The crowds asked John the Baptist, “What should we do?” He said to them in reply, “Whoever has two cloaks should share with the person who has none. And whoever has food should do likewise.” Even tax-collectors came to be baptized and they said to him, “Teacher, what should we do?” He answered them, “Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.” Soldiers also asked him, “And what is it that we should do?” He told them, “Do not practice extortion, do not falsely accuse anyone, and be satisfied with your wages.” (Luke 3.-10-14)
The wilderness is not your friend. That lesson is loud and clear in John Krakauer’s nonfiction book published in 1996 that carried the title, Into The Wild, a story about a young college graduate named Christopher McCandless who, after traveling across and up and down America goes to Alaska, where he plans to spend time in the Alaskan wilderness.
Tragically, young Christopher is unprepared for the wilderness, not even having a pair of boots to wear in the winter months ahead. Setting up camp in an abandoned city bus, McCandless realizes, as time goes by, how brutal the wilderness is. Deciding to return to civilization, he sees that the river has become impassable from the melting snow, so returns to the bus, where he dies a short time afterwards, after having eaten a poisonous plant by accident. His body was found two weeks later by moose hunters.
Today, the evangelist Luke takes us into the wild, a godforsaken region east of the Jordan River in Palestine, where he introduces us to a man named John, a prophet who lives in the desert until the word of the Lord comes to him, telling him to speak his words of warning to the peoples in the region of the Jordan. This John does, his teaching as hard and harsh as the desert from which he came.
Each year, it is John, a Scourge figure, who stands guard at the gateway to Christmas, allowing us to pass by to the festivities only after we have listened to his hard-to-hear rantings. He is no Christmas caroller, lifting our spirits, smooth and soft vocals drifting our way, as we anticipate the joy of the coming holidays. More Debbie Downer than Frosty the Snowman, he is the grouchy uncle who makes things awkward at the Christmas table.
We can avoid him, if we like, darting past him, dodging his pronouncements, jumping on the sled ride to Christmas. Many do. But people who avoid prophets, as history teaches us, do themselves no service, soon enough finding themselves in a real pickle, his lessons from the wilderness vital to their well-being, had they only listened to his forewarnings.
So the choice presents itself to us again today, as John stands before us, scowl on his face, an old soul in his eyes, sounding a four-alarm fire, warning us to “flee from the coming wrath,” an image of the desert ablaze, the creatures in the wilderness scurrying to stay ahead of the raging fires about to consume them, the flames licking at their heels.
Hence, the question that we hear his listeners pepper John with, “What should we do,” the question asked by the crowds, by tax-collectors, and by soldiers, Luke indicating to us by these various groupings that everybody has reason to be concerned about the impending doom. Not one to mince words, no time for delay, John responds with clear and concise directives.
To the crowds, he says, “If you have two coats, give one to the person who has none.” To the tax-collectors, he says, “Stop lining your pockets with other people’s money.” To the soldiers, he says, “Quit flexing your muscles on the little guy.” Reading their hearts, John pinpoints the temptations that each of them faces, the weak spot in their souls that allows the serpent to slither in.
As we can see, overall, John is telling the people to stop going after more for themselves at the expense of others, the perennial message of all prophets, who, coming to know the heart of God, knows his concern for the oppressed and alienated, for the widow and orphan, for the poor and the destitute. In other words, those the world shuts out, sees as nobodies, and shuns as serving no purpose.
At the heart of his preaching, of course, is the call to the world to change its ways, to redirect its course, to find its way back to the Most High God. Like a tuning fork, the prophet offers us the perfect pitch that allows us to attune our ways with the ways of God. Turn a deaf ear to his utterance, and we are out of tune, the noise we make with our lives off-pitch and discordant.
Ironic and almost idiotic, Luke ends his presentation of John with these words, “Exhorting them in many other ways, he preached good news to the people.” Where, we want to ask, is the good news in anything John said? The answer is simple, just beneath the surface. If we listen to John, making an earnest effort to change our ways, the world stands a chance of avoiding the wrecking ball that is destroying everything and everyone in sight. And that certainly is good news for us.
