(Third Sunday of Advent)
A Fanatic Heart
by
The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
(From The Lectionary Page)
I ranted to the knave and fool, but outgrew that school,
Would transform the part, fit audience found, but cannot rule my fanatic heart.I sought my betters: though in each
fine manners, liberal speech, turned hatred into sport,
Nothing said or done can reach my fanatic heart.Out of Ireland have we come. Great hatred, little room, maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart.
W.B. Yeats wrote Remorse for Intemperate Speech early in the 20th century. He was thinking of his beloved Ireland, but he might as easily have written it of just about any country in just about any century. Take first century Israel, for example, a tiny piece of real estate, occupied yet again by a foreign power, this time Rome. Great hatred for the Gentile overlords who desecrated the Promised Land, little room from Dan to Beersheba and filled with competing pieties of Judaism, each convinced that they alone knew the mind of God. The hearts that beat in Israel under Rome, like in Ireland under England, were indeed fanatic.
Our gospel reading today picks up in the Jordanian wilderness. It’s early in Jesus’ ministry and he has resumed baptizing there, following the stealth visit by Nicodemus. Meanwhile, some nearby Judeans, perhaps Pharisees or Essenes who were interested in ritual purity, drew the disciples of John the Baptist into disputation about purification rites. They apparently wanted to know whether the John’s rite of baptism fit within the framework of orthodoxy. Together, this anxious, defensive rabble went to John the Baptist and said in essence, “That guy Jesus, the one YOU testified about, is baptizing across the river and everyone is going to HIM.” In other words, “He’s on your turf. You'd better go straighten him out, let him know who the real baptizer is.”
It’s a tense moment, one that most of us recognize. If you’ve ever wandered onto the turf of a colleague – intentionally or unintentionally -- you know what can happen. Battle lines get drawn, and you’d better watch your back in the near future and beyond. To be sure, turf warfare in the workplace is far different than on the mean streets of Kansas City or Chicago or anyplace where gangs carve up the neighborhoods and literally kill you if you’re on the wrong turf. But even we middle-class folk recognize the unspoken rules concerning the privileged purview of project manager or committee chair. The more anxious the system is, the uglier the consequences are for putting your foot wrong. Great hatred, little room, maiming us at the start.
We recognize that place of scarcity, though none of us much likes to admit it. Who among us has not felt a sense of being crowded out by Another who just might steal our thunder, maybe garner accolades that should, by rights, go to us. Who among us has not felt -- if not hatred and violence -- then certainly the seeds of those dark emotions – envy, defensiveness, resentment – when a limited supply of goodies like money, prestige, security, or Xboxes is threatened by rivals? The French philosopher Rene Girard describes this phenomenon persuasively in what he termed the Theory of Mimetic Violence. This theory postulates that violence springs from our innate desire to imitate others and to possess what they possess. But because efforts at possessing what the other possesses are often thwarted, anxiety builds until violence erupts. Girard traced this phenomenon both in primitive and in modern cultures. He found evidence of it wherever human culture exists. And it begins early – just ask any pre-school teacher or daycare giver. Girard concluded that we humans are virtually hardwired toward violence. It’s the natural consequence of our desire to imitate and possess colliding with our fear of being imitated and our store of possessions thereby diminished.
And into this tense moment, John the Baptist – a fanatic heart if ever there was one – reacts to the presence of Jesus not with a spirit of resentment or competitiveness, but with joy. The one whose coming he had foretold had come. A new day was dawning, heralded by the arrival of the True Light. It was as though the glorious vision of Isaiah, which we heard in our first reading today, was being enfleshed in real time. God had acted and was acting again. The joy with which John the Baptist reacts to the news was indeed imitative; not of his scarcity-based, honor-bound culture, but rather imitative of God’s abundance.
And what of us, here this morning, 2000 years and half a world away from that astonishing, subversive moment there by the shore of the Jordan River? The voices we recognize in our gospel passage today are those of John’s disciples and of their fellow Judeans. They are the ones we reflexively imitate. If imitation and the desire to possess what someone else possesses are hallmarks of human reality, it seems unlikely that we can by a sheer force of will stop that behavior. Yeats put it well: our hearts are fanatic. But perhaps we can practice subversion. Perhaps we can choose, at least imperfectly, who we shall seek to imitate. Perhaps we can choose what it is we seek to possess.
If so, it seems to me that the challenge our gospel places before us this morning is this: do we have it within us as a people, as a culture, as a church to imitate John the Baptist? What would happen if we as a people sought to decrease our inflated egos, decrease our rhetoric, decrease our insatiable desire for things so that Christ working within us might increase our desire for justice and peace? What would happen if we chose to possess the Kingdom of God?