Central Lutheran Church - Elk River
Central Lutheran Church - Elk River
Wild Faith: John the Baptist's Radical Path {Reflections}
The wild, untamed nature of God's work takes center stage as we explore the revolutionary ministry of John the Baptist – a man who abandoned his priestly inheritance to preach in the wilderness. This seemingly simple career change represents one of the most profound challenges to religious authority in the biblical narrative.
Born to a temple priest and a mother from Aaron's lineage, John was destined for temple service. Yet we find him in the Jordan River, dressed in camel's hair, eating locusts and wild honey, and baptizing people miles from the established religious center. No one authorized John to offer forgiveness of sins through baptism – a practice traditionally confined to the temple. His actions were radical, drawing crowds from all regions and fundamentally questioning who controls access to God.
What makes John's story so compelling is what it reveals about divine presence. God doesn't need buildings, institutions, or human permission to work. Like the Holy Spirit – once known as "the wild goose" in church tradition – God's movement is untamable and unpredictable. We humans constantly try to domesticate spiritual experiences: marking holy sites, building structures around them, creating rules about access, and eventually strangling the very vitality that made these experiences powerful.
This pattern extends beyond religion into how we approach raising children, experience love, and connect with the divine. We create systems and structures that often end up limiting the very things we're trying to nurture. John reminds us that sometimes the most authentic expressions of faith happen outside conventional boundaries. His story invites us to consider where we might be trying to tame the wild goose in our own lives and where God might be calling us beyond comfortable, established patterns.
Ready to explore more? Subscribe to Reflections and join us as we continue uncovering profound spiritual insights hiding in plain sight throughout scripture. What wild, untamed aspect of faith might you discover next?
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What is up everybody? My name is Ryan and welcome to our Reflections podcast. And hey, I want to talk today about John the Baptizer, john the Baptist. His story is unbelievably wild to me. I mean no pun intended about being wild, but it's also pretty short. So here's some background.
Speaker 1:John he's the one who prepares the way for Jesus. You can find him in the gospels and the early parts and then he kind of disappears, which is also interesting. But anyway, he prepares the way for Jesus. In John he says I'm not the one, I'm pointing the way, I'm preparing the way for the one. But here's the thing you may not have picked up on about John.
Speaker 1:Maybe you did, but John is the son of a priest, so his father's a priest working in the temple, serving the temple. His mother, elizabeth, is also from the line of Aaron, and so sons of priests, or anyone in the line of Aaron, typically would follow their fathers into the priesthood, learning priestly duties, serving in the temple, and they'd be the next generation of priests. But John doesn't do that. He never becomes a priest. That we're told. Instead, when we find John, he's kind of an adult now, but we find he's living out in the wilderness, out in the wild eating locusts and wild honey, which back then probably wasn't that weird as we think it is today. But then he's doing this weird thing where he's dunking people in water and he's telling people to repent, and what happens is a ton of people come out of nowhere, from all around, and even the wider regions were told in the Gospels to come and be dunked in water and to confess their sins. And a lot of people start confessing their sins. It's wild. And here's the thing Most often in the Jewish story people would confess their sins in the temple during temple practices or festivals and these kinds of things. Of course, the temple was like the hub of all things religious and economic and social and political and everything for Jews. So you would go there to do most of your things, especially the religious things, and confessing of sins is considered a religious act to God in the temple. But here's John in the wild doing this. What was he doing out there? I mean he should have been in the temple. Why wasn't he in the temple? What was he doing out there? I mean he should have been in the temple. Why wasn't he in the temple? And also, who gave him permission to be out there to preach repentance and to somehow offer forgiveness of sins in this way and to dunk people in water. Who authorized him to do this? Well, according to the gospels, nobody, no one gave him permission.
Speaker 1:Now, think about this. This must have made the temple leaders quite upset, to put it mildly. I mean they must have seen John as some rabble-rousing, rebellious, disruptive, unauthorized figure. I mean, here he is the son of a priest, which means his rightful place was in the temple, and yet he sort of rejects that entirely. And he's not in the temple performing rituals in the temple. He's out in the wild preaching and baptizing and calling for repentance.
Speaker 1:And it's this incredible challenge to the seemingly to the religious authorities of this day and maybe a criticism of the establishment itself and a message about the way that God does things. And here's what I'd say about that. It seems like John is saying, hey, he doesn't need the establishment, john doesn't need the building, john doesn't need the authority, he doesn't need anyone's opinion or permission, he's just doing it because he felt like I'm reading into the text here, but maybe he felt like God told him to do it, which also means this then, that God doesn't need the establishment, right, and God doesn't need the building, he doesn't need authority, he doesn't need anyone's permission. God can do whatever God wants. Now listen, I'm not like an anti-establishment, you know, anarchist, obviously. I work in the institution, I'm a pastor, I get it. But God does not need these things. These are the things that we have sort of made over time. That's a whole other podcast episode in and of itself. But God can do whatever God wants.
