"Pigeonholes"

There's no getting around it: John the Baptist is weird. You began to suspect this yourself, didn't you, when you found out that he eats locusts? But it goes on from there.

John is the most popular man of the day. His sermon record sales have all hit gold, and some are platinum. Larry King and Jay Leno both want him on their shows. And now the biggest network of all has sent Oprah Winfrey out from town to interview him. You'd think he'd be flattered. You'd think he'd be pleased. You'd think he'd cooperate. After all, this is free publicity. But John just grumps.

"Everyone in Jerusalem is talking about you," says Oprah. "And half the town has come all the way out here into the wilderness to be baptized by you. And some folks are saying this is the perfect time for the Christ to show up. Who Are You, Really?"

"I am not the Christ," says John. Five short words. No embellishment. He still doesn't say who he is, just who he is not. "I am not the Christ."

"Well," says Oprah, "There's also a saying in the old book of Malachi that Elijah is supposed to come back. Are you Elijah?" "I'm not," says John. Even shorter. Just two words. I think John's grumpiness quotient is going up.

"Then are you some other prophet?" "No!"

More and more here, I'm picturing John as played by Whorf, the Klingon. Brisk and brusque and abrupt. Short on words and short on the fuse. And Klingons eat funny food too, don't they?

"C'mon, John, work with me," says Oprah. "Inquiring minds want to know. What am I going to tell your public? Talk about yourself a little. Who the heck are you?"

But John still won't talk about himself in his own words. Instead he quotes a line from the scroll of Isaiah, a line we heard last Sunday:

I am a voice crying in the wilderness,
"Make straight the way of the Lord." (Isaiah 40:3)

Then John takes over the interview. He still keeps it short, but he goes off in a direction no one would have guessed:

"You're interviewing the wrong person," he proclaims. "In your midst stands one you don't know at all, but so important that I'm not worthy even to untie his shoes."

Yes, John is really weird. He never talks about himself. Always talking about someone else. Always bragging someone else up and putting himself down. He is the John Alden of the New Testament. And when Priscilla Mullins, I mean Oprah, I mean the priests and Levites and Pharisees say, "Speak for yourself, John," he can't do it.

He sure wouldn't fit in the 1990's. Not in a time when anyone who wants to be anyone has PR experts and spin doctors and press secretaries, who are hired to promote and expand every moment of notoriety (or even to create it, if necessary.)

Not in a time when moxie and chutzpah are our most prized possessions, and sales agents give themselves pep talks every morning in the bathroom mirror.

Not in an age when pop psychologists by the bushel are telling us our only real problem is low self-image, and here are ten time-tested ways to improve that self-image for only $19.95, and that includes the cassette of mantras to play back to ourselves in the car on the way to work. John just wouldn't fit in.

On my computer screen I have some little things called "aliases," only "alias" isn't a good word. I usually think of an alias as a fake identity for a crook. These aliases are different. They're like little pointers or stand-ins. They're really tiny, and they take up almost no memory. But you click on a little alias, a little pointer, and a great, big program, hidden in the background, opens up. I have an alias for my calendar and an alias for my address book, and an alias for my word processor. The aliases are nothing in themselves. Insignificant. But they point to a greater reality hidden away. So, in computer lingo, John the Baptist is an "alias" for Jesus. A pointer. You talk to him and he immediately directs your attention to a greater reality hidden away.

From the point of view of our culture, this is pretty stupid. John could have his picture on the cover of Time Magazine. But he prefers to stay unimportant, and direct our minds to Jesus.

And yet, and yet there are times I wonder. Could John be smarter than we are? Could John know something we don't know?

Nah!

That's just old weird John. Don't pay any attention to him.

Funny! That's what he seems to want.

Now, the world wants to know about someone, those inquiring minds do want to know, in order to pigeonhole that person, to file them and forget them, to replace all the complexity of a human personality with a quick word or slogan. There is good reason for this. It is hard to get to know someone, really know them deeply, and it takes a lot of mental effort, brainpower that we prefer to spend thinking about ourselves.

For instance, during my life I have taught three different people to drive a stick-shift car. Driving a stick-shift at first isn't easy. Especially in hilly Seattle. It takes lots of thinking to coordinate that left foot pumping up and down at exactly the right moment without looking, while the right hand moves the shift lever to exactly the right notch (and usually there are a couple that are very close together) again without looking, while the right foot applies just the right amount of power, with your eyes on the other drivers and your left hand controlling the steering. But after you've been driving that car for a few months or years it becomes completely automatic. You don't pay any conscious attention to what your hands and feet are doing; you just shift. Some people do it while talking on their cell phones: one hand on the gearshift, one hand on the wheel, one hand holding the phone to their ear. Hmmm!?

