John the Baptist Archives - Page 2 of 3

January 7, 2015January 5, 2018

Familiar Things

Baptism of the Lord | Mark 1:4-11

Familiar Things

Lectionary Project

Familiar things are the hardest ones to see. We walk past them, overlook them, think we already know everything about them—how they look, what they mean, what they are going to tell us. But we don’t know them, not really. We only know what we think about them, which is not the same thing.

There is a glass sun on a slender pole outside my front door. It is beautiful, a once blue glass disc with metal sunbursts, a face with a bemused smile on the glass. Days go by before I see that the disc of the face is turned in its frame, rotated so that it is looking at me sideways, napping. I do not know if it is the wind, or whether children come and move it, perhaps on a dare or to find out how long it will take me to notice. I seldom do. Perhaps it moves with the help of the birds, or somehow more mysterious. As I said, I often walk by without even seeing it.

I have an image in my mind of how that glass sun appears, a memory of it standing new in the corner of a shop, when my daughter was a toddler. Yet every time that I stop to look at it, I realize that it does not match the image in my mind. The color is different. The blue is more pale, or more green. The smile is less, or maybe more, friendly. I find that I do not know this sun so well as I may have thought.

John the Baptist again—the lectionary insists that we keep returning to the Gospels to read about him, even though we already know him. We already know God, for that matter, and the entire Christmas story. A child in a manger, angels singing, wise men, sheep and shepherds, we know them all.

And so we cannot see them.

We do not see our neighbor, because we know her, and if we stop to see the burden she is carrying we may have to lift some of it ourselves. We do not look for God, because we already know as much as we care to know, thank you. Seeing God would be life changing, and we are not that brave or that stupid. Why look in the mirror when the image we imagine is more pleasing?

Stating the obvious, that is what I am doing. We don’t care to hear it. We already know what it means, and we have all heard this sermon a hundred different ways, so why listen now?

“He saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him.” Was that John or Jesus who saw, and did the other one even notice? And the voice that came from heaven, who heard it? Who believes such a thing happened, or was it only a way of telling a story, a wrinkle in the Gospel narrative, and do we hear this voice at all? If I hear a voice, could it be God, or must it be my unconscious mind talking to me? How do I know the difference?

Anyway, how do you talk about God to people who are tired of listening? When did it happen that talking about God, or, God help you, the Bible, was the same as being intellectually insipid? Why are skeptics celebrated as insightful and brilliant, while those who are open to possibilities of the spirit considered dimwitted?

If I can walk past a glass sun at my own front door and not see it, what makes me think I would notice God-things? We don’t see the things we know are there. Why would we ever see or hear the things that we may doubt? It is ironic—those who claim to know God do not look for what they think they already know, while those who deny the existence of God do not look for what they refuse to accept.

It’s a wonder that anyone notices God at all. In fact, it’s a miracle.

Just look at the messengers. John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness. An unlikely bunch of rough disciples. Women. Most of the New Testament written by a zealot claiming mystical experiences. More women. Prophets who wore strange clothes, or no clothes, or who otherwise exhibited odd and unusual behaviors, things that might indicate mushrooms were involved. Judging by all of these people, it seems that God does not speak through the mainstream. The people existing comfortably in the middle already know what they want to know, and they’ve heard all the voices they care to hear.

God is on the edges, witnessed by the fringe elements of the faith community. Remember, Jesus himself was an outsider, rejected and killed by the intelligentsia. It was only years later that he became a central, loved, and respected figure at the heart of what is now Christianity.

The world we think we know, the people we know too well to see, the truth we think we understand—these are what separate us from God. We fail to know God, not because God is far away, but because all that is holy is too close for us to see.

