John the Baptist’s Wake

In the last few weeks, I have spoken about plants as teachers and birds as the subjects of God’s kingdom – inviting us to see ‘spirit’ in our ecosystem. This week, I would like to talk about the dead.

Having grown up in a progressive congregation in the 90s, I think we may experience generational differences in our encounter with the miraculous. I have watched my parent’s generation crusade against biblical literalism and the scientific illiteracy it engenders. I have seen them wrestling their parent’s generation, for whom, I assume, the miraculous was a cudgel with which to ensure obedience to cultural norms.

I haven’t even seen that cudgel, really. Maybe you have.

For me, those cultural norms are reproduced more subtly, with the quiet threat of meaninglessness and mortality showing us the edge of an abyss of nihilism, and then a comforting arm drawing us back, and promising to fill us up – with the rugged expansiveness of a new truck, the lineless immortality of a moisturizing cream, the limitless charisma inherent in a new pair of shoes – all resting on the exploitation of both the labour of the marginalized and the productive capabilities of the earth.

I believe that our parent’s and grandparent’s work defanging the threats that might have bound us to an allegiance with hegemonic Christianity was necessary and important, and I don’t believe that our emancipatory work in this moment will be possible without it.

In our world, I see the emancipatory fight use witchcraft and astrology and meditation practice. I see black and indigenous teenagers appealing to their ancestors for aid.

I am afraid that the secularizing impulse that renders spirituality an exclusively internal phenomenon weakens our ability to recognize the genuine spiritual reality of systems – both destructive hierarchies and healing allegiances of community and care – and it weakens our capacity to recognize the genuine spiritual reality of the ecosystems we are present within.

I believe in scientific literacy. In this moment, I hear the contemporary scientific community saying the world is all a bit more alive than we had assumed, but also – for God’s sake – we need all hands on deck for climate change right now. I suspect that a metaphysical reframing will be a part of what gets us there.

Knowing that the fundamental stories we tell do have power to shape our relationship with the world, what stories do we need to be telling?

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I have heard sermons about the feeding of the five-thousand annually, over the course of my life, and all of them have been about demystifying the story and explaining the miracle away.

The real miracle, I have heard, over and over again, is that people shared.

Really, it is a story about the inspirational power of one person’s example. Really, it is a story about generosity. Really, it is a story about the self-sufficiency of a people.

There is some good stuff there. But it all comes from the rather dry question: how could the story’s core elements take place without anything metaphysically suspicious occurring?

What I haven’t heard is that the feeding of the five-thousand was a wake.

In the early days of his ministry, Jesus wasn’t all that popular. The real deal was John the Baptist, Jesus’ fiery associate and predecessor. His ascetic mission along the Jordan was attracting vast crowds of people, who I imagine thought of Jesus fondly as John’s pupil, who might carry his torch someday.

By Matthew’s account, John is loudly critical of Herod Antipas, the Tetrarch, because he’d married his brother’s ex-wife. Josephus, the Roman historian, figured Herod was simply worried about John’s power to foment a revolution.

In either case, Herod has John decapitated.

Jesus, who I imagine had really loved John, tries to find a quiet place to mourn, but he’s the closest thing to a relative John had ever had & certainly the mantle of John’s leadership seems to be coming his way, and so those who had been taught by John, baptized, impacted by him, or even who had watched his work fondly from afar felt the need to be together, with someone who could make sense of what had happened and give some direction on where they were going next. They follow Jesus out into the hills.

How many, I wonder, of those who had come to hear Jesus preach only had his name on their lips. How many were honouring a beloved teacher and leader they’d lost?

How many of those eating bread and fish left some for the one who had lived on honey and locusts? As Jesus, trying again to find a quiet place, is interrupted by the disciples afraid, on their boat in the storm, and walks out across the water, did he remember the cool touch of submersion and the one who lived for so long in the river’s embrace?

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I believe that our tradition is powerful in equipping us to honour our ancestors.

