It had been a long time. History seemed more moribund and leaden than ever. Hope was either frozen or fanatic. Cynicism was the daily fare and optimism the dream of fools. So it was in those days of long ago. But now there was a stirring in history's corridors -- not in the throne rooms of Rome or Alexandria, not in the libraries of Athens or the armies of Caesar -- but in little backwater towns of a troublesome, rebellious, backwater country. The first of the stirrings began in Jerusalem with a tired old priest, childless and lonely in his old age, enduring the oppression of his time with his barren wife Elizabeth. While attending to his priestly duties of burning incense at the Temple altar, the old priest Zechariah had a startling vision. The archangel Gabriel appeared to him and said, "Your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear a son, and you shall name him John ... He will be great in the eyes of the Lord ... He will go before the Lord as a forerunner, possessed by the spirit and power of Elijah ... to prepare a people fit for the Lord" (Luke 1:13-17).
This was no vague hope, no wild dream of an old man who should know better. What he saw actually came to pass, and those preliminary stirrings began to shake the foundations of history. And as the child, John, grew up, he became strong in spirit and began living in the wilderness. In a life of solitude, of prayer and fasting, he sensed he was not alone, that the New Age of God's Messiah was at hand. History's long-awaited day was coming. The Christ was approaching. The time of God's anointed was near.
The wilderness silence could contain John no longer. He felt the impulses of the ages in his soul. His veins throbbed with the zeal of God. Blowing through his hair and beard and very soul was the wind of the hills, God's Wind, God's Spirit. The fire of judgment belched from his nostrils. His eyes were aflame with righteousness, his heart thrusting the lifeblood of hope and expectancy through his being. He had to preach. He was compelled to speak out.
Prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert
a highway for our God.
The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Prepare the way of the Lord.
Sure he was fiery and uncompromising, nearly a radical, a fanatic. But the sins of the people were oppressive and deadening. The structures of life were drawn tight and everyone was suffocating. John burst the bonds and began to set the captives free -- free from their sins, free from their smothering compromises, free from their lack of vision and hope and imagination.
No wonder Jesus, in admiration, remarked: "What did you go out in the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? Why then did you go out? To see a prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet" (Matthew 11:7-9). Even though the official deputation of priests, Levites, and Pharisees didn't want to admit it, they were hearing a prophet. He called them a den of snakes. King Herod, against his better judgment, came out to listen to the wilderness preacher, and he knew he had heard a prophet because he heard the truth about himself -- a truth all his palace yes-men would never speak. And ever since those days of long ago, we have been gathering again and again to hear the Baptist's cry. Speaking over nineteen centuries ago, his voice resounds across history to this very moment, to this very place. In his time, Tiberius Caesar was issuing official proclamations to be spread throughout the world by official couriers of power and authority.
But John -- the lonely, uncompromised John of the wilderness -- shouted from the hillside, and his voice is still the voice that should be heard and is heard, this very day, by thousands of couriers in thousands of churches announcing the Lord's Advent. "Who are you, John?" they asked. "I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the Lord.' " He is the voice to be heard.
I
John's voice was heard because he had the courage to speak out. He spoke out bravely, courageously, daringly, in ways that eventually cost him his life. There were a thousand priests mumbling the words of the Lord in the seclusion of their sanctuaries day after day. Service after service Levites sung and chanted the message of God. Lawyers, by the thousands, studied the law every day and knew it by heart. Yet in public they all said what everyone wanted to hear. Only in private did they whisper the truth. But not John. He stood up and spoke out. He had no real credentials. He was without backing from any official group. No newspaper or television station or church or college stood behind him. He had no degrees, no best-selling books, and had appeared on no talk shows. He was not a member of a powerful family. He was without independent resources and existed on food from the wilderness. Uncompromised, he cried aloud, he spoke out, he proclaimed the truth.
It occurs to me that our age is not unlike John's. Instead of the Romans oppressing us, it often is our own government. The Caesars do not threaten us. Instead we are intimidated by our bureaucracies. Witness, for example, the frequent destruction of personal property by narcotics authorities. In one city, a narc squadron of government authorities invaded a citizen's house, suspecting drugs were hidden there. They overturned every piece of furniture, knocked holes in walls, displaced clothing, tore apart pictures, only to discover they had chosen the wrong house. The last I knew, the people had not been adequately compensated by the government. Or consider the example of narcotics agents seizing a young man's new sailboat in the Caribbean, a sailboat he had just bought for $24,000 and was now enjoying on his vacation. Federal narcotics agents boarded the boat and literally destroyed it looking for drugs they never found because there were none. At last report, he had been compensated only $8,000 of the $24,000 he spent on the boat.
