Happy Advent, you brood of vipers!

But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Matthew 3. 1 - 12

John the Baptizer keeps popping up in daily readings in this year's lectionary/daily office cycle. And he "does not mince words or spare anyone's sensibilities," as Bishop Deon Johnson says in today's Forward Day by Day meditation. John has been wandering around the desert eating bugs, wearing rags and preaching the coming of the Messiah and baptizing people...even Jesus! He gets people's attention by telling the truth, whether it hurts or not, and ultimately it costs him his head.

What lesson do we learn from John the Baptizer? If we are going to follow Jesus, are some of us to be a “voice of one calling out in the wilderness,” preparing hearts and minds for “the way of the Lord.”? Are we called to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind no matter how much it hurts? And does this path of faith always begin in a wilderness time in our lives?

Our secular worlds and our religious worlds are becoming more and more fractured, and the John the Baptizers among us are chastised, ostracised and told their behavior is "unbecoming." And yet...to be whole, to be fully in relationship with God, we must embrace the magnitude of the power of the Love God brought into the world with the Incarnation. That Love is not just for people who believe a certain way, or pray a certain way, or baptize a certain way. It is for all of Creation, and it is found most often in the cracks and crevasses of the wildernesses of life. God shows up in the most impossible of situations even in food troughs in the desert. I look forward to finding God again for the first time this Christmas in the most unlikely of places. Only a few more days of searching.

Digital Art. Copyright © 2007, 2014 Robert Flores.

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. But this is the first and great commandment, nonetheless. Even in the wilderness — especially in the wilderness — you shall love him.

― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces

Art work by Robert Flores, 2014