John the Baptist – Peculiar Faith

For the New World Coming, Leave the Old One Behind

Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon recently gave me a visceral view of what an apocalyptic Advent looks like. Their recent Netflix film Leave the World Behind also starred Mahershala Ali and Myha’la, but Roberts, Hawke, and Bacon matter for the “old world,” which I’ll describe shortly.

But first I need to recall the kind of Christian tradition I grew up in, which relegated “conversion” to an interior matter of the heart. By confessing one’s sins and turning to Christ as Savior, one leaves the old self behind for a brand new life ahead. This turning away from the old to embrace the new, moreover, is meant to happen just once; conversion is a moment in time.

There are some biblical texts to support that view of the spiritual journey, but not many. The prophets of ancient Israel and the overall arc of the Christian Testament certainly affirm the importance of what the modern West calls “personal conversion,” but the emphasis falls squarely on the transformation of the world and not only the “heart.” Depending on the particular biblical book or writer, a changed heart might be a prerequisite for a changed world, or it might be a result, but they never remain in isolation from each other, at least not for long.

This notion of social change and a world transformed has been difficult to imagine for many of us in the “comfort class” of the modern West. As the modern world increasingly made life easier (especially for white people in the middle and upper classes), biblical denunciations of the “world” and equally bracing declarations of a new world coming sounded not only unlikely but a tad bit embarrassing. Transporting that transformation onto the interior landscape of each individual made the whole religious enterprise much more palatable—and far less biblical.

So along comes Sam Esmail’s film adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, Leave the World Behind, which is perhaps the best Advent movie ever made. When a privileged white couple physically leaves the metropolitan world of New York City for a remote getaway spot on Long Island, they quickly realize that have taken parts of their “old world” with them—not only their reliance on modern technology (which is oddly and increasingly crumbling over the course of the film) but also their own latent racism and class privilege, which no longer insulates and protects them (if it ever really did), and which they must let go, like so much technology baggage that no longer works, anyway.

I grew up enchanted with Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and My Best Friend’s Wedding, had a crush on Ethan Hawke in Dead Poets Society, and of course fell in love with Kevin Bacon in Footloose, the soundtrack of which one of my dearest friends and I listened to while we drove from Chicago to San Francisco for our Big Gay Adventure. That these three actors clearly show their age in the film is a perfect image of the old world being left behind, while Mahershala Ali and Myha’la—whose work I barely know but whose talent is breathtaking—embody beautifully a new world emerging.

I know I’m not the only one who has been feeling generally “off” for quite some time, often fighting back tears or struggling to grasp the world around me as if through gauzy filters. Yes, we’ve lived through a global pandemic, but that seems more like a symptom than a cause of some deeper malaise so many of us are shouldering and which we just can’t shake. Amanda Sanford, the Julia Roberts character in Leave the World Behind, delivers a somber, rather insightfully prickly, and spot-on speech to her younger companion-of-color roughly half through the film. Amanda is an advertising exec who doesn’t like people and hasn’t felt right about the world for decades—and yet she has kept on keeping on, and now…well, I won’t spoil the film for you.

I cannot help but hear the gorgeous opening notes of Handel’s Messiah, the text of which many Christians heard this past Sunday morning from Isaiah (40:1-11): “Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.”

This God of comfort so many of us are longing to encounter—perhaps only because we at last hear the word “comfort” said out loud—this is the God whom Isaiah tells us to expect and make ready to meet: “Prepare the way for the Lord,” Isaiah says.

And out from the desert steps John the Baptist, whom the lectionary also gives us on the second Sunday of Advent (Mark 1:1-8).

Wait. That can’t be right! What kind of comfort is this that shows up in a wild figure wearing ludicrous clothing and eating a ridiculous diet? Divine relief looks rather unkempt, or maybe just scorched and frazzled, like the image by French artist Lynda Miller Baker.

That image of John can remind us just how out of place he is in the grand story of modern Western progress. Most Americans love that story in much the same way we love to narrate the success of our own lives—the success that comes under a rather pitiless scrutiny in Leave the World Behind.

Starting back in the eighteenth century, with the birth of liberal democracies and the industrial revolution and the invention of everything from electricity to antibiotics, the very notion of progress itself seemed to be woven into our shared destiny—a destiny ordained by God!