January 1, 2015

Seeing God

Second Sunday After Christmas | John 1:1-18

Seeing God

The Lectionary Project

Earth_Moon_NASAimage — Earth and Moon, a NASA image

No one has ever seen God, says the evangelist John in the first chapter of his Gospel. Never mind the vision of Isaiah, or Elijah in the cave, or Moses on Mount Sinai: they were mistaken, or only had a glimpse, or perhaps it all happened in their minds. Only the Son has seen the Father, John tells us, leaving us in the quagmire of understanding the Trinity, one God in three Persons, Father, Son and Spirit.

As we have said elsewhere, we may be like God, but God is not like us.

And what does John the Baptizer have to do with all of this? All of the Gospel writers insisted on the importance of this odd man in the wilderness, pointing people to God. What is the big deal, and why should we spend time at Christmas remembering such an outlandish man?

Perhaps pointing people to God is the message of Christmas, and that is what mattered about John the Baptist. He wasn’t making a fuss about himself, certainly wasn’t dressing to impress or living out the delusion that the world revolved around him. In that regard he was a spiritual Galileo or Copernicus, pointing out that the world, in fact, is centered elsewhere. We might consider living the same way—centered elsewhere. Both Johns, the Gospel writer and wilderness prophet, tell us so.

For all that we grasp the shape of our solar system, we cling to our notion of a world that spins around us.

A Christmas resolution then:

May we be centered in God, not in ourselves. May we live life better for knowing it is not only about us. May we keep Christmas by pointing to the presence of God, the holy Other all around us.

God has come into our world, and God will come into our world. Blessed are those who see.

December 11, 2014December 15, 2017

The Edge of Our World

The Edge of Our World | John 1:6-8, 19-28

John the Baptist never claimed anything. At least, he didn’t claim anything that seemed to matter to the people who asked about such things.

He was somebody, though. That much was clear, or they wouldn’t have been asking.

He lived in the wild places, down by the river, and crowds of people trekked out to hear what he had to say, to make a new beginning, to let him baptize them—an odd enough ritual when you think about it. Say a prayer. Stand in the river. Let this wild looking man either plunge you into the river or pour the water over your head. (They weren’t particular about how it was done in the beginning; those arguments started much later.)

When crowds of people went out to John, their leaders followed them. After watching the crowd and listening to John long enough, they managed to ask, “Who are you?”

Maybe, like the song says, they really wanted to know. It’s more likely that they really wanted to get rid of him. Nobody rues competition quite like religious folk and politicians. They wanted to know who he was.

Are you the Messiah? No. Elijah? No. The prophet? No, no, and no.

I’m only a voice in the wilderness, says John. It’s the only claim he makes about himself. Then John adds one more thing. Someone else is coming, he says. Someone else is standing in the midst of you all, in plain sight. You haven’t even noticed. And he is much greater than I.

You’re asking the wrong question. That’s what John is telling them. The question isn’t, Who are you? The question is, Who else is here?

Who else is waiting in the wilderness? Who lives at the edge of our world?

That’s where they found John, after all. At the edge. He wasn’t so far in the wild places that nobody could find him, but he wasn’t calling out his message in the city streets. John, this harbinger of God, was out on the edge of the world, where people had to make an effort to go, out beyond their normal haunts and habits. He stood at the edge of their world and talked about God.

John dressed in a queer fashion, and he ate strange things. According to the Gospel of Luke, John may have taken vows as a nazirite—no wine, a limited diet, and perhaps never cutting his hair. Twenty or thirty years of that, and you get a stone cold sober guy wearing camel hair and leather, eating locusts and honey. Hair hanging down around his knees. Standing in the river. Preaching.

That is the man God sent to announce the coming of the Messiah, at the edge of the world.

If we are going to encounter God, we may need to change our expectations. Finding some sense of the Other may require that we step away from our routine. We’ve got to leave our habitual comfort zone.

When God touches our lives, God starts at our edges. Perhaps it’s because our center is already so full of activity that not even God can find room. Or perhaps it’s because our center doesn’t map onto God’s center. Just as God is not the center of our world—be honest—neither are we the center of God’s world. Again, be honest—did you think you were?

