Doug was an Elder in a small Presbyterian
church. He at one time became quite
motivated about finding an outreach project for his little church. It just happened that he happened to meet the
minister of the Presbyterian church in Puslinch, ON who was deeply involved in
a newly founded organization called North-South Partnership for Children. This ministry was a cooperative venture between
First Nations Reserves in Northern Ontario and various organizations in
Southern Ontario to help relieve poverty on the more isolated northern Reserves.
North-South Partnership had a unique approach. It let the Reserves say what they needed and
then it resourced those needs. The
typical protocol in these matters is that the government or some other
organization tells the Reserves what the Reserves need and tells them to take
it or nothing. When actual needs are
ignored, the system remains paternalistic and nothing changes.
One of North-South’s success stories involved a
Northern Reserve needing clean drinking water.
Government solutions were proving inadequate and slow…and yet the people
still needed water. Someone in the
Puslinch church looked over at the Nestle water plant and said “They have
water” and went and asked if Nestle would help.
Nestle did…by the truckload. A
common sense solution to a sickeningly unnecessarily common problem.
Inspired by such successes, Doug became more involved
in the North-South organization along with his church. Then for some reason he decided to go to his local
Member of Parliament to see if he could maybe possibly see if the government
might maybe want to endorse such an ingenious way of helping people. Doug asked his minister to come along and
together they had a very cordial meeting with the MP. The MP said there was really nothing he could
do. He said, “I’m just a backbencher in
the party and I don’t have a say in anything.” In the conversation the MP
noticed that the minister had a Southern accent and offered to do what he could
to help him become a Canadian citizen which amounted to nothing more than
giving him paper copies of Citizenship documents and forms that are readily
available online.
The minster left that meeting a bit astounded. Here was a government official drawing a
salary over three times his own, a member of the governing party of Canada,
elected to represent his constituents, saying he really could not represent or
help anybody because he was a backbencher in his party and in Parliament. He was good for photo ops, but not for much
else.
This is troubling for a society. If any MP elected to represent the people of
a constituency is effectively voiceless in Parliament, this means that in the end
Canada is little more than a functional oligarchy, a nation ruled by a few who
weren’t elected by the majority of the people but are simply powerful in their
party. How these few gain their power is
always an interesting story.
Nevertheless, such is power.
Looking at Luke’s Gospel, it is interesting that he begins
his account of John the Baptist’s ministry of preparing the way for the Messiah
by naming “the few” in the land who had “the power”. There were the Roman powers at the top:
Tiberius, the Emperor; Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea. There were the Jewish powers appointed by
Rome: Herod, his brother Phillip, and Lysanias. And, there were the Roman appointed Jerusalem
Temple authorities: the High Priests Annas and Caiaphas. This was the rule of one imposed by a few. That’s how power work’s in an Empire.
It was during the rule of this band of cronies that
the Word of God came to John the Baptizer out in the backwater region of the wilderness
of Jordan. As we remember from Sunday School and Children’s Sermons of yore,
John was a bit of an odd cookie. He was
a hermit, very hairy and dishevelled, wore clothes made of camel’s hair, and
ate locusts and honey. He was the son of
a rural priest named Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth. They were too old to have children but God
gave them John, a child of promise. And
remember the wilderness? For eighty
years after the Exodus God’s people wandered in the wilderness of Sinai and
there learned to rely on God and believe his promises.
In the scheme of how political change happened in the
world of first century Israel John was a backwater, backbenching prophet. He had no “power” at all in the government. Yet, when prophets start talking about
valleys being filled, mountains being brought low, the crooked being made
straight, and the rough being smoothened they are talking about the people
being empowered, the powerful being brought low, corruption ending, and life
becoming easier. But, his own attempts
to hold the powers that be accountable to the way God gave his people to live
only got him arrested and in the end beheaded.
Regardless, the “grassroots” movement he started paved the way for
Jesus, the Messiah, and did in time destabilize the Roman Empire and change the
world.
John the Baptist didn’t do bad for a backwater
backbencher. If we think that his call
to repent to those people of God flocking to him in the wilderness was simply a
non-political matter of private religion, we are mistaken. More over, if we think that following Jesus
is just a private matter of personal faith, we are mistaken. Following Jesus is a public matter that will
involve confronting the “powers” from the backbench in backwater places.
The people flocking to John in the wilderness were
desperate people who were expecting their God, the God who had delivered them
from Pharaoh out of slavery in Egypt, to deliver them from Roman
domination. John’s calling them from the
wilderness of Jordan to return to the ways given them by God was a grassroots
call to the people of God to stop participating in the elements of their way of
life that fed on the Roman way of life and in turn start living as the faithful
people of their God. Faithful living was
the way to prepare the way for the Lord God to come and establish peace.
We could learn something from what God was doing
through John the Baptist. The way to
overthrow an Empire is to stop living according to the ways of that Empire;
ways to which we ourselves have grown accustomed if not addicted and in turn,
start doing as Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and
with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and
your neighbour as yourself” (Lk 10:27).
John’s call to repentance was the call to the people
of God to start acting like people of God and in so doing find that the Kingdom
of God is near. Love for God lived out
looks like love for neighbour…even if and especially if that neighbour comes
from Syria or Guatemala. How different
would this world be if we stopped with the Consumerism, the Materialism, the
Militarism, the Patriotism, the Racism, the Individualism, and all those
“ism’s” that make empire’s strong and simply made a practice of loving our
neighbours? Amen.