Speaker 1:And there's John out in this river, the Jordan River, dunking people preaching forgiveness of sins and having folks come from all around and confessing their sins far away from the temple. It's wild. I was in the Jordan River a couple of years ago, out in Israel, and our tour guide, a guy named Kent Dobson, who's incredible, and if you ever have a chance to do a tour of Israel, go with Kent, because here's the thing there are tours of Israel. I mean, you can throw a rock in any direction and find someone that will take you on a tour over there. And there are a dime, a dozen and a lot of them are kind of what I would maybe call like mainstream tours spots and fine, fair enough.
Speaker 1:But one of the things that we did was we went to the Jordan and Kent took us to a place where nobody else was. See, here's the thing about the Jordan Nobody knows where John really was in this part of the gospels. No one knows where he was exactly. Some folks kind of guess. And there's this one spot in the Jordan where you can go and there's a lot of the tourists go and you can imagine already there's people everywhere and they've kind of turned it into this almost like a touristy kind of a trap and you go down there, you can, you can pay five bucks and get a white robe and put it on there. You can get baptized in the jordan, which is cool. And if you've done these things, look no guilt or judgment, I'm just saying and in there's all kinds of tourists around and you pay the five dollars, you get that and like what this is. It's an odd idea.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile we went with Kent. We went to the spot in the Jordan where there was nobody around. It was a wild kind of untamed part of the Jordan and I loved it and we went through there and picked up rocks and stones and I actually baptized a woman who wanted to get baptized in the Jordan. It was incredible, but there was nobody else around. It was truly a wild part of the Jordan and Kent was like you know what's funny about the Jordan? We, as humans, we love to have control, we love to domesticate things and he goes.
Speaker 1:I can imagine you know somebody tells this story in their book somewhere I forget who it is so I can't give him credit but he tells the story about. You know how humans love to control things. And so imagine when John is there and people are gathering there to get baptized and this is a great move of God and Jesus comes and John baptizes Jesus and then a few folks come this is not in the Bible, it's just an extra story that an author was telling later on. And Jesus comes along and you know it gets baptized and then leaves and then probably for decades people would gather around this spot and say this was where God moved. This was an incredible move of God.
Speaker 1:And you know we should put some memorial stones down here and like great idea. So they put some stones down. More folks come from miles around to see this spot and they're like wait, you know what we should do? We should put a bridge over this river to remember this spot and to get a little bit closer into the river and to see it from above and to have this kind of a bird's eye view. And they're like, yeah, great, so they build the bridge and then we can get more folks in this space and we can see it from up top. And yeah, great, so they build a house over top of the bridge, that is over top of the water. And then they're like, you know what? But we want to keep this safe, safe and protected, so let's put a rope around this wild river in the wilderness to keep it safe and kind of cordoned off, you know, and keep the riffraff out and to keep the stuff in the house and then the hut safe. So they put a rope around it and one day, I'm sure you know, somebody finally says you know, let's just stem the river flow and to keep the river from, you know, ruining what we've built here. And, lo and behold, we've domesticated the river.
Speaker 1:And, man, this story is so unbelievably profound in that we humans love to control things, we love to institutionalize things, to build boxes around things and to keep the riffraff out and to try to tame the Holy Spirit. You know, the Holy Spirit for many years in the church was called the wild goose. You ever try to catch a wild goose? Wild geese are wild and they're crazy and they squawk at you and they flap their flap their wings and they're powerful and you don't know where they're going to run and they're quite dangerous.
Speaker 1:But we try to tame the wild geese, you know, or the wild goose, and often what happens in our lives is we end up strangling the thing. Do you know what I mean? Like love, we try to like, over-examine or over, maybe institutionalize love. Love is quite chaotic. Like scientists cannot predict how people will fall in love or with whom they'll fall in love, with who they'll fall in love with. It's sort of a chaotic thing. Raising kids we try to over-structure how we raise our kids and I get it I've got four kids of my own but sometimes you got to just kind of like it's like this living and moving, breathing organism and you can't strangle it too much because they're kids. They're like wild geese. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:In our own search for and relationship with God, we sometimes try to domesticate it too much or allow I don't know other institutions to do that for us and really it's meant to be this wild expression or experience of God. Who can tame the wind? Not me. So today, remember the story of John, this wild son of a priest who was not doing what he was supposed to. According to all the authorities, he's out in the wild, I think, because God told him to go out there and he didn't need anyone's permission, and neither do you.
Speaker 1:And listen, if we are people in the institution like I am, that's okay, but just remember that we don't have the monopoly on the presence of God. It isn't like God only dwells in the church and not outside of it. In fact, the psalmist wrote. And then King Solomon himself, after he built the temple, was like how can this building hold God? It can't. And then David, the psalmist, writes that the whole thing is God's temple, that God dwells in and amongst and around all things. And so remember that's what God is like. He's this untamed wild goose you cannot tame, and God does whatever God wants. And so maybe live in tune with that, whatever and wherever you go today, all right, love you guys, peace. Hey, if you enjoy this show, I'd love to have you share it with some friends. And don't forget you are always welcome to join us in person at Central in Elk River at 8.30, which is our liturgical gathering, or at 10 o'clock, our modern gathering, or you can check us out online at clcelkriverorg Peace.
