Second Sunday of Advent, 9 December 2018
Austwick, Clapham
My name is John the Baptiser. And this is an open letter from me to all the people of God at the Church here in [NN].
I wanted to write to clear up a few misunderstandings about me that seem to have built up over the years. I want to do this, because what people think about me reflects back onto what people think about Jesus. I hope that if people understood a little more about me they'd appreciate more about the Son of God as well, whose sandals I'm not fit to carry.
I'm just a bit worried that people have written me off as a bit of a freak. The wild man who came in from the desert ranting and raging. All those paintings of me out in the desert, surrounded by wild beasts, dressed for the wild outdoors; with wild, windswept hair, like the Ken Dodd of the desert. Caravaggio paints me like I'm in deep inner torment, struggling to come to terms with what’s in my head, out there alone in the wilderness.
To be honest, that's close to the truth. Because, as the 20th century writer Daniel Berrigan says, the desert is a place of combat and rebirth. I didn't go there to escape. I went there to wrestle with my faith, to give myself totally and completely over to God in thought and prayer, to discover who God wanted me to be.
Now I'd like to get this across: in all of this, I had my family behind me. My father was a priest and both my parents were devout religious people, always in the house of God in prayer. They always said that my birth was miraculous, because they were very elderly when I came along, and through dreams and visions they knew for sure that it was God's doing. That’s why old Zechariah, my dad, insisted on calling me John - which means 'God's gift', rather than naming me after himself as expected. It made everyone think that I'd turn out to do something significant for God, and soon after my birth my father spoke some words about me which Christians still repeat today:
You, child, will be called the prophet of the most high, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins. [1]
Those words were really my commission. Or my calling. I carried them with me through childhood and when I grew a bit older and my elderly parents had passed on, I had to work out what this commission meant. You yourselves know, as people of God, that if you feel you're being called you have to do a lot of thinking, a lot of praying, a lot of listening to God, to work out what your next moves should be. So I went into the desert to do this.
I suppose in some respects that does make me seem like a wild man; because especially in the 21st century people are encouraged to be individualistic but they're not encouraged to be different. And especially if they decide to follow the way of faith in God - that's too freaky; that's wild behaviour.
But it didn't seem that way to me at the time. For I was the child of a priestly family following my own call into ministry. And there were other people out there in the desert, small communities practising their own particular ways of serving God, studying the scriptures. Like the Essenes, for whom repentance was central; they had 'purification baths' in which they made themselves clean. The Essenes helped me see how I too should offer people a baptism of repentance; so I took that idea back out of the desert into the country places around the river Jordan.
The other thing that became clear to me out there in that place where I encountered God, was that the words of the prophets of old, somehow applied to me. Isaiah convinced me that it was my task to be ‘the voice of one calling in the desert: prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God.’
And when I remembered Malachi talking about a messenger acting like a refiner’s fire or fullers soap, ie, purifying the people; I realised it was my calling to call people to repentance, it was my joy to tell people to clear a way in their lives for the coming of God, in all his glory.
I say it was my joy despite many people thinking asking people to repent of their sins sounds too harsh, particularly to modern ears; but the reality is that when people face their shortcomings and failures, when they do repent - in other words, turn away and turn around - it brings them a glorious new beginning in their lives. Remember how one of your Anglican hymn writers put it:
On Jordan's bank the Baptist's cry / announces that the Lord is nigh;
awake, and hearken, for he brings / glad tidings of the King of kings. [2]
My call was to wake people up to something wonderful, something that should make them sing. Because as Isaiah puts it, people are like grass, tossed around by every breeze that life blows at them, liable to wither and fade away, and the good news of the coming of God into the world is that they don't have to be like that any more. What Jesus taught and showed was that people who are prisoners to themselves or their circumstances can find release in him. As they turn to him and turn around, they find themselves, and begin to experience the world in a whole new way.
Some people through the centuries have called me the last of the Old Testament prophets. That's a grand title. I'm content to be remembered as the man who prepared people for Jesus; a sort-of divine warm-up act; the one who came onstage first to set the scene, to get the audience in the mood for the main performance. Like all warm-up acts my talent is tiny compared to the one to follow; but I hope this letter has helped you understand that what I offered wasn't freakish or crazy, not in God's terms. I hope I was faithful to the reverence my parents showed almighty God, and true to the story that God continued telling through Jesus. Whose sandals I'm not fit to carry. To him be all the glory.
Yours,
John the Baptiser
Notes
I have preached earlier versions of this sermon in Liverpool in 2001 and 2004, and in Devon and Somerset between 2011 and 2017. The talk can be illustrated with various pictures of John the Baptist - icons, Hieronymus Bosch, Caravaggio.
[1] Luke 1.76-77
[2] On Jordan's bank the Baptist's cry, Charles Coffin, 1736.
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