I’ve had a mixed experience with messengers throughout my life.  Some brought good news:  you are now husband and wife, it’s a healthy boy, we have a lovely baby daughter for you to adopt, you’ve won a major scholarship, you’ve been selected for an important award, your lawyer is here (after three days in a Mississippi jail for civil rights activities), you passed your comprehensive exams (in seminary), we have a nice appointment for you, your grand-daughter’s bone marrow is a good match to give for her older sister’s transplant which saved her life.

Other messengers brought bad news:  Mama has died (from my father when I was 12), you’re fired (three times, seldom put that directly), your grant request has been denied, you have to move, I want a divorce, (X) has been raped by an older man, I’m living in someone’s garden shed and am broke, I’m in jail, GWB has won his second term, we have invaded Iraq, all of the planet’s eco-systems are under great stress and at least a third are entering collapse mode, you’re preaching Communism, socialism or whatever!

John the Baptist was the Messenger who came out of the wilderness announcing the arrival of the Kindom* of God in his cousin Jesus of Nazareth. For some that was bad news, for others that was puzzling news, for still others it was threatening news, and for many it was stunning good news in the midst of their despair!

John was no quiet secluded hermit creeping out of the wilderness. In his imaginative biblical paraphrase, The Message, Eugene Peterson describes John as “Thunder in the desert!” (I’ve aspired to be “thunder in the pulpit,” but I seldom pulled it off.) John came preaching a baptism of life-change that leads to forgiveness of sins. John was what we call “media savvy” with his rough animal skin garb, wild diet, and primitive ways that only made him a more authentic prophet in their eyes. He baptized a huge following into his movement.

But John, as messenger, was not recruiting them to follow him though many did. Peterson paraphrases the Baptist as saying, “The real action comes next: the star in this drama, to whom I’m a mere stagehand, will change your life. I’m baptizing you here in the river, turning your old life in for a kindom life. His baptism—a holy baptism by the Holy Spirit—will change you from the inside out.”

The various messengers and many messages I’ve met in my 68 years have led me many ways. Some were fulfilling, some were dead ends, others were frustrating or exciting, and many were confusing, scary at times, often diverting me down many byways. While in high school, at the same time I was being converted to a liberal theology, I also was being lured by God into signing on to the kindom movement of Jesus.  Sometimes I hear John’s thunder calling faintly in the distance, and at other times it is close and deafening.

But as we start to relive the story of that  Advent journey once again, it continues to change me from the inside out, and keeps me going in hope even when things seem most hopeless