I have exercised great restraint in not bringing John the Baptist too much into our Advent worship until now.  I made reference to his wilderness message last week but that’s about all.   But you’d miss him so much if I ignored him altogether.  He’s part of the tradition. And as you know, traditions are the heart of the season…..even if you don’t like them or understand them much.    Sort of like fruitcake.  And yes, I know some of you actually like it.  The rest of us don’t understand why but we’re happy for you.  Well, some of us actually like John the Baptist.  He always shows up in the Advent readings crying in the wilderness to prepare the way of the Lord.  It’s a birth announcement of sorts but not the “baby in a manger” announcement but the “God’s at work among us….which is the real meaning of the Christmas Gospel.  Who is he?  Today, lets just look at him and at some of the others who appear in today’s reading and maybe we might hear an echo of something important but long forgotten.
  Luke’s Gospel tells us that he was Jesus’ second cousin, and the one in the family most likely steeped in the institutional religious tradition of his day.  His father, Zechariah, was a priest which I guess makes John sort of a preacher’s kid.  This may explain a lot.  Most preacher’s kids I know, including me, are deeply ambivalent about the institutions of religion.  So John, out in the wilderness wearing animal hide tunics and eating organic honey and insects.  If that were normal the gospel writers would have had little reason to comment on it.  They think it’s kind of unconventional.  John has made it about as far from the confines of life in and around the parsonage as you could go.   I’ve always pictured him looking a little like Sonny Bono circa 1967….remember him with that long hair and ridiculous looking fur vest?  I wonder if Elizabeth and Zechariah just sort of shook their heads when friends asked, “so, what’s John up to these days?”  Still, of the two cousins he was the one with the closest thing to recognized religious credentials, even though they were inherited.  His cousin Jesus grew up in the home of a carpenter.
John was a prophet in the tradition of the other Hebrew prophets whose message so often had to do with truth telling.  Truth tellers are just irritating always dousing our fantasies with a  bucket of ice water.  No…you can’t have your cake and eat it too.  No, you can’t always get what you want if you have to take it away from someone else.  This may be another reason why John’s preaching in the boondocks rather than sitting on the Board of Trustees of his father’s synagogue.  He called into question a whole lot of conventional wisdom about what was the heart of their spiritual tradition.(common good) They try to shed light and uncover truths long forgotten.   Those who have a vested interest in defining the good life in any way other than the pursuit of justice and practice of compassion consider prophets  a major irritation at best and dangerous at worst and work to marginalize or get rid of them  which is why John was later beheaded by Herod the Great. Who wants light shined into the darkness when what you are doing in the dark is working really, really well for you?   In his truth telling John has all the marks of one of the great prophets which is so appealing to those who were struggling that many of them assume he is the one with the answers on exactly how and what God is up to.  Maybe HE is Messiah.  YET,  he is strangely ambiguous and even ambivalent.  For all his prophetic passion and urgency he doesn’t have all the answers.  He just keeps pointing beyond himself.  He keeps insisting on the reality of something that he hasn’t yet fully understood or grasped.  That is what I am finding increasingly appealing about him.  In an era in which too many are claiming a spiritual certainty that tends to be self focused…to truncate the wonder of God, whittle the Holy down to a formula, John stands as a model of continual discernment…. 
Now freeze frame John for a minute because I’ve also become intrigued by the people who come out to question him in the second part of the reading.  Remember, I like John and so I don’t like it when he gets picked on and given the third degree.  But the people who challenge him were the good people….the ones who would had spent lifetimes upholding the tradition…the one’s with credible spiritual pedigrees. 
They saw something in John that they recognized as having some authenticity.  But they are also baffled by him.  His message had some of the hallmarks of messianic hope and promise but it was also very different.  It got them thinking about what it was that they were hoping for and longing for and expectantly preparing for.   Some cracks in their certainties were beginning to let some light in.  They go out to meet with John in search of clarity. Yet, there is no litmus test.  No factcheck.org for the Holy.  John continues to insist that the real deal is something beyond him yet very much among them.  The best he can do is to point beyond himself with the utter faith and conviction that God is, indeed, stirring up something new.   A message for all times and all places…the awareness of light shining into the darkness….
The ones who went out to question John were doing the best they could with what they knew…just as John is doing the best he can in his insistence that he doesn’t have all the answers yet.   We haven’t been reading this story right.  Or at least I haven’t.  Maybe you’ve done a better job than me in hearing the uncertainty and ambiguity that swirls around this time that was pregnant with hope and possibility…just as all times are pregnant with hope and possibility….this time, my time, your time.    We’ve made of these people wooden, two dimensional characters who walk onto the stage at their assigned time and deliver their lines so that the plot can move forward when, in reality, they are part of that vast company of God’s people who struggle with what the deep longing for God’s goodness to fill the earth and the great difficulty in teasing out where the authentically Holy is at work.  What I want to hold onto in their story is their openness to the possibility that their truths have been subsidiary to larger, less explainable realities.  They are open to some light filtering in…to new wonders being revealed.
The seekers and questioners in this Gospel are not just first century Jews.  They are  us…the faithful and confused, struggling to discern what is real and authentic and truly of God in the midst of all that is going on and all the reasonable facsimiles so readily available. 
I think this willingness to be in constant discernment is one of the great challenges, not only of this season but of our day in general.   The challenge is to go deeper than the beauty of the season or the comforting tradition of the church to a more nuanced awareness of where God is in our life in this time pregnant with possibility…..our time light is shining in darkness.  Will we know how to recognize the Christ who will lead us?  Are we willing to be those who point beyond what is to what can be? 
We talk a great deal about the church being the body of Christ and I believe that to be true.  We are the legs that – city street….arms that hug, etc.  But we also are part of the tradition of John and so we must always be pointing beyond ourselves.    The reason we are here is not to get people to come to us and stop.  But, to point beyond ourselves to the great mystery and otherness of God….to be able to say “look….at this and that…..has the smell of the holy…..
 In my conversations, especially over the past several years, I sense a deep shift taking place.  I sense in these times of change and uncertainty that we are beginning to recognize that we need more than canned answers to life’s pressing questions.  We need light in our darkness.  I sense an honest searching for the Christ…the Holy One of God…to lead us into a deeper and more authentic, nuanced definition of “the good life, lived in with and among God’s spirit. Crack open the stale and outdated “certainties” and let God’s light shine in. …illuminating the darkness to reveal unexpected places where God is at work.  …this God who was present in the cry of a baby in a feeding trough in a cattle shed long ago….and is present still…mysterious and hopeful as ever….

Mary Gaut,
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