Speaking truthfully about modern Western history presents a very different and much messier story, one with enduring heartache, and considerable suffering, and ongoing violence. I want to promote healing for such a world, but I wonder now whether it all just needs to be left behind. Is that John’s message from the wilderness? Isaiah’s?

This much seems clear: the way forward for people of faith, the “good road,” or the highway for our God as Isaiah described it, is mapped with change and transformation, not with progress. That word “progress” comes saddled with the same baggage as the word “evolution.” Far too many people think both of those words mean that everything is constantly getting better. Evolutionary biologists would beg to differ, of course, and so would most historians.

Believing in “progress” usually requires practicing denial and refusing to see what must change—a whole world that needs to be left behind, or in the image of the second letter of Peter, burned up (3:8-15). True to classic Advent themes, the lectionary also gave us alarming apocalyptic images of all things passing away and even melting, and perhaps for reasons both Rumaan Alam and Sam Esmail would enthusiastically endorse.

We wait for “new heavens and a new earth,” Peter says, because we need a world where “justice is at home”—and this present world is not it, not without dramatic change.

This is the rude message of the prophets that come to us every year in Advent. As Carl Jung once insisted, “Every transformation demands, as its precondition, the ending of a world—the collapse of an old philosophy of life.” And that’s what Christian traditions mean by “conversion”; that’s why the prophets preach repentance; that’s why the new liturgical year begins with Advent, not Christmas.

Rather than a single moment, conversion is a lifelong journey of change, and rather than unfolding on an interior landscape only, it kindles a fire on the world around us. And this is exactly why paying attention is not only a banner for Advent but a primary discipline in nearly every one of the world’s religious and spiritual traditions.

Keep awake and pay attention—not to how your own story is “supposed” to go or the way a community ought to run or where we think God should show up, but pay attention to how things actually are, at this very moment, and pay attention to the voice of one crying out from the wilderness—repent, slow down, turn around, and change your course.

Or perhaps we need to say it as clearly as Alam and Esmail do: leave the old world behind.

If we do that—or rather, in all the many ways we do that—we declare along with Mark that this is just the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

“Gospel”—that’s good news. Neither Advent nor Mark will let us embrace its goodness until some things change; our hearts, yes, but also the world.

White supremacy, patriarchal domination, ecological destruction—those are just some of the pieces of an old world from which I have benefitted enormously as a white male, and the cost is unbearable.

That world needs to be left behind, and there’s no time to waste.

“Such is the Kingdom of God,” Daniel Bonnell

Gandalf’s Question and the Wilderness of Hope

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” Frodo said.

That’s the Hobbit Frodo, from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. You need not have read the books or seen the films to appreciate that quote. Simply know that Frodo had been given an epic task many times his size—and the world’s survival depended on his success.

frodo_ring — Elijah Wood as Frodo in Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s *Lord of the Rings*

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” Gandalf responded, Frodo’s wizard companion. “And so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide,” Gandalf declares. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

What time is it, anyway? High time to wake up, take notice, pay attention?

Is it time, finally, to repent?

Haven’t we heard that before? Aren’t some of us sick of that word? Preachers, I mean, especially. How much time should this take, anyway?

Does anybody really know what time it is (I don’t)
Does anybody really care (care about time)
If so I can’t imagine why
We’ve all got time enough to cry

Those of a certain age will recognize those lyrics from a band called “Chicago.”

My hometown. My kind of town, Chicago is.

Chicago—where they broke some heat records this past summer, during this past July, the hottest month measured on Earth since records began in 1880.

“In those days…John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness.”

John_baptist — Anton Raphael Mengs, “St. John the Baptist in the Desert”

We always hear about that wild man in the wilderness in this second week of Advent; this year, we heard Matthew’s version (3:1-12). But what exactly does Matthew mean by “wilderness”? Are there any wild places left on this planet not contaminated by plastic? Did you know that nearly every day it rains tiny plastic particles at the top of the Pyrenees Mountains in southern France, and at the top of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and likely over every mountain range on Earth?

It’s hard to know where my attention rightly belongs at a time like this, if not up there in the mountains, then maybe…

down here at the border, with the thousands of children separated from their parents, many in cages and put there by my government;
or maybe with more than a thousand incarcerated men of color fighting California wildfires for $3 a day and who are then barred from working as firefighters after their release from prison;
or where whales beach themselves, starving to death, their stomachs filled with plastic—presumably with whatever plastic hasn’t already rained down on pristine mountaintops.