The whole point is to pigeonhole the mechanics of driving in order to let our conscious mind focus on something else.

We do the same thing in human relations: we pigeonhole people; we get to know them just well enough to file away a caricature, a quick description in 25 words or less. He's a skinflint. She's crabby until she gets her coffee. He's like all the Smith boys: he can't handle money. She's like all the Jones girls, very musical. Everyone from Georgia is a Redneck. Everyone from Ballard is Swedish, drives at five miles an hour with the end of their seatbelt dragging on the ground. All Baptists do is ask you if you're saved. All Texans do is brag.

We pigeonhole people so we don't have to think about them very hard. It's easy to do; we do it all the time. I did it myself just five minutes ago: John the Baptist is weird. John the Baptist is grumpy. John the Baptist eats locusts. John the Baptist is like Whorf the Klingon. I just pigeonholed a living, breathing person with a high IQ and a colorful way of preaching and creativity and passion and deep faith and all the other complexities that make up a human being. I turned him into a bumper sticker. I turned him into a caricature. We do it all the time.

But John says there's someone else. Somebody we don't know, even if he's standing right next to us. Someone we don't pay any attention to at all, not even enough to pigeonhole them. Someone who doesn't seem worth a caricature. Practically invisible.

There's an old Carol Burnett sketch in which she becomes an invisible woman. Not scientifically invisible but psychologically invisible. People don't notice her. They look right through her. The receptionist at the doctor's office completely ignores her. She stands in line at the bank and the teller starts talking to the person behind her. Totally invisible. Totally frustrating.

Well, John says there's an invisible man out there, someone they don't know at all. But this invisible person is the most incredibly important person in the universe. So important that it would be in insult for John the Baptist, Man of the Year, picture on the Wheaties box, platinum album charismatic preacher, an insult for John to untie this man's shoes. So important that none of us could ever measure up. And they are ignoring him. They don't know him at all.

Well, at least we're better off than they are. We know who John's talking about. We know it's Jesus the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, the hero of a thousand stories and the central image of a thousand pictures. Thank goodness he came out of obscurity. Thank goodness he didn't shun publicity. Thank goodness that we can know him.

We do know him, don't we?

Or do we?

What are your images and memories of Jesus? They're probably like mine. There's a snapshot of a baby lying on straw with friendly beasts all around. There's a picture of a shepherd carrying a lamb, and a man knocking on a door, and a man praying on a big rock. There's a short movie sequence (only a few moments, really) of a man hanging on a cross. There's a final picture of him standing in a garden one morning, surrounded by Easter lilies. Well, of course, there are also hymns and some bumper sticker slogans: "King of kings and Lord of lords." "Do unto others as you want them to do to you." "The Lord is my shepherd."

A tremendous simplification of the most influential life ever lived. This is the person whose picture, assuming we had one, should be on every magazine cover, every week, every month, every year. And on the cereal boxes. And on the milk cartons: "Have you seen this person?"

This is the person who should be interviewed by Oprah, and honored by the Nobel Prize committee, and awarded a medal by the President. Yet even the highest honors our civilization could give would trivialize him.

"Among you stands one whom you do not know. " We have four gospels; and 40 thousand books have been written about him; and 40 million preachers have told us about him; but we still don't know him. We still try to trivialize him. We still try to pigeonhole him. We still draw caricatures. We still try to simplify.

Sometimes a little aliase on my computer gets disconnected accidentally from the larger program it is meant to point to. The link gets broken. It is frustrating, but at least the computer is smart enough to tell me the alias no longer works. Unfortunately our brains aren't always as user-friendly as the computer. We keep clicking on our prejudices over and over and still think we are accessing reality. But that larger reality remains unknown.

To pigeonhole people is prejudice. To pigeonhole God is idolatry. And God won't stay trapped in that box. God will break out. "The Lord whom you seek will suddenly appear in the temple." God will sneak outside our categories and make an entrance as a baby in a manger or as a thief on a cross. The world's pigeonholes are breaking down. The world's caricatures cannot stand. God has come to our planet, and we can never see God, or our fellow humans, or even ourselves in the old way again.

Among us stands one whom we do not know. But if we truly did know him, we would be embarrassed to even offer to untie his shoes.






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