Midsummer is still a couple of weeks away, but I’m thinking ahead. That’s often how it is when you are worship planning. You need to think ahead and sometimes that feels like getting ahead of yourself and sometimes, more appropriately, it’s just a case of preparing the way. That’s what it feels like this morning, as I find myself thinking about John the Baptism. His feast day is coming up on June 24th and it is one of the few saints’ days which mark the birthday rather than the death of the saint. Back when such things were being decided, this was a clear and clever decision because it it easily to set a date – six months before Jesus’ birth – and it also falls just about midsummer and so ties in beautifully with a whole range of ancient soltice practices. For centuries and likely more, Northern Europeans have lit and leapt over bonfires on midsummer’s eve. With a celebration for John the Baptist thrown into the mix, these bright fires celebrate the one who prepared the way for the coming of the Light. A nice bit of ecclesiastical poetry, there.
I’ve been reading Malcolm Guite’s poetry, too. You can find his powerful sonnet of St John’s Eve here but here’s a snippet for this morning.
So keep his fires burning through this night,
beacons and gateways for the child of light.
I like imagining the childhood of this fierce desert prophet. Because he wasn’t always wearing camel-hide and eating locusts and wild honey. First, he was longed for and loved – the child of Elizabeth’s old age. Children born to older parents are often seen as precocious – performing for doting parents, preferring their company to that of their own peers. I wonder if it was like that in Elizabeth’s home.
I wonder, too, about John’s earliest words and sentences and how his mother treasured them, how his father listened, perhaps again in silence, delighting to hear how carefully he put his words together and shared his thoughts. Our own little Plum has taken a new leap in his own speech, making the switch from third to first person. And I treasure that his first “I” sentence was “I ….love … you.” The Spouse, both astutely and beautifully, noted that it reflected what he hears around the house. And that made me glad to the very core.
John developed his own confident voice – a strong, bold voice for love. But for humility, too. I am rather fond of an old 1928 commentary of the Gospel of John written by G.H.C. MacGregor as part of the Moffat New Testament Commentary series. It provides literary and historical criticism without which, as Moffat himself writes in the introduction, “ our reading becomes unintelligent.” MacGregor writes this about John’s humility:
In exercise of their authority as guardians of the people’s religion the deputation demand of John ‘Who are you?’ John in reply energetically denies his identity with any of the religious leaders of popular expectation. He is not the Christ or the Messiah, a denial the force of which lies not so much in the negation as in the implication that someone else is the Christ.
John declares that he is merely the voice crying in the wilderness ‘level the way for the Lord!’
That humility echoes through into C.S. Lewis’ description of the work of the church:
When we carry out our ‘religious duties’ we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last the water comes, it may find them ready. I mean, for the most part. There are happy moments, even now, when a trickle creeps along the dry beds; and happy the souls to whom this happens often.
Digging ditches and lighting beacon fires. Not a bad line of work. May it bring us joy.