God’s world does not revolve around us. Like Galileo, we have to look to a different orbit. If we are to encounter the Holy, it will be where we have not been looking. If Advent is about waiting for God, waiting may turn into a journey to the edge. That is where God is waiting for us.

Photos by Granny™

December 4, 2014December 8, 2017

Make Way

Make Way | Mark 1:1-8

The Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the four gospels, does not begin with angels or shepherds. There’s no virgin birth, no wise men, no manger, no stable, no Mary and Joseph.

Instead, Mark jumps thirty years ahead to begin with a wild man preaching in the wilderness. John the baptizer appeared, Mark tells us. The word he uses might be translated differently: John the baptizer happened in the wilderness.

Some people are like that. They don’t just show up, or hang out, or arrive. They happen.

Mark tells us that John happened, and then Jesus happened. As Christmas stories go, it isn’t much. If we had only Mark’s Gospel, our Christmas celebrations would be different, and the narrative would be short. We might receive ‘Jesus Happened’ cards. Santa might wear a camel hair jacket, feeling no need to compete with the rich attire of a wise king. Children would stare at candy covered locusts on their plates and wonder what they were supposed to do with them. (So would I.)

For Mark, John the baptizer is a messenger, a prophet, a human being trying to smooth our way to thinking about God. Why would God use people for that anyway? This bottom-up approach can’t be as effective as the top-down one—the word of God booming from the clouds or being handed over by an angel, radiant, glowing, awe-inspiring. Why use human messengers to point to God when God surely has more immediate ways to get our attention?

If Mark were the only Gospel, we would no doubt still miss the irony of his quote from Isaiah, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” Never mind that Isaiah was clinging to masculine images of God: these things take time. What about this odd idea that people are to make a straight path for God? Isn’t that backwards thinking? Isn’t the Lord supposed to straighten our paths, make our way smoother? Isn’t that what God is for?

How would we even go about making the God-path straight and smooth anyway?

We send rockets into space. Engineers and scientists talk about how the rockets work, what the mission is about. We can watch video of the launch, and we can see photos from space—so many that it starts to seem commonplace. None of it is the same as seeing it happen in person, watching the launchpad covered in smoke and steam, feeling the power of it make the ground tremble, seeing a rocket soar across the sky in an arc of fire and light.

Everything we’re told about it is junk compared to the seeing the real thing. It’s more than we imagined.

If we experience the presence of God in some way, it likely will not happen as we think. We’ve got the God-stories of the gospels, the prophets, all the rest of scripture, and all of it is at least as true as the video feed of a rocket launch. It’s still not the real thing.

That’s the meaning of Advent. We choose to believe that someone is coming. Not a thing, not an asteroid from space, not a card in the mailbox or a box on the doorstep. We have the child-like notion that there is a God, not an idea but a real entity, who has been coming into our world, into our lives, for as long as human beings have looked around and wondered. We can settle for the ideas we have, the pictures in our heads, or we can open up to the possibility that we don’t know everything. Even the most determined atheist could agree to that notion—we don’t know everything. And by opening our minds, just a little, to a real encounter with someone that we do not completely know, someone new, some possibility of God coming into our world, we are celebrating the season of Advent in the truest sense.

Meanwhile, there is some preparation to do. We need to get rid of the junk in the road. Fill in the holes. We can move our preconceptions out of the way. We can entertain the possibility that the most basic Gospel message is true, that God is always coming into our world. Mark doesn’t tell of a God who breaks down our walls or kicks in our doors. This is the story of a God who uses the strangest people and the oddest methods, and who comes to us in the most unexpected ways. This Gospel tells of a God who calls us out of our normal paths and into the wild places. This is a God who waits until we straighten a path to our souls.

Make way. God might happen.

September 25, 2014September 30, 2017

Odd Prophets

Odd Prophets | Matthew 21:23-32

Religious folk came and asked Jesus what he was up to. They may have wanted a straight answer, but they didn’t get it.

