John the Baptist. You’d think we’d try to find a more savory character to concentrate on as we prepare for the Feast of the Nativity. It’d be all right if we stuck to that part about John doing a double back layout in Elizabeth’s womb when he hears Mary’s greeting. There’s joy there, the expectation of something so wonderful even fetuses start doing the Electric Shuffle in the amniotic fluid.

An ante-partum John the Baptist is much easier on the Christmas cheer than the one who shows up a few years later with the leather and barbed-wire tattoo, and the hair all over the place, looking like people your mother told you to steer clear of.

Christmas, most people believe, is about babies and angels and nice barnyard animals. It’s hard to know what to do with John the Baptist in Advent. But here he is in our Gospel for today.

John shows up on the scene, according to Luke, presumably looking to cut a swath for the Messiah who is to follow. He’s preaching repentance, telling people they need to be baptized for the forgiveness of sins.

Now, anybody who’s introduced in a story as a guy who walks around cracking people on the knuckles and telling them that they’re naughty children probably isn’t likely to be around long. We know enough about plot development to know that.

We’ve read to the end of the book and we know that, sooner rather than later, what the authorities take to be John’s overbearing religious criticisms catch up with him and cost him a long and rewarding retirement in his time-share at the beach. His moralizing amongst the hoi poloi isn’t much appreciated by the folks in charge, and it eventually gets him whacked.

But in our Gospel today, John hasn’t yet started the “Turn or Burn” stuff. Luke introduces him with the words of a dream. Prophet words.

They’re not the hard, uncompromising, “Get Right or Get Left” stuff that works so hard on everybody’s last nerve. No.  Luke speaks evocatively, hopefully. He speaks as though he were dreaming.

But Luke’s in good company. These are good words. Prophet words. Another prophet used these words about another people lost in the wilderness. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a people wandering around in the deserted wasteland of racism. He used these dream words back in 1963.

Remember?

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. (Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream*)*

Dream words. Prophet words.

Interestingly enough, the first words in Luke’s Gospel about John the Baptist aren’t even Luke’s words. They are literally, in fact, prophet words. They belong to Isaiah. All the way back in Isaiah 40.

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.  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; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (3:4b-6).

Remember where the children of God were when those words were first uttered? Busting rocks and stamping license plates over Babylon.

Remember?

Nebuchadnezzar had force-marched the cream of the crop from the land of Judah around the Fertile Crescent, taking a long detour around the desert, the wilderness, all the way back to Babylon, where they were living in exile.

Now, the accommodations in Babylon weren’t all that horrible. The kids got to play little league and some of the parents were voted onto the PTA, but, still, they were a long way from home.

In fact, what lay between them and home was the wilderness. The desert—the place that the people of God had languished in throughout so much of its history.

Remember?