SERMON Fire and Hope

The Nativity of St. John the Baptist: Malachi 3:1-4; Psalm 141; Acts 13:13-26; Luke 1:57-80

Sisters and brothers, grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

This week I was in southern Louisiana with my wife's church mission trip. We were working with a local nonprofit group called Bayou Grace. It's an organization dedicated to helping the residents of the bayou areas south of New Orleans to recover from the damage done by Hurricane Rita, which, along with Hurricane Katrina, showed us how vulnerable even we in America can be to the power of nature and the consequences of governmental failure.

If you ever get the chance to visit the Louisiana bayous, I cannot recommend it enough. The pace of life is relaxed, the people are open and friendly, and you can still buy shrimp fresh off the boats as they come up the bayou from the Gulf of Mexico. Both the food and the summer weather are as hot as the devil's necktie. The drawl is distinct from the rest of the South, and it's as thick as crawfish etouffe. It's the kind of place that gets a person to dream up folksy-sounding similes all day long.

At the same time it's poor and run-down, the kind of place history seems to have passed by. The housing is often sub-standard. The ten feet of water that surged up the bayous during the hurricane left damage that is still being fixed, especially in those households too poor to hire workers to do the repairs. And the whole area is sinking into the sea. The Mississippi delta’s system of levees, shipping canals, oil drilling, and assorted mismanagement over decades has cut off the natural process of flooding and silting that kept the area in balance with the sea. As a consequence, the land sinks day by day into the Gulf of Mexico, marshes drown, and barrier islands disappear. The people of the bayou are more and more exposed to storm surges. Every year people are forced inland as land they once farmed and hunted on is covered with feet of sea water. The town we were in, Chauvin, will be underwater by 2040 if present trends continue.

We went down there looking to address one event and one particular problem -- hurricane damage. We ended up getting a glimpse of a much bigger and more awful network of natural and human crises that rebuilding a few houses can't even begin to resolve. One of the leaders of Bayou Grace told us about a conversation she had with a college professor who trained her in gathering oral histories. "Now you should go back home and write the obituary of your community," he told her. Imagine hearing that: not that your community will change, or turn over ethnically, or that its buildings will be torn down and replaced, but that it will fall into the sea and die, and its unique way of life will no more be known on the face of the earth.

She followed this statement with another one: "People here have never been more hopeful." After years of getting nothing whatsoever for the oil pumped from its territory, the people of Louisiana will start getting some revenues that can be used to restore its ecosystem. Attention is finally being paid to the unsexy-sounding but very important problem of coastal erosion. Groups of Christians from all over the country are coming down not just to help out but to learn about the dangers this fragile community faces. The place that time forgot has, for a time at least, been remembered by the wide world that eats its shrimp and drives with its oil.

All of this is a roundabout way of introducing today's celebration, the commemoration of the birth of St. John the Baptist. John was a prophet who came to Israel to declare the imminent arrival of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. From the earliest times, Christians read the prophecy in Malachi that we heard this morning as referring to John:

"See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come into his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight--indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fuller’s soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness."

In other words, you don't really want to meet John. He comes to startle and accuse and purify, to show his world that it is in need of God's saving action. We humans tend to fall into illusions of permanence; we assume that our institutions, our ideas, our communities--the very fabric of our lives--will continue much as they have and serve us as well (or as poorly) as ever. The sacrifices of the Temple will continue to be acceptable to God. The Roman Empire will stand forever. The Church will continue to have sway over the society. There will always be gas for our cars. Our retirement accounts will keep appreciating. Our children and our children's children will be educated much as we were, except better. We will always be the world's only great power. There will be ups and downs, to be sure, but the world we know will endure.

Then a crisis comes along and proves us wrong--a hurricane, a disastrous war, an environmental crisis of massive proportions. We see that there is much chaff mixed in with our rich wheat, that our shining silver hides dross and stain. The land is sinking underneath us, in large part because we made choices that benefited us and we didn't care to examine the consequences too closely.

John the Baptist came into a society that was having a crisis. He came in warning, to puncture its illusions that all would be well if only the old ways were upheld. He came to say that his people needed a new act of deliverance at the hand of their God and that they needed to be ready to receive it. This was a hard message to hear in his time and it is no easier to hear in ours--remember that the king gave John a martyr's death. Yet it is necessary to hear this hard message because it is only through it that God's saving work can be known. We will look for salvation only if we need it, and we will need it only when we see that our world is not permanent and that our land can fall into the sea. Any rich, smart, happy fool can be an optimist--can draw the conclusion that what is good today will be better tomorrow. It takes a real desperate person to experience hope, which exists only in the face of overwhelming trial.

So no, you wouldn't want to meet John the Baptist, but you might need to. We might just need to encounter a locust-eating, hair-shirt-wearing, God-ridden freak to see that hope is our only option and that the world won't just take care of itself. This, I think, is what our friend in the bayou was telling us when she said "People here have never been more hopeful." The crisis is on, and it has exposed a way of living in the world that simply can't continue. Yet this is the only way to see that just possibly deliverance may be at hand. We may have strayed far from the Lord, but the Lord has not abandoned us, and will send us our salvation in the refiner's fire and the hope of the Messiah's coming. May it be so in our own community, in our hearts, and in our world. Amen.

June 24, 2007

Benjamin J. Dueholm, guest preacher

Vicar, Imani Bethel Lutheran Church

Chicago