Gang Up

And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him . . . 

 - From Mark 1

John the Baptist was a rock star (yes, I called him "Baptist" rather than "baptizer." I'm not afraid people will assume he was a member of the Southern Baptist Denomination).

For a period of time, he was the most popular thing around. He hit his stride, and everybody had to see him. He was the new thing. He was different. He had odd practices, and we may assume that a wave of people adopted his ways: his look, his diet. 

But just like that, he was gone, and when Herod imprisoned him and had him executed, there was no one around to defend him. 

People are no different today. The Information Age, our modern equivalent to the Tree of Knowledge of Adam and Eve, is too much for us to handle. 

One week Senator Al Franken has a best-selling book. The next week, members of his own team are demanding he step down. 

There's hope for anyone that is down, in the public eye, to be lifted up for almost any reason. And a person at the top of their game can come toppling down, with very little warning. And we all play along. 

The Gospel has to be different than that. It needs to be rooted in things that do not change. We can't count on anything else, or any thing. Everything changes, and we are carried to and fro by the latest trend. But in Christ, we have to find steadiness and constancy. 

Here's something to resist: The ebbs and flows of popular opinion. Let's rise above it. An easy thing to resist is partisanship. Just refuse to play.

When I was a kid in Rochester, New York, my friends in my neighborhood were the best. They helped make my childhood wonderful. 

But they were human, and immature, and occasionally they (we) would start talking about someone not present. The negatives would percolate and soon we would decide to "gang up" on the missing person. When he or she showed up, they (we) shunned them. You would have to go back inside and wait until it passed over. A day or two later, one of them would come to the door and say that it's okay, everyone wants to play with you now. 

It was an ugly system, but it was a fact of life. And it still happens today, in the adult world. (Yes, it does, right?) And I developed a sort-of "radar" where I could pick up when things had made a bad turn about me. It is not a good feeling.

This is what partisanship is. It is what "following the crowd" is. And let's face it . . . with the anti-Franken stuff, the anti-Trump, the anti-Hillary, the anti-Kaepernick, etc., etc.,...  At the heart of so much of it, we want to fit into a crowd that we have selected. 

Resist it. Wouldn't it be great, to have been someone that actually stood up for John the Baptist, a public figure who, just last week, was adored by tens of thousands?