A recent article[1] in the New York Times described the day-to-day proceedings in Amazon.com’s warehouse BWI2 in Baltimore. With fourteen miles of conveyor belts and twenty-seven acres of floor space, this warehouse embodies Amazon’s calculated response to the demand for fast delivery and economical prices. And in warehouse BWI2, Amazon has implemented a system of cool efficiency to ensure that quotas are met and the material cravings of a consumer society are satisfied.
The Times noted the extent to which computers have become the arbiters of which workers keep their jobs and which ones are fired. Computers are eerily adept at registering how many items have been scanned and properly stowed at the myriad worker stations in the warehouse. Once an item is scanned, the clock starts its judgmental countdown: One, two, three, four. . . The effectiveness or ineffectiveness of each employee is duly registered, and when the computer spits out the data from its surveillance, those who are deemed inefficient are ultimately subject to being fired if they don’t step up their game. The wheat is separated from the chaff, you might say.
Some workers thrive off this clear-cut but demanding environment. Others realize quickly that they can’t keep up with the pace of production necessitated by the public’s voracious appetite for more. One worker noted that she quit her job after the second warning that she wasn’t measuring up to the expected standards of the assembly line. She knew that a third warning would be grounds for dismissal. Even as I speak, at warehouse BWI2, the timers at countless stow stations tick away: One, two, three, four. . .
And here we are, at what seems like the beginning of Advent, yet we are only two weeks away from Christmas. Can you hear the clock ticking its countdown? We expect a sense of urgency in Advent. Each day, in this all-too-short season, we cross off another date on the Advent calendar. We hope to get in all the wonderful Advent hymns, when there really just aren’t enough Sundays to sing them all. We are one, two, or three days closer to that moment when the gifts must be purchased, wrapped, and waiting under the tree. We find ourselves caught up in the frenzy of the shopping season. And these days, if we didn’t start knocking items off our gift lists back in October, we are already behind.
But even ignoring the superficial, materialistic urgency of this time of year, an urgency that is so often divorced from the Gospel, we still find ourselves face to face with Scripture passages like today’s Gospel, one full of urgency. It’s hard not to be struck by the exigency of St. Matthew’s tone. John the Baptist barges onto the scene in chapter three with all his wildness and strangeness, feverishly crying out for repentance and directing our eyes to the horizon where the kingdom of heaven has drawn near. John doesn’t shy away from announcing God’s judgment of humankind. “Repent!” “Bear fruit worthy of repentance!”
There is, too, that terrifying image of the ax lying at the root of the trees. Jesus is coming with his winnowing fork to separate the wheat from the chaff, and the chaff will be consumed with unquenchable fire. Can’t you just hear the counting of the clock, the seconds ticking away until the ax swings?
One, two, three, four. . .
And confronted with these dire warnings from St. Matthew, it’s difficult not to be anxious, because if the kingdom of heaven has indeed drawn near, and that clock is ticking away towards judgment day, and the ax is lying at the root of the tree, and there is a raging fire waiting to devour the chaff, it seems like there is no time to waste. We must act with haste or face the painful consequences.
We can sense the adrenaline coursing rapidly through our veins. Our hands begin to sweat. Our heart rates increase. We freeze up because this voice crying out for us to repent is so harsh and strident, and we have been caught off guard in our laxity. We’ve been surprised and found sleeping on the job, and we need to wake up and do something.
And when we do turn around—if in fact, we do turn around—to face the horizon of the dawning kingdom of heaven, its light breaks upon our messed up world and reveals just how much we have gone astray. But how are we to take that next step and bear fruit worthy of repentance? How are we to measure up to the spiritual demands made of us? And meanwhile, that cold, calculating clock continues its merciless ticking: One, two, three, four. . .
It’s easy to point our fingers in hindsight at those wily Pharisees and Sadducees who arrive on the scene where John is baptizing. It’s easy to single out those we believe to be contemporary Pharisees and Sadducees. But, I wonder, does the light of the kingdom of heaven, illuminating the horizon, expose our own complacency and contentedness? Has the daily regimen of religious faithfulness become too comfortable? Is our spiritual heritage as heirs of Abraham seen as a right that has made our citizenship in the kingdom of heaven no more interesting than holding a driver’s license? Is there, among some of the most faithful, a secret or overt pity for those who are not endowed with Anglo-Catholic richness or Episcopal privilege? Is it easy to forget that every moment is a rich gift and that everything taken for granted could change on a dime? True, baskets of beautiful, ripe fruit can be recognized and appreciated for what they really are, but before long the fruit is rotten and is no longer fit for consumption if it just sits in the basket.
