Second Sunday of Advent - Year A

Welcome to the second week of Advent. As is our practice during this season, we sit in what we call the “waiting rooms of Christmas”: Apocalypse, Wilderness, Prison, and Public Disgrace. These unsettling rooms mirror the lived experiences of vulnerable communities and the simmering anxieties of our world today. Each waiting room yields its own gift. This week, we join John the Baptist in the wilderness, where the unquenchable fire of God’s love is kindled.

Wilderness is where God’s people go to sort things out. It’s the space between Egypt and the Promised Land, between slavery and freedom, between what was and what is to come. Wilderness is where Israel first learned to be God’s people. John the Baptist occupies this place, announcing strange things, wearing strange clothes and eating strange food. But he is not performing spiritual cosplay. He is inhabiting Israel’s memory: Words from Isaiah, camel hair from Elijah, honey from Samson, locusts from the wilderness wanderers. This is how John lights the match that kindles the fire — through memory.

The word gets out. Crowds come. Something in them knows they’ve lost the plot of their own story. They want to begin again. The religious power brokers come, too, but they emerge like “vipers” from their burning nests. To occupy this waiting room is to experience the unquenchable fire of God’s love in Christ: Not the fire of vengeance that destroys, but the fire of love that transforms. Like the burning bush in the wilderness, it is a fire that occupies without consuming. In the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, / And every common bush afire with God, / But only he who sees takes off his shoes.”