The bad news, by contrast, is our failing to listen, whereby the world continues its downward decline, decimation and incineration the inevitable result. “Even now, the ax lies at the root of the trees,” John forewarns us, assuring us that, “Every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire,” bad news for trees, bad news for us who behave like fruitless trees.
The question before us, then, is whether or not we choose to listen to John. Like a children’s Christmas program, where the actors quickly move to the sides, John’s appearance on the Advent stage is short–next week we will find Mary on her way to Elizabeth, pregnant and poised for Christmas–so we wait just a bit and the scene will shift, allowing us to look forward to babies and sleigh bells in the snow, happy to have John the Baptist in our rearview mirrors, his words fading into history, and we get to stay the way we are, comfortable, content, and uncontrite.
It is, certainly, the easier course–not to change our ways, but to continue doing what we’ve always done, telling ourselves God loves us just the way we are, running out the clock on our lives without doing the hard work of making a change for the better. Countless people choose the easy path, not the straight and narrow one, which goes a long ways in explaining why our world looks for the world like a time bomb about to go off.
The truth is we need John the Baptist. Our world needs his words, unwanted and unwavering as they are. Honestly, we’ve tried it our way, for a long, long time, ignoring his warning, wrapping ourselves in a warm blanket of denial, and look at where we are, darkness enveloping more of the world, despair entrenched in too many people’s hearts, desperation encamping in their homes.
Is this truly the best we can do? Or, asked another way, written on a bumper sticker, “Isn’t it time for Jesus?” If we are ready to acknowledge this is not the best we can do, then we also have to say it is time for Jesus, the one promised by John, the one John said to prepare for, the one more powerful than he. It is time for us to put our best effort in trying another way, not our way, and seeing if we can get the world back on course before it is consumed by the forest fires we have set and that are ravaging everything in sight.
The problem is that we want a quick fix and the truth is there is no quick fix. Changing our self-serving ways–deep-rooted and deep-seated–requires hard work, something we are adverse to, particularly when it comes to heart work, which is what conversion requires. Still, we have to start somewhere, and start now, which is to say starting before it is too late, seeing as how the clock on the gymnasium wall is counting down the minutes.
Once, as a spectator was watching the sculptor Michelangelo chip away on a large chunk of marble with his chisel, the man asked the artist what he was doing. Michelangelo put down his chisel and, looking at the man, said, “I am releasing the angel imprisoned in this marble.” So it is with us, allowing the angel imprisoned within us to come to the fore, requiring that we chip away at the block of marble in which we have encased our heart, a chip at a time until the faint image of an angel finally can be seen.
“Fear is not a bad place to start a spiritual journey,” the gifted writer Kathleen Norris wrote years ago in her book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. She said, “If you know what makes you afraid, you can see more clearly that the way out is through the fear.” So, if we are afraid of what the world is becoming, then the answer seems to be to use our fear to change ourselves, and, in this way, to change, at least, our corner of the world.
And that change happens when we’ve given John the due he is owed, his message cracking open our hearts, seeping in deep-down where pools of good still lay, allowing the waters of love to flow from us into the world, washing the dirt off people’s faces, sweeping the streets of the litter on them, cleansing the wounds that fester in the world. The change begins with us.
An ancient rabbinic story tells the story of a man who went to the rabbi, complaining of how dirty the streets of Jerusalem were, wishing someone would clean them up. The rabbi patiently listened to the man and then offered him these words, “If you want the streets of Jerusalem to be clean, then you must first sweep the dirt off your own front steps,” his words reminding the man–and us–that changing the world begins with changing ourselves.
John and his message of conversion come once a year, always during this season of Advent, the prophet urging us to correct course and to make straight the way of the Lord. It is a timely and a timeless message, one we do not want to breeze by, however strong the temptation, however bitter the medicine John gives us. Only the blind cannot see that the streets of Jerusalem are full of dirt. Only the blind of heart cannot see that cleaning it up begins with sweeping our own front steps. This, in short, is the message of John, as the dim days of Advent fade before the bright lights of Christmas.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 