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Black Friday is the advent of profit for marketers. The Advent (anticipation/expectation) season is special to people of the Christian faith and my hope every year is to awaken more people to a living, present, advent experience. The “Big Church industrial complex” doles out its own version of Black Friday, wooing as many undecided voters as possible into its machinery, and anesthetizing the masses with entertaining Christmas hymns, holiday gush, and nativity sensitivity training. The herd habituates back into tradition by conflating the nativity story with the Advent of God’s Kingdom, and then it highjacks the Kingdom in the midst of us, by telling us it still hasn’t really arrived.

Religion keeps us in Advent Purgatory.

If the Advent is to possess any real and present meaning, we need to replace our nativity scenes with John the Baptist living in the wilderness. Why was he there? What is the significance of his message? For thirty years after the Magi had gone back home, John and Jesus co-existed under the trees (Hebrew Fathers), preparing for the Way of the Lord, which is the most subversive movement in the history of the world.

“Behold, I send my messenger before your face,
    who will prepare your way,
³ the voice of one crying in the wilderness:
    ‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
    make his paths straight,’” (Mark 1:2-3, sited from Malachi 3:1, Isaiah 40:3)

While baby Jesus initiates the Advent of God’s reign and rule in the world, it’ll take another thirty years before it becomes a chain saw in the face of religion. The arrival of God’s Kingdom is NOT the inauguration of a new world religion, but a subversive force that unearths all worldly (exousia– authorities) or “power-over” dynamics.

“Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees (religious leaders)…” (Matthew 3:10)

The Good News (Gospel) of the Bible is an absolute wrecking ball to all world religion. Salvation has come to ALL PEOPLE, not just religious people. John the Baptist was the forerunner of religious deconstruction, paving the way for Jesus to go farther than John:

 “You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.” (Matthew 24:2)

“Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.” (Matthew 21:31)

If religion was going to be promised WAY OF THE LORD, John would have remained in his religious family, in the shadow of the Temple. Instead, John lives as far from religion as a man can get. By religious standards, he’s unclean, wearing dead animal skins, eating undignified things, and living as a wild beast in the wilderness, and not within the safety of city walls. Yet the people “…were in expectation” (prosdokáo– waiting, expectation, advent)… and are going out to him, questioning their inner self (dialogizomai–puling their heads out/through) (Luke 3:15). The Religious Industrial Complex, of Jerusalem, its temple, priests, and purification rituals, is being emptied…gutted.

The Biblical revelation is that the Advent doesn’t bring people into religion, it liberates us from it.

John’s GOSPEL reveals ALL people are forgiven, not by religion, but by God Himself. Tax collector and soldiers are “in” now that God has subverted religion, and Jesus hadn’t even started his ministry. One rule replaces all the Hebrew religion, “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance” (Luke 3:8), “Rethink how to live.”

Can you now see that THE WAY OF THE LORD is being obscured and even co-opted by religion.

A listener recently paralleled the Democrats in the recent election with the current Church Industrial Complex. Pastors and parishioners like political elites, live in cloistered culturally contrived bubbles that are disconnected from the realities of our modern world. Paid clergy, like the Democrats are dismissive of podcasters, like me, where so many come to hear the prophetic voice. Their echo chambers of fundamentalism create reality for them, rather than God’s word which reveals how dangerous the Gospel is for institutional power. John told the powerful in Luke 3:12-14:

“Collect no more than you are authorized to do.”

“Do not extort money from anyone…”

Do you belong to a system that believes John’s Gospel? A simple test is to follow the money, Judas always holds the money bag. Is Advent a church growth strategy? If your pastors are paid to preach, they have more in common with the religious ruling class than they do with John, Jesus, and Paul.

Some people hate my constant deconstruction of religion, others cheer me on. There is a place for communities to organize, but not for the sake of religion. There are twenty times more churches than Starbucks and almost none of them see the Advent of God’s Kingdom as disruptive to their business. John’s “axe of deconstruction” was as subversive to the religious chaff in his day, as it is for the modern church:

“His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” (Matthew 3:12)

When I pick up John’s axe today, and wield his message, the religious mind cannot make sense of life in God apart from religion. Institutional power beheaded John, in the same way scoffers in religious power keep stifling voices like mine. The cry from the wilderness still goes out, and religion hates it as much now as it ever did.

But you are here now… What do you say?

If we truly want to experience the Advent season this year, we must follow the winnowing fork, lean into the axe swing of deconstruction, and regain the Gospel that subverts the institutional powers of religion, and every authority which belongs to Satan (Matthew 4:8-9).

Let that one sink in.

I can say boldly and confidently that the fruit of this ministry proves we don’t need to go to church in order to BE the Church. We don’t need to convert to the Christian religion if instead we place our faith in Christ and follow his example of subverting institutional power, as we wake up to this reality in own life. Once we see Christ everywhere, “in all things” (Ephesians 1:10, Colossians 1:17,) we know the Advent of the Kingdom has come to us.

What are we to do if we are to avoid going through the motions of Big Religion, or getting hooked into the pageantry of church marketing this Christmas season? I suggest we seek our King out in the desert of our life. Participate no more than John or Jesus did in the religion of the day…not from rebellion, but in fidelity to the Advent. Let the axe take out your religious root. God is not in religion, He’s no longer in the temple, He got out, and dwells in the wilderness within us with nowhere to lay his head. Find your King dwelling in His kingdom in the midst of you…in the stillness…in the quiet desert…away from the light pollution of the religious city where the Advent ceases to be an historical event, and becomes the foundation of our very life.