Every year when the Second Sunday of Advent rolls around and I hear the Gospel reading about John the Baptist, I’m always transported back to a weekend over fifty years ago when I went to visit a college friend and her husband. He was a young psychologist working at a Roman Catholic home for children described as having serious emotional problems. It was a lovey facility on a wooded campus where small groups of children lived in cottages with caregivers. My friend and her husband also lived in a cottage on campus. This being during my Roman Catholic period, I went to mass at the school on Sunday morning which was held in a multipurpose sort of space. As I sat in the back looking over the congregation of mostly young children, there was nothing that hinted to me they were anything other than ordinary young people. When it came time for the homily focused on this reading about John preparing the way for Jesus, the priest compared John to the road crews who fixed the road so the kids’ parents could come visit them. Given that John prepared the way for Jesus, Love incarnate, and the road crews made it possible for love in the form of their parents to reach those children, it was perhaps a more apt comparison than that priest’s young congregation might have realized.
As the Gospels tell it, John and Jesus were second cousins, with Jesus being six months younger than John. The son of older parents who hadn’t expected to have a child by the time he came along, John was evidently a man who spent a great deal of time in the wilderness. Consequently at whatever point he felt called to become a forerunner of someone coming later, he didn’t go into the cities to urge people to repent and be baptized, but rather stayed in the wilderness in the region around the Jordan and let people come to him. This was by no means taking the easy way out; the Judaen wilderness is a really barren area, the man wore clothes made of camel’s hair and ate a ritually pure but rather limited diet of locusts and wild honey. Eccentric as he may have appeared, though, John’s message was clear, and he developed a strong following. Mind you the man did not mince words about the universal need for repentance. At one point he referred to a group of Pharisees and Sadducees who came out to hear him as a brood of vipers. Later he was arrested and ultimately beheaded for criticizing Herod for his illicit marriage to Herodias.
But before he was arrested John baptized Jesus. I’ve often wondered if early in his ministry John knew that the person for whom he was preparing the way, the person whose sandals he felt unworthy to untie, was his cousin. He certainly seems to have realized Jesus was the one at the moment he and Jesus were face to face in the river, when he told Jesus that he, Jesus, should be the one doing the baptizing only to have Jesus say no, I need you to baptize me first. What a remarkable moment, one young man nearing the end of his ministry as the other was getting ready to begin his. What did they see in each other’s eyes that day? Surely mutual respect, hopefully unconditional love, perhaps an awareness deeper than words that neither was destined to spend very long on this earth.
In John’s mind the way he was supposed to prepare people for the one coming after him was to convince them to repent, that is to turn away from their obsession with material wealth and self absorbed earthly pleasures in order to grow closer to God by living according to the law. Ideally this would make them more open to Jesus’ message, the heart of which was to abide by the Great Commandment, that is, to love God and to love each other. Over 2000 years later neither message has changed. As we spend this Advent season preparing our hearts and homes to once again welcome the Christ Child on Christmas, we’re called as we are every year to shift our focus from caring about what we have to caring about what we have to offer. Admittedly that can feel like a tall order these days, when hostility seems to be many people’s default setting, making us feel reluctant to even interact with people we don’t know well, and some that we do, let alone try to help them. However, we need to remember that down through time humanity has never gotten it right, people have never been universally caring and compassionate. After all if our forbearers had been, there would have been no need for Jesus. So we need to resist getting sucked into that bottomless vortex of despair, where we tell ourselves that today’s problems are way too big for us to solve, so since we can’t possibly make everything right, there’s really no point in trying to do anything. Instead we would do well to remember that for every person mentioned in a history book, there have been literally millions of unsung heroes down through time who have done as much if not more to make the world a better place than the few whose stories we know.
