Brooding
Friends, we’re now in the Second Sunday in Advent. The painting you see up on the screen is one I asked Mary to put up there, so you’d have it for reference, because I’m going to draw your attention to it in a few minutes. In the meantime: take a look, and consider what you see up there. Now that we’re in week 2 of Advent, we’re spending some time with the first of the vital characters that help bring us Jesus–his weird cousin John the Baptist. Preachers with a sense of humor (and that very much includes me) adore our friend John. Stage actors portraying him have a field day. He’s not a calm, cozy character, the one who would hold your hand and read you a gentle bedtime story while sipping some chamomile tea. He’s a walking cartoon character, and the evangelist Matthew wanted to make sure we knew that. There’s “rough around the edges”, and then there’s this guy. Despite having mild mannered, highly respectable parents–a Temple priest and his doting wife–John the Baptist chooses t...