John the Baptist in the Wilderness
Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.
Abby: Good morning. Some of you who have seen me on stage before said, "You're not actually nervous, are you?" Listen, I could stand up all day and preach about Jesus, but there's something very personal about my story and your story. And because even though I've shared my story of faith to countless groups of people, small groups, from platforms, individually, I've never actually been able to share this part of my story. So thank you for today.
Vocational ministry has been my life for really all of my life. As a pastor's daughter, I spent way more of my life at the church than anywhere else. I knew from a young age who Jesus was and my love for him. I got my degree in Christian education, and right out of college, I got a job at a church, became their youth pastor. Fresh out of school, full-time job, a new and wonderful community of people. I bought my first home. I was living the dream.
The youth group grew quickly. The church was thriving. I was well-loved. I had a great group of friends doing life in a place where lakes are abundant and golf courses are beautiful and ready to be played. And I tell you this side of my wilderness story because from the outside, I was able to hide my wilderness for a long time. Both hide it from the world around me, hide from it and hide in it. I was able to live and feel two very different things at the same time. I was surrounded. I was loved. Thriving in a ministry God continued to bless. And yet at the same time, I was searching. I was alone. I was so scared because someone who loved Jesus with all their heart and was living their entire life for him—they weren't supposed to be gay. That's not possible.
So the moment I started to wonder or feel certain things, I would just brush it off as I needed to pray more. I needed to try harder, and that couldn't possibly be me, right? These two things don't go together. I even tried marrying a man because it was what I was supposed to do. And I broke off the engagement four months before the wedding day. I spent years writing in my journals, crying out to God and even there—even in my journals—I wasn't willing to voice the way I felt because what if someone knew? What if someone read it? The fear that dwelt inside of me.
I read some of those journals yesterday in preparation for today, and I was overwhelmed by my brokenness and God's faithfulness—page after page of brokenness. And yet I look back now and all I see is his faithfulness. I would walk away from those times of crying out to God with the phrase, "This is just my lot in life. This is just the thorn in my side. And God is going to see me through." I couldn't tell my friends. What would happen to my job—my job that took up my whole life, my whole community, my whole world?
The topic would come up with students or on staff, and I knew what to say. I was even able to separate myself from myself. I was really good at it. However, being in the wilderness alone and in hiding can only happen for so long before the tension is too much because we weren’t meant to do this alone.
After eight years of full-time ministry and not even fully knowing myself at the time, I shared with my parents my struggle. I didn’t fully come out to them because I wasn’t even able to say the words myself, but they knew. And they responded in a way you could only hope and pray for. They loved me big, and I knew they would always be there. And even though we didn’t talk about it again for many years, and even though I was still in the wilderness, I was a little less alone.
I didn’t think I’d ever work at a church again. I really didn’t want to. It was a relief to be done. I had no idea where I was headed or what I was doing, but I knew God had me. Two years later, a new church—the church I was attending—wanted me to come on staff. The pastor at the time spoke words of life into me, breathing life into my broken and defeated heart and continued to call out the gifts and call the Lord had on my life.
But how? How can this be? It was not an affirming church. I’d have to hide again. Even though I had a close friend in my life and my family who I was out to and loved me greatly—who I wouldn’t have made it without—ministry is just so all-consuming, right? It felt like I would have to hide again. And there was this huge risk in saying, “Yes.” I didn’t want to blow up a church. I didn’t want to get hurt in the process. Why am I doing this? Why me?
But I couldn’t shake the fact of what God was doing in my life and my heart, and it brought me to this place. So I walked into that job in the midst of that tension. And there was so much goodness in that job—so much goodness and also hard parts, continuing the wilderness of before. I’d go home and the phrase, “If only they knew,” constantly going through my head. “If only they knew the real me.” But God continued to move and show up and lead and guide. And I would continue to reside to the fact that this is just my life. This is just the way it’s going to be.
During that time, I was doing more reading and studying, and I came to a place of someone who—I was accepting who I was. And the more I read and the more I talked with close friends and spent time with the Lord and walked in what he had for me, the more I came to see and know that he loved me—all of me—that he didn’t make a mistake when he created Abbie. That having the gifts that he’s given me doesn’t just make up for the fact that I’m gay or butt heads with the fact that I’m gay. If anything, they flourish because of that fact. And that all the time spent in the wilderness had brought me to this place where God was at work in my outside ministry life, but also in the ministry of my heart.
