ONE GRAND PASSION

December 8, 1985, 11:00 a.m. Worship Service
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way
of the Lord,..." ~- Luke 3:4 (RSV)

Scripture

Psalm 25:1-10
Malachi 3:1-4
Luke 3:1-6

"In life there are many loves, but only one grande passion."

The phrase caught my eye, not while reading the newly discovered Shakespeare
love sonnet or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but actually while perusing the
lush advertisements in the December issue of Chicago Magazine. It was’
impossible to miss this one: full page, provocative photograph with the
caption: “In life there are many loves but only one Grande Passion." The
product being marketed, of course, was not human passion at all, but a
French Liqueur, which the ad suggestively announces, is "a sensual coupling
of passion fruit and French Armagnac" (Who could resist that?)

But the phrase sounds true. So off I went to Bartletts Familiar Quotations
to see who said it. Surely it was Shakespeare -- or perhaps Ovid. Actuaily
the only thing close was by Israel Zangwill who, in addition to coining the

“melting pot" metaphor for America once wrote -- "In how many lives does
love really play a dominant part? The average taxpayer is no more capable.
of a ‘grand passion’ than of a grand opera." (Romeo and Juliet and Other

Love Stories)

Yet, I kept thinking, there is truth here. One grand passion...to be fully
alive is to know the meaning of the phrase. To be fully human is to have
had deep and compelling passion called out of one. How sad to live seven
or eight decades and never know about that.

A Sunday School teacher once reported that she was asking the eight year

olds to describe something they believed in and loved more than anything

else -- something for which their love would never change. The pedagogical
assumption was that the youngsters would understand in this exercise passionate
commitment to God, and that they would probably identify their own parents

as that for which their love would never change. However, when she got to

my son, he looked her straight in the eye, and said he would forever love

the Chicago Cuos.

Passion -- one grand passion -- is the deep and compelling force that
energizes and animates and inspires us to be what we are. Sometimes it
overwhelms all else and looks like madness. Sometimes it is so big and
strong that it will not be integrated and there is about the person a
singularity that is tragic, although enormously creative. But not to
know it at all: never to be passionate, is to have missed something
wonderfully human, something divine about our humanness.

In a delightful literary autobiography, Eudora Welty tells about the process
by which she became a writer, and a good one. She had studied, read and
written for school newspapers, but it was while reading Yeats at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin that she “made a discovery for myself that has fed

my life ever since... The word is Passion." (One Writer's Beginnings,
Pp. 70}
One Grand Passion -- a common motif in contemporary social criticism is

that Western culture does not encourage passion, does not, in fact, have

a respectable place for it. We are inundated with sex and violence on
television, some suggest, because there is no other place for passion to

be celebrated. Sad pornography seems to have replaced joyful eros. The
IMainstream of culture prefers control, responsibility, moderation and is
suspicious of passion of any kind. In religion of our variety, passion

is suspect and there is a dichotomy, sadly, between head and heart. The
story is told about the enthusiastic worshipper in a Presbyterian Church

who insisted on responding verbally to the preacher with a litany of "Amen's
and Praise the Lords.“ Finally, an Elder asked him to stop. The man said -—-
“But Ifve got religion." To which the Elder responded, "Well you certainly
didn't get it here."

Our forte is reason. Our strength is our rationality. Culturally and
religiously we are uncomfortable with passion. And onto the stage today,

the Second Sunday in Advent, walks a curious figure, a man of singular
passion, and he is introduced by some strikingly passionate Biblical material.
He is John the Baptist, who has found his grand passion, a man hard to love
and impossible to become sentimental about.

What is he doing here, in the middle of Advent, with the holy family on their
way to Bethlehem, and the gorgeous carols playing and all the lights twinkling?
What is he doing standing in the mud of the Jordan River, howling about God's
kingdom? What has possessed the church for many centuries to use this Sunday

to recall him, of all people? He represents a dimension of the story that

needs to be told. It's the part of the Gospel of Christmas about our humanness,
and about grand passion, and standing in the mud of some Jordan River with

tears in our eyes because out of the cool controlled ethos of modern life

we have found something, someone to die for. But first the Baptist: who is he?

