"John the Baptist Prepares the Way" - 12.14.25

Scripture: Matthew 3:1-12
Sermon: "John the Baptist Prepares the Way" (Rev. Dr. Chris Ganski)
Worship Folder: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LFcC...

~~~~~~~REFLECTIONS~~~~~~~~
After two thousand years, [John the Baptist] still stands there, irreducibly strange, gaunt and unruly, lonely and refractory, utterly out of sync with his age or our age or any age. . . John is the sentinel whose function is to proclaim the coming reversal of the downward spiral of human history, to deliver the message of the invading Son of God . . . whose single-minded life and horrendous death at the hands of the powers and principalities are a preview of Jesus’s own death. . . John demonstrates that it is in the suffering and death of God’s servants at the hands of despots and tyrants that God’s new rule is made manifest.
~Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus

John both gets it and does not get it at all, which is why he has to exit stage right early in the drama. He has played his single and important part, and he knows it. His is brilliantly a spirituality of descent, not ascent. “He most grow bigger, I must grow smaller” (John 3:30) . . .The only way such freedom can happen is if John learned to be very empty of himself already as a young man, before he even built his tower of success. His ego was out of the way so much so that he could let go of his own ego, his own message and even his own life. This is surely the real meaning of his head on a platter! Some have cleverly said that ego is an acronym for “Edging God Out.” There’s got to be such emptiness, or we cannot point beyond ourselves to Jesus, as John did. Such emptiness doesn’t fall into our laps; such humility does not just happen. It is surely the end product of a thousand letting-goes and a thousand acts of devotion, which for John the Baptist gradually edged God in.
~Richard Rohr, Preparing for Christmas: Daily Meditations on Advent

One evidence that John the Baptist is an Advent voice to us is that he confronts us with the message that God uses people in our lives to tell us the truth about ourselves. He was by his very lifestyle as well as his words a confrontation, calling people to repentance and conversion of life. We need to ask whether there is a John the Baptist in our lives who, unpleasant as it may be, points out by his or her example a sinful habit or desire in our lives with which we need to deal.
~Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Time