Sermon: Rage Against the Machine

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Rage Against the Machine:
John the Baptist

By Charles Rush

December 10, 2000 -- Second Sunday of Advent

want to say a word of thanks to the choir, to our soloists, to the ensemble, to my colleague Wayne Bradford for the remarkable Christmas oratorio of last week. Music communicates the gospel in a way speech never will. It opens a spiritual dimension in us not otherwise accessible. Despite this fact, we live in an era that is increasingly illiterate, musically speaking.

Harold Dunn collected a set of answers that were given by students in the state of Missouri that caused him some concern as a music educator. Here are a few of the stellar entries:

Refrain means don't do it. A refrain in music is the part you better not try to sing.
A virtuoso is a musician with real high morals (no virtuoso's here)
Johann Sebastian Bach died from 1750 to the present.
Henry Purcell is a well-known composer few people have heard of.
Most authorities agree that the music of antiquity was written a long time ago.
Aaron Copland is one of your most famous contemporary posers. It is unusual to be contemporary. Most composers do not live until they are dead.
Music sung by two people is sometimes called a duel.

Thank you Choir, thank you Wayne … you are doing your part in an uphill fight.

John comes to meet us today quoting one of the more wonderful passages from Isaiah. “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill be made low and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth and all shall see the salvation of God” (3:5, 6a). The image comes from the Ancient Near East when kings would come to visit a remote region. Before the king actually made the visit, an advance team would go out for weeks and shore up the roads, getting them in tip-top shape for the royal visit.

Things haven't changed much. A friend of mine from college was recently promoted to position number three in a major corporation. He visits the many different companies that they own on a rotating basis. I recently asked him the one single thing that was hardest for him to get used to about his new job. He said, everywhere he goes there is great scurrying, catering and currying for his favor and it is very hard to get people to talk to him normally. The two of us remember when we were both just waiting tables in college. Now, people only know him as ‘the boss' they are supposed to kiss up to.

John comes proclaiming, “The King is coming. Straighten it up around here.” Then he adds this wonderful, hopeful promise. “You shall see the salvation of God”. I gotta tell you, I want to see that. Imagine a world where we would see the salvation of God present in our midst… a world where the pot holes of poverty, disease, and degradation would be filled in; a world where the crooked path of the conniving, the cheating, and the plain old mean people would be made straight; a world where those perverted by abuse and torture would be made whole; a world where the diseased would be healed; a world where those who have more worldly crap than they need would be freed from it; a world where the elite could become brave enough to join the common bonds of humanity; a world where leaders would be genuine servants of all.

This is what John came to announce and what Jesus came to embody. It is a bold, beautiful vision. I want to suggest this morning that it is also meant for us as a realistic mission statement. God really wants us to embody this, nearly impossible that it is to do it.

Now, if you read the rest of John's preaching, you have to wonder if he actually understood what the salvation of God really meant. The positive note of salvation gets wrapped in a fairly caustic message delivered in us/them dialectic. He called people to come out of the corrupt world. It was an understandable misinterpretation of what God was doing in Jesus and it has been repeated many times in history since John.

“John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, ‘you brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘we have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is laid at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” Add the high-pitched whine of AM radio, and you would think you were in Texas or Georgia.

Aren't you glad that I don't preach like that every week? These preachers certainly have moral earnestness on their side- not a lot of humor or fun- but they are earnest and they have consistency for sure- ‘the hobgoblin of little minds' as Oscar Wilde once noted- but they do tell you what to do and where you stand.

John called all of the people in Jerusalem to be baptized, to do good works and ritually bathe themselves to rinse themselves of their former sinful ways. He preached this sermon right on the edge of Jerusalem. You can go there today (I've stood right on the spot). From that place, you look up to the walls that surround Jerusalem. You look up to the palace on the top of the hill where the Roman Governor, Herod, lived. You look up the hill to the Temple mount, where all the priests that were associated with the Jewish Temple in all of their compromise with the Roman authorities. He preached his sermon down at the edge of town, at the bottom of the hill.

He preached right at the river Jordan. This place had a lot of symbolism to the Jews. This was the place where Joshua stood centuries earlier. The people of Israel had left Egypt with Moses. They wandered for 40 years in the wilderness in the Sinai desert and eventually they came to the Promised Land. Moses saw the Promised Land, you may remember, but did not enter it.

Joshua took the people to this place on the river and they crossed over to the Promised Land. This is where John was preaching. It was a place that was rife with rich symbolism. He was preaching to a people that were occupied by foreign powers, he was preaching about people that had made their living by compromising their moral and spiritual integrity, compromising their moral and spiritual heritage, supporting the enemy oppression of their own people.

I am quite sure that these people John was preaching about didn't see themselves that way. They were the leaders that were working in a very difficult situation. We would call them realists. They were doing what they had to do to make deals work, forging something everyone could live with in a very complicated situation. They were realists. But prophets stepped back to see the wider focus. From that perspective, they were compromised.

John the Baptist, in effect, led the people back to the place where they first entered the Promised Land. The Promised Land didn't look too promising at the moment. He called them sinners in no uncertain terms and challenged them to cross back over the river, and go back to the wilderness. He called them out of civilization and all of its compromise to become ascetical spiritual revolutionaries. He wanted them to remember who they were, whose they were, and reclaim their freedom. They would have to give up the opulent standard of living that the Romans provided- the entertainment of the coliseum games, the sumptuous feasts, the incredible engineering for public works, the beautiful buildings- but they would have the integrity of their freedom.

