Foraging for the Spirit
Learning to look for God's gifts | The Word in the Wild, Epiphany 1, Year B
Note: This is an old post of mine on the lessons for this coming Sunday. I’m offering it while I take some time this week to work on some new writing I’ll be sharing with you very soon!
The trail descends from the pavement above, concrete giving way to packed mud, quartz, and shale, roots running here and there across the path. Below the path, the ground slopes, settling into a creek that eventually flows to the Arkansas river. Throughout the late summer, and well into the fall, this hillside is pocked by the orange trumpets of chanterelle mushrooms, fruiting from the unseen mycelium below the surface. On our weekly walks in the woods, my daughters compete for the privilege of cutting them from their stems, collecting them in the cloth bags we bring for the purpose.
Chanterelle’s provided my family’s first foray into foraging–the ready pickings of easily identified mushrooms that no one else seemed to be harvesting in our local woodland park. There is something delightful about gathering food from the forest floor, food that we’d done nothing to earn other than noticing its ripeness for the taking. My small exercises in gathering have been a reminder both of the abundance of the world and the reality that the best things available are not what we can buy, but what we can accept as gifts.
John the Baptist seems to be one who knew this truth. In Mark’s otherwise spare narrative, he offers us a good deal of detail about John’s dress and eating. In both cases, John’s needs seem to have been fulfilled from gathering the resources of the wild, the abundant and sustainable food of insects, the rich flavors of honey, the skin of a camel.
To be a forager requires a deep attentiveness to the landscape. It requires patience; it takes waiting and watching. Honey would have been a hard to find food. My family has stories about one of my ancestors who would throw flour on wild bees and then track how long it took them to return to a water source. With this method he’d eventually find their hive. I don’t know the method used in John’s day, but I’m sure there was one, and that whatever it was took hours if not days to fine a hive.
In all of that waiting, I imagine that John learned how to see gifts when they came. He learned then to be ready for the Holy Breath, which both brings gifts and is a gift. What John could offer was not a gift in and of itself. He couldn’t make honey, or locusts, or camel skins; he had no control of the Holy Breath. He could teach how to be ready for the gift, how to see it when it came, how to go searching for the gift that was surely there and waiting–he could offer the baptism of repentance.
Repentance is not the gift in itself, but it is the preparation for the gift, the making ready in order to see. Gifts can come without it of course, but they can easily be missed. I’d seen hundreds of chanterelles, wondering if they were edible, before I sat down with a mushroom field guide and confirmed my guess. The gift was there, but I wasn’t ready for it. If I hadn’t done the work of preparation then I would have missed some good food or worse, mistaken a chanterelle for a poisonous lookalike. I needed to reorient my vision in order to really see.
Baptism ushers us into the family of God through a double movement: the repentance and clearing of death, the gift of new life through the Spirit. We need both in order to enter into the life of God, both gift and giver. We see this in Paul’s encounter with the disciples in Ephesus. They are described as “disciples,” so they are already on their way toward being the church, but what they lacked was the gift of the Holy Breath of God. They’d done the work of making ready, but it is only when Paul comes that the gift is finally given (a gift Paul was himself given and passes on, as all good gifts must move).
On this Sunday, as many churches celebrate baptisms, giving again the gift that has continued to circulate through the church from its beginning, let us also remember with John the need for repentance, a change of heart and life. The given world of wilderness and the waiting required to discover the gifts of God are all around us. It is only through the work of repentance that we can again ready ourselves to inhale the Holy Breath that continues to inspire life all around us. The alternative is that we will might miss the gift and grab hold of one of its poisonous lookalikes, the commodities of happiness that are offered for the price of our fullness.
Repent, go to the quiet place of the wilderness where you can listen. God’s wind is moving over the waters and creating a new world. We will we be ready to welcome it?