NOT OUR FAVORITE PREACHER . . .

John

How many Christmas cards have you received depicting John the Baptist?

Greetings from our house to yours. Our thoughts of you at this time of the year are best expressed in the words of John the Baptist,

Not our favorite preacher, John.

“And don’t you say, ‘We have Abraham as our father. My family has always been members of this church.  I tithe.  My father was an elder.’”

John is not done:

“You are not indispensable to the Lord.  God can raise up a people out of the stones in this river if God wants” (3:8).

Not our favorite preacher, John.

Yet, the writer Luke tells us that hellfire-and-brimstone-John is preaching “good news” (3:18).  If so, what in John’s message are we missing?

A Place to Start

First, a deeply personal story. Twenty years ago I had what can only be described as a breakdown—mentally, spiritually, emotionally. I collapsed. My wife Sally came home from work one afternoon and found me curled up on our bed, weeping. She sat down by me, rubbed my back, held me tight, wept with me—said little, but loved me much.

After a bit, we sat up on the edge of the bed. “I’m done,” I said. “I can’t do this anymore.”

She said, “I know.”

The “this” that I could no longer do was church. Two weeks later, I resigned—with no new job, no idea of what was next. I just quit being a church pastor.

How did I come to the point of walking away from church? First of all, let me say that I loved being a pastor and for the most part, I was pretty good at it. It would be easy to dole out blame on others for my breakdown, simultaneously piling shame onto my own person. The problem is that I never find blame to be particularly helpful or healthy. Fortunately, a good therapist helped me own what was mine to own and to slowly let the rest evaporate into mist.

Words from Another Preacher

“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” says the Preacher (Ecclesiastes 1:2). The Hebrew word translated as “vanity” actually carries a meaning of “breath mist”—the vapor you can see coming from a person’s mouth on a cold morning.

Back to my story. Here is what happened: I thought I was stuck but the fact is that I was not. This is, for me, the “good” in John’s news—you are not stuck! (Stay tuned for more on John.)

As I look back on those meltdown years, I realize that when I was certain I was stuck in a toxic church environment, I was not stuck at all. I was actually moving toward something, but that something was a train wreck—a breakdown. I find that in life you are rarely truly stuck.

Back to the First Century

John preached to a people who thought they were stuck. The Jewish people were living under a brutal occupation. They were paying huge taxes to Rome, toward King Herod’s building projects, and to the Temple in Jerusalem. Daily, they were subjected to check points and all the other indignities that come from being totally controlled by forces greater than yourself. Roman soldiers could stop any Jew at any time and make that person carry a soldier’s pack for one mile. Simon of Cyrene carried the cross of Jesus because he had no choice.

Add to the stress of occupation the anxiety of being a first-century Jewish parent. If you had a child growing up in Judaea during that time you constantly worried about losing that child to Greek culture. Hellenism has been cited by many Jewish scholars as the single greatest threat to the survival of Judaism. Even today, religious parents (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) are more concerned with losing their children to secularism than to another faith tradition, and rightly so.

Hellenism

What was it in Greek culture that enticed Jewish youth, especially young men? It was the theaters and the baths and the emphasis on the body and the individual—the self.

In the Roman baths young men wrestled naked. Much like today, there was cultural pressure for men to have those six-pack abs. Romans disdained an uncovered “glans”—i.e. tip of the penis. Therefore, some Jewish young men underwent a surgical procedure known as epispasm—an operation that “corrected” a circumcised penis. Why? So they fit in.

The procedure was so common that the New Testament writer Paul, no proponent of circumcision, forbid epispasm among Jewish followers of Jesus. “Was any one at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision” (1 Corinthians 7:18).

Politics as Usual

Along with Roman control and cultural wars, there was internal political strife on the landscape. Militant Zealots were beating the drums of war and rebellion. But Temple priests were joined at the hip with the Roman authorities, and lay leaders (Pharisees) were burdening the common people with minutiae—well-intended but arduous laws for daily life. Moreover, each of these factions had divisions within themselves. And so there was confusion and chaos throughout the land.

Bottom line, the people thought they were stuck—victims of their circumstances with no way out. Maybe you think you are stuck as well. Or maybe, like me, you think some of our institutions are stuck—government, churches, seminaries, colleges, etc. Perhaps you are certain that everything is going to hell in a hand basket with nothing to be done. 

If that is where you find yourself, then preacher John has news for you, and you can decide whether it is good or not.  Within John’s message I hear this: You are not stuck—nothing you are connected with is stuck, nobody you know, especially those you care most about, is stuck. Everyone and everything is moving toward something. The questions is, “what?”

Repent And Then Repent Again

Of course, once we figure out what it is we are moving toward, then we have the ability to respond. Both John and Jesus urged “repentance” as the proper response to anyone who is feeling stuck.

Many Christians narrowly define repentance as a change in moral behavior—stop sinning! My 18-year-old granddaughter condenses a typical Sunday morning sermon into these words: “Jesus died for your sins, now be good!” 

For John, and also for Jesus, in keeping with the use of the word “repentance” throughout all of the Bible—repentance was “the act of changing your mind based on new information.”

My way of describing “repentance” is to use a wilderness metaphor. Having hiked extensively in the Judaea wilderness, I know how treacherous the paths are. If you are following the wrong path, you can end up in serious trouble—no access to water, steep climbs or declines. This was especially true in biblical times where you would have to be concerned with bandits, wild animals and simply being on a path leading nowhere. To repent then, in wilderness terms, is to “turn around.”

And It’s Hard

What I personally hear in John’s message is the reminder that you and I, and our systems as well, are not stuck in place, not trapped, but moving toward something. John’s encouragement, I believe, is for us to assess where exactly we are headed. We do this by looking backward into our own history as well as listening to those who have gone before us.

I have found that the major obstacle to change involves pain avoidance. The fact is that the pain of doing nothing is often less than the pain involved with change. Anticipating and executing a change in direction is frightening and with good reason. Walking away from a marriage, a job, an addiction, a lifestyle is indescribably painful, or at least it was for me.

I changed direction only after hitting a wall. But it was when I walked away—even though it was into the unknown—that I discovered I was more than simply a preacher or church pastor—much, much more. And with that discovery came freedom, and with freedom came new life and new opportunities. Was it difficult? Damn right! Was it worth the pain? Yes. But still, changing direction was really, really hard.

Things Don’t Have To Be The Way They Are

A couple closing thoughts. If you think you are stuck, if you are feeling as if you are trapped in a toxic situation with no way out, or if like so many, you want to be healthier, happier, less anxious but you don’t think it possible, then John should be your favorite preacher, as he is mine. John invited his Jewish family to climb down into the muddy Jordan with him and acknowledge the need for change. “Things don’t have to be the way they are,” he was assuring them. “You can change direction! Life can be different.”

And by the way, John added, there is one coming who will help!

You and I, we are not the Titanic. We don’t have to hit the iceberg. We can turn our lives around, change our situation, and be a part of changing the systems around us as well. But to do so, we have to be aware of the need for change, and we need to be willing to ask for help as well.

Dear friends, we have to try. Taking some small steps twenty years ago would have made a giant difference in my life and maybe in the lives of those in my circles as well. Or (and now I’m going to get really real with you), I could have looked at the abuse I was taking and said NO. Stop. I could have walked away sooner and that would have been better. I didn’t have to crash.

And neither do you.