To mention someone of whom I’m betting most of you have never heard, though his life story was the basis for a movie, I give you Desmond Doss. When World War II broke out Doss was working at a naval shipyard in Virginia. A devote Seventh Day Adventist, he held particularly strong views against killing and working on the sabbath. He could easily have applied for a deferment and spent the war working in the shipyard, where he would definitely have been supporting the war effort. However, when he was drafted he didn’t refuse to enlist on the grounds of being a conscientious objector because in a classic moral conundrum he believed the country was engaged in a just war and he wanted to help the war effort. However, he wasn’t willing to do so by killing anyone, so he asked to serve as a medic. Unfortunately, even future medics had to go through regular basic training, which involved among other things, learning to use a rifle. Doss refused. Though he was verbally harassed, physically beaten, endlessly bullied by both the other enlisted men and his commanding officers for refusing to handle a weapon, he would not allow himself to be driven out, and ultimately was sent to the Pacific where he served as a medic with an infantry regiment. Over time his unrelenting efforts to care for the men in his unit earned him first grudging but ultimately genuine respect from his comrades. The event for which he is famous, and for which he became the first conscientious objector ever to be awarded the Medal of Honor, occurred on the Maeda Escarpment, known as Hacksaw Ridge, on Okinawa. The escarpment where the battle in question took place was on top of a 400 foot cliff which the US forces had to use cargo nets to climb. After fighting for three days without gaining any ground, the unit was ordered to retreat. When the surviving troops got to the bottom and checked for who was and was not there, Doss was missing. He had stayed behind it turned out, because there were wounded men still on the battlefield. After the sun went down bodies started coming down the ridge one at a time on a stretcher being lowered by a single rope. Somehow Private Doss, a physically small man, carried or dragged roughly 75 men from where they had fallen to the edge of the cliff, and then singlehandedly lowered them down to where their comrades were waiting. Only when he could find no one else to save did Doss descend himself.
What Doss did can be viewed two ways. Sadly the cynics among us these days would say oh, millions upon millions of people died in World War II so what difference does it make that Desmond Doss saved 75? Others would say in one night Desmond Doss gave 75 men a chance at a future that without him they would not have had. Our war for nearly two years has been against not an army but a virus. Clearly no one has been able to singlehandedly eliminate Covid and all its challenges, but most people I know have done something during this pandemic to help curb the spread of the virus. Obviously the medical professionals who have worked to the point of collapse for nearly two years treating those who have fallen victim to this relentless disease have led the fight. Other front line workers have risked their own wellbeing to provide services all too many of us take for granted. Still other people have simply tried to behave in ways that would minimize the likelihood of transmission, sometimes only to be treated horribly for their efforts, enduring months of relentless verbal abuse for wearing a mask at work for example, which they were doing not so much to protect themselves as to avoid catching the virus and then spreading it to other members of their families. I have friends who have seen their families splinted between those who have gotten vaccinated and those who have refused to do so, but they personally have still done all in their power to give those who wanted to receive the vaccine the opportunity to do so. Then there are the countless people who have adapted their ongoing ministries as necessary in order to go on serving those in need, perhaps differently, but just as faithfully as before the pandemic. In short, millions of people have been and continue to be busy doing exactly what Jesus asked us to do: make the Love of God real to a broken world.
But getting back for just a moment to that sermon from all those years ago, the priest that day said that John had come to prepare the way for Jesus, so that Jesus could prepare the way for us to get to heaven, which I believe is the state of grace we will experience when love finally conquers all. As the priest was wrapping up his sermon one of the children raised his hand and asked, “So how will we know when we get to heaven?” I honestly don’t remember what the priest said, or if he said anything at all; he may not have heard the question. What I do remember is that on my way back to Boston that evening I composed my own answer to that little boy.
Tell Me, Father
How will we know when we get to heaven?
How will we find the place?
Will it be hidden deep in the woods
Or outside of outer space?
Will it be pretty? Will it be neat?
Will it be worth the wait?
How long does it take if you go by car?
By plane what is the rate?
Oh my child it takes no time
To reach heaven, love sublime,
For the saints they have no meeting place
And the slowest runner can win the race.
For heaven is merely a state of mind
Which few on earth e’er will find
But if you try with each new day
To love, to hope, to try to pray,
When God is ready, in God’s own way,
You’ll find heaven
And you’ll get to stay.
Amen.
