forest hill 
December 7, 2025
"A Time to Turn Around"
John the Baptist must have been a scary man: weird clothes, bugs for breakfast, and fire in his belly. People who are willing to put everything on the line for their faith are frequently compelling, and John clearly drew a following. For all his oddities, he articulated the complaints of his generation with clarity, precision and passion, and they turned out by the thousand to listen to his message and be baptised.
And what a message it was! God is on the way to set things right, he preached. Watch out! Particularly if you’re powerful; particularly if you’re supporting the ones who are running things now; particularly if you’re profiting from the Roman regime, watch out! The axe is about to fall! None of this is going to last, and God’s vengeance is about to strike. Be sure you’re on the right side when that happens.
It’s impossible to know exactly what “baptism” meant for John. Clearly it was some kind of cleansing ritual – a symbolic washing away of the things that impede God’s work. But it was probably also a re-enactment of the Entry into the Promised Land – a symbolic reminder that God who heard the cries of slaves in Egypt was also hearing the cries of oppressed people under the current Roman rule. Those Israelites from Egypt walked through the Jordan River to get to their new home; John took them out to the borders of the Promised Land so they could walk through the same river all over again. Baptism was probably initiation into a movement that was preparing to take up arms when God’s armies arrived. Maybe he even thought that if enough people got committed in this way, it would encourage God to act sooner.
Fiery sermons are entertaining, and John clearly spoke with authenticity. People believed his message. But God’s armies never came. The predicted axe never fell; the Roman Empire continued in control of Palestine for hundreds of years after John was arrested and then executed in a particularly gruesome display of nepotism and casual brutality. John, who saw so clearly that God hated how people were being abused, was entirely wrong about how God would come to fix the world. His trust in a violent and avenging God, wielding a “winnowing fork” and threatening “unquenchable fire” was wrong. It just never happened.
I think that’s because the world never changes for the better when threats and vengeance take the lead.
The vision of a world that both John and Jesus inherited from their forebearers is beautifully described in the Book of Isaiah: “The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them. … They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” Could the Divine wrath that John expected ever get us to a world like that? Could the military might of Russia or Ukraine or Israel or Palestine every get us to a world like that?
What would it look like if God’s strategy were consistent with God’s goals? What would it look like if we chose peace-making strategies – at home and on the world-stage and everywhere in between – that mirrored the kind of world we hope to create? Would we succeed? Would we be laughed off as hopelessly naïve and ineffectual? Is this dream even possible at all? And what does all this have to do with Christmas?
Join us on Sunday as we ponder the weird and wacky prophet crying in the wilderness, and what his success and his failure has to teach us about God’s peace.