"What will this child be?" [Nativity of John the Baptist (June 24)]

I confess that I don't know whether I can separate my head* and heart enough to write a coherent post, one that does what I insist we have to do, which is evaluate what we hear in the scriptures on a weekend and act on it. I'm really tired. The weight of the terrible news, the story of what citizens and leaders of this country are actually doing in the name of national security in a nation founded on the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. We have families being split up at our borders, children separated from parents and placed in pens; we have removed ourselves from international agreements on human rights, after already denying climate change; we have congressional representatives moving to take away safety net programs and social security to pay for border walls and space warriors; we have leaders turning away from longtime allies and cozying up to tyrants with their own bloody histories of human rights violations. To top it all off, we have a government official quoting the bible to say that disagreeing with them or disobeying their orders goes against God's will, because God ordains the government.

In my own church, not a homiletic word about any of this. Not one. It's as though parish life is unaffected by the world we live in. The priests of the archdiocese are in a weeklong retreat together with Cardinal Cupich, a man whom I greatly admire. I wonder whether, John-like, they'll come roaring out of their desert "retreat experience" with something new to say. If not, I think retreats have lost their purpose and meaning.

As for me, like Paul Simon in his "American Tune" that pulled together his experience of political life and the aspirations of many of us in the 1960s and early 70s,

And I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
or driven to its knees
But it's all right, it's all right
We've lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
we're traveling on
I wonder what went wrong

I was briefly disappointed that we would not be celebrating the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, with its gospel about Christ calming the sea. It seemed to me that we need to be reminded that even though the waves are crashing over the side of the boat, and we're sinking, Christ is in the boat too. Even if it sinks, I guess, though sometimes he calms the seas. Then I remember that I'm supposed to be Christ in that story. I'm the person who's supposed to say to you, "Don't be afraid," and then to the sea, "STFU so we can get some sleep." I'm supposed to believe I can do that, and do it. But we don't get those readings this year.

Instead, we get to celebrate the birthday of John the Baptist. In the summertime. This is all pretty much because of some early (to us, late, to church historians) documents that  posited the annunciation to Zechariah to have taken place while he was serving in the Temple during the festivals of Tishri, at the autumnal equinox, the same documents (De solstitiis et aequinoxiis, the argument summarized in Origins of the Liturgical Year, by Thomas Talley, pp. 93-99) that go on to surmise based on the scriptural witness that the annunciation to Mary happened when Elizabeth (John's mother... are you getting this?) was in her sixth month. I could go on, but you're getting the picture. The birth of the Messiah and his herald thus fit with cosmic precision into the scriptural witness that John said, "He must increase, and I must decrease," with even their birthdays cooperating as the (northern hemisphere) days increase in length after the winter solstice, and decrease after the summer solstice.

And it dawned on me that John the Baptist, the baby whose birthday we celebrate, is a good place look for light today. "What will this child be?" was the question the people of the hill country started asking when the boy's mother and deaf-mute father somehow decided in the same instant that his name should be John. What will this child be in our occupied nation of pop-up messiahs and bloody suppression with ruthless capital punishment by crucifixion? What will this child be in our nation where our occupiers insist that there is no separation of religion and government, where the emperor is god, and there are real limits to the worship we can offer to our own God?  What will this child be as he grows in a world where violence is all around him, and the mighty lord it over the weak, and yet  his father serves, quietly, faithfully, a God with an unfinished story of deliverance and liberation?

John's baptism announced the arrival of the reign of God. It was a call to metanoia, a change of life that amounted to a turning around from one field of vision to another, from a worldview that put the pretenders to God's place (I'm using "pretenders" rather than "enemies of God," because to be consistent, I have to believe that God has no enemies) behind the believer, and field of vision of God's reign, a world of liberation, opportunity, and enough for everyone, in the foreground. He invited people to the Jordan to come through and be washed of the old way of being and, by symbolically passing through the border river of the Promised Land, passing into the new world, which was, in fact, where they belonged. Away from the legions and spies and intrigues at the political centers of Judea, John's preaching and cleansing ritual offered people the chance to express what they all knew to be true, that something serious was wrong with the world, that power was turned upside down, that justice had disappeared from their experience, and it was time to reject, at least in a symbolic way that could offer an inner hope and memory, the status quo offered by the empire and its Herodian and temple collaborators.

Anybody seeing any parallels here?

