During Advent I presided at at the Catholic Community's Sunday Mass at the University of Guelph. It afforded an opportunity to speak about the importance of John the Baptist, not only for the season of Advent, but for the whole liturgical year, since it's on John's avowal, "He [Jesus] must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30), that our liturgical year is structured, with the Nativity of Christ coming just after the winter solstice, and the nativity of John, just after the summer solstice. (The only other nativity celebrated in the iturgy is that of the Virgin Mary, the 8th of Sept.)

Both are feasts of light – light increasing and light decreasing. In pre-Reformation times, the Nativity of John the Baptist was a great feast, parallel to that of Christmas. It still survives, even in a predominantly Lutheran country like Latvia, where bonfires are lit on the eve of the feast. And, of course, it survives in Québec.

Growing up in Montréal, I observed the great parades each year on the 24th of June as the floats proceeded along Sherbrooke Street, past the corner of St-Denis, where my father had a properous tobacco shop. The parade rivalled the Santa Claus Parade in size and probably also in the numbers who turned out to watch it.

It was such an important religious and cultural celebration that I was almost convinced that John the Baptist – St-Jean Baptiste – must be a French Canadian. Only later did I discover that he was actually a separatist, or so the Société St-Jean Baptiste made it appear.

This co-opting of religious symbols by the prevailing culture is as strong as ever in our secular North American culture: it has co-opted Advent and turned it into shopping days till Christmas; it has co-opted St. Nicholas and turned him into Santa Claus; and it has co-opted Christmas itself and turned it into a time for racking up credit card debt in order to buy mountains of gifts that people don't need and often don't want.

And so we have the curious phenomenon of the Nativity scene in the Mall. At the start of Advent, the Stone Road Mall in Guelph announced that, for purely business reasons, it had decided to do away with the traditional Nativity scene. A storm of protest erupted, drawing in even the cardinal archbishop of Toronto, a native of Guelph, and soon the Nativity scene was reinstated.

While this might seem a victory of sorts for Christians in our overwhelmingly secular culture, we might ask ourselves, Is it really? If someone from another culture were to visit us during the Advent season,,like St. Paul visiting Athens, he might note that there is a Nativity scene in front of every Christian church, and even one in the Mall, and, like Paul, he might say,"I see how extremely religious you are in every way."

But he might also note that most of the churches are half empty, while the Mall is crowded with shoppers. He might well conclude that the Mall is our true place of worship, and that shopping is our real religion: in it is all our hope, 

Our culture is largely what defines us, and our North American culture attempts to define us as consumers, as though this were our principal function in life. But it is our Baptism that defines us as Christians. Claimed for Christ by the sign of the cross, and anointed with the Holy Spirit, we have been made prophets, priests, and rulers or shepherds.

Both John and Jesus were prophets, and more than prophets. A prophet is one who, in Abraham Heschel's words, hears God's voice and feels God's heart. He is brought into the inmost sanctuary of the Almighty's presence, who whispers his pain and sorrow in the prophet's ear: "I thought my people would call me My Father, and would not turn from following me."

And so God's suffering becomes the prophet's suffering: "My anguish! My anglish! I writhe in pain!" as he sets out to proclaim the Word of the Lord. But Jesus not only hears God's voice, he is God's voice; Jesus not only feels God's heart, he is God's heart. He is the Word of God made flesh in order to reveal the compassion of God.

As prophets, both John and Jesus oppose the ruling powers. John challenges Herod, the ruler of Galilee, and Jesus challenges the chief priests when he enters Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and goes straight to the Temple, clearing out the courtyard, saying, with Jeremiah, that they have made it a den of robbers. How, then, are we in our own day to live the vocation of prophet?

As Christians, we are called to be in the world but not of it. Where possible, we should try to be leaven and light for the world, transforming it by our work and by our lives. But as prophets, we are called to challenge the culture of our day, as John did, as Jesus did.

This is difficult because it demands first that we grow in awareness of our own culture and of how it works. Like fish in water, we live and breathe our culture, and are hardly conscious of it.

The Nativity scene in the Mall demonstrates just how unsonscious we are of the ways in which we serve the culture, even when we seem to be protesting against it.