Sermons
24th June 2007 - The Birth of John the Baptist
I remember when I was a little boy I found it very annoying when people would say ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I didn’t know the answer, and it seemed a ridiculous question, and how many people end up being what they wanted to be when they were small? And anyway, I already was something I thought, not simply waiting to be something later on. Furthermore, I certainly had no sense that God might have something to do with what I ended up being, or what I was at the time.
In contrast, there is a story about Cosmo Lang who as a boy, was discovered writing the same thing again and again on a piece of paper. When asked what he was taking so much time and care over he answered ‘my name, I am practising my name’. And when the piece of paper was later retrieved it was found to be covered with many copies of two words: Cosmo Cantuar. Lang was practising signing his name as Archbishop of Canterbury, a position to which he was later called.
Perhaps we tend to fall into one or other of these camps, the ones who seem to know exactly where they are going and the ones who don’t really have a clue.
Today’s gospel tells us of John the Baptist that, ‘the child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel.’ Might he have been found practising his identity like Cosmo Lang writing John the Baptist, John the Baptist, John the Baptist?
We are given much detail about John’s birth and about his public ministry but we know nothing about all of the time in between. We celebrate the birth of John the Baptist today, a birth surrounded with many portents and signs, a parallel birth to that of Jesus to whom John will be the forerunner, the one urging people to prepare the way of the Lord. In both cases, we have wonderfully evocative stories of their conception and birth but then almost nothing more until they appear together again as two young men who between them turn the world on its head thirty years later. We have the briefest glimpse of Jesus’ childhood in the story of his parents losing track of him as he wanders into the Temple to sit with the Rabbis, but otherwise, in each case, nothing. Imagine your own life story being written with just the beginning and then the last couple of years, there would be a huge amount missing, the full picture would not have been painted.
But first to what we are told. With John the Baptist, the birth is miraculous, a barren woman rejoices that she is made fruitful and she is surrounded with the joy and excitement of her family and friends, who are greatly perplexed by the choice of name, a name divinely given to the parents and a name which when accepted by them frees Zechariah from his mute state to sing the glories of God in the Benedictus.
With Jesus the birth is the greatest miracle of all, a virgin receives the gift of the spirit to bring life into her womb, she is most blessed among all creation and the birth is surrounded by the joy and excitement of both earth and heaven, not only the shepherds on earth but the angels in heaven rejoice, the human and the divine find in Mary a home to dwell, Mary is the gate through which the divine Word enters into the human world in fleshly substance, and her song Magnificat proclaims the joy of a vocation received.
So with both John and Jesus their births are portentous, miraculous, signs of divine engagement with the world, and of course their intertwined ministries and deaths reveal the fullness of God’s visitation of his people.
But what of the wilderness years, the years we know nothing about? It can’t be that nothing was happening during those years, surely the immense struggle of answering their true vocations, their true callings, was developing. Luke says that John was in the wilderness until his appearing, and of course as soon as Jesus appears he too goes into the wilderness, a place of encounter with God, a place where false vocations are heard and rejected, a place where true vocations are answered.
People returning from various sorts of wilderness often exhibit a much clearer sense of identity, a better defined idea of who they are. I’m sure that like me you have encountered someone who finally is answering their true vocation. We tend, quite mistakenly, to associate this term vocation with the ordained ministry, but each of us has a distinct calling from God and it is our life’s work to answer the call. And when we encounter a vocation being answered joyfully it is very often something that shines out of people, as if they had always been destined for that particular role and this is perhaps particularly apparent when there has been a long period in the wilderness before the reality of vocation is accepted. We can say with confidence, ‘Yes, that is the place where you should be’. It is as if the final pieces of a long-unfinished jigsaw suddenly fit and we can see the whole picture as it should be.
Many of you will have heard me speak of how vigorously I resisted the call to ordination. I literally ran away from the idea, first to Africa and then to the Middle-East, but I was pursued relentlessly and am still pursued. God seeks each of us out, his love and calling is quite relentless. God has known each of us from before our births and he has known and loved us through all the twists and turns of our lives. The Bible tells us many times that God forms his people before birth as well as after, the psalmist says that God has created our inmost parts and formed us in our mother’s wombs, and the annunciation to Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, proclaimed that the child to be born would be filled with the holy spirit even in his mother’s womb, just like that previous prophet Jeremiah to whom God announced ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you came to birth I consecrated you’.
So we have themes today of vocation and wilderness and what can we take away from the gaps in our knowledge about John the Baptist and about Jesus? Perhaps most importantly, we can take models of how we might manage to survive the times and places of our own wildernesses. And how many and various are the disguises under which the wilderness can creep up on people. Perhaps because of the image of John the Baptist on the margins of society, dressed wildly, eating locusts and honey we naturally expect to find people wandering through wilderness at the edges of our own society, the outcasts, the prisoners, the refugees, the homeless. There is certainly wilderness in these places but, as a priest, I often come across people who appear from the outside to be traveling through places of rich and habitable land, people who seem to have it all, but whose lives are actually falling apart, whose lives are empty and barren through an unwillingness to respond to God’s call. They say things like, ‘I don’t know what it is Father, I have everything I aimed for, I have achieved so much, look at all I have, and yet, I am utterly in the wilderness. All of these things that support my life are props that if taken away reveal huge tracts of arid and uninhabitable wasteland, in the midst of apparent plenty, I starve’.
Whatever your situation in life, if you are in the wilderness today, never imagine that God has ceased to call you. That wilderness may be a testing place, a place where many false vocations have to be discarded, where the temptation to avoid the very thing God calls you to may be very strong. But the temptation has to be resisted, the wilderness is not endless, God will not abandon you, God will not cease to call you.
And what might it be, to what is God leading you? Will you allow his voice to be heard? It can never be too late.