Living into New Understandings

One of my regular “go-to” exegetical blogs offered an intriguing wondering question this week on the Matthew 3:1-12 text.  “I wonder who baptized John.”  
 
It’s easy sometimes to sit where we sit and venerate the inspiration of God in the life of John and other prophets. God had a special connection with these folks, right?  They aren’t like us.  God was guiding them and they were going where God led.  Only they were creating new understandings of where God was leading, not just for themselves, but where God was leading the faithful community through them.  They were both being discipled themselves and discipling others.
 
We have a tendency in life to stick with what we already know, rather than slowing down enough to listen and observe how we might be led to new understandings.  As John baptizes others, and eventually Jesus, in waters of repentance, he has an understanding that something even more transformative than what he is doing will come to pass.  He is imagining that future that God is bringing into being.  But he is doing so while also living into the new thing he is doing himself.  John was working out a new ritual, inspired by God, but still needing discernment and time to understand what this new thing meant.  You have to wonder how God may have been at work in others who John encountered along his own journey to this understanding.  
 
If we remember that prophets are among the great cloud of witnesses, both as disciples who followed and as those who discipled others, then what might that mean for each of us?  We’re the earthen vessels of God’s goodness, capable of being connected just as John was.  What should that mean about how open you are to the inspiration of God?