Being the voice

 This week's verses are John 1:22-24:

Then they said to him, “Who are you? Tell us so that we can give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”

John said, “I am the voice of one shouting in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way for the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.” (Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.)

A friend of mine shared John 1:23 with me when we were praying a couple weeks ago during Lent, and now that I've had some time to reflect on it, it seemed worth sharing.

We start out with some neighborhood religious folks who had stopped by John the Baptist's "church" to spy him out. They want to gather some info on him so that they can figure out how to shut him down or put him in a box with a lid. 

We see that nowadays too. Empire-building congregations and local officials all want to make sure the power dynamic doesn't shift too much. They don't want to risk having to submit to a new power. They don't want influences on the local election that they can't control. They don't want to lose tithe dollars. They don't want new ideas. They want their own ideas to be validated.

So the Pharisees came to sniff out what was going on in the desert that was drawing all of those people. They wanted to know who John was. "Are you Moses? Are you Elijah? Are you the Messiah? What kind of thing are you running here?" So John kept telling them, "No, I'm none of those people." But they kept pushing. Finally he shares this verse from Isaiah, and it's brilliant!

First of all, it's funny, because John was literally in the wilderness shouting. But it's also true, because he was trying to make straight the way for the Lord. The original verse, which I've taught on before, basically describes a construction foreman whose job it is to make a highway ahead of the King's visit. It's a bit like a spiritual version of the Army Corps of Engineers.

This construction foreman is asking for rough spots to be smoothed out and for obstacles to be obliterated or moved out of the way. The valley is being widened for security purposes (more visibility) as well as for the sort of larger vehicles that the King will be using.

For his part, John is preaching repentance and baptism. If you read some of what he preached, he was trying to get people to change their hearts so that their behavior will change too. So in a sense, he is calling for the removal of obstacles to righteousness, and smoothing out of people's rough places. He is preparing people for the arrival of Jesus, who will bring power and blessings when he visits.

In essence, what Isaiah was describing, and what John was clever enough to recognize, is that the point of preaching is to rally people to give each other a hand in preparing that hard ground for God's arrival in our hearts. 

Imagine you're starving and your furnace is nearly out of fuel. You've been snowed in at a camp for a week due to a blizzard, but you hear that a truck with supplies is on its way, if it can unload in your parking lot, which is waist deep in snow. There are fifty of you in that camp. So what do you do?

Do you wait for the truck to arrive and then plead with them to clear the parking lot themselves with your shovels? Do you shovel that giant parking lot yourself while everyone else waits expectantly? (Unless you're a teenager, you'll destroy your back and explode your heart!) Do you let people sort things out on their own, and assume they know the truck is coming? Probably not.

The most effective thing is to rally everyone you can into cooperating to clear that lot. And that's basically what a message to a church is. Or what one of these Bible studies is. It's someone saying "Hey guys, if you want that truck to make its stop, we've got to help each other out and get things cleaned up as best we can so the driver knows we're serious." 

When someone preaches, are you aware that you're being asked to do something? Or if nobody is preaching something you know to be true, do you see yourself as the one who needs to shout? This is the wisdom that John was trying to explain to the delegation of Pharisees, who were trying to figure out what kind of show they were watching. (John's answer: It's not a show.)

So what can you do to help yourself and your neighbors prepare the way? Do you know that the truck is on its way? Do you know how big it is? Do you know anyone else who can help you get ready? Make some noise and rally the folks with shovels. Be the voice of the one calling in the wilderness to make a wide path for the Lord.