All Flesh

Baruch 5:1-9 or Malachi 3:1-4 • Luke 1:68-79 • Philippians 1:3-11 • Luke 3:1-6

On the Second Sunday of Advent, you may find that—beyond the coming of the Messiah and the repentance of sins—you have forgotten some of the content of John the Baptist’s message. Some progressive, socialist, and leftist Christians may also experience difficulty establishing a practical contemporary connection between John’s emphasis on individual repentance, baptism, and God’s ability to follow through on the centuries old unkept promises to permanently decolonize Judea. Nevertheless, let us try to establish at least one viable, practicable connection.

Luke 1:68-79—also known as Zechariah’s Benedictus—is music sung by John the Baptist’s father Zechariah. Christians may contemplate this text as testimony of Zechariah’s fidelity renewed following a kind of gestation period in blessed silence. His silence is blessed because it allowed him to avoid uttering the wrong words twice on the topic of God’s decolonial power.

His silence is blessed because it allowed him to avoid uttering the wrong words twice on the topic of God’s decolonial power.

This part is key.

Zechariah is a priest whose primary role includes performing cultic rituals and offering the prayers of the entire nation to the God of Israel. It is precisely in the very act of performing his cultic duties that Zechariah’s disbelief opposes the decolonial power of the God of Israel just when God initiated a process that involved transforming Zachariah into a prophet.

An angel appears, in typical form, announcing wonderful news that Zechariah and his spouse Elizabeth will give birth to a special boy who will mature into a man whose obedience to God will provide a unique contribution to tangible answers to the prayers prayed by generations of oppressed people!

Zechariah—childless against Elizabeth’s and his desire—responds by asking for a second layer of verification to supplement the divine promise.

A disappointing and unhelpful response, indeed. 

This writer cannot, in good faith, blame Zechariah.

Nevertheless, let us at the very least consider a possibility, collectively.

At first, Zechariah is unable to believe that his own prayers can be answered. He communicates as much when he asks the messenger of God for additional authentication. Do you get the feeling, however, that Zechariah’s sin of disbelief bears at least a family resemblance to certain habits of mind and speech whereby socialist, leftist, and progressive Christians sin profusely?  

If we can agree that occupying religious space and calling ourselves by the name of the people first martyred for living that life that is animated by the Spirit of the One who died with the people, while, at the same time, saying aloud or in our hearts that the legacies of colonial plunder cannot be destroyed in historic time, is itself, disbelief—then we are on the right track to understanding what Zechariah’s individual disbelief teaches us about how individual repentance relates to ending colonial dominance as a collective.

Consider that Zechariah’s time on earth was an era defined by some as a time of divine silence. Zechariah and his contemporaries inherited centuries of collective memory featuring a steady and demoralizing sequence of foreign dominations. The undeniable fact of historical dominance served to highlight the unfulfilled promises of salvation from long dead prophets.

It is fortunate, then, for Zechariah and his community that he is actually prevented from speaking until the Spirit of God deigns to borrow the aging man’s body to communicate in public the role that his and Elizabeth’s miracle-son, John the Baptist, will play in the realization of God’s unfolding liberation of Israel.

Finally, when the time comes, John publicly confirms Elizabeth’s spoken word by inscribing the name John before witnesses.

Then, the Spirit takes hold of Zechariah and sings through Zechariah’s mouth that John will perform a pivotal role in God’s imminent “deliverance for his people,” divine “salvation from our enemies,” and God’s ”mercy to our ancestors.”

This is the proper function of a priest transformed into a prophet by being possessed by the spirit of God.

Singing through Zechariah, the Spirit announces that the people can finally anticipate in historical time, an era when “we, without fear, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve in holiness and righteousness before God all our days (Luke 1: 68-75).”

But when the miracle child matures into his calling as John the Baptist, his interpretation of God’s salvation exceeds the prophecy that entered that community through Zechariah.

Zechariah prophesied concerning those who worshiped the God of Israel and announced that God would create conditions under which the people of Israel could worship their God free from foreign domination in the Kingdom of Israel.

John the Baptist, in notable contrast, invites penitents, sightseers, pilgrims, onlookers, and spies, onto a path that starts with an initiatory “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (Luke 3:3)” and ends when God’s salvation becomes the lived experience of “all flesh (Luke 6).”

Filled with the Spirit of God in utero, John put on the prophet Isaiah’s expansive confidence in God’s universal love and power.

Filled with the Spirit of God in utero, John put on the prophet Isaiah’s expansive confidence in God’s universal love and power.

In surrender to the Spirit of God, John exhorts those gathered to “bear fruits worthy of repentance,” instead of asserting ‘We have Abraham as our father.” “God is able from these stones,” John retorts in advance, “to raise up children to Abraham (Luke 3: 8).”

