope as it supposedly did in its ancient context.

Yet, perhaps there is another path to finding hope in this passage. In this sermon I have attempted to outline several different geographic perspectives that are latent in this evening’s text. First was the imperial vision which imposes its own hegemonic categories upon the land. This perspective is found in the opening list of bureaucrats Luke provides for us. It pays no heed to the particularities of place or the people who dwell there; considering a region peaceful by virtue of it being “pacified.” The only story permitted in the geographic descriptions of empire is the story of the totalizing scope of the imperial landscape.

This universalist claim of Rome is resisted by the introduction of John, the son of Zechariah, a person who comes from a storied people but who has been forced into the wilderness to bring the judgement of the wilderness against the structures of imperialism. This unleashing of the chaos of the wilderness against the violent order of the empire raises questions for us about the nature of wilderness chaos. I noted that the Christian tradition has found the wilderness to be not just punishing, but also healing. The wilderness as a locus of healing has been the source of strength for both Christian and Indigenous resistance from ancient times right up to the present day. If the wilderness stands in judgment over destructive political hegemonies, then it simultaneously provides comfort for the victims of these regimes. Thus the desert provided nourishment to Israel and John the Baptist when the powerful had left them disenfranchised, just as the school of the bush is bringing healing to the intergenerational survivors of Canada’s genocidal residential school system.

But now we are left with the final use of wilderness – wilderness as the locus of God’s self-revelation. Some of us, I expect, are quite comfortable with this Isaianic language; for surely God’s appearance in the created order would be accompanied by violent upheaval of the created order. It is fitting that the created order would bow and make way for the Creator. However, there are others of us that may be worried about the poetic possibilities of this language to inspire Christians to neglect their obligations to the wilderness, or worse yet, give them license to bulldoze it to create actual highways and straight pipelines through the wilderness.

Let me suggest a middle way. I noted earlier this evening that the second Sunday in Advent is traditionally associated with the theme of judgment. I neglected to mention that the modern theme associated with the second Sunday in Advent is peace. Set as it is in the golden years of the Pax Romana, Luke’s gospel testifies that there was a man, John the Baptist, who arose in judgment of that Roman Peace from the non-place of the wilderness. Channelling the prophetic fury of his people, John launches a full frontal on the false peace of the Romans. In this act of judgment, the full force of judgment wilderness motif is brought to bear against the hegemony of Roman imperial geography. John names colluders as the snakes that they are and offers baptismal waters from desert brooks and streams to those who are brave enough to venture into the healing and purifying embrace of that same wilderness. It is in the liminality of this wilderness that John can rightly appropriate Isaiah’s oracle, announcing the coming of the Prince of Peace who will make roads in the beauty of the wilderness that are infinitely straighter than the best engineers of the Roman Legion could achieve.

John’s appearance in the wilderness draws attention to the third Christian conviction about wilderness. As much as wilderness is a non-place, a place of chaos and danger and healing, it is also finally, properly part of God’s created order and thus may emerge as a new place of communion with the Creator at any time. The cry in the wilderness does not abolish wild places; it calls into question the very nature of our straight roads and hegemonic descriptions of God’s geography.

John thus proves to be a prophet for our time here and now. The messianic hope of Israel and by adoption, the Church, is one that begins in the punishing and purifying chaos of the wilderness. The promise of peace that is offered first by Isaiah in the Book of Consolation and then by John in Luke’s Gospel is first a word of judgment against all those who attempt to erase or relativize wild places and the peoples who draw their life from them. The mountain pathways and valley routes of the wilderness are held up as an indictment of the artificially straight roads of the empire. This Advent, John’s voice continues to cry in the wilderness, offering the healing waters of living streams to all who continue to remember the old covenant promises of a God who wills to be for his people. God meets his people at his shrines and temples in the city, but the God we meet here is the same God who will emerge in the non-places of the wilderness and establish for himself new places and peoples who will present offerings that “will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.”

Amen.

---

[1] The three wilderness motifs that give structure to this sermon were brought to my attention in, Najman, Hindy, “Towards a Study of the Uses of the Concept of Wilderness in Ancient Judaism,” Dead Sea Discoveries 13, no. 1 (2006): 99–113.

[2] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (San Diego: Mariner Books, 2001).

[3] Today, that irony is found especially thick where urban elites celebrate the culinary break-through of indigenous cuisine in Toronto and Vancouver, yet are uncomfortable with the serving of seal meat in these restaurants. This represents a lingering commitment to the Romantic conservationism that desires to see wilderness only as a pristine place for our aesthetic contemplation.