But last fall, I couldn’t do it anymore. I was having a harder and harder time keeping my world separate and segregated, desperately in want and need of a place and a church where I could be myself—where I could share all parts of my story and hear all parts of other stories, where I could do life fully as me. And believing he had that for me elsewhere from where I was. And so I made the really hard decision to hold on to the Lord, to leave my role, and to trust.
There are different wildernesses now. The wilderness is not just something we get through and then it’s over—done with the wilderness. Because as long as we’re living in this world, we will be in the wilderness. But as far as that particular wilderness for me, there are parts that still linger and hurt. But I’m grateful that it’s shifted. And I’m grateful to no longer be alone and scared of what is to come. Thank you for welcoming my wife and I into this community with open arms. It means more than you could ever know. [Applause]
Debbie: Thank you, Abby. And Abby’s right, that’s way harder to do than get up and preach a message. You know, when Abby—we asked her to do words of institution. By the way, we will be having her preach this fall. But when we asked her to do words of institution a few weeks ago, it was absolutely hilarious because there were some folks in the audience—and my brother and sister-in-law were visiting—and they looked over at my husband and go, “This ain’t her first rodeo, is it?” You’re gifted. You’re called. Thank you. Thank you for sharing.
While we continue on in our series, Experiencing God in the Wilderness, we’re in week six. We’ve talked about the wilderness being this sort of barren place that can be isolating, a place that sometimes we’re tested, a place of uncertainty and difficulty and grief and loss. It’s this place that’s full of both risk and reward. And one of the things that I think we’ve seen over the stories that we’ve heard in the last few weeks and through this, the biblical text, is that often in the wilderness, God meets us. God speaks to us. God shapes us in that space, and God sends us from the wilderness. What’s clear is that it’s a place of divine presence, and the wilderness—both literal and metaphorical—is shown throughout scripture.
Moses and Elijah and Job, Israel and soon—in the next few weeks, Jesus. But tonight we will be in the wilderness with a maybe a little rough around the edges, eccentric prophet—a prophet, John the Baptist—that God sends into the wilderness to prepare the way for Jesus. We’re in Matthew 3. [paper flies off the stand] Oops, I do need that unlike Maggie. We’re in Matthew 3:1–11. And maybe someone could turn that fan a little bit for me so my stuff’s not blown over. That’d be awesome. Here we go:
In those days, John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.” Now John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and honey. Then Jerusalem and all of Judea and all the regions around the Jordan were going out to him, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor.’ For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; therefore, every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. I baptize you with water for repentance. But the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I, and I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
Matthew begins this story with the phrase “in those days.” And those days that precede this story that we see in chapter one and two—those are days of slaughter of innocence. It’s when Herod had all the children two years old and under in Bethlehem and the surrounding area killed. And in those days, God was watching over the life of his own son. And in those days, God was protecting his people. And in those days, God was waiting for just the right moment to reveal the truth about the leaders that were in power. And in those days is when John appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming repentance. This is a prophetic moment. The wilderness becomes a stage for God's coming and the voice, the mission that had been prophesied 700 years earlier by the prophet Elijah—Cody talked about Elijah last week—or Isaiah, I’m sorry.
John was born to a woman—you might know this story. Many of us recall it. We often hear about it in Advent—to a woman that was considered barren. Mary, the mother of Jesus, her cousin Elizabeth, and the priest Zechariah had long desired and prayed for a child for decades. And they became pregnant with John the Baptist—that’s his beginning. And he lived most of his life in the obscurity of the desert. Around 31-ish years old, the Word of God came to him, and he started preaching in the wilderness a message of repentance. People from all over—the urbanites from Jerusalem, the folks from the rural area of Judea, the Sadducees, the Pharisees—they came. They came to hear this message. And they came out of either curiosity or conviction or maybe because they saw John the Baptist and his message as a threat. But despite his startling appearance, startling message, they came.
