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Advent 2

John the Baptist is the Holden Caulfield of the Bible.

Like Salinger’s famous character, John the Baptism has abandoned any sense of propriety. He has stopped caring what people think. He is the prophetic ‘voice in the wilderness.’ Listen to this description of one that equally applies to both:

"His bitterness is a form of self-protection from the hypocrisy and ugliness he perceives in the world around him."

That’s Holden, according to an article in Wikipedia that even now high school students are reading and summarizing in such a way that their teacher won’t notice. Holden is jaded at seventeen, tired of all the phonies in the world, and looking for something pure, something unspoiled, something he can point to in his troubled little world.

The Catcher in the Rye has sold 65 million copies since 1951, so we know that there is some kind of cultural resonance here. It is the second most assigned novel in high school English, and also the most frequently banned book in high schools. I’m not sure how that works. Nonetheless, the voice of Holden, both idealistic and jaded, seems to have a timeless appeal for young readers.

Listen to our other Holden, found in the Gospels:

"You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."

If you’re trying to win friends and influence people, I’d say don’t start with John the Baptist. John is the very definition of ‘the voice in the wilderness,’ the voice that understands that few people are listening and even fewer seem to care.

So he decamps. He leaves behind polite society and heads for the Jordan, the river that runs through the heart of his world. Since running water was such a rarity in this part of the world, we can assume it represents some sense of purity in a nation of stagnant pools. Maybe it pointed to the first ‘crossing over,’ when the Israelites entered the Promised Land purified through desert wandering and finally came home. Whatever your symbolism, John settles in to wait, and so do we.

John is waiting for the ‘one who is more powerful than I.’ The one for whom he is not worthy to ‘stoop down and untie his sandals.’ John has a baptism of water; ‘the one who comes’ will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ Through it all John is proclaiming ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.’

See the contradictions? The world is corrupt so he must flee. The people who follow him are corrupt, so he curses them, then offers them a ‘baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.’ But they must wait some more, for one is coming that John himself is unworthy to approach. John demonstrates forgiveness through water, but it cannot compare to the power of the Holy Spirit yet to appear.

Despair and hope; anger and forgiveness; water and the Holy Spirit. John is all over the map. He’s cynical and hopeful all at the same time. He is surrounded by phonies and hypocrites and offers them hope. Why, you might ask, do we even bother with John the Baptist in the weeks leading up to Christmas? Was the sermon store all sold out of angel stories and barnyard animals? The answer is yes, they were all sold out. Try Christmas Eve, I say, I hear they are getting in a new shipment.

Did you know that consumer spending makes up two-thirds of the North American economy? And did you further know that up 40 percent of all retail sales happen in the days leading up to Christmas? I know I’m giving you a John the Baptist Christmas, but think about it. People are using money they don’t have to buy things they don’t need. Every item is waiting to become landfill, and next year we’ll do it all again. We’re cooking the planet and the most important thing on our minds is something called ‘consumer confidence.’ At one time police office and firefighter were two of the most dangerous occupations in town, but now you can add Wal-Mart greeter to the list. Even when told an employee had been trampled to death, shoppers complained bitterly that the store was closing. “We waited in line,” one shopper said, “so let us shop.”

While we’re playing ‘spot the hypocrite,’ I should tell you that I’m pretty sure one of Santa’s elves is bringing me an iphone. When two-thirds of all economic activity involves shopping, you can be pretty sure all of us are complicit. Maybe like me you try to dress it up by bringing your own bags, but it’s still shopping. ‘John the Baptist Christmas’ sermons write themselves, a dash of guilt, a cup of statistics, and stories of shoppers gone mad.

***

If John the Baptist had lived long enough to see the end of the story, he would have come to the same conclusion as St. Paul:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. (Romans 6.3-4)

John would love Romans 6. He would have loved the fact that Paul could draw together all his favourite themes, that he could link baptism and death and newness of life. He would have loved that going beneath the water of the Jordan people died to former ways of being, died to self, and emerged from the water new people. He would have loved Paul’s link between the death and resurrection of Jesus and the very same thing he was trying to do in the muddy Jordan.

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Where’s the hope in a ‘John the Baptist Christmas?’ The hope is coming, the hope is moving now to the Jordan, ready to accept the same baptism we accept. The hope is the death of sin that comes at Calvary. The hope is in an empty tomb. The hope is in a God who is willing to enter human experience. The hope is in a God who suffers when we suffer and laughs when we laugh because God came to us long ago and learned how we live. The hope is in utero now, waiting to come, but promising to overturn all we know about a God who seems distant and remote and hard to know.

Notice how everything has a place: River Jordan, Calvary, Bethlehem: This God is profoundly local, with rivers and hills and caves: a cave for birth and a cave for death. The people are real, not in the factual sense but in the actual sense: meaning they have actual lives like ours will faults and problems and hypocrisy. We are all Holden Caulfields, cynical and optimistic at the same time, fleeing to the desert but surrounded by the same broken people, waiting for new life and a little worried at the same time.

I wish for all of you a ‘John the Baptist Christmas:’ with enough hope to get you through, and enough pause to be a little wary. We wait with John at the riverside, for new life to come. Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 8:43 AM