These days are those days when John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching repentance.

Wilderness—a place of purgation, of starting over, of being refined by fire—and who exactly is that preacher out there? Matthew says he’s the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke.

Isaiah, it should be noted, had some peculiar notions about the wilderness, about wild places—where the wolf lives peaceably with the lamb, and the leopard lies down with the baby goat, and the calf dwells amiably with the lion, that wacky place where bears graze with the cows (Isaiah 11:6-7).

More than a few Bible commentators quickly propose that these are really only metaphors, poetic ways of speaking, not about wolves or sheep or lions and bears, but of humans, and about that day when human warfare shall cease.

That sudden eruption of peace would be wonderful, of course. But I see no reason to shy away from reading Isaiah just as wildly as his wilderness, to let him stretch our credulity and push us beyond—far beyond—what seems polite and reasonable; after all, not everything in the Bible that sounds just a bit outlandish is only, in the end, a metaphor.

I mean this: the God who can inspire humans to beat their swords into plowshares is actually too small for a prophet like Isaiah. The God Isaiah apparently had in mind is the God who rewrites the biological scripts of predation and reweaves the very fabric of creation without any trace of violence or destruction. “No one,” he imagines this God to say, “will hurt or destroy on my holy mountain” (11:9).

peaceablekingdom_isaiah11 — John Swanson, “Peaceable Kingdom” (based on Isaiah 11)

I’m guessing this is why Paul quoted Isaiah directly, by name, in his letter to the Romans. We heard from that letter for the second Sunday of Advent, too, probably because Paul really did single out Isaiah by name. I had never noticed that before, and these days it makes perfect sense.

Perhaps only Isaiah is sufficiently outrageous for Paul, sufficiently wild with hope to qualify as a champion for Paul’s outrageous take on the Gospel. Let’s recall some of its glittering nuggets that he offers to the Romans: this is the letter in which Paul invites his readers to imagine God acting “contrary to nature” by grafting the wild branch of pagan Gentiles on to the one true tree of Israel (11:24); in which he reassures his readers that by dying with Christ, we rise (6:1-11); in which he describes the whole of God’s creation groaning with anticipation for the day of salvation (8:19-23).

This is the letter where Paul insists that nothing whatsoever can ever separate God’s creation from the love of God in Christ (8:38-39)—and this is the hope, he declares, that the scriptures (like the stuff that wild and crazy Isaiah wrote) are supposed to inspire in us (15:4), the hope which we cannot see but without which we cannot live, the hope each of us needs, desperately.

But wait. Why is hope so vital, so mission-critical?

Because without it, we could never take seriously the question Tolkien’s Gandalf poses to every generation: what will we do with the time that is given us?

In these days, in this time that has been given us, the answer to Gandalf’s question will likely be very difficult to utter much less live. It will mean the kind and depth of repentance few have ever attempted. It will mean living in radically and dramatically different ways.

It will mean tapping into hope as if our lives depended on it.

Because they do.

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Advent 2: Peculiar Prophets for a Peculiar Faith

What or who, exactly, is a prophet? Among the many possible responses, try this: Prophets simply cannot digest the crap of their own societies. They take it in and it burns in their hearts and minds, like a severe case of acid reflux. And out spews lava-hot invective that has mostly nothing to do with anticipating a cozy fireside scene with a baby in a manger.

The modern rhythm of Advent devotes the second week of Advent to prophets, and especially to John the Baptist, the path-burner for Jesus. John is no modern day front man, no feel-good warm-up act to get the crowd pliable and eager for the real deal. John instead relishes calling out the religious leaders who visit him in the wilderness as hypocrites, a “brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7).

John_baptist_herod — John the Baptist preaching to religious and civic authorities

John clearly never took the Carnegie course on how to win friends and influence people. Yet John is pretty mild compared to his ancient forebears. Episcopalians have been reading from Amos during Morning Prayer the last couple of weeks, a prophet who could barely contain his disgust at the sight of his own people oppressing the poor, giving lip service to religious duty, and growing fat on clever strategies for economic exploitation.

“I hate, I despise your festivals,” Amos imagines God saying, “and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies” (5:21). Set all that aside and “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (5:24).