At the tail end of the 1st century, someone who probably wasn’t Paul, in their Epistle to the Hebrews, refers to the faith of Abel, Enoch, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac, Jacob and then David and Samuel and the prophets, saying ‘since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses… let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.’

From the 2nd century, when the Christians were being persecuted, they prayed for the dead, but to the martyrs – thanks to their resoluteness in the face of suffering, they were believed to have intercessory power.

By the 3rd century, this was a major part of our ordinary life – the Christian sections of the Roman catacombs were built with large chambers with benches on the side for the eucharistic assembly. A regular part of the rhythm of a Christian community was to go down into the catacombs to experience communion with dead members of the family.

By the end of the 5th century, as the Roman Empire fell and its centralizing influence disintegrated, the honoured dead of local spiritual leaders took on an equivalent role as the martyrs themselves.

Even in the 21st, we hang photos of our ancestors, trace our genealogies, and bring flowers to the graves of those we have lost. We hold theologies of God’s presence throughout everything, and if God permeates the universe, is anyone ever totally gone?

Honouring the presence of the dead is an important part of who we are.

Unlike plants and birds, for example, I imagine our ancestors have a vested interest in our well-being. While there are certainly some bad apples, most of them, I imagine, unambiguously want us to thrive. For many of us, many of those ancestors were Christian, and would easily speak the language of Christian remembrance.

For many of us, whose ancestors participated in the colonial enterprise – for example – figuring out how to lovingly but unflinchingly name them in their role in that project may bring rest to both them and to the ghosts of all those whose deaths that project depended upon, and empower us in deconstructing its ongoing presence today.

For many of us, our ancestors lived through trauma, which they then passed down – acknowledging that story, which is always bigger than us, may be a part of our healing.

For many of us, our ancestors were wise, and loved deeply, and accessing that love and wisdom may be helpful and empowering for us in our time.

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In his teaching, Jesus picks up the intellectual and prophetic traditions of Israel’s past and reinterprets them for his context. He is honouring those who have gone before, naming them, and recognizing the presentness of their influence.

Throughout his ministry, he’s compared to those who preceded him – is this Moses reborn, people would say, or Elijah? He has the bearing, and the personality, and influence of the prophets of old, such that it seems they’ve returned.

As he makes his way towards Jerusalem and the culmination of his ministry, he’s transfigured and those prophets appear visibly with him and they speak together. In his death, the crowds assume he is calling out to Elijah to come and take him away.

Jesus is haunted by the prophets, and by the whole of the prophetic tradition.

Some religious traditions rest on firm sets of principles as their root, while Christianity has an event – Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. We look back to that moment and then past it, into the haunting confluence of factors that led their – we are bound to history.

I suspect that as they massed across the hills in order to hear Jesus make sense of John’s death, some people brought food – it wasn’t just the one child. And, I suspect, that food wasn’t enough to feed everyone, nor to have twelve baskets left over.

In an already heightened time, when history is taking place all at once, the Spirit is a keenly felt part of human life, and when religion and politics are weaving inseparably together, after one who named God’s kingdom as an alternative to Rome is executed, as a crowd masses with another holy one to decide what’s next, and they eat together in the name of the one they have lost: I wonder whether anyone is ever truly gone, whether that person is there, and whether in the sharing, one basket might become two.

For me, there is power, for us in our world, in telling that as our story.

I don’t want to lose the theology of Jesus as God experiencing the world, but we can hold it and that the divine might manifest through all people: Moses, Elijah, John, and Sarah, Rachel and Miriam. Jesus might be Water as such, but he is also stepping into a particular river as it runs through history in a particular people in a particular region.

As you think back to the stories of the river of those who went before you, I wonder what names you recall. I wonder what their impact was, what they might teach. I wonder how they’d appreciate being greeted, or remembered, or informed about what was happening in your life, or invited into it. I wonder what basket they would bring.