John 1:6-8, 19-28
1:6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
1:7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.
1:8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light.
1:19 This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?”
1:20 He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.”
1:21 And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.”
1:22 Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”
1:23 He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’” as the prophet Isaiah said.
1:24 Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.
1:25 They asked him, “Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?”
1:26 John answered them, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know,
1:27 the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.”
1:28 This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.
The text from John today fits ideally
into the Advent schedule: it features John the Baptizer leading the way for the
initial coming of Christ. Though, to be sure, no one has any idea who John is
when he arrives on the scene. The text from parallel gospels says that John
eats locusts and wild honey. I think that, if he had been born in America, we
would be more socially inclined to link him to one of the Georgian hillbillies from
Deliverance than to a prophetic
version of Christopher McCandless or Wendell Berry. He was, quite simply,
wholly other.
And he was doing something that the Pharisees hadn’t sanctioned:
he was baptizing. So, naturally, they had questions: they wanted to know who he
was and by whose authority he was baptizing. And he confessed that he was not the Messiah, not Elijah, and not the
prophet. And finally he identifies himself in the words of an other, the
prophet Isaiah, as a “voice in the wilderness.” John says to the Pharisees,
Christ is already among you and I’m not worthy to untie his sandals.
Kenosis. Kenosis is a Greek word that means emptiness, but theologically it’s a
self-emptying so as to be completely receptive to God. So John self-emptied,
making himself available and receptive to God’s calling. In the text we
encounter John already having undergone a kenotic self-emptying. He was a
vessel, a prophetic voice. But I doubt he had always been that receptive to
God’s calling. Maybe he was a troubled youth at some point—or maybe he had
constructed some kind of life plan that he thought sounded neat. We don’t know
about John’s ambitions—he never wrote a memoir—but we know what he did: he
emptied himself of his own will and received God’s instead. Then he ate locusts
in the wilderness while baptizing people.
I imagine it would have been intimidating
to be approached by the priests and Levites, skeptical of his credentials and
connections. Regardless of whether he was intimidated, he did his bit: he
proclaimed that Christ was soon coming. That’s where the text leaves us. John
was completely receptive to his calling. John surrendered himself to God’s
will. This does not mean that kenosis
requires losing yourself. On the
contrary, kenosis means making room
for God to call you to use your gifts, to call you to be in the world as John
was: as a sign of Christ, which we do best when we’re ourselves rather than
some contrived street preacher.
So
before John could even find his identity in his calling, he had to empty
himself of his previous less satisfying identities and simultaneously recognize
his actual calling. Some might call John foolish, perhaps, for resisting. And
some might call me naïve for advocating for identity crises. But the truth is
that we live in a country obsessed with self-creation. We hear things like, “Oh, he’s a self-made man.” Or: “Oprah! She built what she has from nothing.”
Granted, that is more than true. There is, however, a price to be paid
for fabricating around us a society as artificial and mechanized as our own,
and the price is that we can exist in it only on the condition that we adapt ourselves
to it and play the game
This is our
punishment—the social form we have adopted cuts our consciousness to fit its
needs. Its imperatives tailor our experience. The social form says that, at any
cost, we must be passionless, unemotional, and docile, merging our identity
with our need for success and with our careers, rather than molding our success
and careers to our affections, spontaneity, and heart. And it is not only our
emotional world that dies in this form: the world of our creative imagination
and intelligence is also impoverished. Humans can create the most sublime art,
and humans can at the same time create the most depraved systems of oppression.
Our kenosis begins here. We are
called to be ourselves, not the
selves that social form would have us be, but the selves that God has been
calling us to be. The trick lies in recognizing God’s calling through all the
noisy identities that social form have thrust upon us.
I remember
how nervous I once was before a date, and my roommate told me: Just be yourself. I appreciated his
advice, but if there’s anything less helpful in the world than being told to be
yourself, I don’t know what it is. We instantly become self-conscious when
we’re told to be ourselves. We analyze our walk, our smile, our inflections,
our gestures—nothing feels natural. But if John the Baptizer is any help, I’d
say we are to be ourselves, but with
careful attention to what we know God is not calling us to be, and then with
special attention to what God is
calling us to be. When we can isolate what we know we aren’t called to be, we have begun to live into kenosis, because we start to make more
room for what God will finally call us to be.
In the season of Advent we are
called to be in anticipation of Christ. One way we can be in anticipation of
Christ is to begin kenosis and
recognize, as John recognized, that we are not
Christ, and so we have something to hope for. I think we have all heard of or
know people who forget they’re not
Jesus: people who suffer from a Messiah Complex. These people, while
well-intentioned, try desperately to absorb the world’s suffering. Which is
impossible. And self-destructive. I
can hardly take care of myself, much less the world. I’m happy to release any hyper-ambitious
universal responsibility—I don’t want to
be Jesus, is what I’m trying to say. But, at the same time, we’re called to
be in the world, not as saviors, but as we are, using our gifts, doing the
things we love, and even doing things we don’t love but that need to be done.
So when we are given the amazing freedom not to be Christ for the world, we are
freer to be more authentically ourselves.
In
undergrad, I had trouble remembering that I was not my parents. It’s perhaps
true that if you ever saw me in a shoulder-length wig and in sensible heels,
you might mistake me for my mother. I have her ironic eyes, her severe jaw, and
her hefty teeth and charming smile. It’s a pity I never inherited her social
grace and Midwestern modesty. If you met my father, you’d recognize me in his self-conscious
smirk and his inability to lose graciously when playing chess. But, alas, I am
not my mother, nor my father, though they are both a part of me, and I bear
signs of them, like my teeth. So I can say that because I am not Christ, nor my
mom, nor my dad, I came to know part of who I am: I am a gay seminarian, a closeted poet, and
a hippy-dippy Christian. And the world
needs me to be a gay seminarian, a closeted poet, and a hippy-dippy
Christian. And the world needs you to be who you are, not who the world would prefer you to be.
I say that
I know part of who I am because frequently
we learn much about who we are from what others tell us about ourselves.
Without the devastating but honest reality
check from my poet mentor, I would still be deluding myself, believing I am, as
I actually once claimed to be, the reincarnation of Walt Whitman. It took
someone else to tell me that I’m not who I thought I was because who I thought
I was was a fantasyself I constructed to avoid the reality of the gifts I had
but desperately did not want to recognize. The gifts we have more often than
not lead us to know who we are and what God is calling us to. For me, I was
being called into seminary and the church, though I’m still learning who I’m
called to be in the church as I hone the gifts I have. I am not a charismatic
preacher—I can’t sweat, and spit, and cry, and use theatrical movements to
bring you closer to God—so in that lack of a gift—in that empty space—I trust
that the gifts I do have will
compensate for my dry temples, and together we will find an identity in
anticipation of Christ, who was, and is, and is still to come.
We have a
couple weeks left before Christmas, which means we have a couple weeks left of
Advent. This is a season of great joy and, at times, greater anxiety. Between
last-minute shopping and work and family and travel and the cold, how can we
remember that this is precisely the time to be living into kenosis? This is the time to release those things that you’re not
called to because when you cling too tightly, it’s much harder to be a sign of
Christ in the world. So we have a couple weeks left to emulate John and release
something, to create some empty space. It is precisely that space we have yet
to empty that Christ will fill. And there, in that empty space, is precisely
where we will begin to bear the sign of Christ, and what was once our proudest
witness to the world of our own greatness will soon become our testimony to the
world of the greatness of God.
1 comments:
He's a keeper.
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