The wilderness is a marginal place. The wilderness is on the edge of what is organised, institutionalised, civilised. The wilderness is like the margin to a page of text; it is the place where nothing has yet been spoken, where the comment on the text is waiting to be made.
John the Baptist doesn’t seem to dress in a civilised manner and his diet would not be catered for by the best restaurants in Jerusalem. His presence in the wilderness seems like a comment on the prophet Isaiah and his commentary brings the crowds out from their seats of power and their organised religion. John the Baptist is a marginal figure not only geographically but in relation to the whole gospel – ‘There is one who is coming who is greater than I’.
On the wall over there in the south chapel there are other marginal figures – people who spoke from the edge, people who went against the grain; Bishop Bell who opposed Churchill’s policy of mass bombing; Janani Luwum who spoke out against Idi Amin in Uganda; Edith Stein a Jewish existentialist philosopher who became a Carmelite nun and died in the gas chambers; Christian de Cherge a Trappist monk who refused to leave Algeria because of his respect for Islam and was killed by Muslim radicals,
At first sight a Harvard educated New York lawyer who was also a graduate of the LSE might not seem so marginal as the others; and yet William Stringfellow is marginal because though one of the least well known of the names above that altar, he was one of the greatest American lay theologians of the last century.
In the early sixties Stringfellow went to Boston to give a lecture both in the Harvard Business School and the Divinity School. He debated with himself whether or not to leave out all the Biblical references from the Business School version but in the end he left them in. The business school students were fascinated and the subsequent discussion went on far longer than scheduled. Later the same speech was ridiculed and written off by the divinity students. The reason for this curiously divided response lies in the main thread of Stringfellow’s vision of faith.
Last Sunday we had two baptisms as part of this service. There the parents and godparents had to reject and renounce , the devil and all rebellion against God and the deceit and corruption of evil. That language is hard to explain these days and yet it was part of the language which Stringfellow used in Boston. It is the language of the power of death, and enslavement to the principalities and powers of this world. The business students in their experience of financial corporations and commercial powers were able to identify with the language Stringfellow used. The divinity students trained in a certain school of modern Biblical criticism found the language of principalities and powers, rulers of present darkness, all too quaint and archaic with no real meaning in history and human life.
As a student Stringfellow had attended a world conference of Christian youth in 1947 in Oslo. Speakers from Germany, Norway and France had recently emerged from the Nazi shadow. They taught him about the way in which humanity can fall slave to its own systems; they showed him that resistance however symbolic, haphazard or seemingly futile is the only way to stay sane and human (as many other faces on that wall would also attest); and they showed him that the use of Scripture is a primary, practical and essential tactic of resistance.
Stringfellow then became a suspicious Bible reader – not suspicious of the Bible but suspicious of the way in which the Bible could so easily be read Americanly or for that matter Englishly. The spirit and ethos of American or English society asserts itself in the way in which we read scripture claiming the text as our own, interpreting it in our own image. And yet the Scriptures teach us to be suspicious of all earthly powers. We are naïve if we underestimate the fallenness of human beings as collectivities as well as individuals. This is not a recipe for anarchy nor an argument for Christian abandonment of political involvement. It is more powerfully a warning that all man made systems of government, economic institutions, and social organizations are as prone to corruption as we are as individuals – and in their corruption these principalities and powers exercise a force over us as individuals against which we have permanently to be on our guard. Stringfellow compared the language of such principalities to the language of Babel; the reign of the soundbyte, spin doctoring, jargon, coded language, rhetorical exaggeration, and incoherence. We are deluded if we think we are the masters of our institutions and our systems. To find a place on which to stand we have to ask such questions as these: what is the vocation of this bank or newspaper, law firm or city or for that matter this school of biblical interpretation? How does it praise God by serving human life? How does it contribute to human alienation? How will it answer to the judgement of God?
Stringfellow as we might have expected was heavily involved in the movement against racism in the States. Racism and white supremacy was one example of those principalities and powers against which all baptised Christians had to fight. Similarly he saw the Vietnam war as something that had got out of the control of democratic constraint, driven by military technology and its systems. He called for the impeachment of Nixon well before Watergate. He was a partnered homosexual who believed that all sexuality needs conversion into Christ, but conversion does not imply the denial or repression of sexuality. His legal practice was located in Harlem representing poor African Americans and Hispanics. And in the present credit crunch, the crisis in our banking system, he would have seen again the way in which a man made system takes on a life of its own operating with an independence actually beyond human decision making and control. Of course the system is run by human beings each with a will of his or her own; and yet we have become so imbued with an economic ideology, so integrated into the system that our judgements and attitudes become the expression of the system where all are caught up in its web.
The title of Stringfellow’s best known book is ‘An ethic for Christians and other Aliens in a Strange Land.’ It is an ethic trained to ask the difficult questions, to oppose the forces of death and destruction; it is an ethic based neither on culturally determined liberalism nor on a fundamentalist evangelicalism. He believed that if we take the Bible more seriously then we will inevitably love the world more readily, because the word of God is free and active in the world.’ It is good news for the world.
Which brings us back to John the Baptist. We will never understand the gospel as good news if we do not see it as an assault on the powers and principalities – the forces which are opposed to human flourishing. And we will never enact the meaning of our baptism if we do not see it as the entry into a new kind of citizenship. Baptism in the gospel is a public act, and an offense to the ruling authorities. Baptism is a defiant act, which directs us towards the kingdom where everything that limits or divides our humanity is transcended. Baptism is we might say the resurrection of our gladness, teaching us to delight in ourselves as God delights in us. Amen.