Homily 12/08/02 Fr. Ed Fride Christ the King Parish Ann Arbor, MI

John the Baptist

The people that were going out to see John the Baptist were serious. Some would go because he was a novelty. But the people that went out to actually receive baptism by him were serious about wanting to come closer to God. They did so at a certain amount of risk.

John the Baptist was not part of the established Jewish hierarchy. He was not associated with the Temple or the priesthood in Jerusalem. He was not looked on favorably by the religious leaders; and he was certainly not looked on very favorably by Herod. To go out to this desert, to find this prophet in the wilderness, and allow him to minister to you involved a certain amount of risk. And yet they went. They went because they wanted more of God. All that mattered was that God in some special way was doing something. They wanted more. They went.

And what did they discover? John the Baptist says something to them that would have been completely incomprehensible to them. “I baptize you with water, but the one who is coming after me will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” This would have been almost completely meaningless to a Jewish person. There’s no theology of the Trinity among the Jews. The idea that the Holy Spirit was somehow a separate Person would have been completely foreign to them. The hallmark of Judaism is an absolute uncompromising monotheism that, as they understood it, meant you just had one Person. You had God the Almighty. You had Yahweh, the Lord of heaven and earth.

So who is this Holy Spirit, and what on earth does it mean to be baptized by Him? They were clueless. And the likelihood is that John the Baptist was just as clueless as they were. He was a prophet. He was called to proclaim a prophetic message, and the interesting thing about prophecy is that it’s not a function of the prophet understanding what’s going on, as we see especially of the Old Testament prophesies that deal with the coming of the Messiah. Did Isaiah have any idea what he was talking about when he gave the Immanuel prophecy? “A virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and you shall call him Immanuel.” Did he think it was going to happen right away? Did he have any idea what the virgin birth meant? Did he have a clue that it involved the Son of God? Probably not.

John the Baptist proclaims his message. The people simply choose to believe it. This oddity about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, they just wait to see unfold. And it does on Pentecost. And on Pentecost, the disciples remembering John the Baptist’s message would have thought, this is what John the Baptist meant. Here is how God the Holy Spirit descends and baptizes us with fire, and that moment we count as the beginning of the Church, when even as Adam became a living being when God breathed into him the Spirit, so the Church became the Bride of Christ at the moment Jesus breathed into her the power of the Holy Spirit.

John the Baptist’s listeners needed to make a practical decision to trust, to trust and see what God was doing and how it would unfold. And those who chose to trust and stay close to the center of action experienced that great gift of the Holy Spirit, and the immediate impact of that was they went out and proclaimed the good news and found to their amazement that that Holy Spirit accompanied them and filled everyone they spoke to who was willing to receive. In fact it was the door that opened the Church for those of us who are Gentiles by birth. Because when God the Holy Spirit fell on the Gentiles, as Peter explained in explaining his actions to the Church in Jerusalem, “How could we deny the Gentiles baptism if they received the Holy Spirit in the same way we did?” And the universality of Jesus’ invitation becomes proclaimed because of the action of God the Holy Spirit.

And two millennia later that same invitation is being given, and in a special way now during this Holy Season. Because this season is so oriented toward the coming of the Savior, it is now for a short period of time commercially marketable to be pro-Christian, i.e., to encourage Christmas shopping; encourage all these things that have as a root that Jesus himself was born in this holy time. And because of that, people are talking about it, and people are less affronted, in a certain sense, if we talk more about it, and we need to take advantage of the grace of this Season and just a little bit more openness in other peoples’ heart to share with them the good news. We just need to be ‘wise’ as far as how we do that.

For example one of the common questions that people will ask during this time is, “What do you want for Christmas?” What better response than, “To fall more deeply in love with Jesus Christ, who died for me and for you.” – Be subtle… You may make somebody’s Christmas an entirely different experience. And it’s easy to get overwhelmed during this time by all the extra things that we have to do on top of what are already phenomenally busy lives. But if we plead with Jesus we can experience Him being present even in the midst of the chaos.

