This guy
is scary. This guy means business. This guy walks up to you and to me
and he points his finger right in our faces and says, “You’re
in trouble. You’re in big trouble.”
That’s
John the Baptist, and some of you know that I got to play the part of
John the Baptist in a production of Godspell in which the audience was
largely members of my parish. Now it’s not often that a priest
has an opportunity to point his finger at the congregation and call
them “a viper’s brood.” But I did have that opportunity,
and some said it was a little scary how much I got into the role. But
that was exactly the point. John the Baptist wasn’t interested
in gentle persuasion, and you had two choices: either dismiss him as
a lunatic or wake up and pay attention. “Hey, everybody, something
incredible is about to happen and you need to be ready!”
It’s
been said before that no one could have invented John except God. Mark
Twain once said, “Be virtuous and you will be eccentric,”
and nowhere was it more true than with John. He suffered from a chronic
condition which many of us would define as
God on the Brain.” Perhaps “eccentric” is putting
it too mildly as we picture him feeding off grasshoppers and outfitted
in animal skins, living in the wilderness, in self-imposed isolation—small
wonder that John seems to have only one companion: God. But God, for
John, was enough. And it was in this wilderness experience that he was
grasped by Isaiah’s word—the voice of one crying out in
the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in
the desert a highway for our God.” And so if there is any one
figure in scripture that we would associate with the Advent season,
it is that of John the Baptizer who comes to us with that wild look
in his eyes and says, “Get ready!”
Someone
once said that in addition to John’s title “the Baptist”
we could just as easily call him John the Invader and John the Confronter,
and finally John the Exciter.
John
the Invader: In the first place we need to remember that nobody invited
John to proclaim God’s message. The government certainly didn’t,
nor did the religious hierarchy. There was no poll taken, no election
held, no village meeting convened, no church committee formed to authorize
him to “say a few words for us this morning.” Nor have we
invited him, really, a people and social order highly conscious of its
boundaries and rules of social interaction and civilized behavior. But
John the Invader doesn’t understand “boundaries.”
And because he doesn’t understand them, he’s an irritant.
He’s an intruder. He comes without a permit or a license or a
diploma and he tells us, whether we like it or not, to repent, to shape
up. And he keeps telling us that, year after year. And even if he were
not an inevitable part of our lectionary, he’d still find a way
to show up, walking into our comfort zones with that unsettling word
of God: “Repent.”
But this
is exactly why we might also call John the Confronter. He kind of takes
on the world by challenging us with our assumptions of self-gain to
a life of self-denial. And it’s not just the way he’s dressed
that we find confrontational, it’s his message of non-conformity.
He is different from the world because his message to us is that we
must be different from the world. That’s because he is the forerunner
of the Kingdom of Heaven: that place where the first would be last and
the last would be first. It’s the place where those who have worked
but one hour are given the same wage as those who have worked eight.
It’s the place where the world’s outcasts are welcomed and
healed as its primary citizens. This is by its very nature a confrontational
message. It’s not one that the Church enjoys emulating and it’s
not one that the extroverts among us—myself included—enjoy
mimicking. But there it is. He confronts us by telling us the truth,
the truth about our values, the truth about the world’s injustices,
the truth that the Kingdom of God requires a change of heart. And it’s
ironic that because John the Confronter is different from the world
that he can proclaim God’s word with authority. If he’d
had a good salary with good insurance looking forward to a nice pension
at 65, who would have believed him?
But if
John is the Invader and the Confronter, he is also the Exciter. As hard
a word as we would receive from him, it is nonetheless a creative word,
a word that excites and magnetizes those who first heard him: “Then
the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all
the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the River
Jordan, confessing their sins.” Something about starting over,
wiping the slate clean, getting a second chance, putting ourselves in
a right relationship with God. As formidable and as threatening that
might be, it is, finally an exciting invitation.
Advent
is the Church’s new year. It’s our chance to say, “Let
me try to get this right. Let me see if God can become real for me again.
Maybe this is a good time to read the whole gospel of Matthew, or set
aside a few minutes each morning for some disciplined prayer, or to
sign up for the soup kitchen. Maybe this is a good time to change something
in my life, to grow, to go deeper in some way that might have threatened
me before. Maybe this is the time for me to trust, really trust, God.
Now, wouldn’t that be exciting! And can’t you hear Andy
Rooney saying it: “I’m getting really bored trusting myself.
I think I’ll try God.”
Amen.
