December 5, Advent 2C (Luke 3:1-6)
To be wild is to be free, unbought and unbossed by the structures of power.
Rome pulled the strings of life in Jesus’ time and place through a unique iteration of settler colonialism masked by puppet kings and empire-bankrolled priests. God goes around all this to create a pathway of freedom for the people. The God of justice bypasses the game of thrones and disrupts trickle-down religion through a wild man in the middle of nowhere.
Zechariah’s son resigned from his hereditary claim to the priesthood and its iconic regalia, opting for camel-hair clothes and an eccentric diet of roasted locusts and organic honey. According to Henry David Thoreau, “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” This is often misquoted as “wilderness.” But Thoreau uses wildness to refer to an experiential and mental state of human beings, not a geographical phenomenon. John impels us to embrace wildness as a form of human freedom invested in the flourishing of the other.
What if God is calling us to a wild life—not an existence of convenience, settling, respectability, or compliance? The domesticating character of religion can crush us into dust trampled over by the ruling classes or cram us into the miserable mold of a status quo gasping for the rarified air of authenticity. It is an existential tragedy to live high on public compliance but deficient of divine love.
