Please Click Here for Sermon Video
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 passionately involved in a newly founded organization that 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.
The organization 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 get nothing. When actual needs are ignored, the system remains paternalistic and nothing changes.
One of this organization’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 like now. 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 all too common problem.
Inspired by such successes, Doug became more involved in this organization and so did his church. For some reason known only to him, Doug 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 (me) to come along and together they had a very cordial meeting with the MP.
Now get this, the MP said there was really nothing he could do about the problem. He said, “I’m just a backbencher in the party and I don’t have a say in anything.” Moreover, 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 minister (me) 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 (PC), elected to represent his constituents yet here he was saying he really could not represent or help anybody because he was a backbencher in his party and in Parliament. Back benchers sit in the rear of the House and say little to nothing except maybe join in on the very adult heckling and hissing that happens in Parliament. He was good for photo ops, but not for much else.
This is troubling for a nation. 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 necessarily elected by the people but were 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 home-grown powers appointed by Rome: Herod, his brother Phillip, and Lysanias. And, there were the Rome-appointed Jerusalem Temple authorities: the High Priests Annas and Caiaphas. This was the rule of one imposed by a few. But, there’s also the few behind the scenes who have power over that one. That’s how power works 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 forty 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 better. 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 the grasshopper-eating backwater prophet started paved the way for Jesus, the Messiah, whose followers 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. Moreover, 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/is the way to prepare the way for the Lord 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. This is difficult because we ourselves have grown too accustomed if not addicted to the ways of the Empire. We have to change our loyalties. Primarily, we must 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, the followers of Jesus, stopped with the Consumerism, the Materialism, the Militarism, the Patriotism, the Racism, the Individualism, and all those “ism’s” that make empires so strong and simply made a practice of loving our neighbours? Especially those who are different and vulnerable? Amen.
