We cannot stay silent - Inspired by John the Baptist
Baptism of Christ - Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River by John. Painting by David Zelenka [2005]. Source: Wikimedia Commons
What does it mean to be a prophet? What image does that word conjure up for you?
At a celebration of the first birthday of our Open Table Nantwich community on Sunday 26th November, Warren Hartley from Open Table Liverpool asked these questions, inspired by the story of John the Baptist [John 1:6-8, 1:19-28] which we hear during the season of Advent.
“Isn’t it truly remarkable in our day that LGBTQIA+ folk, like those of us in our Open Table communties, are able to find words of life and encouragement in the Bible, a book that many of our siblings have used against us?”
As I grew up with a very conservative and fundamentalist understanding of Christianity, a prophet meant one who predicted the future, especially the second coming of Jesus. So much ink was spilt, and hot air expelled, on interpreting the Books of Daniel or Revelation and events in our world, attempting to put a year on when Jesus would return.
I now see this as an utter waste of time, ink, and paper. Indeed, I think it leads us entirely astray from the message of a prophet. I want to suggest that a prophet is instead one who sees clearly. A prophet is someone whose eyes have been opened and can see to the heart of what is really going on and, more importantly, someone who speaks out and speaks truth to power. John the Baptist was one such prophet.
It is very curious to me that both the gospels of Mark and John start their narrative with the story of John the Baptist. Matthew and Luke don’t, they start with a birth narrative. In the gospels of Mark and John, Jesus enters the story already an adult. Clearly John the Baptist was an integral part of the Jesus story, so important that the story starts with him. Some scholars claim that Jesus was a disciple of John and, formed within the Baptist’s movement, Jesus became aware of who he really was, culminating in that moment of his own baptism when he heard God say ‘you are my beloved son’.
In Mark’s account, John has attracted the interest of the religious leaders who have come to question him. From their perspective, John is strange - dare I say ‘queer’ - and has amassed a following with a populist message. Put yourself in the leaders’ shoes - the country is occupied, a hotbed of politics, violence, and power. The religious and civil leaders of the conquered people had worked hard to create a peace which attempted to keep some form of self-determination and freedom of religion. Yet here is some upstart coming along - could he be fomenting an uprising among downtrodden people in occupied lands? We can see echoes of this in our own time in many different places.
The leaders ask John some good questions - ones I’d like an answer to myself: ‘Who are you? Why are you baptising if you aren’t the messiah?’ ‘What are you playing at?’ is perhaps a good vernacular paraphrase!
John doesn’t give very satisfactory answers. He starts by saying who he is not, and then quotes the prophet Isaiah:
‘I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness’. [Isaiah 40:3]
This strikes me as a strange quote. John is not exactly a conventional person. He stood out, with clothing of camel hair, a very peculiar diet, and embarrassingly public displays of preaching to people before dunking them under water. It’s the kind of spectacle that would make me roll my eyes and stay well clear today. Perhaps I might even call social services to check if someone had escaped from the local psychiatric unit!
But this is the fascinating thing about being a prophet. Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber said it well:
‘the truth may set us free, but first it will make us weird’.
A prophet is someone who sees clearly so doesn’t, or can’t, speak the same language as those who criticise. The prophet has moved way beyond that - in a poetic way, they are no longer even speaking the same language. John has seen the truth of his religious tradition. That truth looks back to the ancient traditions and sees them afresh. This has set him free from the constraints of those who attempt to police its boundaries, and that makes him dangerous - at least to the authorities.
John’s identification with ‘the voice crying in the wilderness’ is deeply within the Jewish tradition of liberation and justice. It upends hierarchies of power, calling people to prepare the way of the creator with revolutionary images:
‘every valley shall be lifted up and every mount and hill be made low’.
This is an illustration of liberation and power reversal - very uncomfortable for those in power to hear!
It strikes me that many read the story of John the Baptist as one where he was preaching morality and urging people to turn away from sin. However, that was the message of the religious authorities - and they were nervous of him! If John was merely preaching about personal morality, the religious authorities would be thanking him for agreeing with them and telling him to crack on! Sin is never merely about an individual wrongdoing - it’s about collective and structural systems, which is what the prophets always rail against. John is being prophetic about a new order that is to come. Wouldn’t that make you nervous too?
This is an advent, defined as ‘a coming into being’. This is why the readings about John show up in the lectionary in the weeks leading up to Christmas in the season of Advent. We are not just passively awaiting that coming into being, we are being called to be active participants in this revolution of truth, peace, and non-violence. If that doesn’t make you nervous, you probably don’t take it seriously enough!
I am, by nature, a very quiet, unassuming person who used to just want to fit in, not stand out. Yet, once we’ve seen the truth and our eyes are opened, we can never un-see nor ever be the same again. As LGBTQIA+ Christians, our mere existence is a prophetic act. We are not what people thing that we are, we need to speak our identity, who we are. Not in a way that makes us greater than anyone else, but so that we too speak of the one who comes after us, whom we have met on our own road to Damascus, and whose love we have experienced. One is never the same after that encounter with truth and love.
John seems to be baptizing without a license! His questioners seem to think this shouldn’t be, unless something truly remarkable is happening. John says something truly remarkable is about to happen. Isn’t it truly remarkable in our day that LGBTQIA+ folk, like those of us in our Open Table communties, are able to find words of life and encouragement in the Bible, a book that many of our siblings have used against us?
This reading for me underscores the importance of knowing who you are, and who you are not. The religious leaders strongly desired to place a label on John: ‘Well, if you aren’t this, are you that?’ It echoes the way many want to classify us in binaried ways, as either straight or gay, male or female – they really don’t like those in-between places. Sometimes LGBTQIA+ people show the same intolerance for those who come out differently. I want to ask how we can testify to the light without the temptation to believe that we are the light? The metaphor of the light lends itself to showing things as they are - testing and questioning those conclusions. The light guides others and us in the quest for truth, wisdom, and liberation. This emboldens us! As Open Table Network patron John Bell said at the Greenbelt festival in August 2017:
‘Those of us who… know the love of God should not keep silent!’
As we approach the season of Advent, may I pose you some questions:
What are you waiting to come into being?
Who are you?
Who are you becoming?
Who do you represent?
Can you be a voice in the wilderness for LGBTQIA+ people?
This all takes courage. Where does the courage come from? As modern prophet and poet Maya Angelou said:
‘I believed that there was a God because I was told it by my grandmother and later by other adults. But when I found that I knew not only that there was a God but that I was a child of God, when I understood that, when I comprehended that, more than that, when I internalized that, ingested that, I became courageous.’
