Loading...It was about this time a few years ago when I spotted a young‐looking man standing on a busy street corner in downtown Spokane as I stopped for a red light. He wore a heavy jacket and had a knitted cap pulled down to the top of his glasses. He waved a big, cardboard sign that read, “Worship Christ, not filth!”
There is a long wait at that light, so I got a good look at him and at his sign. He waved it at passing cars, sometimes getting an occasional friendly honk as they sped down the street. But mostly people were ignoring him. I was curious about what made him stand there in the cold winter wind that afternoon. Why that sign? Why that corner? Why that message?
There didn’t seem to be anything near where he stood that might have offended him – just a gas station, a car rental agency, a fast‐food restaurant and a church. There weren’t any shady kinds of businesses in the neighborhood as far as I knew. And it was probably a coincidence that the lettering on his sign perfectly matched the red and yellow of the gas station on whose sidewalk he stood. But clearly he was a man on a mission.
I thought about how hard it is to be a prophet. How challenging to get a message across. How hard it is simply to get people to slow down and read your sign, in his case.
This is a week to think about prophets and prophecy as we encounter John the Baptist in Luke’s gospel. This is a week and a season for prophets to enter into our reality – speak their message – challenge our lives.
Prophets are people who have a clarity about what God is saying to the culture they are living in and beyond. Their job is to share those insights – which are things people often do not want to hear. That makes being a prophet a particularly challenging vocation. Prophets often appear to be odd or impertinent or even a little bit crazy—not necessarily the people we’d invite home for dinner. Sometimes they can seem annoying. But their message has staying power. Biblical prophets spoke to the people of their time, but their message continues to speak to us.
In Advent we have a rich diet of prophecy as we look forward to the coming of the messiah with a two‐tiered kind of expectation. There is both the anticipation of the birth of Christ which we celebrate at Christmas, and also the anticipation of his return at the end of time. Profound hope is a part of this anticipation as God enters the world in a new way. And, as we hear today from John the Baptist, we’re also called to a kind of spiritual accountability as we wait for the Lord whose time is near.
Certainly on this Sunday, John the Baptist is at center stage – an odd man to be sure. In other gospels he is described in more detail: oddly dressed, eating locusts and wild honey and calling people to repentance. 
Sometimes we wonder how such an odd and impertinent character dare invade this quiet season of Advent. You’ll never see John the Baptist on one of those Currier and Ives Christmas cards or see him on a seasonal billboard or adorning a shopping mall. But John walks along with us in this season as the one whose voice cries out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”
You can look at John the Baptist like a photographer does – first with both a wide‐angle lens and then with a zoom lens to see the immensity of his prophetic ministry as one who prepares the way. When we look at the big picture – with the wide‐angle lens, we see John as a herald of hope.
Hope is such an important part of our lives. A while back when I was attending a conference for diocesan staff members who are consultants to congregations, we talked a lot about hope. One of the speakers reminded us again and again that there are certain things that people can’t live without – and at the top of that list is a sense of hope – a sense of faith that the future holds something for us. Here, John points to that future and to the coming messiah. To us, that hope, that future, is tied up in the coming of Jesus. This is good news.
John spoke in his own unique way to this longing for hope. The people of the Judean countryside who flocked to John lived in complicated and difficult times. They lived with the reality of an occupying army. They were not times of economic prosperity. These people needed to hear words of hope.
We might ask ourselves, when we look with this wide‐angle view – what we long for, what we hope for as we look around our world in a time of long wars, of continuing economic struggle in many places, a time when many fear terrorism and violence. We have just experienced another week punctuated by mass shootings in our nation – two of some 315 so far this year. We long for peace, for healing, for reconciliation. For security. For hope. For justice. What is that longing that nudges us toward Jesus – God among us? And what nudges us to offer ourselves somehow in this quest for peace, healing, justice and reconciliation that we long for. The prophetic call is a also call to action.
I marvel at the power of John’s message that invited people to a baptism of repentance – a kind of cleansing bath to put them right with God. When we look through the zoom lens and see this up close we see that John spoke to the more personal concerns of the people of his time. To whatever alienation, sense of personal exile, or spiritual emptiness that they might have felt. Repent, he says. Turn around in a new direction and live anew. And they came.
I’ve wondered what we might see when we apply that zoom lens to our own culture and to our own hearts. When John the Baptist says to us, “Something is way out of line here. Something has to change,” what would we name? It could be any number of things. In aftermath of a week like this, what would it take to reverse the tide of increasing violence and senseless shootings of innocent people? What would it take to move toward peace and security? What things in our culture need to be challenged?
At a more individual level, we can often see in our culture a kind of spiritual emptiness, a longing for connection, a restlessness. We need only to open our eyes and ears to know this.
We Americans are somewhat unique in the world because we believe we have a right to be happy. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be happy, but that quest can almost become an obsession. Sometimes we’re hard pressed to explain what that means, but we work so hard to be happy. That’s especially poignant this time of year in the midst of a holiday season when there is a lot of pressure to be happy, even when there are a lot of reasons not to be happy – loss, sadness, struggle, illness. Sometimes we simply need to say, “That’s our reality,” offer up the sadness and struggle and move along.
As a culture that quest for happiness often turns into an incredible appetite for accumulating stuff, or being entertained, having power over others to get our needs met, or to a restlessness and empty sort of longing for something – who knows what – that will satisfy that appetite. In the words of an old beer commercial, we want to grab all the gusto we can.
John’s voice cries to us in whatever wasteland, whatever place of anxiety, whatever place of restlessness we find ourselves in. Wherever our search for happiness has run aground. Wherever we have arrived at some place where our own resources aren’t enough to carry us through. He says, “This just isn’t working,.” and invites us to a place of surrender to the holy – to admit our vulnerability, our humanness. To repent. To turn our lives in a new way.
The spirituality of twelve‐step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous asks its members to admit their own unmanageable exile and to hope for one more powerful yet to come. That is an Advent spirituality – a spirituality of hope and longing. We don’t long for a savior to come among us whom we can manage and possess. Instead we long for one to whom we come in our vulnerability and trust. One who comes to us in our places of exile, our places of hopelessness, or disorder, our places of deep need. One who is with us when our restless search for happiness hits a dead end.
I’m still puzzling about the prophetic figure at the gas station downtown, whose message went right over my head. It makes me wonder what I might write on a sign that I held up for people driving by. Or what you would write. But I know that the timeless message of John the Baptist hits home. It calls to us in whatever difficult place we are dwelling; it calls us to take stock, to repent; to live anew – and to live in hope, to look ahead.
May John the Baptist – messenger of hope ‐‐ be our companion this Advent as we prepare the way for the Lord.
