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 to sleep in the woods. He shaves random animals whenever he needs a new outfit, and walks around in head to toe animal hair. For reference, normal people just wore linen. If you complimented him on his outfit, he’d say “thanks, I just gave a camel a haircut!” He would have been expected to become a Temple priest just like Zechariah, his father, but instead he’s voluntarily jobless, and unwilling to either buy what he needs or ask others for it. So when he needs something to eat, rather than heading to the market place and buying meat, bread, and wine, he grabs a handful of bugs. Locusts, to be more specific. In Moses’ day those were a plague, but to John they’re a good trail mix. I got so morbidly curious that I did some Google research, and it turns out you could live off of locusts for a long time, they’re rich in protein, and in some countries they’re even a delicacy. I’m guessing Palestine is not that country. It’s why Jesus didn’t serve locusts at the Last Supper. Be thankful. When the bug diet isn’t hitting the spot, John harasses the local bee population and eats honey. Clearly bee stings don’t scare this man. I’d guess very little does. When he’s around other people, he isn’t looking to make friends. He stands on street corners and yells at people. Get ready, he says. If you think I’m a lot, you’re hardly ready for what’s about to hit you. This is the guy we warn our kids not to talk to. You say hi, and he yells back that the mountains are too big. And when he’s feeling extra spicy, like in this morning’s story, he confronts the Pharisees, the Bible’s very own Mean Girls, the same folks who bully Jesus ad nauseum. He tells them their status is worthless, their heritage is worthless, God could grab a random handful of humans anywhere and find more worthy descendants of Abraham. He calls them a brood of vipers. Not a compliment. John doesn’t get any less controversial, as you’d have to imagine. He never loses an ounce of that holy outrageousness. And eventually, after he publicly denounces King Herod’s remarriage and calls he and his wife shameless political gold diggers, he lands in jail, and ultimately loses his head at a birthday party. There’s never a dull headline when the story is about this man.

What’s so amazing isn’t necessarily that this walking zoo of a man exists in public. Rather, it’s that he doesn’t scare everyone away. Some folks see him in the public square, with a mouth full of bugs, looking like Tom Hanks while he’s on that island in Castaway, yelling about fire and chopping down family trees, and they sit and listen. They approach him. They absorb his wisdom. They even ask him to baptize them. Can’t say I’d see this guy in public and ask him to dunk me in water. That doesn’t exactly sound like it would end well. But he manages to earn the trust and respect of many people, and even gain his own disciples and followers. What kind of life would you have to live to listen to this man for Good News? What would you see in him? We know enough about his neighbors to know that many of them weren’t clothed or fed any better. They were naked and starving, so camel hair and a handful of bugs might have looked inventive and smart to them. Brave. John was incredibly weird, but he understood them. And he wasn’t intimidated by the ones who held the poor folks down. He saw them for the snakes they were. He was willing to be very unpopular, and give up his life, for what was right. He was revolutionary. And if you could get past his scary appearance and trust John enough to see him as a teacher, you could certainly do as much for Jesus. John was a bridge. A gate. The step between what is, and what might be, in the name of his cousin.

With that in mind, I want to switch gears and think about the prophetic words we hear this morning from the book of Isaiah, and this painting. This painting is titled “The Peaceable Kingdom”, and this version of it was painted by Edward Hicks in the year 1833. He revisited this idea several times between the years 1820 and 1849, so you may have seen different variations of this same painting–bigger landscape, more animals, different animals, etc. Edward Hicks began his career as a sign painter, but once this particular subject so captivated his attention, he realized he had a different calling, and became a Quaker minister. Our Quaker neighbors, also called the Religious Society of Friends, have strong beliefs in social justice, equality, and peace. The left side of this painting is a direct reference to the Isaiah passage we just heard– 

“The wolf shall live with the lamb;
    the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed[b] together,
    and a little child shall lead them.”

Hicks and Isaiah imagined the same world–one with no predators, and no prey. I’m not sure what that means for the ecosystem, and mealtime at the zoo. Maybe it’s also a world with no more hunger? And no more overpopulation? A world with perfect balance? These are Pastor Natalie’s wonder thoughts. But regardless, it’s a world with no fighting, no violence, no fear, and no enemies. A lion casually sits with a cow. A sheep grazes with a wolf. And small children and angels attend them.

The natural place our brain takes that image is relationships between people. If the goat and the cheetah can sit together without eating each other, gee, can we bring this same peace to congress? They might actually get some work done! 

Amazingly, Hicks was way ahead of us there. The image on the left side of the painting is the animals with the little children and angels. But on the right side, in the distance, you see these adults talking to one another. Hicks left it a little vague, but in his imagination, that scene was William Penn making peace with Native Americans. To grasp the depth, you’d need to know the history. Hicks was from Pennsylvania, which was settled in 1681 by a British Quaker by the name of William Penn. King Charles II owed a debt to Penn’s father, and granted Penn the land to resolve the debt. Penn established the colony of Pennsylvania, and then the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia, as safe havens for his Quaker friends and family, who faced persecution for their beliefs in England. In Pennsylvania, they’d be free to live in peace and harmony. In this new colony, Penn advocated for religious freedom and a fair judicial system. He wanted the government to represent the people, and drafted a state constitution that later influenced the US constitution. He also drafted treaties between the English settlers and the Lenape tribe that was indigenous to the land, to ensure the Lenape tribe would be treated with fairness and respect, and so they could live in harmony with the White settlers.

The peaceable kingdom, imagined by Edward Hicks, prophesied by Isaiah, proclaimed by John the Baptist, and then commanded by Jesus, is a place where White folks atone for the sins of colonialism and racism, and do the work of creating peace and fairness. It’s a place where people live without fear, without persecution, without violence, and without warfare. It’s a place where justice and brotherly (and sisterly) love reign. 

But, despite the ideals in William Penn’s mind and plans, Pennsylvania is not a utopia of peace, and Philadelphia may be the City of Brotherly Love, but they’re as plagued by violence, crime, and prejudice as any other American city. Penn’s fair province hasn’t come to fruition. Hicks’ peaceable kingdom hasn’t come to fruition. John the Baptist’s leveled mountains and raised valleys haven’t come to fruition. By definition, that reality, the Kingdom of God, is still brooding within us. Merriam Webster tells us that “brooding” means harboring deeply unhappy thoughts, like the handsome rebel without a cause character in your favorite show. But brooding is also the verb for a mother bird sitting on her eggs, nurturing them until they hatch. A “brood” describes the Pharisees that John likens to venomous snakes. But a brood is also a vulnerable family in the making. A brood is Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus. A brood is us.

We harbor deeply unhappy thoughts about the state of the world, about life, about what holds us back. We create our own unhappiness, and John puts down that bug sandwich and yells at us, and calls us vipers. And we need to hear it if we want to change it. But we have so much potential, and we’re sitting on it. We may be hate and war mongers. But we’re also treaty writers, painters, street preachers, and baptizers. If we choose it, nurture it, and make a safe path for it to thrive, then the peaceable kingdom is much, much closer than we think. We can make it happen.

Amen.