An Unexpected Visitor - December 18

Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 119:49-72; PM Psalm 49, [53]; Isa. 9:8-17; 2 Pet. 2:1-10a; Mark 1:1-8

John the Baptist keeps showing up in Advent. We encounter him again today in the Daily Office readings. He’s intense, to say the least—I even preached about him this past Sunday. I wanted to share the image I used in sermon because the community that engages with our Daily Reflections is much larger than our gathered worshiping community.

Here we are once again, face-to-face with this wild, locust-eating prophet. I often imagine John as the kind of person your daughter might bring home from college: unconventional, unsettling, and impossible to ignore. He’s not someone you want crashing your cherished holiday traditions, but you also know that rejecting him outright will only make your daughter defend him all the more. So, you have no choice but to take him seriously.

We, too, must take John seriously. His message—a call to repentance and recognition of the brokenness within ourselves and the world we’ve inherited—is an essential part of preparing for the kingdom of God. It demands that we stand in the light of truth, even when that light reveals parts of ourselves we’d rather keep hidden.

Today’s reading doesn’t quite bring us to the point we reached on Sunday, but it still offers an uncomfortable encounter with someone we might see as uncouth or unwelcome. And yet, maybe that’s precisely the point. In the midst of this busy and often chaotic season, John the Baptist invites us to be open—open to hearing God’s voice in the most unlikely of places, and through the most unexpected people.

Maybe John unsettles us because he reminds us that God doesn’t always come as we expect—wrapped neatly in beauty, comfort, or sentimentality. Instead, God comes through the raw, the unpolished, and the inconvenient, speaking truths we’d rather not hear. John’s wild voice cries out not to condemn, but to prepare; not to shame, but to awaken. He stands at the edge of our lives like a threshold we must cross, reminding us that God’s arrival rarely fits neatly into our plans.

So perhaps the challenge for us this Advent is to let ourselves be disrupted. To lean into the discomfort John brings, because on the other side of that discomfort lies transformation. In the unexpected, in the unsettling, in the voice crying from the wilderness, we might just find that God is closer than we ever imagined.

Faithfully,

John+

Questions for Self-Reflection:  Where do you hear the voice of John the Baptist in your life?  What are the challenging voices that deepen your Advent season?