Who said you had anything to teach us? That’s what they were asking. Who made you the spokesperson for God? They dressed the question up, of course, to make it sound reasonable, but the condescension and the resentment were still there.

Jesus responded with a question of his own, a riddle—who sent John the Baptist, that wild loon of a prophet baptizing all kinds of people out in the wilderness? They wouldn’t answer him. They were afraid to answer because they didn’t want to give Jesus any leverage, as if he needed any more.

So he did the Jesus thing. He told them a story. Why? Why tell a story when calling down fire and brimstone would have been so much more fun?

There’s power in words that cannot be found in a fist, or in a bomb. You can only clinch a fist so long, and after a while even brimstone burns out, but words?

A good story is unforgettable. It keeps playing in the back of your mind. Worse, a good story is a Trojan horse for the truth. By the time you realize there’s meaning in the story you’re hearing, it’s already running amuck in your mind. There is no getting it out.

The story Jesus puts in their minds is simple. A father tells one son to go and work in their vineyard, but he refuses. Later, the boy gets up and goes to work anyway. Then the father finds his other son and tells him to get to work, and this boy agrees at once, but he never lifts a finger.

Which liar was the faithful son?

Open rebellion is more honest and faithful than secret disobedience, and Jesus claims that prostitutes and scoundrels are closer to God than religious folk are. That’s pretty good news for prostitutes and scoundrels. It’s not much of a recommendation for the rest of us.

Worse, the story doles out a double damning for the self-proclaimed good folk—our faith is worthless if it doesn’t respond to what God is doing in our own lives, and more than worthless if it doesn’t respond to what God is doing in the lives around us. If Jesus had pointed at John, a wild haired man ranting in the wilderness, and asked us who sent him, we wouldn’t have answered him either. The prostitutes, scoundrels, drug addicts, and thieves would at least have ventured a guess.

Most of us, I suspect, are too afraid to be true scoundrels. And nobody is suggesting prostitution as a viable lifestyle choice. Still, if we believe these stories in the gospels, scoundrels and the prostitutes went far out of their way to hear wild John preaching down by the river.

We good folk worry more about who has the right credentials than about who might be channeling a word from God. I’ve got degrees hanging on the wall, and education is not to be despised, but someone off the street, uneducated and untrained, may just have something God wants us to hear. God seems to use the oddest prophets. Only a few of them wear ties.

And we say that we’re responding to God, but we move our lips more than we reach out our hands. Meanwhile, God smiles on the folks who say they want nothing to do with church or religion but who still respond to the weird prophets God sends.

Which bunch of liars has more faith?

If the stories in scripture are our guide, God does use some odd folk. All by itself, that thought is encouraging to many of us. Moses the stammering murderer. Isaiah who walked around naked in public for three years. I wonder how much credence we religious folk would give a murderer and an exhibitionist. Jail time and medication are more likely what we’d offer them.

The truth is that we are all liars of different sorts. Some of us say we listen to God, when we are really listening to our own ideas about God. Ever find yourself sitting across from a friend but focusing on what you’re thinking instead of what your friend is saying? Same thing.

We may not want anything to do with God or anybody else’s ideas about God. Still, there’s that small voice running amuck in our heads, muttering that something might be out there and that it wouldn’t hurt to listen for a while.

One thing is for sure. If God is really God, then God is not going to go about things the way we would think. God is not like us. And God has some odd prophets. Some of them have done terrible things, like Moses. Some might come walking down the street naked, like Isaiah. Some might look uncomfortably like people we don’t even like or want to be around.

My dog was named after a prophet—Malachi—and I’m sure that he can tell me more about God than I know, but do I listen?

Stop walking around with the answers. Start listening to the questions. Who knows? Now and then we may run into some odd prophets. Let’s just hope they’re dressed better than Isaiah.

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