A Voice From The Wilderness

December 4, 2022

Hope Lutheran Church

Rev. Mary Erickson

Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 3:1-12

A Voice from the Wilderness

Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.

Once again we encounter our old Advent friend, John the Baptist. Every year he revisits us. Or do we go and visit him? Do we make the trek along with all of Jerusalem and Judea to hear the voice in the wilderness?

I think it’s more that second one. Advent calls us once again to this desert pilgrimage. We leave all familiarity behind and we dare to enter the lonely territory unknown and uncharted.

At first blush, it seems like this wilderness pilgrimage takes us to the far reaches of the Judean wilderness. We travel in our imaginations through the dusty roads winding downwards to the lonely lowlands of the Jordan River.

But this pilgrimage really follows an internal road. This lonely, uncharted territory is deep within each one of us. It takes us to the internal places of our mind and soul that we’d rather ignore.

But it’s from here that John calls to us. He calls from our own wilderness regions.

John is a wild man. He dresses like a hermit. He subsists on a very primitive diet. His hair and his beard are unkempt. And he cries out. He cries to us in a coarse, guttural voice. John’s wilderness voice is full of urgency and alarm.

When you see someone in mortal danger, that’s how your voice goes. You yell out, “STOP!!!” And we all recognize this voice. It’s not pretty, but there’s an urgency to it. It’s more about the tone that grabs us. Even if someone said it to us in another language, it would have the same effect. We’d stop dead in our tracks.

This is how John is crying. He desperately wants us to stop and consider the course we’re on. He doesn’t mince words. There are dangers aplenty: axes laid at the root of our trees, there are poisonous vipers, a great threshing floor and unquenchable fires. This is no time for hesitation.

Once again, Advent beckons us to journey the lonely pathways within. We join the bands of pilgrims on their way to the banks of the Jordan River to hear this voice beckoning to us. And like them, we’re looking for a quick fix. A jump in the waters, and then we’re good to go, good to return to life as we know it.

But then the voice comes, THAT voice, the voice that stops us dead in our tracks. It’s not so easy as we like to make it out to be. “Tell us what to do, John. A dip in the waters? OK. You want us to promise that we’ll be better at coming to church on Sundays? Fine, we can do that.

But the voice calls for something located at a profoundly more personal level. It wants to remake us from the inside out. It calls us to take a fearless search within, knowing that the healing power of the divine goes with us.

Carl Jung was one of the pioneers of modern psychology. One of his patients was an American man by the name of Rowland Hazard.

Hazard suffered from alcoholism. He’d tried everything, but nothing could keep him from drinking. Hazard was privileged to come from a wealthy family, and they sent him to Switzerland to be treated by the great Carl Jung.

Rowland Hazard is eager to meet with Jung. He desperately wants to be freed from his addiction. He undergoes in-depth psychiatric analysis. Finally, he’s ready to return home. But within a very short time, his demons get the better of him. He falls off the wagon.

So back he goes to Switzerland. He meets with Jung, but Jung doesn’t give him the answer he wants. “I’m sorry,” he says, “there’s nothing more I can do for you. I’ve given you everything I’ve got, there’s nothing left. Your problem is beyond the reach of medicine and psychiatry. I’m afraid you’re hopelessly addicted to alcohol.”

Rowland Hazard was shocked. He asked Dr. Jung, “Is this it? Isn’t there anything else for me to do?”

Jung responds that his only hope was to made a deep, deep change. He called it a psychic change. This change needed to go all the way down to his soul. All of the things that had been the guiding principles of his life needed to be thrust aside and he needed to anchor himself to a new center of divine life.

When Hazard returned home, he reached out to the Oxford Group. It was an evangelical association that had an absolute dedication to personal honesty. With time, Rowland Hazard experienced the deep, spiritual transformation he needed. His personal experience and healing eventually led to the formation of Alcoholics Anonymous, where he is affectionately remembered as Rowland H.