A Voice in the Wilderness
A Voice in the Wilderness
Luke 3:1-16
There are a lot of pastors who spend no time at all on Jesus’ infancy and childhood and growth into adulthood. You can make a case for this. After all, two of the four Gospels never mention Jesus’ birth at all. (I have yet to meet a pastor who just skipped over Advent and Christmas.) I’m afraid you all have been cursed for thirty years with someone who is on the other end of the spectrum. It is really central to me that Jesus was born like us and grew up like us and got lost as a child and was a little sassy about it, like us, and eventually became an adult. We often quote scripture saying that, “God so loved the world.” I believe that Jesus so loved the world, too. In fact, I believe that he fell in love with life just like us—a day at a time, a person at a time, a sunset at a time. I think it’s only when we learn to so love this life that the world ends up being worth fighting for, maybe even dying for.
Jesus so loves the world and his life and his family and his work that he didn’t want to leave any of those things but he left anyway. Somehow, he knew he had to go. If your version of Jesus is totally divine and not all that human, then you probably think he knew the whole time that he was growing up that this day would come. Personally, I need Jesus to be more human than that. I need to know that there was a battle inside of him about whether he should stay or go, whether he was being called to leave all of his responsibilities behind, whether it was okay to go at all. People were going to be disappointed in him, after all. As a person who struggles with conflicting feelings, I need Jesus to struggle, too. This helps me to accept that struggling is not the absence of faith. The struggle is an essential feature of faith, itself.
As a struggling person, I imagine Jesus not receiving a divine message from above, but trying to listen to his life and discern his calling. On the one hand, who among us hasn’t had a growing sense of restlessness at times, asking ourselves, “Isn’t there something more that I should be doing. What’s missing in my life?” On the other hand, there are almost always words spoken or actions witnessed that feel pregnant with meaning. My personal theory, grounded solely in my imagination, is that word finally reached the end-of-the-world, podunk town of Nazareth about a crazy guy who was hanging out at the River Jordan, a guy named John. Maybe someone in town even knew enough to ask Jesus the question, “Hey, Jesus…isn’t this guy, John, your cousin?”
What’s interesting to me about all this is that for all the curiosity that I have about Jesus’ growing years, I have a certain reverence for the way we just instantly meet John the Baptist. Sure, he must have been a kid once. His parents were Zechariah and Elizabeth. We met them during Advent. Do you remember? I’m sure they loved him and I’m sure that he broke their hearts when he grew up and left home, probably at a pretty early age, to become an Essene—a super strict religious order if not, maybe even, a cult. John left everything he knew growing up and joined a religious community. Then, he left that community and set up shop by himself in the wilderness. Lots of people want to feel like they have a calling in life. Not so many people are willing to accept the costs that are always there in owning that calling as your own.
Before Jesus ever shows up, John the Baptist’s ministry is flourishing which really is kind of amazing. It’s not convenient to get to him. Who wants to journey into the wilderness, after all? Yet, people came. Certainly, John probably benefitted from the core “fear of missing out” that has always been present in human beings. Probably, early on, not that many people came. However, somewhere along the way, going to see John became “the thing to do.” “Have you heard?” “Have you seen?”
Another group of curious folks were the religious authorities. Who is this John and where does he get off doing what he is doing? Doesn’t he know that rabbis need to be trained, that cleansing people with water is a temple ritual, that the only people who are meant to be offering such things should be designated holy people who were making money for the temple? Rumor has it that this guy is doing what he’s doing for free. What in the world is going to happen to the authorities if getting right with God doesn’t mean paying the tab at the temple?
I think the other group of folks who would have made their way to John would have been the folks who were genuinely looking for a different spiritual life. They were not “anti-temple.” It’s just there was the nagging sense, not unlike the nagging sense that we guess was there for John and for Jesus that there had to be more than what they’ve found so far, that there had to be a deeper meaning to this life. Even if John wasn’t the one who would tell them what that meaning was, maybe John would at least offer them a clue or two.
