Midsommar

Propers: The Nativity of St John the Baptist (Johnsmas), A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“He must increase, but I must decrease.” In this one brief turn of phrase, John the Baptist sums up not only his entire ministry but the calling of every Christian to come after him as well.

Today, brothers and sisters, is Johnsmas, the Nativity of St John the Baptist—or, more properly, Johnsmas Eve. In celebration of the summer solstice and the longest days of the year, folks in Nordic countries tend to build big bonfires on this night and stay up from dusk till dawn. For indeed, Johnsmas is the summer counterpart to Christmas.

John is Jesus’ cousin, related through their mothers. And everything that Jesus does in the Gospels, John does first. The angel Gabriel heralds his birth six months before Jesus’ own. When he grows up, John gathers a cadre of disciples, including several who would go on to become Jesus’ Apostles as well. John baptizes in the River Jordan, calling people to repentance, to be turned again toward the coming of the Messiah. And John is imprisoned, and unjustly murdered, for speaking truth to power—a death that Jesus interprets as heralding His own.

In short, John is the promised Forerunner of Christ, the one crying out in the wilderness, “Make straight the paths of the Lord!”—the same one who inherits the spirit and mission of Elijah, greatest of the Old Testament prophets. John’s job is to be ever pointing beyond himself to Jesus, a calling he takes quite seriously and faithfully fulfills. “Behold,” he cries, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”

Now, as much as we might not like to hear it, the days from this point on shall steadily dim, the sun moving farther to the south, the light diminishing over the coming months. This pattern will continue until Christmas, when light and life and hope shall be reborn amidst the solstice snows. And so the calendar itself—indeed, the heavens themselves—beautifully illustrate the truth of John’s ministry and the calling of us all: that we must each decrease, while Christ in us must increase. Only in this way can we be Christians. Only in this way can we become who each and every one of us is truly meant to be.

In Christianity, death and resurrection is not simply an article of faith but a way of life. We must die to ourselves every day: die to our selfishness, die to our egos, die to unfettered self-centered desire. We must drown all that in Baptism. And we must rise anew each morning, resurrected, with the Light of Christ burning within us, so that we might now be Christ for others, and for a world still very much in need. And this can be quite hard. It hurts to slay the ego, the Old Adam deep within.

Baptism, as they say, drowns us to our sins. But the Old Adam is a very good swimmer. And we must return, time and again, to the Font of our Baptism, to the promise Christ has given us: that our sins are forgiven; that our wounds are healed; that we are absolved not seven times but seventy times seven. We fall and we rise and we fall and we rise until that day when our Baptism is completed in death—and we rise in Christ, never to fall again.

So how do we do this? How do we be Christ for the world? How do we live in such a way that we decrease and Christ in us increases? It begins with proper worship. Worship inspires wonder, humility, gratitude, and awe. Or at least it should if we do it rightly. We kneel before the infinite, the transcendent, the Source of all possible worlds, in whom we all live and move and have our being.

And when we do so—when piety breaks in upon us—we encounter two great truths: that you and I are very small, so small that it is indeed easy to lose track of ourselves in the infinite abyss of glory; and yet that we are, in every moment of our lives, loved, by a Love beyond all time and space, beyond all limits or measures, beyond anything we could ever hope to comprehend. And that love cannot die, cannot cease, cannot ever be snatched away. That love makes us who we are, and remakes us who we are meant to be.

And the only proper response to such love, to such wordless almighty awe, is to let it flow, to fill ourselves up to bursting with the life and light and love of God, so that it might pour out from us upon the entire world.

And we have many metaphors for this. C.S. Lewis calls us mirrors, that the more we cleanse ourselves of grime, the more brightly we reflect Christ to all those around us. Augustine likens God to a lion, so that to defend His truth we need but step aside and out of His way. Paul says that we are like silver, and the more we dwell in God’s all-consuming fire, the more we glow with the light and heat and purity of that fire, the more we become truly ourselves. It is all the same idea: we must decrease, but He must increase.

Needless to say, this can’t only happen on Sundays. We gather here, every week, to confess our sins and be forgiven, to hear the Word of God boldly read and rightly preached, and to meet the Risen Lord: both in this community possessed of His Spirit; and in His own Body and Blood beneath the form of bread and wine. Thus are we drowned and resurrected, raised up in Christ and sent out into the world. Because the Sunday assembly exists to support and revivify Christians for our work in every day of the week beyond these hallowed halls.

Real faith is the faith at home, the faith found in simple things: in daily prayer and grace at meals; in opening the Scriptures and teaching them to our children; in practicing forgiveness and grace and mercy and love, confessing our wrongs, loving our neighbors, humbly serving all in need as Christ has first served us.

So feed someone who hungers. Clothe someone now naked. Forgive someone who repents. Give without thought of reward and lend without thought of return. Just once this week, turn the other cheek, speak a loving word, swallow down your pride because of Jesus, because of your faith in His teachings, because He promised that we are to love one another as He has first loved us.

Have faith in Christ—and live that faith simply by trusting His instruction. Not to earn our own salvation. But to be part of the salvation of the world.

You know, the early Church didn’t have much in the eyes of the world. No buildings, no riches, no political clout of any kind, not even terribly many in number. All they had, really, was Jesus, this undeniable encounter with the living, Risen Christ. And for all their foibles, all their squabbles, all the things they screwed up or got wrong, those early Christians transformed our world. Empires of the mind rose and fell not by their own efforts but by the work of Christ in and with and through them.

Today the Church has all the things the pagans used to have: great temples, great learning, great institutions of government, education, and medical care; not to mention great scandals, great follies, great hypocrisies laid bare for all the world to see. And none of that seems to be doing us terribly much good. The Church thrives where she is small and persecuted, thrives amongst the edges of society, all those judged to be the last, the least, the little and the lost. In short, the Church is most alive when all she has is Christ.

Because when we have Christ, we have everything. And when we have everything, we must give it all away. Otherwise we’ll lose it.

Come to Jesus. Receive Jesus. Become Jesus. We must decrease. But He must increase.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.