Penelope Bridges
John the Baptist is probably not the person you most want to see at your Advent party. He’s loud, unkempt, and supremely lacking in tact. While we are trying to focus on hope, love, peace, and joy, John interrupts with his accusations of hypocrisy, and dire warnings of the coming of one who will judge and burn. As frightening as John’s words are, he is merely the opener for the main attraction; John’s prophecy will be followed by the cataclysmic actions of the one whose coming John announces.
This second Sunday of Advent always comes as a bit of a shock, as John the Baptist makes his dramatic appearance on the stage. John stands firmly in the line of the Old Testament prophets, speaking truth to power in the same vein as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and the rest. But the texts we are given today from Old and New Testament seem to crash into each other, with Isaiah painting a picture of the peaceable kingdom while John promises fire and brimstone.
Why do we hear from John the Baptist on this Sunday every year? It’s because John is an agent of change; he was preparing the way for the mission of Jesus; and the change that Jesus would introduce into the Jewish world was radical. You don’t get people’s attention about change by being meek and gentle: you get it by being loud and obnoxious, interrupting the norms of communication, creating a space. You might say that John wielded his axe to break open the people’s hearts, so that Jesus might enter into them.
God’s coming into the world is a rude interruption of business as usual. It’s normal for human beings to endure business as usual, however uncomfortable. We are incredibly adaptable and resilient creatures, and we can get used to conditions that, viewed from the outside, might seem intolerable. I experienced this myself as a child growing up in the Troubles of Northern Ireland. We will put up with injustice, pain, bad leadership, environmental degradation, violent neighborhoods, and dysfunctional relationships, rather than grasp the nettle to bring about a change for the better.
The Preface to the first Book of Common Prayer, published in 1549 and still included among our historical documents in the current BCP, starts out by saying that everything human beings invent, however well-intentioned, eventually becomes corrupt and in need of reformation and renewal. I’m paraphrasing the Elizabethan language, but you can read it for yourself on p. 866. I believe we are witnessing this phenomenon today in the current state of our politics and in our economic system; and I wonder when we will decide that the short-term pain of change will be less than the chronic pain of business as usual.
At the time when John the Baptist and Jesus started their ministries, the Roman Empire had inevitably become corrupt, and in Israel the Jewish establishment, operating under the stress of Roman occupation, had bought into that corruption. Religious and secular powers had become enmeshed, with unhealthy consequences. Those with resources had found ways to flourish in the prevailing system, leaving those without resources behind. One rebellion after another roiled the holy city, bringing down the iron fist of Rome on the people with more and more brutality. The time was ripe for revolution, and God’s people looked for God to send a savior, a Messiah, who would lead an uprising and sweep away the tyrants. They expected this Messiah to come from one of the traditional power centers of Judaism, an heir of the house of David, an obvious leader, a military champion.
But God had other plans.
John the Baptist was a figure from the margins. His parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth, were humble people, serving God as their tradition dictated, living for most of their lives with the stigma of childlessness. John was the cherished child of their old age, raised outside of the urban mainstream. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all identify John as an outsider. The center of Jewish power resided in the Temple in Jerusalem, and people usually went there to hear the Word of God, spoken by the accepted authorities. But when John comes on the scene, we see a reversal of the usual pattern: instead of the people converging on the center of Jerusalem, people are streaming out from the city to find John in the desert. The draw is so compelling that even the religious leaders, the Pharisees and Sadducees, join the crowd trekking out to the banks of the river Jordan.
We are familiar with other prophetic figures who have drawn people from the establishment out to the margins: John Wesley preached to crowds in cemeteries, because the Church of England clergy barred him from their churches; people thronged to hear Wesley at a time when the established church had lost its way, and the pews were empty. But people were still hungry for the word of God, and they were willing to defy the establishment in order to hear it.
In our own time William Barber and our own Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, both of whom will speak here in San Diego next weekend, draw crowds to gatherings outside of the traditional church, seeking to interrupt our “business as usual” lives of anxiety and acquisition. Rev. Barber attracts huge crowds to the work of the Poor People’s Campaign and the Moral Marches on centers of power. Bishop Curry has led a series of revival-type gatherings in conference centers, campgrounds, and city centers, bringing thousands of people together outside of the church buildings to be renewed and encouraged in their faith.
And of course next Saturday we will have the opportunity to experience one of those revivals, in the Good News Festival at the Town and Country Resort in Mission Valley. The spirit of John the Baptist is alive and well in the Episcopal Church, speaking truth to power and calling for repentance and reform.
In our story of Advent, John is just the beginning. When Jesus arrives on the scene, radical change starts to happen. The helpless child born into poverty survives against all odds, grows up to be wiser than his elders, preaches of liberation, opens the eyes of the blind, brings back to life those who were spiritually or physically dead, and disrupts the complacency of those who thought they had the world under control.
After John softened us up with his fiery speeches, Jesus offers a vision of a different kind of life, a world where everyone has enough, where all are respected, where joy, hope, and peace prevail over anxiety, fear, and resentment. The peaceable kingdom of Isaiah’s prophecy can be realized, Jesus says, but only if we are willing to turn upside down the way things are now. The Crucifixion tells us that the people of Jesus’ time weren’t willing to do that, and the challenge for each generation of God’s people is whether we will choose differently.
The life that Jesus offers us, the prize at the far end of that choice, is expressed in the beautiful blessing that St. Paul offers at the end of his letter to the Romans: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” As we ponder John’s stern words and consider how to respond, we can carry Paul’s blessing with us in the journey ahead.
Amen.