The 100 years before the birth of Jesus was a peculiarly quiet time for God's
people. Back from their exile in Babylon, with a rebuilt Jerusalem and a
temple now several hundred years old, they were settled in, a quietly and
respactably religious people. It had been hundreds of years Since there

was a prophet to fire the people with Love for God and love for justice and
righteousness. The memory was there, however. The prophet Malachi, whose
book is the last in our Old Testament, had written:

"the messenger of the covenant...is coming...

But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can
stand when he appears?

For he is like a refiner's fire..."

The prophets reminded Israel that whenever God comes it will not necessarily

be pleasant. Sometimes God's presence will feel like judgment.

In those quiet years before the birth of Jesus, when no prophet spoke in

Israel, that idea was kept alive by communities of devout people who lived
tegether in the desert. John the Baptist may have been one of them. They
built monastic communities around the Dead Sea, the most famous one of which

is Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. They lived a strict, celibate,
and simple life. They practiced baptism and ritual bathing, they adopted
Orphans, they rigidly kept the law, and looked for the appearance of the

Lord's messenger and the Messiah who would follow. In their Book of Discipline,
discovered at Qumran, the archeologists found a mandate that members of the
community are to sever their connection with ordinary people in order to

"go into the wilderness to prepare the way." That phrase, a quotation from
another prophet, is employed by the Gospel writers to introduce John the
Baptist. And he, it would seem, saw himself in terms of the passionate
INessenger of God who would prepare the way and who would burn like a refiner's
fire, :

John looked and sounded like a prophet. He was certainly passionate. He

Was portrayed brilliantly by Michael York in television's most recent Biblical
epic: wild, uncontrollable, uncompromising, unpleasant. He compared the
people who came to hear him, with a den of snakes. Respectable religiousity
was not enough, John shouted. God demanded a renewed commitment to righteous-
ness, a passionate devotion to the life of the Kingdom.

It's difficult to be soft and cozy about John the Baptist. From a distance
of twenty centuries he still makes us uncomfortable. And he is on stage
today as a passionate interruption to Advent sentimentality.

I am not interested in pulpit tirades against the rampant commercialization
of Christmas by the culture. The target is too fat -- the battle too easy.
Besides, I'm convinced God is pleased whenever human beings are generous

and celebrate their love and talk about peace on earth for whatever reason.

The danger is not that happy pagans will defile our sacred feast by celebrating
it, but that we -~ who think we are the custodians of the celebration, will

so romanticize it that we miss the truth it represents as thoroughly as the
crowd at the bar in the Bethlehem Inn behind which Jesus was born missed him.
That's why, by the way, the church has always seemed a little grouchy during
Advent. The culture is going berserk -- enjoyirg a year-end bash, and the
church puts on purple. The department stores are playing carols while the

church is singing hymms in a minor key about mournful exiles. And, aesthetically,
the institution whose affair it is comes off a distant and plain second to
festively decorated pizza parlors on Rush Street. It's not that we are opposed
to joy and celebration. It's just that there is a totality about this truth
which is diminished and trivialized if we exclude the John the Baptist part

of the story, and the refiner's fire and the humanness and the loneliness

and the alienation for which the birth happened. For centuries we have been
observing Advent as a time of preparation and reflection, pointing to the

time when the carols are sung and the bells peal and the candles are lighted.
There is, of course, no commercial potential there, and emotionally-spiritually
there is no instant gratification, and therefore we will always be several
weeks behind, and our Advent will always seem restrained.

John the Baptist is a reminder that when Jesus came it was not all pleasantness
and light and happiness; that what happened when Jesus confronted the people
and structures of power in his culture could, in fact, be described with
metaphors like "“refiner's fire" and "“fuller's soap;" that on an occasion

when he did. indeed come to the temple, few could stand.

John himself, of course, was Martyred. He baptized Jesus one day, and after
that, apparently went on proclaiming the nearness of God's kingdom and the
corruption and injustice of Herod's Kingdom until he ended up in prison and

was executed. His presence on the stage in Advent is a reminder, in the midst
of all the wonderful pre-Christmas sentiment, that the baby grew up, got in
trouble, and was crucified; that to celebrate birth is at least to be attentive
to the man the baby became. Even as the whole demise , pluralistic culture
pauses to rejoice in God's love, or at least human love, we Christians are
reminded that followers of Jesus will, on occasion, find themselves in conflict:
that Jesus has a way of precipitating conflict in the human heart: that he

is a refiner's fire -- making intolerable our own moral compromises and personal
Yationalizations: John the Baptist is a reminder that followers of Jesus will
be in conflict on occasion with the culture.

