A Voice in the Wilderness

There are two stories I remember hearing while I was a child that I must admit influence the way I listen to anyone who steps forward to announce some momentous event. One of those stories was about the boy who cried, “wolf!” The other was the story of “Chicken Little.”

The first story was about a boy who was not happy with the job he had guarding the sheep. The work was not that hard, but he got bored with the long hours and wondered whether anyone appreciated the job he was doing. To break up the monotony he raises the alarm and is delighted when the people from the village rush out help him protect the sheep from harm. Discovering there is no threat, they return to their work in the village.

After a similar sequence of events occurs several more times—with diminishing fervor from the townspeople on each occasion; a wolf does actually attack the flock. When the boy raises the alarm this time, people pause, look up from what they are doing, shake their heads, and then go back to their work. The flock (and in some versions, the boy) is lost.

In some ways Chicken Little is more successful in raising the alarm. She is struck on the head by an acorn as she is pecking around the farmyard, and mistakenly concludes that the sky is falling. As she goes from one resident of the farm to the next, she is quite convincing. With each voice adding to the alarm, the anxiety becomes even more palpable, and leads the whole crew to fail to see the very real danger of following “Foxy Loxy” into his den (from which they never return).

When a voice breaks through the noise today, I have to admit that I filter what they say through a skepticism that had its genesis in these stories from my youth. But I also face a more personal challenge when I am the one who is charged with raising the alarm: How do I call the community of faith to take seriously the challenge “to prepare the way of the Lord”?

He has come and he is coming again. “And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God” (Philippians 1:9-11).