I tried to see whether there was any research done on this topic, but I couldn’t find anything, so I’ll just have to go with my own observations over the years, and you can tell me if you think I’m wrong: which is that John the Baptist really isn’t anyone’s favorite saint. He has great name recognition, you have to admit that, but it often doesn’t go much beyond that. You never hear about anyone who has a special devotion to John the Baptist, you know, who just loves the idea of him being a role model. You don’t hear about people choosing him as a confirmation name. I’m sure there are parishes named after him, but really, not a lot of them. And you can kind of imagine why: He seems like a religious nut, dressing strangely and yelling at people. If he has good news, it often doesn’t seem like it to us.
But I think what we get wrong is, we think that he must be here to tell us that as people we are all off track and rotten and we need to do something about it. He seems angry, and who needs that? But really if we notice, his news is not that we need to do something, but that God is doing something, and if we don’t want to miss it, we need to pay attention.
This is a hard world in which to believe that God is doing something. I think probably it was a hard world to believe it in 2,000 years ago, too, and yet people really wanted to believe it, since John attracted huge crowds despite his strange appearance. These people were willing to be convinced that God was about to break loose with something, and the question today is, is it even possible for us to believe that too? We all have pretty low expectations for God, when you come right down to it. We might believe that God does nice private things for people one on one, maybe even that he has occasionally been gracious to us individually. But do we believe that he is acting on a large scale to transform this world into the way God wants it? That he has started doing it and is doing it?
Often all we can say to that is, it doesn’t look that way to us. We don’t need to go through all the examples we could name of how the world seems like a more desperately divided and an even more unequal place than it was in John’s time, and more to the point, it doesn’t seem headed in a good direction.
And yet, in Advent, we are called by this messenger to expect something better than we have, better than what we can imagine. The past has been terrible, but it is time to turn our back on it and move forward without it. John came to tell us that God wants to purge and cleanse the past, and to tell us that God is already making this possible.
Advent is when we get ready for something, make room for the idea that the future can be different, that we can do something new without the past dragging us down. And we won’t be doing this alone, God will do this for us, open this door, set us free.
We often get told that Advent is the time for quiet waiting. Today the answer is, well no, not really. John is not the patron saint of quiet waiting. He is the patron saint of waking up. He is calling us to a state of attention where we notice things we didn’t notice before about what God is doing for us, what God is offering us, what God has placed right under our nose as a message for us, something we are not seeing but that we should be paying attention to. Like Mary who we will hear about later in Advent, we have to be open to a messenger who might come to us and tell us something new we need to hear. We don’t have to save the world, but we have to stir ourselves out of our belief that the world is a rotten place that can’t be changed even by God, we have to throw away our belief that the way things are is just the way they are.
We all don’t know exactly what God is laying in front of us as a sign in our lives that the past is over, and God is doing something new. That’s why we have this season of being awake, listening and watching. Maybe some sacred silence on these cold dark mornings will open up a window for some message to reach you, or maybe a conversation with someone completely unexpected will give God that chance to break through. We all have resistance to the good news, we are all attached to the past that God has declared over, and the only way through is to let God get at us in a way that we usually don’t allow.
There is our Advent assignment, to let God interrupt our usual habits and remind us that he is hard at work to save us and save this world. Give up hopelessness, the way things are is not the way things will be, God will see to it. John the Baptist is really John the Great Interrupter, telling us, there is a new path open now, don’t miss what God is doing because you weren’t awake to see it.