You know what that scene is like. There is a wonderful scene in the movie Braveheart when the poor, pure, beautiful, simple, country Celtic people are about to go into battle against the powerful, mean, nasty, thousands upon thousands of English. They are lined up for battle and the English send over a messenger who invites the poor, pure, beautiful, simple country Celtic people to surrender. The Celts are hopelessly outnumbered by the English and the English are much more technologically sophisticated to boot. Surrender is quite reasonable. Instead of surrendering, all the Scottish highlanders in the group turn their backs to the English, lift the kilts, and bare their rumps to the English. They would probably die in battle but they would die free men.

That is pretty much the gesture that John the Baptist, the prophetic preacher was making to the Roman authorities and all the compromised religious and political Jews that worked with the Romans.

We are told that a lot of people came out to hear John. This was not lost on Herod. Herod was a man who ruled with brute force and political cunning. He was born to it naturally. His father, also named Herod (known as ‘The Great' for all the buildings he erected) was the former governor. Herod the Great once worried that his wife was a political threat and had her murdered. The two sons of this woman, Herod's two half brothers, never forgot that their father murdered their mother, and as they turned twenty and were set to be married and begin to rule themselves, word got back to Herod the Great that they were seeking revenge for their mother's murder years earlier. The governor had them murdered as well.

He promoted Herod to leadership in their place. Herod was a man who knew the precariousness of ruthless rule. He sent his spies out among the people on a regular basis. John the Baptist made no secret of what he was preaching. Everyone knew what it meant.

Herod was also a man who was not shy about using his power. He took what he wanted and didn't spend a lot of time worrying about it. He was married to a woman for many years when he suddenly became infatuated with his niece. Not only was she related to him, his niece was also married and had children. Herod divorced his wife, the daughter of the King in what is today Jordan. Since all these marriages were arranged political marriages, this caused a great political crisis between Palestine and Jordan, as well as a domestic crisis. He married his niece and took her daughter into his family.

I report all this to remind you are not the first person that has been born into a hyper-blended dysfunctional family. You are not the first person to work for a tyrant surrounded by obsequious sycophants. I report this to remind you that the message of peace and salvation did not come to some idealized rural community. It was announced in the rough and tumble world of power politics, violence, abuse, and injustice.

John started preaching about Herod's family as a symbol of everything that was wrong with the country… and he wasn't even a radio talk show host. Herod's family was part Jewish, seriously compromised morally. They were an easy target.

But the family didn't like it and back then they didn't have to answer to the people or the press and these were not the type of people to lay awake wrestling with their consciences. As best we can tell, Herod was devising a plan to quietly do away with John the Baptist before his little band of revolutionaries got out of hand. Apparently, he didn't think it wise to arrest him in a confrontational manner for fear of a riot.

One night Herod is having a party. He is drunk. His niece, now his wife, is with him. Her daughter, a very attractive teenager, offers to dance for Herod. Leering, lecherous, and loaded he asks her to dance this provocative dance in the middle of the party. She only wants one favor. Herod agrees. She dances and it was quite a spectacle and was remembered for years after the event. After the dance she approaches Herod in a most fawning gesture and requests the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Lovely request… Sensitive child. (I'm trying to picture this. Presumably this request was made after the crème bruele and cappuccino had been served.) Herod had been upstaged in public by his lust and a teenage girl. He had John executed and he brought her the head on the plate.

I think you can see why John called people out into the wilderness. He presumed that civilization was beyond reform, beyond redemption. By the way, several years after John the Baptist's death, Herod had a regiment of troops on patrol in Jordan. They were at Petra, the famous frieze carved into the desert caves that was featured in the last Indiana Jones movie. The regiment was cut off in the narrow pass and summarily cut down, slaughtered to the man by a small group of guerilla revolutionaries. The great Jewish historian Josephus recorded that event with the comment that it signified divine retribution for the death of the good man John the Baptist. Such is the twisted score keeping in an intafada.

You can see the appeal of John's approach. In the long march of western civilization, it has been quite popular. The world is hopelessly compromised. Let's withdraw to our commune, our little Woodstock, and get back to the land. Timothy Leary, the prophet for my generation went from campus to campus telling us to “tune in, turn on, drop out.” It is an appealing message.

For centuries, Monks retreated from the world to found their little oases of peace in the midst of a wider social conflict. Think of Iona, the island between Scotland and Ireland. The monks retreated there for centuries in the midst of a nearly unending battle between the Celts and the English, with the occasional rape and pillage from the Vikings coming down the coast. They gave Britain writing. The kept learning alive in the Middle Ages and developed the prototype for learning that would eventually evolve into the modern university. They supported music. The developed the arts. They were an oasis of virtue in the midst of violence and compromise.

But, Jesus did not encourage us to withdraw. That was not what he was about. The only time he withdrew was to pray, to get centered in God. Jesus lived his life and preached his message about the salvation of God surrounded by people with terrible diseases; he knew prostitutes and some of the wealthy women in Jerusalem also showed up; he had tax collectors in his crowd- those compromised slugs that collected money from their own people for the Romans- and he also knew the leading religious authorities in Jerusalem; he had revolutionaries among his disciples and he talked to Roman soldiers. He took ordinary fishermen for his disciples and he also spent time with the rich young ruler, indeed, with Pilate before it was all over. Jesus was not someone that withdrew. And his message was not some idealized utopian vision. Believe it or not, it was meant for you and for me. It was meant for us right here in all of our compromise and integrity. It was meant for us with our quirky families and our dysfunctional work situations and our strange political fiascos. St. Paul said, ‘brothers and sisters, work out your salvation among yourselves.' He got that right. It is not easy but the good news is that we can do it. Let the Spirit of God fill you in the complex ambiguity of your world and watch… wait… watch for the salvation of God in your midst.

Amen