As we do our spiritual about-face and turn towards the dawning of the kingdom of heaven, its light illuminates the severe darkness of our world. The voice crying into the wilderness of our day echoes down the hollow halls of an empty culture that has neglected its values or sold them off for cheaper prizes. We see more clearly than ever the battlefield of dead trees, severed from their roots by the ax of God’s judgment, all of which reveals how humanity has profoundly failed to bear fruit worthy of repentance.
The timer ticks away towards the day of reckoning, and yet another statistic of a violent death, so numbingly common, fails to create a sense of urgency, an expectation that indeed something could change. Yet another year in which we still need to provide boots for our brothers and sisters who are in need of solid footwear in extreme weather, and the rift between poor and rich only gets wider. Yet another article in the paper on the alarming prospect of irreparable damage to the environment provokes our anxiety, and at the same time finds us staring at the relentless clock, waiting for the alarm to go off, feeling helpless and incapable of doing anything fruitful. Tick, tick. One, two, three, four. . .
And so is it any wonder that people want to flee from any talk of judgment? Many prefer St. Luke’s general emphasis on exalting the lowly to Matthew’s frequently harsh language of judgment spewed forth by the hot, foul breath of a locust-eating wild man.
But we can’t avoid the reality of judgment. And if we inhabit a culture so sleepy and lazy with its own entitlement and riches, the discordant cries of a firebrand like John the Baptist are exactly what we need to shake us out of our sleep, turn us around, and point us towards the kingdom of heaven dawning on the distant horizon.
If we are so reluctant to discuss judgment, could it be that our view of God’s judgment has been co-opted and distorted by the secular judgment of a ruthless, mechanical, and materialistic world? In this world, pointing fingers, hypocrisy, double standards, and shaming are the marks of judgment. And for a worker at Stow Station 3312 in Amazon’s BWI2 warehouse, a ticking clock means ultimately being cast with the wheat or the chaff, being sent away jobless and anxious, with little hope for mercy.
But for us, as workers in God’s kingdom, the ticking clock is something different. It’s a hopeful countdown. Or perhaps more accurately, it’s a ticking forward into the future, which is not founded on fear or anxiety. It doesn’t end in sending people away empty. Working in God’s kingdom is not a cutthroat competition for recognition or reasonable salaries. The ticking forward of this expectant season of Advent is one that boldly marches towards the final dawn and realization of an age in which God will make all things new: every lost job, every fearful person, every unclad foot, every incurable illness, every act of violence that rends asunder the bonds of humanity.
Is it possible, then, to see God’s judgment as a gift? For a minute, let’s dispense with our terror of a ticking clock connected to a computer that will assess whether we are with the wheat or the chaff. Let’s reject the image of sitting for a timed exam that will determine our fate. Let’s forget about the horrifying images of what will happen to us when that alarm sounds. Let’s consider that God’s judgment is all about God’s justice, that judgment is exactly what this world needs because so many things need to be made new and so many wrongs need to be righted. But if we never see the error of our ways and if we never turn around back towards God, we will miss the light of his kingdom when it finally breaks fully on the horizon.
That ticking clock—one, two, three, four—is pushing us forward towards a time when we can hope to be delivered from the sin and evil that surround us. In that day the wolf shall live with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. There will be unending peace among all of God’s children. And the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
But if we believe that it’s solely up to us to produce the fruit worthy of turning this world around, then we will be hopelessly frustrated. This is the rub: we are to bear fruit, but we can’t do it alone. Because if we do, we will be anxious and afraid, and we will never feel up to the task. We will be incapacitated by fear before a ticking timer in our private stow stations as we seek to meet the incessant demand for more and more and more, helpless before the tick of the clock.
One, two, three, four. . .
God is calling us to trust in his power to cast away the works of darkness. The tick-tock of the clock becomes the metronome that pulls us forward at a joyful allegro towards the New Jerusalem. Our hopeful expectation and our blissful sense of urgency are rooted in God’s promise to us, a promise that will equip and inspire us to bear fruit.
So, the timer counts down—one, two, three, four—and each moment, each tick, is a reminder to savor the pregnancy of this season of expectation. We are right to feel impatience for the sake of the Gospel, to long with every ounce of our being for God to step in, to act, and to save this world floundering in its waywardness. And I wouldn’t stop you if you were to leap up from your pews right now to run towards the breaking dawn of that kingdom of heaven, not out of anxiety but because you are so ready for everything to be made new.
Preached by Father Kyle Babin
8 December 2019
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia
[1] “Prime Mover: How Amazon Wove Itself into the Life of an American City,” The New York Times, November 30, 2019.