The Summer of John

Propers: The Nativity of St John the Baptist (Johnsmas), A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

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

Welcome to the height of summer!—the longest days and the shortest nights of the year. For obvious reasons, cultures throughout the world have celebrated the midsummer joys of life and light and heat and harvest: the lush abundance of nature, the firstfruits of the field, and the languid warmth of long hours spent basking in the bright-burning sun.

The further north you go, the bigger the party gets. Northerly climes, after all, see the greatest variation betwixt the solstices. We celebrate not only because our long days are the longest, but because our winter nights are the darkest. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. Norway famously builds gigantic bonfires, record-breaking stacks of wooden pallets 120 feet high to blaze out in the midnight twilight. “Do not go gentle into that good night … Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

The British celebration of Midsummer’s Day was largely clamped down by Henry VIII, because it, like medieval Christmas, had become a chaos of drunken, brawling revelry. And this has led to the accusation that Midsummer is a pagan holiday. But what does that mean, really? Surely people celebrated summer and something like the solstice long before the Gospel came to Europe. But we’re fools if we think that only pagans notice the sun; or gather flowers; or appreciate fertility.

Christians love Creation because it shows us our Creator in all His Goodness and Beauty and Truth. Nature was His first book, after all, and as such she is our sister. Mother Nature is not our parent but our sibling, our fellow child of God. And in an age when we feel so detached from the natural cycles and rhythms of Creation, when even gazing at the moon or the stars has somehow come to be considered irreligious, it is a relief to remember that the earth still turns, the sun still burns, God is still God, and we are as yet still only human.

But on top of this appreciation of Creation, this warm and smiling solstice, today is also, and for the Church primarily, the Nativity of St John the Baptist—or Johnsmas. John is a wonderful character in the Gospels, the foretold Forerunner of the Christ: Jesus’ own cousin, prophesied of old, whom Isaiah proclaimed would go before the Lord to prepare His Way. And indeed, that’s what John does. He goes before the Lord.

John, like Jesus, is miraculously conceived after an encounter with the angel Gabriel. John, like Jesus, gathers disciples, preaches in the wilderness, baptizes sinners, rebukes the powerful, and is executed unjustly by corrupt and secular rulers. John in fact does everything that Jesus does before Jesus does it—which is why we celebrate his birth now, exactly six months before the Nativity of Our Lord at Christmas. John is the last of the old prophets and the first of the new.

He is prepared even before birth for this. One of my favorite images of John in the Bible is that of His pregnant mother Elizabeth, entering her third trimester, when Jesus’ newly pregnant mother Mary shows up. And the Holy Spirit leaps from Jesus in Mary’s womb to John in Elizabeth’s. God’s call goes out from womb to womb. So honored is John in Christian tradition that his is one of only three birthdays on our liturgical and sanctoral calendars, the other two being Mary, of course, and Jesus Himself. Johnsmas and Christmas stand at opposite extremes: one as summer in its prime, now decreasing; and the other as Light reborn amidst the darkness.

Today these two themes—the midsummer sun and the nativity of John—deftly intertwine. For when Jesus, in His early thirties, began His public ministry, John had already amassed quite a following, waiting for the Christ. And when Jesus at last emerges, John speaks clearly to his disciples: “You yourselves are my witnesses, that I said I am not the Messiah. I have been sent ahead of Him … For this reason my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.”

Here John’s cri de cœur—“He must increase, but I must decrease”—becomes the model and the joy of all those who would announce the coming of the Messiah. We must decrease: decrease our egos, our desires, our pride. And He must increase in us, that we might truly be Christ for a world still very much in need of Him. And Creation itself affirms us in this, for from this point onward, after Johnsmas, the light of the sun will decrease every day, and the shadows grow longer in the evening, until at last our Christ, the Light of the world, is born for us at Christmas.

Nature and revelation are not at odds. They are both books written by one and the same Author. In Christ God enters as a character into His own Creation, into the twin books of Nature and of Scripture, so that He is Immanuel, God-With-Us. Let us celebrate with joy the beauties of this season. Let us welcome with warm hope the Forerunner of the Lord. And let us be reminded, as the sun slips a little lower to the south each evening from now until Christmas, that we in ourselves must decrease, and Christ within us must grow.

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