John's demise came about when he spoke the truth to religious and civil power. Herod Antipas, the Jewish puppet king, had divorced his wife in order to marry his brother Philip's wife. Being a Jew, Herod was breaking the Torah. As king, he was occupying a place in the social order in which he stood as a localization of God's presence, much like the high priest did, though with more power due to his relationship with the Romans. For John, then, this was an abomination, a blasphemy, not just a little domestic drama. When Herod had enough of John's diatribes, he took him out. Maybe he got wasted first, maybe besotted with lust. Or maybe he just had had enough of the outsider, and separated his mouth (and the rest of his head) from his neck, where it belonged.

John's driving energy seemed to come from his conviction that God was about to show up and set things right in the world, and that it was going to happen with violence and retribution. "You poisonous snakes! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Show me evidence of your changed hearts, and don't tell me about how you're the chosen people. God can turn these stones into Jews. (my paraphrase, Lk 3:7-8)" He goes on to warn that the ax of God is already in the orchard, and if there's no proof of change (fruit on the tree), the ax will fall, and there's going to be a burning. The "one who is coming" will bring this about, and soon: "He's going to sweep the threshing floor, and the broom is already in his hands. He'll gather up the wheat, and the rest he'll throw into the fire. (3:17)"

But the thing is, John got it wrong. John's vision was obscured by a malformed sense of justice, one that depended on force and violence to punish, destroy, and impose its will. The one-who-is-coming, the Messiah, surprised everyone, including John, by not being that kind of God. He was "like no God we had imagined," and even imposed upon John to baptize him, not taking the spotlight, but joining up with the rest of us. Redactors may have later attributed to Jesus rhetoric that was insulting and derisive in response to events in their lifetimes, but the teacher of the Sermon on the Mount already had made non-abusive speech a sign of the fulfillment of Torah. The one who was silent in his trial and died with words of comfort, compassion, and forgiveness on his lips would not, I think, have been one to demonize his enemies. For Jesus, God's arrival would be made visible by the overflow of life, the bounty and abundance of the world when people turn toward one another in love, and begin to live by the simple discipline of doing unto others only what we would want others to do to us. This loving of neighbor as self is a visible sign of loving God. In fact, loving neighbor seems to be identity with loving God.

So I came to see, despite my wish for Christ in the boat and the boat in the storm, that John the Baptist, the baby, the promise, the world within, the child with a future, the baby born into a temple family in the regional capital who came to live in the wilderness and who came to rage against the machinations of the temple and the palace, is a good fit for the problems I'm having with the world I live in, with my perceived powerlessness, with my barely-cloaked desire for a political fix by someone with whom I agree on more issues, with my shameful demonization of my "enemies." I'm (badly) acting like John, and John was wrong. But he kept pointing to the Messiah he did not yet know: "I am not (the one). Behold, one is coming after me; I am not worthy to unfasten his sandals." Later, from prison, he sent a message to his cousin to ask him: Are you the one? And Jesus told them to report what they saw and heard, he told them to report on the "fruit": the healings, the new vision, the word of liberation to the poor. John, so close to the reign of God that he couldn't bear the trappings of the pretenders, surely got the news and knew the answer.

Question of the weekend:

What will this child be?

I'm going to try to find my inner "baby John," the one I didn't have any part in creating, the one of whom Psalm 139 says, "Truly you have formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother's womb." In my infantile Christianity, still immature and afraid after six and half decades of life, I want to wonder, "What will this child be?" Find something to do, and do it, without being an asshole and tearing down my perceived enemies and making all kinds of people I don't know even more upset and afraid and stressed out than they already are.

This fellow who takes up so much room with his needs and words and music, What will this child be?

Music for this weekend at St. Anne:

Entrance: For All the Saints Who've Shown Your Love (John Bell, THE WATER IS WIDE)
Kyrie: Kendzia (Lead Us to the Water)
Glory to God: Mass of St. Ann
Psalm 139: "O God, You Search Me" (Farrell, sung responsorially with cantor)
Alleluia and Intercessions: Mass of St. Aidan
Preparation of Gifts: Blessed Be the Lord (Canticle of Zachary) (Darryl Ducote & Gary Daigle)
Mass of Joy and Peace (Alonso)
Communion: Christ Be Our Light (Bernadette Farrell)
Sending Forth: Canticle of the Turning 

* no pun intended. really.