I went home for Thanksgiving- well actually I was with my family on Thanksgiving - this is home. And what did my family decide to do on the busiest shopping day of the year, the day after Thanksgiving? They decided to go to the biggest mall in the United States. If you’ve never been to the “Mall of America” in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it’s an experience. It’s built on the site of the former Twins’ stadium. The heart of the mall is a gigantic amusement park with Ferris wheels and roller coasters and all this and then four tiers of stores that completely surround it. It is mayhem. And it was unbelievably packed; it was - take a number and breathe on schedule packed. So we walk in, and I’m walking in the midst of this, and not altogether excited about being there, and I’m thinking to myself, “Jesus, where are You in the midst of all this?” And I walked around a corner and here was this fabulous black Gospel group performing for the shoppers. Evangelizing at the top of their lungs in this wonderful, wonderful way. And they were surrounded by a good crowd of Minnesotans who were watching them, who watched with all the exuberance typical of Midwestern Scandinavians…i.e. passionate immobility. It was very exciting.

And of course after spending years thawing out in Memphis, I loved that music. As I was dressed in my civilian clothes, so I wasn’t going to scandalize anybody with how should a priest be responding to this music in a public setting - not that it would have mattered. And so I just kind of enjoyed it and got into it, and there was (you know) every once in awhile one of the group members would look at me say – “Oh, there’s somebody with a pulse, look at that, oh (you know)”! But they were evangelizing wonderfully; proclaiming Jesus’ Lordship, inviting people to surrender; it was a great gift. And it was just a little reminder that in the midst of all this, there are creative ways to evangelize. And when we come across something that is happening, that Jesus is doing, to take part, to enjoy it. It was wonderful music; it was hopefully touching hearts.

There can be lots of little unexpected moments like that where all of a sudden you can be sensitive to Jesus being present doing something that can make a difference, during this season especially. Sometimes it will be wonderfully evangelical; sometimes it will be some other way in which He is there.

I had a kind of different experience of His presence when I was on my way home. I drove from Minneapolis up to Duluth to drop my mom off in Duluth, and then came back across the Upper Peninsula. And driving across Northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula, Bambi smashed into my car just before I got to Ashland. Which was kind of an interesting experience because just out of the corner of my eye I see this gigantic deer and then SMASH! And the interesting thing was that I experienced such a sense of Jesus’ presence, it was like – “oh, there’s a deer, oh, there’s a deer smashing into my car, oh, well don’tcha know.’

On a two-way, ice-covered, truck-encrusted highway, this could have been a little exciting. In fact while I was driving along just kind of bemused by the fact that this gigantic deer had just smashed into me, I realized in looking at the situation that, if I’d hit that deer one 44^th of a second later, it would have come through my window, and I could tell you stories about what purgatory is really like - but you wouldn’t be there to hear them. If I’d hit the deer a 44^th of a second earlier, it would have been right in front of me, and would have smashed through my windshield, and would have had exactly the same result. So I had like a two 44^ths of a second window to safely hit this deer with no damage to the car except for cosmetic. And as the car and I are both getting older, cosmetic damage is pretty much what you expect.

But the experience of His presence, and His protection, was an amazing thing. And a little later on that trip when I got deeper into Michigan and the frequency of the oncoming traffic was one car maybe every twenty minutes, Jesus treated me to a just beautiful gift, in that it’s freezing cold of course, but it was a crystal clear sky, and in Northern Wisconsin, Northern Michigan, there were stars like you would not believe. I actually pulled over the car three different times and parked, and got out and just looked at the stars, because it was breathtakingly beautiful. It was like everywhere you looked you saw Jesus’ fingerprints.

He loves to be present to us. He loves to be a whole lot more present to us then we usually allow for. And during this holy season, He invites us to try to pay special attention to His presence because He’ll give us lots of opportunities to share that Presence, especially during this holy time. The danger is that if we’re not sensitive to His presence, we can miss opportunities. While I was with my family, I’d go to different churches and celebrate Mass. And one day when I got back, my little sister and my mom both said, “Oh if I’d a known you were going, we’d have come”. Which never would have occurred to me, but for which I kicked myself judiciously for missing this opportunity. If I’d have been a little more sensitive, I might have said to them, “I’m going to Mass, do you want to come”?

Jesus will give us opportunities to touch people’s hearts. Lets us not get so overwhelmed by everything else that’s going on, that we miss them. Because it can make a huge difference for people we love, or even for strangers that we hardly know. The greatest gift we can give to Jesus during this holy season is to let Him use us to bring others to Him. It is the only gift we have to offer Him who has done so much for us. Let us open our hearts and let Him move.