John displays infectious confidence in God’s power to realize the long-deferred prophecy of God’s universal socioeconomic leveling after which, “every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth (Luke 1:5).”

But the part regarding “the rough ways made smooth”—this phrase may help us discern a sociopolitical function of individual repentance.

Consider associating Zechariah’s initial disbelief with a kind of sociopolitical roughness or friction.

Ask what if, in fact, I am the one—through sociopolitical disbelief in new possibilities, through my laziness, my cowardice, and my selective practicality—who systemically misrepresents the power of God in public by failing to present my body in service to the Spirit of Christ’s work to deny former impossibilities of their status as impossibilities?[1]  

One scholar says that “God’s word effects salvation history when people hear it, love it, and obey it.”[2]

In this case, then, it makes sense for us to consider on the Second Sunday of Advent, that perhaps we are among the ones causing friction along God’s path to universal salvation.

In this case, then, it makes sense for us to consider on the Second Sunday of Advent, that perhaps we are among the ones causing friction along God’s path to universal salvation.

How might that be?

We obscure what God is doing and cause others to suffer and despair unnecessarily when we act, speak, and think as if the status quo equals or surpasses God ability to use our obedience to invite human beings to lend their own bodies in service to God’s work of universal salvation. Zechariah’s sin of disbelief, however, can remind us to practice saying yes to God’s invitation. But also allow the witness of Zechariah transformation from disbelieving priest to singing prophet to inspire you to say yes to God by repenting of individual sins.  

Zechariah’s sin of disbelief, however, can remind us to practice saying yes to God’s invitation. But also allow the witness of Zechariah transformation from disbelieving priest to singing prophet to inspire you to say yes to God by repenting of individual sins.

It may not be the case that you have sins to repent of the sort committed by Herod Antipas and Salome that ended John the Baptist’s life on earth. Your individual sin that creates a distraction from God’s work of universal salvation may, instead, involve that fashionable form of disbelief that finds your fidelity to a particular political party devolving into an increasingly evil series of choices between a so-called lesser of two evils because you refuse to endure the pain that accompanies almost all new beginnings.

Or, your individual sin may involve perpetual willingness to sell your labor on the open market while never organizing a series of processes with other workers that results in individual and corporate persons being required to share profits with workers whose indispensable labor makes profit possible simply because you do not believe in the possibility of a world in which progress and the end of economic exploitation coincide.

Perhaps still, your individual sin could be your refusal to combine your public antiracism work with an equally public assertation that reparations for the distinct communities working to heal from a range of colonial harms are right, necessary, and possible, because you do not believe that reparations can be achieved without jeopardizing something you hold dearer than ending racial disparities in historic time.

Perhaps still, your individual sin could be your refusal to combine your public antiracism work with an equally public assertation that reparations for the distinct communities working to heal from a range of colonial harms are right, necessary, and possible, because you do not believe that reparations can be achieved without jeopardizing something you hold dearer than ending racial disparities in historic time.

We all must count the cost of inviting the Spirit of Christ to dwell in us.

John and Jesus’s life, work, and deaths do remind us that the empire indeed strikes back!

But once you have decided which spirit deserves to animate your life while you dwell on the earth—the Spirit of Christ or the spirit of capitalism—consider what might happen in the United States and around the world if devotees of Jesus like you took their cue from John the Baptist’s ministry and repented of all patterns of disbelief that make your body into a delivery mechanism through which cynicism, death, and despair delay the historical time when “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

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[1] My phrase ‘deny former impossibilities of their status as impossibilities’ in this devotional is my own Christianization of a formulation found in “Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and the Initiation of an African Shaman,” by Malidoma Somé, 299.

[2] Francois Bovon, A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1—9:50. Translation by Christine M. Thomas Edited by Helmut Koester, Fortress Press; 2002, 121. 

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The Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam serves as the inaugural director of the Center for the Repair of Historic Harms at the Presbyterian Mission Agency, PC(USA) where his team is focused on growing the number of human beings working to share the Good News that restorative justice and Reparations make common sense for the common good as soon as possible and for as long as it takes. Jermaine was ordained as minister of Word and sacrament by the Presbytery of the Twin Cities in 2013 where he began ordained ministry as executive director of 21st Century Academy at Kwanzaa Community Church PC(USA) in North Minneapolis—renamed Liberty Community Church—and Associate Pastor for Social Justice at Oak Grove Presbyterian Church. In addition to serving as the Center for Repair’s director, Jermaine is a Ph.D candidate in Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan where he is completing a book tentatively titled “Trammeled by the Bonds of Union: Social Ecology of anti-Black Violence and Impunity after Emancipation.” Jermaine is also the author of two recent articles on reparations entitled “Breaking the Miller Cycle and Reparations and the Ministry of Planetary Peace.”