John the Baptist is still hanging around for another week, preaching repentance, exhorting people to generous, merciful, honest lives, and preparing the way for the good news that comes to us in Jesus. Here are two wise and wonderful women with something to say about John the Baptist and the good news he brings.

First, from Barbara Brown Taylor:

People were drawn to [John], apparently, not because of who he was and what he said but also because of what they offered them - a chance to come clean, to stop pretending they were someone else and start over again, by allowing him to wash them off…John’s baptism bypassed the temple and all its rites. Setting up shop in the wilderness, he proclaimed his freedom from so called civilization, with all its rules and requirements. He called people to wake up, to turn around, so that they would not miss the new thing God was doing right before their eyes. (Barbara Brown Taylor, from Home By Another Way, Cowley Publications, 1999.)

And then, expanding on a similar theme, Nadia Bolz-Weber:

The way in which John the Baptist prepares the people for the Gospel is by making room for it through washing away their old ideas and expectations. The untruth and sin and shame and all competing identities float away in the Jordan because the real thing was finally here. Because, in Jesus, God is doing a new thing, not to make us good but to make us new....Repentance is what happens to us when the Good News, the truth of who we are and who God is, enters our lives and scatters the darkness of competing ideas. For it is the external truth of God that liberates you from the bondage of self. This is what the daily return to baptism looks like. It is like the arm of God reaches in to rip out your own heart and replace it with God’s own. The Gospel is like your own emancipation proclamation. Every time you hear the absolution – that you are forgiven, every time you hear that Christ has come into the world to change everything, every time you hear that you are a child of God and that this is God’s very own body broken and poured out for you; every time these external words of Good News enter your ears they scatter the darkness of competing claims. (Nadia Bolz-Weber, "Sermon on Repentance.")

In this last week before Christmas, how is God making you new? Where do you hear God's voice of liberation? How can you live into your divine identity as a redeemed and blessed child of God?