One thing that we know for sure is that folks didn’t flock to John for his Hollywood good looks and charisma. Essenes didn’t cut their hair or their beards—ever. (I remember the first time I came home with a bright red beard to visit my folks. My mother took one look at me and ran the other way!) The Essenes weren’t big on bathing and personal hygiene, either. They ate primitive diets and were not known for flossing so, for sure, there would have been locust wings stuck in those yellowing teeth. To top it off, the man, at least in my imagination, tended to speak at maximum volume. How else would you be heard in the wilderness?
I think people stayed, despite his appearance, because of what they saw him doing. There was a long, snaking line of people, all of whom were waiting for their turn to have John stand behind them, take them by the shoulders, and dunk them into that cold water. How much trust would that have taken? What a sight would that have been? They are in the middle of nowhere. There is not a rabbi to be found. Yet, somehow, this feels like one of the most sacred things they’ve ever seen. The more they look at those people, the more they see the “before” and the “after” in those people’s eyes. Something powerful is happening here, something powerful that might touch them, too. So, they take their place in line.
Occasionally, John steps out of the river. Did the chill of the water overtake him? Did the “weight” of all that trust drive him to just need a break? Whatever the cause might have been, the pause gave him a chance to do some teaching. However, unlike most good speakers who begin by connecting to their audiences and building their common bond, John goes straight on the attack. In essence, John says, change is coming but let’s get one thing straight: the change is going to start with you. In fact, depending on which Gospel you read, John either calls the crowd, itself, a bunch of snakes (our text), or calls the authorities a bunch of snakes (Matthew). Either way, John comes out swinging. He does this because he believes that the world is about to change in a fundamental way and that the people need to get right with God—right here and right now!
The Pharisees and the Sadducees would have agreed with John at that point. After all, pointing out people’s flaws to them and their urgent need to get right with God was something they had been doing for centuries. They might have even forgiven John for his lack of credentials and his made up little rituals in his altogether unholy place if only he had closed the loop by teaching these people that their only hope for getting right with God would be to get to the temple right away. John could have just been a new “marketing” arm for the religious machine.
Here’s the problem though. For John, you don’t get right with God by sacrificing an animal at the temple. In fact, nothing about getting right with God has anything to do with the temple at all. Instead, the way that you get right with God is by changing the choices that you make in your life out here in the real world. In a moment that has to remind us of Jonah, the man who would have done anything to avoid God’s calling, who despised the people that God called him to care for, John preaches to the “vipers.”
Whoever has two coats, even though no one can make you, you need to share with the person who has none. Whoever has plenty of food even though no one can force you should share with the people who are hungry. If you are a tax collector, even though you can get away with ripping people off, choose not to cheat. If you are a soldier, even though you have all the power, don’t use that power to extort people who are less powerful than you.
John has done two revolutionary things. He has detached faith from the religious authorities. Just as importantly, he has said that lived faith is not a matter of following the rules at the temple and then getting away with whatever you can get away in the rest of your life. There is a higher calling. That higher calling rests in recognizing other people’s needs and acting with compassion. Faithful people live with kindness and integrity, which is a pretty crazy message to hear coming form the guy with locusts wings hanging in his teeth who thinks you might just be a snake!
Finally, John does one last extraordinary thing. 99 out of 100 speakers who have an adoring crowd hanging on their every word sooner or later get around to saying, “I alone can save you!” “Look at me!” “Worship me!” John is having none of that. He tells the crowd that he is just preparing the way. (Imagine the integrity that it must have taken to have the crowd in the palm of his hand and say to them, “You know…this really isn’t about me!” That’s downright un-American, right?) Who would have ever guessed that the screaming man on the banks of the river would turn out to be a humble guy? And who could imagine the chill that must have run down the spines of the Sadducees and the Pharisees when they heard all this and realized, “Oh no! There’s another who is even greater on the way…”