Oct 19 2019 Matthew 11: 7-15

What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces.

Jesus is talking to the crowds who’d gone to see John the Baptizer. He’s trying to figure explain to them who John was, and who John wasn’t. He eventually gets to the conclusion that John is a prophet, and moreover, the one Isaiah writes about, “See, I am sending a messenger ahead of you”. John, Jesus was saying, was the one sent to talk about the way things are to be in God’s kingdom, in the person of Jesus.

For a slight digression, I’ve always appreciated John the Baptist. As someone described as a prophet, John helps explain what prophets are and aren’t. They aren’t fortune tellers, as much as they are truth tellers. Prophets describe the way things should be in God’s kingdom, and contrast that to how things are in today’s kingdom. That sounds like fortune telling, but it’s more about holding out the practical, world application of something that might be theoretical, or hard to imagine, like God’s kingdom come. Deacons are called to be prophets, and to keep that vision of God’s kingdom in the front of people’s mind.

Before Jesus gets to the conclusion that John is a prophet, he reminds the crowds what John is not. He asks if they went looking for someone in fine soft robes, and then says that people in soft robes are found in palaces, not in the wilderness where they went to look for John. 

This morning, I’m thinking about our unquenchable desire for soft robes, and those who wear them. I believe it was in Gulliver’s Travels where the people are telling Gulliver he should be wearing a shirt of soft silk. He’s aghast, wondering why he’d wear something that would rip and not stand up to his life. No, he’d continue to wear his rough, but sturdy shirt. I remember thinking that was brilliant.

But I have the equivalent of soft robes. I try to find others with soft robes. Isn’t that what advertising is all about? Wear this brand of clothing – never mind that it needs to be dry cleaned, and isn’t even very comfortable. Or those high heel shoes. Really? Most sales are trying to get us to get softer robes, fancier cars. Why? Is it the status we think those things reflect? Or do we really enjoy them?

Not only do we want these things for ourselves, we also go seek them out in others, like the crowds looking for fanciness when they were seeking John. We idolize the rich and famous, the stylish and the palace-residing. Are we trying to see what we might be? How the other half lives?

It’s interesting to think about where we look for things, and where we overlook them. John was probably nothing much to look at. No fancy robes, just a wild-haired, bug eating guy. In today’s world, we might see lots of folks who look and talk like John. Would we give them the same credence as we do a well-heeled speaker?

A few years ago, I was working at a homeless breakfast, and a woman with green-tattooed eyebrows was offering advice. She wasn’t much to look at, but she was a prophet, to be sure. She talked about the gratitude she had for the sun which had just come out, and that she believed her stuff would dry out from last night’s rain. She said that God made sure that there were little bits of sun, thrown in her days and nights. Always.

Today, I want to seek the wild-eyed prophet, and stop worrying about my soft robes.