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The Boldness and Humility of the Prophet: The Nativity of John the Baptist

Sunday, June 24, 2018:
Isaiah 40:1-11
Acts 13:14-26
Luke 1:57-80

Near the beginning of the green book, in the part that explains the church calendar, it notes that “All Sundays of the year are feasts of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Every Sunday is a little Easter, you may have heard before. (Though some say it’s more accurate to reverse it and say that Easter is a really big Sunday.) But the point is that when we gather as Church we’re celebrating our salvation from the powers of death that is most definitively seen in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on the first Easter Sunday. (That’s why the Early Church moved from Saturday Sabbath observance to Sunday worship.)

But back to the green book, it states in that section about the calendar that there are a handful of observances, that, if they fall on a Sunday, take precedence. It’s not a downplaying of the resurrection; it just notes that Jesus is part of, and indeed the climax of the story of salvation. But he’s preceded and followed by other players and events in that story.

And the birth of John the Baptist is one of those days, that comes around every June 24th, and even sometimes on a Sunday. June 24th being six months earlier than our celebration of the birth of Jesus. And others will note that there’s significance to its occurring just after the summer solstice. Because John is a hinge, or transitional character. An Old Testament figure found in the New Testament. In one place the Baptist remarks “Jesus must increase, but I must decrease,” similar to how the length of daytime gradually decreases after the solstice.

But that doesn’t mean that John isn’t hugely important to the story of salvation. Jesus, a little later in Luke is going to call John “more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written, ‘See I am sending my messenger ahead of you who will prepare your way before you.’” And in the Fourth Gospel, Jesus describes John as “a burning and shining lamp.” And so apparently some people and communities hold to a tradition of lighting bonfires in honour of John the Baptist. Maybe it’s no coincidence that in an hour we’ll be gathering around a BBQ for hotdogs and hamburgers.

So John is a big character in the story of salvation. He’s a precursor to Jesus. Like Jesus, he offered a rival expression of the Jewish faith, standing against the official Temple-based system. He was a bit wilder, more austere, less approachable than Jesus. He may have been a mentor to Jesus, for a time. According to Luke, John was Jesus’s cousin. And he was a prophet, or like Jesus insisted, even more than that.

A famous Biblical scholar, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote a famous two-volume work on the Biblical prophets. And he describes them in a powerfully. He writes:

Instead of dealing with the timeless issues of being and becoming, of matter and form… [so, instead of talking about high fallutin’ philosophy], the prophet is thrown into orations about widows and orphans, about the corruption of judges and affairs of the market place. Instead of showing us a way through the elegant mansions of the mind, the prophets take us to the slums….
The prophet is one who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon their souls, and they’re bowed and stunned at our fierce greed…. Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet’s words…. Reading the words of the prophets is a strain on the emotions, wrenching one’s conscience from the state of suspended animation.

“Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor…” Echoes, but also some fundamental differences to how Karl Marx described religion, as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” But where Marx saw an anesthesia, Heschel sees in the prophetic tradition a clear grip on reality. That things are not as they should be. But that they don’t have to stay that way. What Marx labelled a pipe dream, Heschel calls hope. And this hope comes in the form of prophetic messages of comfort to the oppressed, and judgement and warning to the comfortable.

Prophets, Heschel says, are messengers of the Divine Court. Imagine God, as the Bible sometimes does, as ruling from a heavenly throne, surrounded by angels and archangels. Sending word to often foolish humanity by way of prophets. John’s father sees that this role will be his son’s destiny, when, like a Hollywood musical, he breaks out into song and proclaims: “for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn form on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” That’s the message of hope that John’s going to communicate to the crowds when he grows up. He’s going to say that the ‘dawn from on high is breaking upon us,’ and to get out from under the shadow of death, people need to repent, to turn around from their old ways, and to symbolize this by drowning their old lives by being baptized in the River Jordan. But we all know the expression “don’t shoot the messenger.” The sad reality is that, in speaking of God’s will, and God’s desire for change in our world, and in ‘wrenching our consciences from their state of suspended animation,’ the prophets are more often than not, going against the grain, disturbing the status quo. And John will be shot, well not exactly, but the prophet is beheaded by a corrupt leader.

But that’s not the end of the story. All hope is not lost because of that sad event. Because just as Paul in the sermon we heard from The Acts of the Apostles gave a snapshot of salvation history from the time in Egypt to King David, and just like Zechariah’s song begins with a recounting of God’s faithfulness through the covenant with God’s people throughout history — John understood that he was part (a big part, but a part) of a larger story. The story of salvation. Which I think is really just to say, the story of God’s communication with and love for God’s creation. God’s calling us to live our lives as mirrors of the love that God is. John’s a part of that story, and after him, the story is going to continue: in Jesus and in the Church. “He must increase, but I must decrease” was how he described his understanding of this reality. For us Christians today, this same reality of being part of this ongoing story is reflected in our eucharistic prayers, that typically begin with a recounting of some part of salvation history, that leads up to Jesus. After which it ends with prayers for us and for our world. Listen for that today.

So as we remember John the Baptist today we hold together these two aspects in tension: God’s raging in the prophet’s words, like Heschel described it. But also the humility of the prophet, who remembers that it’s God’s message, and not theirs. And God’s world, in God’s time, and not theirs. “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

And today, as in John and Jesus’s day, we need prophets. Prophets to shake and wake us, but also to model for us humility, humanity, and holiness. In the precarious times that we’re living in there are voices in the Church that are taking up the prophetic mantle. There’s a movement in the States called “Reclaiming Jesus” [reclaimingjesus.org]. Where in response to an intensifying civic religion that makes an idol, a false god, out of the President, this movement claims that “It is time to be followers of Jesus before anything else—nationality, political party, race, ethnicity, gender, geography—our identity in Christ precedes every other identity. We pray that our nation will see Jesus’ words in us. ‘By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’ (John 13:35).” Their claim rests on the most ancient of Christian confessions: “Jesus is Lord.” Jesus is Lord: not a political party, not a country, not an office, not anything else. This was the starting point of the Confessing Church movement that opposed Hitler. The reality that we’re messengers of God’s Kingdom that is to come. Not our kingdom of our creation.

And even more recently, just this past week, as word of the separation of children from their parents in the United States, people in the Church remembered that one of this system’s chief architects and defenders, Jeff Sessions, was a devout United Methodist. So over 600 American lay and ordained United Methodists wrote to the leadership of that denomination, with, as they put it, “the ethical obligation to speak boldly when one of our members is engaged in causing significant harm in matters contrary to [their] discipline on the global stage.”

But this prophetic act was done in the Spirit of prophetic humility. You see this in how they write: “He is ours, and we are his…. We look forward to entering into the just resolution process with Mr. Sessions as we seek to journey with him towards reconciliation and faithful living into the gospel.” [http://s3.amazonaws.com/Website_Properties/news-media/documents/A_Complaint_regarding_Jefferson_Sessions.pdf] This is pretty significant for me. Sometimes it seems like we are more open to “loving our enemies” (because it wins us saint points), but we’re hesitant to put up with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

So for the Spirit who dwelled in John the Baptist from before his birth, today we give thanks. For the ministry of the Baptist, and his preparing people’s hearts and minds for the coming of Jesus, we give thanks. For prophets throughout time, and in our own day, who call us to justice, and remind us of the connection of the whole human family, we give thanks. And for the coming Kingdom, or Reign of God that the prophets give witness to, rather than themselves, we give thanks. Amen.

© 2018 The Rev’d Matthew Kieswetter

Quotations from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel are from The Prophets (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1962), 3, 5, 7.