Episcopal Church of the Messiah
Worship Service Sermons
Advent IIIA, December 16, 2007
The Reverend Canon Brad Karelius
Restoration
March 2003, during my Lenten retreat in the desert, I am seated on a flat granite rock on the slopes of the Funeral Mountains. The rough rocky landscape is devoid of anything green. The distinct sounds are the wind, gravel and rocks loosened by my movements and the shriek of a red-tailed hawk. 2,000 feet below me in Death Valley is the oasis of Stovepipe Wells. Spilling out over the desert to the north are miles and miles of huge sand dunes. The wind swirls the sand into climbing columns of fine dust. The sun penetrates through the thin atmosphere; mountains turn red and orange and purple, as sunset is not far off.
I don’t have to go to Israel to imagine the landscape of John the Baptist and Jesus. It is all here in Death Valley. This is what the Dead Sea looks like. It was in a landscape like this, on the southern edge of the Dead Sea, that a Jewish monastic community flourished at the time of Jesus. The Essenes believed that an apocalypse was coming, when God would intervene into this corrupted world. The angels of light would combat the angels of darkness. Through endless rituals of bathing in mikvahs (the origin of baptism) for ritual purity, separation of the sexes and harsh ascetic practices, the Essenes prepared for the Day of the Lord. Some scholars believe that John the Baptist might have spent time here with the Essenes. Perhaps it was their fervent expectation of the apocalypse that fed John’s preaching about judgment, punishment and vindication.
Jesus appears after his own time in the desert and encounters this spirit of expectancy among the Jewish people. "Are you the Messiah," they ask. Jesus points to his works as an answer. These point to a restoration and wholeness to come: the missing are found, the wounded are healed.
Jesus asks the crowd, "What were you looking for:" He knows what they seek: a God-grounded person who cannot be pushed around and would confront the abuses of all those people who live in palaces and appease the Romans. They seek one who speaks the word of God, not only by confronting sin, but also by pointing the way to restoration and redemption.
Jesus is the one who will bring back sight, hearing, movement, vitality and dignity. How does a person become blind, deaf or unable to walk? This was not a medical question, but a search for a spiritual causes.
Carl Jung the psychoanalyst discovered the persona and the shadow. The persona is the idealized image we create: how we present ourselves to the world. But the persona is built up by denying certain aspects of ourselves. We can screen out our body, our emotions, and push away parts of our selves that offend traditional family values. So denial is one way we become blind, lame, or deaf.
&#These neglected parts of ourselves are the shadow: parts we won’t allow into the light of consciousness. Jung discovered that the suppression of the shadow can lead to psychophysical illness, and can lead to violence and oppression of those who are not like us.
Robert Bly calls this shadow the "long bag that we drag behind us."
"When we were one or two years old we had what we might call a 360-degree personality…but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts….They said things like: "Can’t you be still?’ Or "It isn’t nice to try and kill your brother." Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: "Good children don’t’ get angry over such little things." So we take our anger and put it in the bag. By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Minnesota, we were known as "the nice Bly boys." Our bags were already a mile long."
Reading that passage made me think about my own life, how I packed that bag so full of stuff. But it finally popped when I was 21. There were serious consequences for me, but my priest and a therapist over the years helped me look back at that persona and shadow. I discovered God was not a giant spiritual parent with a club, but that God invited me into holy communion, to be real, and to live in the light. All of that insight came from amazing grace.
I think a vestiage of that shadow is the powerful voice of judgement and self-criticism that pops up from time to time in our head, to blindside us with a memory of the past: someone we hurt, someone we disappointed. We have been given new life, but the spirit of desolation in the shadow can still pull at us.
Jesus comes out of the desert with a different message than the harsh judgment and hellfire of John the Baptist. Jesus comes as the one to restore humanity. Jesus begins by doing a striking thing: he sees the essential goodness of creation. In the sight of God, all are good, humans, animals, all of creation. Sin could be how we have forgotten our true identify: as beloved ones of God, as persons whose deepest desire is for connection and intimacy with God.
John Shea writes:
"The deepest desire of the heart is to be connected to God, the source and parent. People have strayed from this relationship and, consequently, live in exile from their true selves. But they search for what they have lost. Therefore, what they went out to see was the possibility of reconnecting, of restoring what they had lost, of reinhabiting the garden in the fierceness of the desert. What they found was John as the path to Jesus. Jesus is the New Adam or, in another image, the bridegroom. John is the friend of the bridegroom and rejoices at the sound of his voice. John clears the path, but Jesus walks on it.
The question Jesus asks you this morning: whom did you come out to see? In these Advent days we welcome the One who brings restoration and wholeness.
Sources used:
A Little Book on the Human Shadow, ed. William Booth.
On Earth As It Is In Heaven, John Shea.