Hearing & Heeding Hard-hitting Words from John the Baptist & Ralph D. Winter
By Shane Bennett
Turns out my seven-year-old son has a superpower. Not the “power of hyperspeed” he imagines but the power of dodging. Yes, dodging. I’ve seen it in action.
Months ago, while we were enjoying some family time on the front porch, his 12-year-old sister inadvertently dribbled the basketball off her foot. It caromed directly toward the boy’s face, who, though not watching, tipped his head out of the way with scary-good timing. The ball sailed by instead of giving him a bloody nose.
Then, two weeks ago at dinner, I failed to account for Colorado’s extreme barometric pressure swings when I opened the ranch dressing. This resulted in a thumb-sized glob of dressing rocketing across the table. Again, with uncanny timing, the boy leaned to the side, allowing the dressing to hit and subsequently drip down the chair right behind where his little, lithe body had been. I know not what this superpower portends!
Similarly, I seem to also have a gift for dodging, though it’s less a superpower and more a refined avoidance. Prepping to preach on John the Baptist this past week brought this home for me. Some listeners wanted to dodge John’s message: the Pharisees and Sadducees desired the virtue-signaling points of getting dunked but not the hassle of changed behavior.
As for Herod, he dodged by tossing John the Peskiest into prison.
The Radical Message of John the Baptist
It seems that the crowd, some tax-gatherers, and the soldiers honestly wanted to feel the full weight of John’s message. I was stunned by their questions and John’s answers. And I don’t want to dodge them.
If you’ve read through the Gospel of Luke a few times in your Christian walk you may find it easy to breeze by what John tells them. I think, at least for me, it might be worth a non-dodging pause:
Crowd: What should we do then?
John: Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.
Tax collectors: Teacher, what should we do?
John: Don’t collect any more than you are required to.
Soldiers: And what should we do?
John: Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.
In each case, John is saying, “Do right regarding your resources and do right to others who lack your resources.” One commentator says, “Luke possesses a sensitive, compassionate theology of the poor.”
I wonder: Do I?
Choosing a Wartime Lifestyle
As that question rolled around in my head, I remembered a scary, provocative article that might have made John the Baptist proud, A Reconsecration to a Wartime, Not a Peacetime, Lifestyle by Dr. Ralph Winter. If you’ve taken the Perspectives course you’ve probably seen it. Maybe like me, you dodged it or tried to dismiss it.
Basically, Dr. Winter said to live on the minimum amount of money and stuff you need so that you can direct the excess toward the best kingdom use.
What I inadvertently heard was, “The poorest among you is the holiest.” While that may sometimes be the case, it’s not what Winter was advocating. He clarified this in 1983 in a family profile in Missions Frontiers:
“A wartime lifestyle may be more expensive or less expensive than simple,” Winter explained. “If a man is out in a trench and he’s eating K-rations, he’s not using up much money, but a guy who’s flying a fighter plane may be using up $40,000 a month of technology. In other words, during wartime one doesn’t judge according to the same model of lifestyle. What’s important is getting the job done.”
Two Key Questions
With John the Baptist on one hand and Ralph Winter on the other, I have a couple of questions. I’m asking them of myself and invite you to consider them as well.
1. Do our baptized, repentant lives reflect a “sensitive, compassionate theology of the poor”?
Do you find that in your life, your church? Generally in the Church throughout your country? In the U.S. these issues seem to have taken on partisan shadows in recent (or maybe not so recent) days. But what would it look like to view them less politically and more biblically?
I wonder if there are Christian responses to the poor and marginalized that transcend party affiliation? Surely many believers are doing many amazing things that would make Luke say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking when I wrote that!”
But for others of us, me included, we may need to keep thinking and take the risk of asking God to shape and direct our thinking. We need to pause before slipping into popular tropes and cliches about why things are the way they are and what is and isn’t being done.
To gain some perspective on your personal food situation, just in case John asks you to give some away, ask yourself this question: If you only ate the food currently in your house, without going out to eat or buy more food (except for milk!) how long could you go? The couple from whom I poached this idea went for 147 meals!
2. What does it mean to live a wartime lifestyle and who should try to do so?
Second part first: If Winter had his way, every one of us would adopt this practice as soon as we toweled off after baptism!
He suggests in his article (written decades ago) that everyone in his denomination could live on what an average pastor or support-raising missionary makes. Pastors may be doing a little better these days, I don’t know. But what about that? What would that mean for your lifestyle? I wonder what would happen if I floated the idea out to the little church where I serve as associate pastor? Could be I wouldn’t have to preach anymore for a long while!
One of the reasons this is on my mind is that I’ve been scheming with a small band of brothers and sisters about how the remaining 1,600 or so unengaged people groups might get gospel workers on the ground among them. I’ve wondered aloud about the possibility (and wisdom) of hiring people to do it! We hire pastors, don’t we?
How many wartime lifestylers would it take to free up funds to hire 1,600 small teams of missionaries? How cool might that be?!