And he had a radical approach, a radical approach that seemed like it was meant to shake things up. Wake up out of your spiritual complacency. He was calling them out of their dead legalism of their religious practices. And if we look at those words and we kind of hear that tone, it doesn’t so much feel like the Minnesota nice that we like to do. I’ll tell you, as a pastor with a bent toward pastoral care, it makes me cringe just a little bit. But there’s something compelling about that because the people kept on coming. There’s a pastor that I’ve followed for years down in Texas, and he’s retired now, but he preached on this text a few years back, and after he read the text, here’s how he started with his community. I’m not kidding you. This is hard for me to even say. This is not my words:
“So what brought you slithering in here today, you sons of snakes? Why are you here—to get out of the cold, to see your friends, to make yourself feel better about how good and faithful you are? Maybe to get a cup of coffee and a donut? Are you here to give God that wish list you call your prayer? And don’t even get me started about who you are and how long your family has been at this church. I don’t care what you’ve done in this place or how much money you’ve given. I want to know what are you doing with your life? Where are you headed? Don’t give me some political answer or some polite answer. This is not dress-up and pretend time. This is serious and there are consequences for the way you are living your life and the choices that you make. So if you are here to change your ways, to live a different life, to open yourself up to God, to truly love your neighbor as you love yourself, then show it. Live it. Let that be seen by the choices that you make, the priorities you establish, the actions you take, and the words you speak. If that’s not why you’re here, then get out. Crawl back to the hole you came from.”
Can you even imagine? I could barely speak these words that were not even mine. I am cringing. But here’s the deal. Let’s peel through some of that language that feels offensive. There’s some good points in that statement. It’s kind of the vibe you get from John the Baptist. There was some name calling. He went out after folks. A little harshness in the tone. And of course we could consider cultural context maybe. But I tend to land on that side of like, language and tone matter in expressing your message. But obviously it was okay that he was doing it because they kept on coming. And at the end of the day, there was something compelling about what John the Baptist had to say. And he’s got a message for us. And in this wilderness place of preparation and repentance, John’s message is simple and it’s disruptive. It’s a message of repentance, of reorientation, of creating space for God to do what’s next.
And I think we need to understand what repentance is because often you think about repentance and all of a sudden you sort of start to feel that shame and that guilt like, “What have I done wrong? Oh no, I need to apologize.” But listen to this quote by pastor, theologian, and author Charles Aaron about what he says about repentance: “John calls his audience to repentance. A thorough change of heart, mind, and actions. Repentance literally means turning around, moving in an opposite direction. This harsh, no-nonsense John whose overall message certainly contains judgment actually teaches the contemporary church a much needed message about repentance. Repentance rises not so much out of fear of punishment as it does out of the sense of passion about the nearness of the kingdom of heaven.” That makes repentance feel a lot less punishing and a lot more hopeful, transformational.
And I think what makes us uncomfortable is sort of the disruptive part of this whole thing. Because maybe the part of discomfort is that repentance—naming what separates us from God, turning back toward God—requires us to respond. It’s a call to action. It holds before us things about ourselves, about our world that often we don’t want to look at, we don’t want to see, we don’t want to deal with. And it’s challenging, critical, and uncomfortable. With John, the name calling, his preaching of wrath and axes and fires—at some level, I think we know that he’s right. Because when we look around our world and we read the newspaper and we listen to the news or we examine our own lives, we are confronted with the reality of John’s sermon. And that’s this: our world, our lives are not as they should be, as they can be, as God wills them to be. And every one of us in this room could name those sinful and broken places in our lives and our world—the anger, the violence, the homelessness, the poverty, the war, lives controlled by fear, years of guilt that have crippled us. And this list could go on and on and on.
You know what the hard part is, is that there’s only one thing worse than that evil I just listed. It’s the indifference to that evil. That indifference is more insidious than the evil itself. It’s more dangerous. It’s more universal. It’s more contagious. And often we live such busy and exhausted lives that we can become indifferent to what’s happening in our world. We can become indifferent to the needs of other human beings. And maybe our worldview—even our church view—can get so small that unless we or someone we love is directly impacted, we can turn a blind eye. We can keep on going with our lives. Because honestly, it’s not a consequence to us. I’m busy. I don’t know if I have time to pay attention, to speak up, to stand with.
It reminded me of a poem that many, many people are familiar with. But it’s something I always go back to. It was written by a German Lutheran pastor by the name of Martin Niemöller. He wrote it post World War II. He was a German pastor who initially supported the Nazis and then became a vocal critic which led him to be imprisoned in a concentration camp. And he first wrote this poem, this piece, and he spoke it in 1946 as sort of a confessional about his own inaction, about the collective guilt of the German people during Nazi Germany. And that poem goes like this:
“First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist. And then they came for the Trade Unionists and I did not speak out because I wasn’t a Trade Unionist. And then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
I think it’s an important reminder for us that as followers of Jesus Christ, there’s no space in our lives. There is no space to be indifferent because indifference makes us complicit. But I think often in our humanness that’s where we go. That’s why this is hard because often we’re pretty content. Maybe that’s not even the right word. We’ve settled. We’ve settled because we feel overwhelmed, powerless to do anything. And again maybe we’re too tired, we’re too busy to make change. Maybe we’re so distracted and overcommitted. Maybe we feel paralyzed or stuck to do anything more than what we’re already doing. There’s a whole lot of ways to settle because somehow we find a way to manage our life, at least on the surface. We become comfortable and maybe even comfortably numb. And we don’t want John or anyone else messing with our lives, our plan, our system.
