Someone
has said that John the Baptist is the watchdog at the gate of Advent and
there’s no going in without getting by him.That’s pretty much how it feels to me.Every year on the second Sunday of Advent and also, believe it or not,
on the third Sunday of Advent too, the assigned Lectionary Gospel readings
present John the Baptist.I get tired of
him.And he doesn’t fit the tone of the
season, does he?Can you imagine
singing, “Joy to the world, said John the Baptist”?Can you imagine hanging an ornament of him on
your tree – munching on a locust?
He certainly
reminds us that we are not in Christmas time, not yet.We’re in the time for looking at our lives,
to make them more receptive and more congruent with what it means to welcome
the coming of the Lord, in whatever ways the Lord would come to us.That’s Advent.Getting through the gate means to face the
piercing eyes of that watchdog whose name is John.
What
does he say?“Prepare – Prepare the way
of the Lord.”And to make sure we
understand what this means, Luke adds that John proclaimed “a baptism of
repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”Those are the two most ringing words of John the Baptist: prepare and repent.And it seems to me
that each of those words defines the other.
If
you want specifics of what he meant, read his pointed words to tax collectors,
to soldiers, and to the whole crowd. But
that’s not in today’s text.What we get
today are two pictures taken from a distance through a wide-angle lens.
Picture
#1 shows a sweeping expanse of desert.As far as you can see is sand and rock.At one edge of the picture is a little muddy river snaking through the
wilderness, lined with thin strips of vegetation.And if you look hard enough, there is one
more object in this wasteland: the tiny solitary figure of a man.
Picture #2.Same expanse of desert, same little river at
the edge, same tiny figure of a man, though now he stands beside the
river.The great difference in this
picture is a that a big crowd of people is now in the desert, near the man who
stands beside the river.
This
concludes our slide show.
Both
pictures show a crucial thing.The first
reflects the start of the story. “The word of God came to John in the
wilderness.” The second picture shows the surprising result: multitudes poured
into the wilderness to find him and join him.That seems even stranger to me than the reports of him in a wardrobe of
camel hide, eating bugs.
Let’s
make it clearer.First, John separates
himself from society, from the culture and the crowd.The government is oppressive, religious
leaders are corrupt, the masses are dull and adrift.He is fed up.But maybe that’s not the only reason he chooses solitude.It can be near impossible to hear the voice
of God without clearing an empty space and finding a silence in which the
Spirit might be heard.John does it
literally, putting actual space between himself and his word.It’s possible, of course, to attain real
solitude without ever leaving home, carving out a silent interior space and
choosing in certain necessary ways to withdraw; but John does it dramatically,
with his whole person.Now, in that
solitude, a word from God comes to him, and his life finds its voice.This man isn’t a watchdog; he’s the patron
saint of creative solitude.
The
curious thing is that people are drawn to him out there.All the way from Jerusalem and farther places they go walking
out through miles of desert to him.Luke
says John did take some initiative, going into regions around the Jordan; but the
older tradition says that people came to where he was.John’s church was in the middle of
nowhere.The crowds were drawn to the
life and the words he had found living apart from them.
Do
you suppose there’s a word here for the church?We often speak of “outreach,” as we must.Going toward
people with good news is non-negotiable for us.But there’s another truth about the world and us.To live apart from prevailing ways, to be
creatively separate – that gives
people reason to come our way.
It’s
a balance of course, engaging the world and separating from it, being “in the
world but not of it.”It’s the balance
that Jesus lived.He entered cities and
towns, mingled with great sinners, got his hands dirty with stinky institutions
and their leaders and with the people they oppressed.But he held himself also in reserve; he
withdrew from the clamor, to rest from it, to pray, to listen for the voice
that is deeper and truer than other voices in the world..And when he was distant, people were drawn to
find him.This even seems prefigured in
the stories of his birth.He arrives
removed, born to a girl from the hill country, into a hidden place away from
the crowd, into something like a cave, among animals.The stories report that certain people were
drawn to the child cradled in that solitude. In large measure, this would be
the story of his life.
What
does it mean to live apart from others and therefore, in time, to engage
them?We don’t let anyone, not even
loved ones, determine who we shall be.We turn our backs on cultural values like material success, power games,
gossip, immorality, excess, the need for other people’s high opinion of
us.To many things, we say No.We withdraw our support, even tacit support,
of violence, public lies and greed, the destruction of the earth, and the
victimizing of anybody.We turn toward
the ways of the Kingdom
of God: becoming servants
to the neediest, befriending those who need friends, speaking what words of
faith that we can, generously giving, forgiving, praying, being non-anxious and
relentlessly thankful, free from fear of what anyone thinks of it all.
This is
part, at least, of what it would mean for us to live apart.And some who are close by would be
amazed.Some would even be drawn by the
magnetism of lives differently lived, lived as if the Word had come in the
wilderness, which it does.
Don’t you wish for it – not first for others but
for yourself, for us?To hear the voice,
to discover strength for being what we were meant to be, to find our real home
in the world?How can these gifts come
unless we let go of the poisoning world and of our poisoned hearts?How do we get perspective without seeking new
distance and claiming new silence, to hear a new word?This is what it means to prepare the way of
the Lord; and this is the meaning of repentance, to turn from what was, toward
the beauty of what can be.Like
shepherds leaving flocks behind, like sages leaving homes behind, we leave all
that we should leave of our old ways in our old world and come to the one
cradled in redeeming separateness.There
we kneel, and from there we go to live as people set apart.