There is a trial going on in Tucson at the moment in which some Christians,
including a Presbyterian minister, are indicted for breaking Federal Immigra-
tion Law by sheltering Central American refugees. It is not an easy matter
for us. The law has been broken: it has been broken because these people
believe passionately that it is conflict with a higher law -- the judge has
ruled that that argument is not valid in a federal court. Regardless of

our position on the legality. involved, and the complexity of our immigration
dilemma, and the rightness, morality-or effectiveness of the administration's
Central American policies, the Christian community needs to be reminded again
that to follow Jesus Christ faithfully is to follow passionately and singularly
and that there may be occasions when that commitment will conflict directly
with other commitments.

It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from his prison cell in Nazi Germany, who taught
us about it -- and whose lasting contribution to our understanding of our
religion was not in the area of civil disobedience, but in helping us to

see that grace is not cheap -- that the love of Christ is strong enough to
die, and that to be alive in Christ -- is to assume for oneself that same
passionate discipleship.

"When Christ calls us," Bonhoeffer wrote, “he bids us come and die."

John the Baptist is a reminder that the Christmas story and the Christian
religion is not an other-worldly and spiritual moraliby ploy but an utterly
human drama, He is a reminder that Christmas is about choruses of angels.
and mysterious visitors from the East -- but it is also about a young man
looking for the meaning of his life. Standing knee deep in the brown

water, his feet in the mud, John the Baptist is a beautifully human counter-
point to the ethereal twinkling lights and fashionably dressed shoppers

on Michigan Avenue. He is a blunt interruption -- a reminder of our
humanness, and the incredible message which is elbowed out of the celebration --
namely that it is our humanness, that God loves so Much he sent a son to be
born into it,

John is on stage with his grand passion for God's Kingdom to remind us that
the Gospel of Jesus Christ appeals to that passion in us -- cuts through

the careful controls to the deep and secret place in us, where our passion
lives. He is a reminder that the God who comes in this birth is not satisfied
with polite religiosity, is angered, in fact, by dutiful ritualism, a God
whose jealousy means that he wants our hearts and minds and deepest loyalty.
John is a reminder that this God's love for us is the strongest force in

the universe: that it can be like a refiner's fire as well as a mother’s
lullaby, but that nothing in creation can separate us from it.

God's commitment to us is what is saving about the Gospel of Christ. God's
commitment to us is strong and deep and human and will be an energy, an urgent,
compelling force in the radical, earthy, human, middle of our own lives.

"Behold, the lamb of God," John the Baptist said when he baptized Jesus...
God had become his one grand passion and when he died his INartyr's death, I
have always imagined that he died -- as you and I would want to die -- fully
alive, fully human, fully intentional, still raging, still passionately in
love with God, sustained by the strength of God's love for him.

This is what Christmas is finally. It is what it all points to -- all the
gentle beauty, all the warmly human gestures, ali the longing and loving and
laughing. Beneath it all is the most incredible force in the world -- a love
that judges, cleanses and burns...and also warms and comforts and inspires
and until the day we die gives life. .

John the Baptist is on stage in the middle of Advent to remind us that following
Jesus is not always easy nor pleasant. He is a reminder of the strenuous
demands of the Gospel, and the call of Jesus Christ to live our lives for him.

But he is on stage as well to remind us that there is full life to be lived,
that if we never love deeply and Passionately we will have missed something
very precious. He is on stage bidding us to care deeply about life, to weep
at suffering, to be angry at injustices, to rejoice at beauty -- to risk
vulnerability, to love with everything in us those we have been given to Love,
to lov: our own lives enough to want to live them thoroughly, to love God

and God's Kingdom in the world with a grand and glorious and life-giving
passion.

John found his one grand passion. And his presence in our Advent observance is
a summons -- to you and me -- to discover it: to celebrate this gentle gift
of love, as the birth of something big enough to live and die for; the birth
of a baby who was and is truth and light and laughter and life forever.

Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon
the throne, and unto the lamb, for ever and ever.

Amen