A view of the wilderness from here.

December 16, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

In church we had another reading this morning about John the Baptist (Matthew 11:2–11). Nine days to go until Christmas (!) but we had a passage when Jesus is a 30-something man about his cousin John in prison for condemning the adulterous and murderous “King” Herod.

By my lights, we should have been reading another passage. But the appointed reading prompted me to look at John the Baptist and his place in the prophetic tradition of Israel.

“Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: ‘What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind?’”

John is described as a wild-eyed prophetic type who called a nation to repentance and baptized people in the Jordan River as a sign of their change of heart. According to the biblical evangelists, he described himself as “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”

Church people read this stuff just so literally! We picture this wild-eyed John dressed in camel-hair clothing and eating insects out in the desert, the wilderness. We take it literally —and because we don’t particularly care about the desert or insects— we nod off.

But perhaps, like the prophet Hosea eight hundred years before, John used his life as a metaphor to make a point. Hosea literally married a prostitute as a metaphor to illustrate Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. John lived, and served, and cried out in a literal wilderness as a sign of the spiritual wilderness of his people.

Is there a sign, a metaphor, a “lesson” for us today, living as we do in a fat and lazy nation of both privilege and poverty—split by racism and prejudice, polarized (or should we say balkanized) into so-called liberal and conservative camps? Is 21^st century America a wilderness?

It is certainly easy to feel like I am not heard — that no voice standing up to the prevailing cultural values (wealth, appearances, greed, power, hubris, entertainment and pleasure) can be heard in our society. It is literally impossible now to “speak the truth to power.” Power does not hear anything but more power.

Is that cynical? Do you believe that you make all the decisions about your life? Or do you see that politics, culture and huge corporations tell us all what to do, what to spend, what to think, what to believe? There has never been a better educated era, with access to all the greatest minds of human history and the important movements of our times, yet our culture is more and more shallow by the minute. (Google “shallow society” and get 1,020,000 hits; Google “Paris Hilton” for 45,100,000 hits.) There has never been a more affluent generation, yet what we buy mentally and materially —as individuals or as a society—has never been more worthless.

As I said recently, there are no true leaders left, only “handlers” and “spin doctors.” Anything can be “sold” to the American people, including the unbelievably stupid myth that the world is “out to get us” so we need to have guns at home, bombs in every silo, and the U.S. military on every continent; we need to build thousands of miles of “Berlin wall” in order to keep out the people who are stealing minimum-wage jobs from native-born American couch potatoes who have given up looking for honest work.

In 1959 Stanley Kramer released “On the Beach” (starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins), about a doomed planet after someone pushed the button that started World War III in 1964. The film takes place mostly in Australia after the entire Northern Hemisphere has been wiped out, and everyone left is waiting for the inevitable end: for nuclear radiation to gradually kill everyone else. In the last desolate scene I remember, a wind-whipped banner in a deserted public square reads “There is still time.”

Is there still time?  “On the Beach” made a huge impression on me as a pre-teen. (I remember how shocked and confused my brother and I were with our Dad because he refused to dig up our back yard and install a fallout shelter!)

Is there still time? Nearly 50 year have passed, and a literal nuclear war has not taken place. But from my perspective of the wilderness out there, we are seeing the aftermath of a neutron bomb which, in popular understanding, would kill all the people and leave the buildings behind. Is the one “crying in the wilderness” the only one who sees that a spiritual neutron bomb is killing/has killed most of the sentient beings on Planet Earth and left all “the stuff” intact?

Is there still time? John the Baptist “flourished” (as biographers would say) around the year 30 c.e. Within a mere 40 years, an uprising of nationalism triggered the brutal annihilation of Judea and the wholesale destruction of Jerusalem. There was no nation left to repent.

Is there still time? The Zealots (we get the word in our language from this political faction of ancient Jews) believed that the only way for the nation to survive was to fight the foreign invaders. But perhaps John the Baptist had it right, crying alone in the wilderness: unless the people repent, the nation would be destroyed from the inside out.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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