This Week: Advent 3C
Gospel: Luke 3:7-18
I rarely struggle to put this story of John the Baptist out in the wilderness, flocked to by countless people, in a context that fits our time. The strangeness of the prophet to us is less so to them. His invitation, to come out into the wilderness to experience a change you can’t find in the city is evocative, familiar, traditional. Further too, when we consider the invitation to change one’s fortune, and one’s community is understood by virtually every generation it would seem.
So many people today feel stuck on a treadmill of never enough or living out someone else’s dreams or struggling to make ends meet. People here always seem to be looking for a savior.
This week, many are reflecting on the way the United States allows its people to be exploited when they are at their weakest: through the health insurance factor in our healthcare system. UnitedHealthcare was the 8th largest corporation in the world last year. It made record profits off denying care. A concept that is, at its heart, the notion of taking money from a person to provide a service only to choose later that such a service is “unnecessary.” A legal way of taking someone’s money.
The reason we’re talking about this is certainly tragic and not something Christians can condone (the murder of a CEO), but the aftermath certainly serves as a “teachable moment.”
As masses of people come out into the wilderness to hear John the Baptist’s call for repentance, many of those people asking for help, saying “what can I do?” are people who make money by exploiting people, impoverishing them, repeating the formula: “deny, defend, depose”. And to this, John’s response is don’t. Don’t do that stuff.
Collecting Taxes
Insurance in the U.S. today serves as a fascinating modern analog to the Roman tax collector, who was paid little by Rome, but empowered to charge more than Rome expected—and pocket the difference.
This caused for Jewish and Roman tax collectors alike a set of curious challenges and opportunities:
- Tax collectors couldn’t survive without upcharging.
- People couldn’t afford the existing taxes.
- Rome gets its money either way. And if they don’t it comes out of the tax collector’s hide.
There is an obvious logic, then to what the tax collector tries to do. They charge enough to live on, but not too much as to be a pariah. Most of us could sympathize, I suspect. And Jesus seems keen to sympathize with tax collectors when the people consider them traitors. But this logic only gets us so far—especially when it comes in contact with John proclaims which is:
“Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.”
In short: take nothing for yourself. Stop living off of exploiting others.
Back to the Health Insurance Example
So what does this mean for insurance companies? I think we see a similarly devastating truth: take no profit. If it costs X amount to get the care a person needs, it should be only X amount.
Be careful of the rabbit holes and justifications and excuses here, because the same logic can get applied throughout the industry by anyone who can set a price of a thing: doctors, hospitals, insurers, drug manufacturers, etc.
We similarly see from the other examples a related measure of approach. If you’ve got two coats, give one to someone who has none and soldiers shouldn’t use the threat of violence to get something out of someone. There is an ethic being developed here, isn’t there? And its most succinct articulation is Give and don’t exploit.
Exploitation
Modern economics is complicated on purpose. It is designed to make you not want to look too closely, to trust the experts, and to not worry about where your money goes. But central to Jesus’s teaching is that we don’t exploit people. Which is a tough message for people who make money by charging people for services at all. And doubly for those who charge for services when a person has experienced a tragedy. This is one of the reasons people frequently loathe lawyers and insurance companies.
This complexity, however, is part of the means of establishing and preserving exploitative relationships. Untying the problem is itself a problem. Or, alternatively, trying to untie a problem without reducing the incomes of anyone is one of the favorite tools.
In his book, Winners Take All, Anand Giridharadas describes the persistent dynamic of the powerful to demand solutions be “win-win” to even be considered, often throwing their weight around to ensure they never have to be on the losing end of a deal.
The wealthy often feel justified in demanding solutions that preserve their opportunities, so that all parties “win” in the negotiation. This seems like a kind of fairness—until we consider, say the 96% of the wealth benefits of the productivity gains going to the top 0.1% of the population over the last several decades. That isn’t a win-win. But to fix that would be construed as a loss to the rich. And as long as we need a win-win, we’re stuck with a system that makes the bottom 90% of the population lose. The win-win becomes the barrier that insures the status quo.
These conversations, when rendered as a competition of equals—the wealthy versus the rest of us—all of us people with concerns for our health and stability—are great for comprehending humanity and being honest about our responses to each other. But they are terrible for fixing systemic problems. Because we too easily sympathize with the handful of billionaires and seek to preserve their wealth while thinking GoFundMe campaigns for medical tragedies are somehow merely regrettable.
Can you see why this doesn’t work? It is like our imaginations are being obliterated by thinking of the humanity of the people who would exploit ours.
The prophet gives us a pretty clear take on this: don’t exploit people. And when people are being exploited, stop it. Preferably without bullets.
In other words,
if Christians listened to the gospel, insurance executives would be humble, generous, and working tirelessly to ensure people don’t die of preventable causes. Their pay would match those of the helping professions, like teachers and nurses. And we wouldn’t be satisfied until that is normal.
The Fire Baptism
I’ve focused a lot on the conversation between John and the people coming to him, but the second half is focused on the people’s messianic speculation and John’s response. And this, too, is a place of contrast for the modern reader, who probably hears the message a bit different than the people who were there would. But let’s acknowledge one thing we ought to remember:
Fire and water are death. And life.
The two images are both signs of protection, hope, birth. And they are both deadly.
The early Christians saw the waters of baptism as drowning, ending one life, to rise out of the water, to begin a new one. It is a twin experience: both always present. Fire, too, purifies and destroys.
A baptism of fire, then hits like a counter and a complement to the water of John. The same and different. And Jesus will come and reveal the truth, to clean up the place.
This, the evangelist says, is good news.
These images, which I suspect tend to frighten those who take them seriously and are welcomed by those who think they must be good, are offered as good news—and those that think they must be good are, perhaps, onto something. Not that a literal wildfire is good, though. Or that people being burned to death is somehow a sign of God’s goodness. It is something short of that assumption.
Focusing on the good
I’ll be honest. I bet most people don’t think too hard about it. Or they are fine with vibing it. But I have had good conversations with people who genuinely struggle with a passage like this because they are focused on the implications for the ones who are burned. This is way different in spirit than the ones who think they’d never make the cut or revel in the idea that the burning is what other people get. This is more like a question of what God does with unrepentant evil, and here, it sounds like it just gets burned away; next question. But those of us committed to a loving God aren’t entirely satisfied with that. And it is an open question of whether or not we should be.
What ends up happening when this question comes up is that we engage in the grand unified theory of God and the redemption of the world—which never seems like what John (or Jesus) is ever getting at. The point is to help us see and become, not make us agree to their concept of the cosmos.
Mostly, though, I’m drawn to how the binary is used to highlight what is good and what is bad so that we know what good is and avoid the bad. I’m usually not big on binary thinking, but our prophetic voices use it to motivate us in a particular direction—to see what it means to be good—and remind us of what would happen if we didn’t. Like the carrot and the stick, the carrot is by far the most effective and yet the stick continues to exist as a contrast.
When Jesus comes to baptize the people with fire, should we fear him? Not if we are following his Way of Love. Because then we’d already be on fire.