December 6
Charles Peltz, Elder
God has uses for wilderness. He banishes people there, they wander there, they are tempted there. The lack of civilization and companionship in that empty landscape can bring welcome reflection. It is where the Israelites learned deeper faith and more patience, it is where Christ shunned the temptations of Satan. It is where John the Baptist lived.
The wilderness is the Hill country between Jerusalem and the Jordan River, an uneven balance of barren and fruitful. John was born here, not into peasant poverty, but into some privilege – his father Zacharias as priest, his mother of honored Jewish lineage. John will not capitalize on these privileges. He casts himself out into barren places where he will minister to others.
Note what is his ministry and what it is not. No miracles, no blind will be made to see, no lepers healed, no lame will walk. His ministry is about repentance. His call resonating from Isaiah, is to “make straight the paths”. What are the paths? Is John to clear brush, build roads? Certainly this is metaphor, but for what?
The paths are people, each person a step in the path of Christ. John will take multitudes and straighten the crookedness in their lives caused by sin and evil. Each repentant soul will bend back into John’s Jordan River burdened by the weight of sin and emerge as light as clouds. He says to them, “And yet this is so little. When comes the one greater than I – oh, the bathing you will have! You will be touched, cleansed, Graced by God himself.”
We are today as those who came to John then. Today the ground under our feet may be cold and snowy and not dry and dusty, the sun may be distant and cool and not close and searing. Yet we walk as did they to the river. The Jordan flows in us, diverted by God from the Holy Land and into our hearts. Into it we dive daily in a baptism prayer ritual of perpetual repentance and emerge soaked in perpetual grace. The greatest gift of Christmas.
John the Baptist lives in us this Advent, encouraging us with his weathered wilderness voice: “bend back and be bathed again this Advent in the living water of Christ.”