Amos is not alone. On the second Sunday of Advent this year, many Christians will hear from the ancient prophet Malachi. When God sends God’s own messenger, Malachi writes, who can possibly stand it and endure? That messenger is like a refiner’s fire (3:1-4).

The baby in a manger so many anticipate in these early December weeks comes only on the heels of the flame-throwing prophets, the ones who speak to unsettle, disrupt, and cajole. The ones who make plain why the world needs that baby in the first place.

So why doesn’t God just fix the mess? Why doesn’t God rend the heavens, come on down, kick some butt, and set things right?

Well, maybe God does exactly that – through us, a peculiar people of a peculiar faith who listen carefully (if not anxiously) to God’s peculiar prophets. Perhaps we are the ones who take in the white supremacy, the violence against women, the xenophobic diatribes of privileged politicians and spew it back with righteous indignation, the kind sufficient to light up the fires of change.

Perhaps, but quite honestly, that is just not me. I can flame and rant on Facebook with the best of them, but then take it all back (with the delete button) when I worry about losing friends. I’m not really any good at standing on street corners spewing harangues nor marching into institutional hallways of power and demanding justice.

Mostly, I’m just not any good at taking risks all by myself, as ancient prophets so often did, not to mention modern ones, too, like Sojourner Truth, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wh mlk_dream_speech at I can do and will do this Advent season is join with others. I mean, go to church and gather around the Eucharistic Table.

Not terribly prophetic at first blush, to be sure. But then I recall how often Jesus got into trouble for table fellowship, for eating with the wrong kind of people, and how the earliest Christian communities did the same thing and kept winding up in jail for it. And still today, when Christians set a Table in the midst of a deeply divided society and say, “All are welcome here.”

In a society marked by so much fear and suspicion, the Table invites a shared vulnerability and a revolutionary intimacy – and even that starts to sound quite prophetic indeed. I don’t mean that Christian worship does this automatically or that Christians haven’t sometimes or even often forgotten the radical character of this liturgical act (we have) or that the Table hasn’t been easily co-opted for nefarious gain countless times in Christian history – it has.

I do mean that God makes space at the Table where grace can happen. Breathing space for the kind of grace that makes friends from strangers and neighbors from enemies; the kind of grace that transforms betrayal and violence, not with revenge or retribution but with tenderness and care; the kind of grace sufficient to inspire ordinary people to do extraordinary things for the sake of peace and justice.

I go to that Table to find the solidarity I need with others – and God has already beat me to it. First and foremost, the Table marks God’s deep solidarity with us, before any of us even thought to ask, the very point of that baby in a manger. This divine solidarity, to be clear, will not keep us safe from violence or moments of doubt or making mistakes. But it will foster courage, the kind of fearless and peculiar faith that creates prophetic communities.

The Table will not solve our problems; Christianity’s peculiar faith and prophetic potential isn’t about solutions at all. I do think it’s about creating the conditions for gracious generosity, bold risk-taking, and astonishing intimacy – conditions from which fresh solutions just might emerge.

And, these days, not a moment too soon.

The Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent, 1979 Book of Common Prayer: advent21

Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the day for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Salvation is an Inside Job

I love Da Vinci’s portrayal of John the Baptist, for multiple reasons. He’s vaguely androgynous, strangely alluring, and his smirk hints at a secret he’s dying to tell – that he did tell: repentance is the path toward life.

The vast majority of Christians hear about John on the second Sunday of Advent, a day when Episcopalians begin worship with a prayer about the message of prophets, the importance of repentance, and the need to forsake our sins. Exactly pitch perfect for life in the U.S. today.

I think it’s worth remembering that prophets quite often make people mad, but not necessarily because of what they say about the future. Prophets make people mad because they tell the truth about the present, the kind of truth-telling more than a few don’t want to hear, especially if it means changing the way we live.

John is usually framed by the gospel writers with the words many Christians also hear in Advent, words from Isaiah the prophet about a voice crying in the wilderness, mountains being brought low, and crooked paths made straight.

John was a bit more pointed about that message. A counter-cultural, granola-crunching, hippie from the Haight-Ashbury, John despised the socio-religious pretentions of decent folk who kept up appearances but did so at the expense of the under-class and day-laborers. Luke’s account has John refer to the religious leaders of his day as a “brood of vipers” and insists that the fruits of repentance will be marked by social and economic justice (Luke 3:7-14).

