Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and Christ Church, Bulkington
Philippians 1.3-11; Luke 3.1-6
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord…’”
Caravaggio, John the Baptist in the Wilderness (ca. 1598), hangs in the Cathedral Museum, Toledo
The trouble with voices in the wilderness is that we don’t usually pay much attention to them. Let’s be honest, there are good reasons for that. There is a planet full of self-proclaimed voices in the wilderness crying out with opinions – let’s be polite and call them “eccentric” opinions – that seem barely in touch with reality. The world has always been full of loud voices whose sound and fury signifies little more than a need to be noticed, and that was even before the Internet.
If we’re being honest, John the Baptist must have seemed to most of those around him just such a… you know… “eccentric” character. Unlike Matthew and Mark, in Luke’s Gospel he isn’t described as living off locusts and wild honey; but Luke does say that the gift of prophecy came to him when he was in the wilderness. I wonder how you would react if I came back from leave and told you all the gift of prophecy had come over me in the wilderness. John wasn’t a respected figure in the world of clever scholars and political power-players in Jerusalem; he was a wild man living on the edge of society—just the sort of person we wouldn’t normally listen to. Yet realities were shifting. Something new was about to enter into the world, and the clever and powerful people couldn’t see it coming.
That’s what you would expect, though, isn’t it?—The people who have everything sorted, the people who think they understand precisely how the world works, can be blinded by their very knowledge and success when times change and something genuinely new emerges.
By any normal standards, John the Baptist’s life ended in failure, imprisoned and then beheaded by King Herod, having made not so much as a ripple on the mighty Roman Empire in which he lived. Yet, in calling attention to and ultimately baptising Jesus, he did something still remembered by billions of people today, when the power players of Emperor Tiberius’ court have long been forgotten.
St Paul’s end was rather like John the Baptist’s. Paul had once had it all, and had himself been something of a regional power player in the world of Jewish religious politics, a man who had the ear of high priests and who was capable of summoning a mob through his oratory and connections. Yet he had thrown all that away to chase a vision that came to him suddenly while on the road to Damascus. By the time he wrote a letter to the still new church in Philippi, which today’s epistle comes from, this proud Roman citizen had been thrown in jail.
The style of his letter, however, isn’t what you would expect from an ageing man enduring a grim imprisonment. Far from complaining about his fate, he is telling the Philippians how full of joy he is, not least because of the reports brought to him about how this church in Philippi is developing. It is a contrast to the often grumpy letters Paul wrote to other churches. The Philippians aren’t the finished article. They still have progress they need to make, in particular they still lack much knowledge and mature insight; but they are full of love and full of commitment to the Gospel. Paul is confident that God will bring to completion what He has already begun in them. These things take time.
With God, things sometimes take lots and lots of time. The famous lines of poetry and prophecy in our Gospel reading to ‘make straight the way of the Lord’ were written almost six hundred years before John the Baptist started crying out in the wilderness.
One thing that might have alerted people to the fact that John was worth listening to is that he wasn’t seeking attention for himself, as so many religious charlatans did then and still do now, but instead sought to point the way to someone else.
That someone was Jesus, the consummation of hopes that the Jewish people had long had for a Messiah, a great God-sent liberating king; and so he would be, but Christ would proclaim a kingdom not of this world, which did not offer political liberation but freedom from the bondage of sin. It was consciousness of that freedom from the chains of sin which made Paul full of joy even when he was a political prisoner
Everything needed for the reign of Christ’s kingdom to come was in place once Jesus gave up His life on the Cross. Yet we await the full consummation of the Kingdom He proclaimed, as Christians have done for 2,000 years. It might be a good thing that we still wait, for like those Philippians, we are not the finished article ourselves, and bringing these things to their fullness takes time.
Advent is the season of waiting. What we await are signs of God breaking into the world in new ways, which are always around us if we care to look; and ultimately the return of Christ to rule in glory. Talking about the Second Coming is often considered rather “eccentric”, and to be fair there are good reasons for that. We avoid the topic only partly because the idea makes us uncomfortable, which it does, but mostly because people who talk too much about it are usually holders of many strange opinions that seem barely in touch with reality. Yet we say in the Creed every Sunday that we believe that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. If we don’t hope for that what do we hope for? And what hope do we offer a world were old certainties are collapsing?
We have lived most of our lives at a time when we, living in a prosperous country with strong institutions and a high degree of individual liberty, thought of ourselves as being in an unending era of freedom and flourishing. At the end of the Cold War, which the Good Guys won, there was even a famous book called “The End of History” which claimed that with Western-style liberal democracy we had achieved the best form of society possible in the real world, and that although there might be bumps in the road, this was the inevitable long-term future of humanity. This post-Cold War glow shaped a whole generation of policy-makers and academics.
Thirty years later, those claims feel arrogant and stupid. It was always naïve and conceited to think that we were somehow the finished product. It now seems fairly clear that the era we have been living through is coming to an end. The end of an era always brings much chaos in its wake. At times, frightening things will happen—we know this, because frightening things have always happened. Yet all this feels a relief as much as a source of fear. I think we all started noticing that the things we were told sensible and caring people should believe had stopped making much sense.
I have no idea what will come next, and it will take time to emerge. Be careful not to be made afraid by the wailing of clever people as they discover the knowledge that once brought them success no longer makes much sense of the world. At the same time, it’s hard to know where one might find a latter day John the Baptist amid the oceans of crying “eccentrics” barely in touch with reality, and obvious charlatans pretending to be eccentrics.
Yet trust that God will be at work in this new time, often in ways unseen by many people and through people not considered important by the standards of the world. Christ has already done all things necessary to save the world and we should await with joyful hope His coming again to bring to completion what began when John the Baptist cried in the wilderness.
And now glory be to God for whom we wait, the Father, and the Son whom He sent to judge and to rule us, and the Spirit whom He sent to comfort and to guide us, now and unto eternity. Amen.
Top image: The wilderness between Jerusalem and Jericho, 16 November 2022, © Gerry Lynch.