Not long ago the United States Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, suggested a terribly politically incorrect idea. She suggested that we study the possibility of decriminalizing drugs. So much crime and violence is connected to drugs, she suggested - - as had George Shultz, Milton Friedman, and William F. Buckley before her -- that our country would be a much safer, saner place if we legalized drugs. If we take the high price out of drugs, would we not collapse the drug cartels and the drug violence overnight? After all, asks Robert Reno in one of his columns, is drug use really a national epidemic? About 0.9 percent of the population regularly uses cocaine. If you double that to include crack and heroin use, you still have less than two percent of the population using drugs.
But seven percent of Americans have heart problems. Nearly eleven percent have high blood pressure, twelve percent have arthritis. Smokers comprise 27 percent of our population and users of alcohol, 51 percent. Reno humorously adds that those who suffer from ingrown toenails and chronic constipation are 2.3 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively. Says Robert Reno, "Drug- related violence may seem epidemic, but clearly drug abuse isn't, when compared with most diseases" (Newsday, December 10, 1993, p. 64).
But think of all the billions and billions spent on drug enforcement. Think of all the violence connected with enforcement, production, and selling of drugs, and all the violence of druggies stealing and maiming to get money for their habit. Why not just give it to them under controlled conditions, and take crime and violence and mayhem and death out of drugs? Why not treat drug use and addiction like alcohol and tobacco abuse?
As it turned out, the new-breed Democrats in the White House distanced themselves from Surgeon General Elders. The drug control and drug enforcement program has been inconsequential in stemming the flow of drugs or curbing their use. Legalize drugs and we may experience a huge drop in burglaries, maimings, muggings, vandalisms, and murders. Many of us cringe at such ideas because we know we have remained silent when we should have spoken out.
Oh, John, you God-fearing, fire-spitting ascetic. You make us shudder. We are afraid to listen to you, yet we are afraid not to. You judge us like T.S. Eliot, "As the hollow men/The stuffed men." With your voice ringing in our ears we shall have to speak up for justice and righteousness and an end to tyranny and oppression. Yours is indeed a voice we hear.
II
If John's was a voice to be heard because he had the courage to speak out, his was also a voice to be heard because he had the courage to speak in -- to speak to the human heart and soul. If Isaiah before him had prophesied a highway through the wilderness of the Arabian desert for the Lord, John was now prophesying a way into the human soul. As noted Biblical scholar Raymond Brown puts it, John was preparing not a highway in the desert. He was preaching "opening up the hearts of men, leveling their pride, filling their emptiness, and thus preparing them for God's intervention" (Anchor Bible, Vol. 29, Gospel of John, p. 50).
John knew the coming of the Lord needed no freeway across the wasteland of Judean geography. John demanded a way be made for the Lord through the wasteland of Judean hearts. The world was not in need of another Roman road to Rome. It needed instead a great way from the soul to the true Eternal City. "Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his paths straight." John knew people. He knew how crooked and devious their lives could be. He saw the deceit and self-deception. Fornicators and adulterers had all the covers lifted to be exposed to the searing light of conscience. Hypocrites and phonies, young and old, were exposed as the parasites they were on God's society. The self-righteous were blown off their pedestals by the blast of his word of truth. Idols with feet of clay crumbled in the presence of his thunderous voice. People who had been living miserly, self-centered lives looked in the mirror and saw themselves for the first time as they really were -- as Ebenezer Scrooges. Talented people burying their abilities beneath trivial activities were summoned to the stage, front and center, for performance in keeping with their gifts. In the secret reaches of bank vaults and stock portfolios, the wealthy were reminded, "Unto whom much is given, much is required." The poor were summoned from the idol of greed and envy, and reminded to seek first the Kingdom of God.
