December 7 2025 Second Sunday in Advent

Isaiah 11.1-10    Psalm 72.1-7, 72.18-21    Romans 15.4-13    Matthew 3.1-12

Wilderness stories abound.  In WA, my son-in-law leads groups of people who are traumatised, some war veterans, some with other trauma, through a program called ‘Southern Fire Wellness’.  A program of walking, talking, sharing, letting go and finding yourself again.  He has a team of professionals of many types who are able to ‘counsel’, and ‘partner’ with those who are struggling with various traumas.  Sometimes they do the ‘cape walk’ where they walk from Cape Leeuwin to Cape Naturalist, a journey of around 150km depending on your route.  They catch and find their own food, they camp on the beach or in the bush, they are totally ‘off grid’, and in this they find healing in the solitude, they find ‘themselves’ again.

John the Baptist may be the first one we know who did this type of ‘wilderness walking’.  We are told he came out of the wilderness, a man who ate ‘locusts and wild honey’. And he called people to what is roughly translated as ‘repentance’, but the Greek word is ‘metanoia’ which has a better translation as ‘beyond your mind’.  ‘meta’ – go beyond, ‘nous’ – mind, he invited those who came to him to ‘go beyond your mind’, ‘transcend yourself’.  To ‘go beyond your mind’ takes you on a walk similar to that which Dan does in WA.  It invites the uncertainty and unknown into your life and allows it to change you.

All four of the gospels put JTB ‘front and centre’ of Jesus’ origin story, and Advent depends on this dishevelled baptiser’s appearance from the wilderness.  In the wilderness you do not have a ‘plan B’, there is no ‘backup’, no ‘safety net’.  In the wilderness you are ‘on our own’, life is basic, unpredictable, and any illusions of self-sufficiency quickly evaporate.  In the wilderness you have no other option but sit and wait as if your lives depend on God showing up, and in fact they do.

This wilderness not only exposes our need for God, it also calls us to go ‘beyond our mind’.  To reach beyond that ‘safe place’ and find who and what we really are.  And our gospels tell us crowds ‘streamed’ into the wilderness to hear JTB’s message, to hear his call for them to go beyond their minds.  To leave the safety of what they know and find in themselves what and who God is calling them to be.  To be ‘transformed’ by God.

JTB wasn’t asking people to cease being Jewish, he was asking, some may even say demanding, they make a radical change in the way they viewed and acted in the world, so that they ‘bear fruit worthy’ of metanoia.  And the wilderness is where this metanoia becomes possible.  The tone from JTB sounds harsh, and it probably was, but the harshness is because of the urgency of the need for transformation, and his honesty about the wilderness.

We cannot get to the manger without going through JTB and he is all about metanoia.  Without metanoia, without going ‘beyond ourselves’, we are unable to open ourselves fully to God, to others, to creation, to ourselves.  John’s words, winnowing fork, threshing floor, unquenchable fire, are harsh, and they are meant to be harsh, but John’s words are also meant to show us that the Messiah who is coming is one who sees us ‘as we truly are’.  He knows us ‘deep down’, he can dig beyond the ‘fluff and bubbles’ of our lives to find the ‘me’ who is truly there.  John is telling us that it is only in ‘going beyond’ that we are able to offer God permission to ‘clear’ us, to separate all that is destructive from that which is good, and beautiful, and worthy.  And it is in the wilderness that we will be able to see the landscape in its entirety and participate in God’s work of levelling the playing field, removing inequality and oppression.

Without the wilderness, we will not be able to see our own privilege nor will we be able to give it up.  Those sitting on the mountain top do not want to see it flattened.  But when we are in the wilderness, and we find barren landscapes as far as the eye can see, we are able to see what is obscured by our privilege.  We will be able to feel the rough places, experience the difficulty found in twisty, crooked paths, to glimpse arrogance in the mountains and desolation in the valleys.  And we will start to dream God’s dream of a totally transformed landscape.  A landscape so smooth and straight that it allows ‘all flesh’ to see the salvation of God.

Metanoia is available to all of us, all of the time.  It is a force inextricably connected to love and mercy.  Let us be ready for our own wilderness experiences, let us ‘go beyond our mind’ and find ourselves, find God in that wilderness, and see the straight path God invites us to travel.