But here’s the thing, and we see it in this text. God doesn’t settle. That’s why these divine wrath, the axes, the fire—kind of counterintuitively—are actually good news. Because here’s the thing: God loves enough to get angry. The good news is that God is not indifferent. He’s not indifferent to the suffering in the world, to the evil in the world. God is not indifferent to his people. God is not indifferent to your life or my life. God’s concern and love for creation are the source of God’s anger. And anger is not the opposite of love. What’s the opposite of love is indifference. And the last thing we need is more indifference in this world. The last thing we need is to hear from another that our very existence is meaningless. And God forbid that we should ever say or act as though another’s existence is of no consequence to us.
I don’t know what’s running through your head in this moment, and I wish I could stand up here and say okay, as followers of Jesus, here’s what we’re all gonna do because I feel a lot of these things. And when I hear those words about, “Wow, does this person that I don’t even know, does this group of people that we’ve never met that live across the world, across the country, down the street in North Minneapolis—is my life, my actions, are they reflecting that I care, that I’m concerned?” Because what’s running through my head when I read that are the pictures I don’t want to look at—those children starving to death in Gaza. The pictures I don’t want to look at is the dehumanization of our brothers and sisters who live in this country that are being deported out and put into these horrible prisons. It’s the picture of my own head that’s sitting at a friend’s house in North Minneapolis in her backyard over dinner and hearing gunshots all over the neighborhood.
Do we care about what’s going on? Because this is why we need to hear the message from John the Baptist. And we don’t so much need to hear the message to tell us that we need to change or turn back or turn around, turn toward God—because I think we all know that. We need to hear the message as a reminder that we can change, that we can turn back, that we can live differently. And that’s the message of John the Baptist. It’s the first thing he says in today’s gospel: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” John’s cry of repentance is the call to turn away from our indifference and to engage at a life-changing level. Because here’s the thing about the kingdom of heaven: the kingdom of heaven reorders our relationships. It reorders our priorities. It reorders our life. In John’s words, our words of interrogation: do we care enough about the lives in this world in which we live? Do we love enough to get angry about the suffering and plight of other human beings even if we don’t know them? According to John, the kingdom of heaven has already come near. Repentance isn’t a precondition for the kingdom coming. Rather, it’s a call. We need to respond to the kingdom coming near. And we need to respond in this time and in this place, in these circumstances, in my life, in your life, the life of this world. And what John is clear about in that text: God wants to see the fruit. He needs to see the fruit. Repentance is not a one-time deal. It is a call. It is a way to live our life and a call to respond.
I’m wondering if every day we woke up and asked ourselves, “Can you hear John’s shout? Can you hear him say, ‘Turn around, people. Turn around. Don’t miss it. Don’t miss what’s in front of you because the kingdom is near, and God calls you to step in and partner with him and bring the gospel mission and message here.’” I’m not sure what’s next, but I know this community has a heart to step into the suffering of each other’s lives, the suffering of the world. And we have a whole team of people on our board, our neighborhood engagement team, who—this community—passionate about social justice, about caring for one another. And as we this fall step in deeper into partnerships and what’s going on, I’d love to hear from you. If you have some passion, some thoughts—gosh, there’s just plenty of places that we can step into as a community of people that we can step into and speak up for and stand with. We’d welcome that. I think a great start—show up at Cody’s study on August 20th. I think immigration is going to be part of what we’ll be called to step into, but step into those spaces. Have conversations. Be reminded that this is part of our call—not to turn away, but turn back towards.
Please pray with me. Holy and gracious God, it is clear to us that you have called us to partner with you in the work of bringing the kingdom to the here and now. What we do know, God, is that we need your help. What we do know is that your spirit is live and moving, and all we need to do is step into the next conversation, the next partnerships, the next spaces that might be uncomfortable, that might be hard, but God, those are those wilderness spaces where you meet us and speak to us, form us, and send us. I thank you, God, for the way you love us and love this world. I thank you that you invite us into that to partner with you. We pray it all in the name of Jesus. Amen.