Some time ago, a young executive of the '60s generation came up to me and said, "You know, I think my generation emphasized external, societal morality while the previous generation emphasized internal, personal morality. That generation believed a moral person would produce a moral society. My generation believed a moral society would produce a moral person." But John addressed both. If his was a voice that spoke out for social justice and structures of morality, it was also a voice that spoke inwardly for individual integrity. If it was a mistake to believe moral people automatically produce a moral society, it was also a mistake to believe a moral society will produce moral people. A good structure administered by corrupt people can produce corruption. And a good person administering a bad structure can still produce corruption. These days we don't like John's message of personal repentance. If we have the courage, we much prefer to talk about problems out there -- about political and economic reform, about accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness in our educational system, about urban renewal and social action. These should be talked about.
But John presses his message of change even further, right on into the heart of every hearer. And the message is -- repent, turn around, open up, make God the center of your life instead of self, or family, or business, or profession, or sports, or success, or power, or money, or popularity, or status. Turn away from those lifeless, death-dealing idols, says John. Open up to the living God. Make a straight path to your heart for him. Are you resistant or afraid? You have every right to be. I am afraid, for when I look into the power of God, I am afraid I may lose control, afraid he will make me into something I do not want to become, afraid he will destroy my self-image or alter it beyond my planning, afraid I will lose some friends or ruffle some feathers, afraid my religion will become unreasonable. Afraid? Yes, we're afraid because, as T.S. Eliot put it, "Our age is an age of moderate virtue/And of moderate vice" ("The Rock"). We're afraid we'll be shaken out of our moderate mediocrity into something fearful and great. Afraid our little kingdoms of self-centeredness will be broken up, afraid our trivial concerns will be consumed in the refiner's fire, afraid our faith will snap like in the blast of the Baptist's voice. You bet we're afraid -- afraid to let go the grudges we've been nursing and hiding behind for years, afraid to confess the hatreds and hostilities we have for ministers and other church leaders, afraid to let go the defenses and excuses we've been erecting between God's church and ourselves. Yes, we're afraid of letting fresh, invigorating air into the stuffy, volatile, seething conceits of our souls, afraid God's power will put us off the throne.
And yet, John's voice is the voice to be heard to prepare the way of the Lord. It's a voice that speaks up and out and a voice that speaks down into the very depths of our souls. And it says, repent. Open up and receive the Christ anew and you and your church and society will be made whole.
Prayer
Almighty God, Creator of all things, who holds the universe in the palm of your hand, and yet who participates in its ebb and flow, out of the infinite reaches of your Being, you have brought forth your Word, giving us tongues to speak and sing and ears to hear. Loving Father, author of all silence and sound, it has pleased you to bless us with bird songs and violins, the sounds of waves against the shore and mysterious winds through the forests. Choirs and symphonies enrich our souls, and prophets and poets inspire our minds and hearts to rise above the mere mundane. Thanks and praise be to you, loving Creator of us all.
If in times past there were lack of sounds and voices, in our time we are overwhelmed with a cacophony of noise. Strident voices demand to be heard. Radical voices insist on their righteousness. Racist voices of every color strain our sense of community. Fanatic voices insist on their way. The politically correct thwart contrary opinions and public officials often obscure the voice of truth. O Eternal God, who sees beyond all appearances to penetrate to the truth, help us to hear your voice of wisdom amid all the competing voices of today.
In your presence it is for us to confess that we often have ignored your word for us. In the deep reaches of conscience you have wanted to speak to us. From the freshness of early morning insight you have nudged us toward higher goals. In late night reflection you have moved in our hearts to remind us we are yours, no matter how tenuous and fragile our lives might be.
Forgive us when we ignore you, O Lord, when we turn our attention to competing lesser voices, or when we turn off our spiritual hearing aids to indulge the passions of the moment. Grant us courage and humility to listen with openness to your voice which is the truth, the way, and the life.
Give us each, we pray, the word we need to hear. If we are discouraged, the word of hope; if we are confused, the word of clarity; if we are tempted, the word of strength; if we are ill, the word of healing; if we are stubborn, the word of faith over fear; if we are arrogant, the word of humility; if we are legalistic, the word of grace; if we are hateful and revengeful, the word of forgiveness; if we are bitter, the word of charity; if we are mournful, the word of comfort and hope.
O Eternal God, the very Word of the universe and all life, in your mercy speak to us anew the word we need in our inmost heart and soul. And help us most to rejoice in your Son, the very Word which became flesh, who came to dwell among us, full of grace and truth. May we receive that Word with all our heart and mind. Amen.