John’s rudeness is something like an occupational hazard for prophets, born, I think, from the urgency of their message. The truth they speak is most often one of judgment and the need for change.

There’s a good deal of prophetic truth-telling happening today and it’s making a lot of people irritable if not really mad.

More than a few otherwise calm and measured scientists are starting to sound a bit unhinged in their truth-telling about our global climate. It’s not just an “inconvenient truth”; to take this truth seriously would mean making a profound course correction in the way all of us live.

We are also living through a nationwide moment of truth-telling about race and racism. To take seriously this truth of systemic white supremacy would mean, just as it does for our global climate, a profound change in our socio-economic institutions.

At this time of year, I’m frequently reminded what often links our climate crisis with our racism: the economy. In this season when the retail shopping engine lurches into high gear, the link is startling.

Some of today’s prophetic voices, for example, are trying to tell us a truly unsettling truth about our shopping malls. They would urge us to notice that nearly every product we can buy in our department stores is made in one of the roughly 300 factories in Juarez, Mexico, just over the border with El Paso, Texas.

Name nearly any mainstream corporate brand you can think of, and there’s a factory in Juarez making their stuff with poorly paid labor, unregulated working conditions, horrible ecological effects, and in the wake of an epidemic of kidnappings, violence against women, and murder. Just a few years ago, Juarez was actually named the “murder capital of the world.” That’s where a lot of our stuff comes from.

Consider this short list of companies who rely on the suffering of the women of Juarez to fuel the global economic engine: Philips, Epson, Honeywell, Toshiba, Johnson & Johnson, Seiko, Lexmark, General Electric, Maytag, Alcoa, Goodyear, Bosch, Pepsi, DuPont, and Coca-Cola.

Again, that’s a short list.

I find this nearly intolerable. None of us chose to set up this system yet all of us are deeply ensconced in it and benefit from it every day – much like the system that has caused our climate crisis and the systems that privilege white people.

I say “nearly” intolerable because I do think this kind of prophetic truth-telling would crush us without the rest of the liturgical year and what it offers for Christian faith. These first two weeks of Advent, after all, are not for our despair but for our hope. Advent rather boldly declares that another kind of world is possible and, indeed, that God is even now bringing about that new world.

The question, of course, is how. How is God doing this?

Personally, I would love to see God just part the heavens, rend them open, step down here and fix this mess. It’s beyond my ability to analyze adequately, let alone sort it out. Some superhero salvation, perhaps from some realm beyond, would be really welcome right now. And indeed, my Christian faith includes the conviction that God has sometimes acted in such dramatic fashion and sometimes still does and will still do.

But mostly not.

Mostly, salvation is an inside job. Social transformation happens mostly from the inside out – and that can be just as dramatic as the heavens being torn asunder.

John the Baptist certainly cared about the inequities, distortions, and corruptions of his own society. Yet notice the twin focus of his message: the urgency of repentance to prepare for the one who will baptize not just with water but with the Holy Spirit.

Ah! The Holy Spirit – now that might be the game changer we need. That’s the who can bring down the mountains of resentment and hate each of us has built up to protect our fragile hearts; the one who can take the twisted paths we follow to justify our destructive lives and make them straight; the only one who can cry out in the wilderness of modern loneliness and despair and make the wild flowers bloom in the deserts of consumerist impulses.

The world’s transformation most often happens and takes root there, in the human heart.

So let’s read Isaiah like that:

In the wilderness (of our collective suffering) prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert (of our sorrow and perplexity) a highway for our God.
Every valley (of despair) shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill (of violence) be made low;
the uneven ground (of economic oppression) shall become level,
and the rough places (of racial hostility) a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken (Isaiah 40:3-5).

Read Isaiah like that and Christmas becomes a celebration of salvation as an inside job: God chooses to save with and among us, to guide and lead us toward our thriving as one of us, from the inside out.

How does God transform the world?

With repentance. The kind of repentance sparked by seeing the world as it really is, from realizing how the world actually works, from hearing words of prophetic truth-telling that can pierce our collective denial sufficiently to make space for the Holy Spirit.

In that space, the Word of God becomes incarnate — again.