Writer Alice Camille says that there’s something about a free person that is just so attractive! Take the woman who is confident enough to let her greying hair remain grey. Or the teenager who isn’t enslaved to the cool factor. Or the neighbor who gives up keeping up with the Joneses and doesn’t buy into The Next Big Thing. Or someone who refuses to play partisan games but prefers to hold onto values wherever they are found rather than the pigeonhole of political identity. If we’re looking for a role model of human liberation, John the Baptist is the guy. Emerging from the wilderness, he’s a man who is not owned by any authority or ideological camp. Roman soldiers come for his advice because they know he’s not in anyone’s pocket. The Pharisees seek his baptism as openly as public sinners and the average Judean citizen. John entered the wilderness to shake society’s grip and escape its preconceptions, cravings, and conveniences. He also eluded the rubberstamp of religious institutions that pose a stranglehold on prophetic impulses, especially those that challenge their notions of good order and authorized power. Because neither temple nor government nor social convention lays claim to him, John is free to speak whatever the Spirit of holiness puts into his mouth. And he would lose his head as the price of such freedom. The real test of his liberty is that even that real possibility did not deter him from saying and doing what was given to him to proclaim. This brings us to the question: have we been bought, by whom, and to what extent? I know there are ways that I am more American than I am Christian, more middle class than I am Catholic, more a product of my education and its advantages than I am a disciple of the gospel. Every advantage I’ve accepted without question is one step down the road of compromise with a culture that does not always or often invest itself in gospel values. John went into the wilderness to escape the shackles of conformity and compromise. Routinely, you and I must also seek the wilderness territory to shake ourselves free of counterfeit allegiances and remind ourselves to whom we ultimately belong.