“Zones of discomfort”
A Sermon given on 15th July 2015, at the Cuddesdon Sisters’ Commemoration Day
When the time came for me to leave my first living I was sad in almost every respect. But there was
one aspect which I did not regret. The principal patron of the parish was St John the Evangelist, and
whilst there is nothing wrong with the Beloved Disciple as such, it has to be said that he made a
rotten choice of feast day! Only the Protomartyr, in fact, could be said to have done worse (at least
from the point of view of the parish priest). Getting people – exhausted by carol services and crib
services, midnight masses and Christingles and all the rest of it – to tip out to Church just one more
time on 27th December: that’s really hard!
So I was delighted that in my second incumbency – a team ministry serving several parishes in rural
south Wiltshire – the parish church of the largest village, as well as those of two or three others,
enjoyed the patronage of St John the Baptist. And it is good that here, now, in Cuddesdon the Sisters
have brought him with them, as it were, albeit having dropped the “the”. John Baptist.
But, delightful though this is, I can’t help thinking – as I couldn’t help thinking in relation to those
very smart, well regulated Wiltshire villages where everyone had tidy tweed suits and highly
polished shoes – what an odd choice John the Baptist is as an inspiration to respectable, normal,
sane people, such as our Sisters are (and, indeed, we are ourselves).
For there is no getting away from it: John Baptist is odd. The circumstances of his birth were odd:
before he was born his father Zechariah was visited by an angel (a somewhat unusual experience,
you will agree). And was struck dumb (something that doesn’t happen often enough to a priest,
some might think). And then there was improbability about his mother’s age as suitable or possible
for childbearing, and then all that kerfuffle about his name…
All this is odd enough, but it gets odder still, as is clear not least from the final verse of the Gospel
we have just heard read. “The child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness
until the day he appeared publicly to Israel.” The wilderness: that’s a strange place for child rearing,
and the result was, not surprisingly, strange, too.
Locusts and wild honey: did he, I wonder, spread the honey on the locusts, or dip them in? It doesn’t
matter – enough to know about the locusts, which prove that his diet did not consist exclusively of
honey: John Baptist was no teddy bear Winnie the Pooh. And don’t forget that camel skins are by no
means the same thing as camelhair! The message is clear: John Baptist was strange.
And his strangeness extended to his preaching. “You brood of vipers” is a line that would win few
prizes in a preaching contest. It’s not an approach we would be recommending to our students here.
John gets no brownie points for charm.
And yet here we are, celebrating this community – the Community of the Sisters of St John Baptist –
now happily at the heart of the community of this college and village, and the patronage it enjoys –
respectable, conventional, gentle and generous as it is – of this rough, weird, more than somewhat
disturbing saint. How strange is that!
Now, there ought to be something more than ironic about this. There ought to be something
challenging, even uncomfortable, I suggest. Here is our patron; here is his example of radicalism,
non-conformity and rebellion – and here are we, paragons of respectability and reason, non-rockers
of the boat, far from wholly uncommitted to comfort and to our own peace. Who, one is tempted to
ask, has got it wrong?
John’s ministry is a wilderness ministry and John’s message a wilderness message. He turned his
back on the Jerusalem-Establishment-Temple world of his father (and how familiar that is, too!) and
proclaimed in the wilderness: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord”. And the people
flocked to him. They flocked to him in the dusty, rocky, barren desert and out there – in these most
unpromising of circumstances – they did, indeed, meet the Lord. Because in the wilderness, in the
person of Jesus, the Lord came and asked for the Baptism of which he stood in need.
John’s example of wilderness living and John’s message of the wilderness as the place where God is
to be met make (if we’re prepared to acknowledge it) for a degree of discomfort for us, at least for
those of us (and there are many) whose instinct is more to embrace the world of John’s father –
Temple and Establishment that Jesus was to upset so comprehensively – as the place and the mode
in which we most naturally operate.
So maybe John Baptist, and the Sisters of John Baptist therefore, have something particularly
important to offer to us, their respectable and conventional friends, and to this place (for what could
be more Temple and Establishment than Cuddesdon, for goodness’ sake?).
John challenges us by pointing us away to our zones of discomfort, to places of newness and
unfamiliarity and uncertainty: necessary places for those who are exploring vocation (and which of
us here is not constantly and faithfully in the process of exploring our vocation as disciples of the
Lord?)
For, as the crowds that flocked to Jesus discovered (or would have done, had they had eyes to see),
it is in the zones of discomfort – the wilderness – that the Lord comes and shares his need with us.
Amen.