Watching some of the trees on our home property has been sad lately. Just last month I took down three plum trees that always produced beautiful red flowers in the spring. In fact, when those three trees started blooming it was the official beginning of spring for me. The flowers on these trees attracted bees and other insects and had a nice fragrance. It was a celebration of life in my backyard.
But over the last few years the trees developed a disease called black-knot. The tips of the branches start gnarling and get coated in a thick black substance that kills the branch and spreads rapidly. Eventually what you have is a tree full of dead wood. I still have one plum tree on my property and hope to save it, but I am not sure it’s possible. Then there are the ash trees in the back. We had plenty of ash trees in our backyard and beyond, tall spindly trees, not particularly pretty, but part of an established landscape, Pennsylvania natives. They have all fallen victim to the Emerald ash borer, a beetle that attacks the inside of the bark and slowly cuts off supply. Those trees are also dead. It’s not a pretty sight!
So, what do you do with dead wood? There is not much you can do other than burn it. In this advent gospel text, John the Baptist compares people’s spiritual lives to plants like trees and shrubs. In the wonderfully irreverent translation of “The Message” it sounds like this: “What counts is your life. Is it green and blossoming? Because if it’s deadwood, it goes on the fire.” – It sounds like a page out of the book written in my backyard. The language and metaphors used by this austere preacher in the austere surroundings of the Judean wilderness is always a bit shocking, as shocking as dead trees on your property. John the Baptist, the great preacher of advent, was not afraid to use stark metaphors from nature to get across his message of spiritual renewal. In fact, he deliberately selected a place of barrenness to evoke what he felt was a lack of soul-life among the people of Israel. I wonder where John would preach today if he were among us here in the United States. Would he gather people in the burnt landscapes of Northern California? Would he preach along the trickling creek of the so-called Colorado River in the summer? Would he choose a shore landscape after a hurricane?
I think it matters that John is clearly connecting his message of spiritual awakening to the natural world around him, and not for reasons of poetry. He, like the native Americans, understood that we’re not living apart from our surroundings. Our surroundings teach us something about life. When they suffer, we suffer. When they rejoice, we rejoice. Whatever people think about Global Warming and the effects it has on us, I think the increase in natural disasters is a message from God, and the message is disturbing. It’s asking us to make change in concrete ways. Bless creation by using less carbon, less plastic, less one-way products, create fewer sprawling developments! We struggle to “get” the message, mostly because change is hard. Yet, repentance is never just an exercise in prayer and soul-searching. John could see through the masks of Pharisees and Sadducees coming to be baptized. They knew how to look remorseful! They were skilled in the art of looking pious. But he wanted them to change their lives! Preparing the way of the Lord, the big advent theme, has less to do with feeling more spiritual or getting our homes ready for Christmas. It has everything to do with life style changes. Is there something we can offer God in the way of true repentance?
Another important aspect of this passage… It’s easy to misinterpret this message, to think that John is separating people into good and bad people, true Christians and false Christians, or any such divisions. But that would be an over-simplification. The famous Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
And so, every act of repentance, whether we engage in a Confession collectively at church, whether we practice it individually in a personal apology to someone, or whether we offer God our struggles and shortcomings in private prayer, it’s like removing some dead branches from a plant so that the plant as a whole may be healthier. Every positive life style change, small or big, whether it’s related to our personal health or whether it’s related to the bigger world, is an act of repentance and a step toward a healthier world. John would have said, “The Kingdom of God comes near when we make those changes.” That is preparing the way for the Lord.
I am reminded of an old literature series that younger people will not be familiar with at all. (So, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re officially young!) In the early 1900’s G.K. Chesterton, a British writer, developed the Father Brown series. Father Brown was a religious Sherlock Holmes, a short, stumpy Roman Catholic priest with boring clothes, a large umbrella and an uncanny insight into human evil. He solved murder mystery cases. Unlike the better-known Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown’s methods tended to be intuitive rather than deductive. He explained his method in “The Secret of Father Brown”: “You see, I had murdered them all myself…. I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully. I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was.”
I have always felt that Father Brown’s approach is scary, to put yourself into the mind of a criminal. Doesn’t that make you a criminal? Isn’t that even dangerous? At the same time, I appreciate this example, because it tells us that we are all human. There is a bit of sinner and saint in all of us; even Father Brown is capable of thinking like a criminal! So, preparing the way of the Lord runs through our own hearts. But where do we find the strength? That’s the million-dollar question. So often we know what we should do but simply can’t. The reason John pointed to Jesus is that he felt Jesus will give us the strength to change, the strength to grow above and beyond ourselves. “One comes after me,“ John said, “who will baptize you with fire!” One who will give you very ounce of the strength you need to make uncomfortable changes!
I planted two dogwood trees in place of the dead plums in November. In fact, I added two smaller ones in other parts of the garden. That was the easy part. Now I hope that God will also give me the strength to live in the light that overcomes darkness and grows shoots of hope out of the stumps of dead wood, as Isaiah said. Even the stumps that run through my own life! May God help us all to do good things and the right things! Amen.