2 Advent Cycle b December 7, 2014
Is. 40:1-11 Psalm 85:1-2,8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a,18 Mark 1:1-8
For your Advent kosher eating, I will pass on this from Rabbi Shmini
For your Advent kosher eating, I will pass on this from Rabbi Shmini
"Every flying insect that uses four legs
for walking shall be avoided by you. The only flying insects with four walking
legs that you may eat are those which have knees extending above their feet,
[using these longer legs] to hop on the ground. Among these you may only eat
members of the red locust family, the yellow locust family, the spotted gray
locust family and the white locust family. All other flying insects with four
feet [for walking] must be avoided by you."
I did not want you to worry as to whether the John the Baptist diet is
kosher. The rabbinical literature
suggests that perhaps pickled locust was the preferred way of preparing locust.
So John the Baptist was definitely an insectivore; after all honey is the
product of an insect, the bee. Now that
we have the Paleo diet, when will we have a proper John the Baptist kosher
insectivore diet plan?
I find the Gospel's reference to John's diet and his clothing to be
interesting because diet and clothing would not come to written description if
John the Baptist was wearing the regular street clothing of his
contemporaries. So John's diet and
clothing were making some sort of life style statement, so much so that it has
come to description in Gospel accounts about John.
John's clothing and diet present to us the lifestyle of what could be
called an "unbribed soul." If
one can harvest one's food from the wilderness free of charge and craft one's
clothing from animal hair and leather, then one does not have to publicly
endorse Armani or Levi the tunic tailor.
By decreasing his reliance upon other people, John was not beholden to
anyone. He did not have to have good
approval ratings and he did not have to worry about stepping on the toes of the
synagogue elders in speaking his mind about anything. He did not have to do a pledge drive at the
temple or synagogue.
There is something very fascinating about such figures like John the
Baptist. They grow up and retain the
child-like freedom to speak immediately whatever is on their mind; only their
mind is usually formed by very strict moral practice. It is almost like they have a automatic
speaking impulse; they speak their mind without thinking about whether people
will like them or not. And it was this
practice which led to the death of John the Baptist. He spoke out about the divorce of the king
and the king's wife Herodias was not amused and
asked for John's head on a platter.
We, in community, don't appreciate people who speak without censoring
filters and who do not have the ability to be sensitive to the needs, customs
and insecurities of their communities.
In fact we call such speaking with censoring filters,
"courtesy." Perhaps you
remember the Geico commercial about whether Abraham Lincoln was really
honest? Mary Todd asks Honest Abe whether
her new dress made her backside look bigger.
And poor Abe, hems and haws, sheepishly makes a wee little sign with his
finger and sheepishly says, "perhaps." To which Mary Todd storms out of the room.
No we do not like unfiltered people like John the Baptist. Since they do not have to be responsible to
anyone, they don't have to practice our games of common courtesy which
thankfully insist that we don't tell the whole truth. We are supposed to leave lots of thought unpublished,
and unspoken.
People like John, and Jesus, and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. get
themselves killed for their unfiltered speech.
And we need such unfiltered speech to remind us about the greater values
of love and justice which call us to excellence beyond just living lives within
our safe communities where we are often taught to be exclusionary and
unwittingly prejudicial in some of our practices.
These prophets who say the hard things which need to be said probably
can be few in number. A community of
John the Baptists would probably not get along with each other. Thankfully, not everyone can or should live
like John the Baptist or Jesus or St. Francis of Assisi.
But we need such figures to model for us the "unbribed
life." We in our lives live such
co-opted lives; we live in such compromise with our social and economic
situations. We are absolved of so much
simply because we fold into the "everyone" is doing it syndrome. Or “ I didn’t do it, the drone did it because
the bombs weren’t smart enough to miss the civilians.” Our social sins are invisible or they are so
great that we despair of being able to make any significant improvement. Issues like social and economic justice or
environmental disaster loom so large that we who belong to the crowd of the
largest consumers respond with the guilt of trying to put band aids on a
gushing wound or we fatalistically despair of doing anything or we deny that
such issues exist or we say that every individual is equally responsible for
the conditions of one's life.
We need models of the unbribed soul.
We need the ascetic principle, the principle of being able to have the
power to fast from things which hurt us and our communities.
We cannot find or discover and activate this power without having it
drawn from us by events and people in our lives. The power to change our lives is to discover
again the unbribed aspect of our souls. We
all have the lingering effects in our lives of being a new born infant and
young child. We have this memory of
being totally "unbribed" and happy and joyful beings. But our orientation into adulthood in
imperfect environments has cut off our memory and access to this part of our
being.
John the Baptist, Jesus, babies, children and poignant events and people
in our lives allow us to have projections from within and access again our own
"unbribed" souls.
An Advent question which the presentation of John the Baptist evokes is
this: How do I live an "unbribed
way" in a life which is already totally formed and shaped by incredible
compromises to my various social and economic environments? Or one of the questions of the Gospel of
John: How do I live in world without
being of the world? Or the question of
Martin Luther: How does one live knowing one's depravity while knowing the full
measure of God's redeeming grace?
Advent Season is a time to access the place of the "unbribed"
soul within us. And how can this help
us? It can help us learn to be content
in the uneven circumstances which can come to us in life. We get so used to assuming that the life of
excess is the normal life and so when that normality of excess is threatened by
loss of financial stability, we find that our habits of addiction to excess
threaten to overwhelm us in our faith and in our emotions and in our
relationships. We can become completely
dysfunctional when our excess is taken away.
Finding the aspect of the "unbribed" soul within us can help
us to rediscover how little we need to survive in our physical lives if we have
learned the wealth of the sources of self-reciprocating Spirit. Any Advent discipline which can help us not
to take anything for granted and encourage us to find that truly the greatest
things in life are both free and abundant, will be a discipline toward greater contentment
in our future lives.
Let the unbribed soul of John the Baptist be for us a witness to an
aspect of ourselves which we can discover within our lives which can call us to
the practice of humility and generosity in our days of excess and a sense of
spiritual fullness in our days of need.
Dear people of God, let us find the unbribed soul within us today. Amen.
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