Baptist

I distrust people who know what God wants them to do because it always coincides with their own desires.
Susan B. Anthony

"Everything I know about him makes me think I would have gone out of my way not to see him. He sounds too much like those street evangelists who wave their Bibles at you and tell you that you are going straight to hell if you do not repent right now (and of course they are the only ones who know how you are supposed to do that and whether or not you have passed the test).

Only there was one big difference between them and John. Self-appointed prophets tend to plant themselves right in your way so you have to cross to the other side of the street to avoid them. They get in your face and dare you to ignore them, whereas John planted himself in the middle of nowhere. He set up shop in the wilderness, and anyone who wanted to hear what he had to say had to go to a lot of trouble to get there, borrowing the neighbor’s donkey or setting off on foot with enough water for the journey, which led down lonely trails infested with bandits.

You have to wonder why someone would do a thing like that, especially someone from Jerusalem, which was where the temple was, and the rabbis, and all the accumulated wisdom of the religious establishment. If someone wanted to hear from God, why not stay right there, maybe attend some extra services or make an appointment with one of the chief priests? Anyone who would turn away from all that and set off for the wilderness was looking for something else, something the temple could not or would not supply.

John had it, apparently. He was scary, all right. He was uncivilized. He was from another planet, but he spoke about the one who was coming as if he were repeating what God was saying to him right that moment, one sentence at a time. He did not have many details. He did not know the name of the one who was coming, for instance, or what he looked like, but he knew that the old world was about to end and a new world was spinning toward him, carried in the arms of God’s chosen one. It was a world that would be built out of new materials, not the rearranged stones of the old religion.

The Holy Spirit had gotten all but covered up in Jerusalem, with pretend piety and temple taxes and priestly hocus-pocus. The flame was all but snuffed out under the weight of all that foppery, so God moved it—out into the wilderness, where the air was sharp and clean, out under the stars where it was fanned by the most socially unacceptable character anyone could imagine. Dressed in animal hair with a piece of tanned hide around his waist, his breath heavy with locusts and wild honey, John proclaimed that Someone was coming, someone so spectacular that it was not enough simply to hang around waiting for him to arrive. It was time to get ready, to prepare the way, so that when he came he could walk a straight path right to their doors."

-- Barbara Brown Taylor