Worship on 12/11/2011

 

“Confusion and Chaos, But Here Comes Joy”

The Gospel of John, 1:6-8, 19-28

 

We live in a world of euphemisms.  You no longer simply rake leaves; you are now in landscape redevelopment.  You no longer hire a baby sitter: you seek a child care maintenance engineer.  Where once you brought your simple covered dish to the second Sunday buffet, you are now an ecclesiastic caterer.  Well, John the Baptist was having none of this.  He was plain speaking: in the words of Popeye the Sailorman, he said “I am what I am”, and he was about to get into a whole lot of trouble.

 

Picture him out there a few miles from Jerusalem, standing on the banks of the Jordan River, preaching a message that was different from what might be heard at the Temple – and baptizing people to boot. The operative word here is “different”.  The people at the Temple did not like different, so they sent out emissaries to make enquiries on their behalf.  They were asking “Who are you?” but this was just as polite way of saying “Who do you think you are!”

 

Here was the problem. John was the son of Zechariah, a well known and beloved priest who served at the Temple.  The only requirement for priesthood was descent:  you had to be a descendant of Aaron, the brother of Moses, a man we encountered first in Exodus – hundreds of years and dozens of generation before.  If a man was not descended from Aaron, nothing could make him a priest.  If he was descended from Aaron, nothing could keep him from being a priest.  John was a descendant, a priest, but he was out there in the wilderness saying some radical things and doing some strange things.  He had better have a good excuse!  Who did he think he was?

 

“Are you the Messiah, the Christ from God?” they asked.   This was a pretty obvious question, because people were always looking for the Messiah, hoping for God’s intervention.  It was a vital part of their religion.  And John said “No!”

 

“Are you Elijah?” they asked.  Another reasonable question!  The priests knew their tradition, and their tradition told them that Elijah would come to announce the Messiah.  He would stand on a high mountain with the angel  Gabriel, who would blow his trumpet, and Elijah’s voice would carry all over the land, proclaiming the coming of the Lord!  They asked, “Are you Elijah?” and John said “No!”

 

Then they asked yet another question: “Are you the prophet?”  The prophet!  Another part of the tradition of the Jewish faith was that a prophet – either Isaiah or Jeremiah – would come back to prepare the way for the one who would come.  Moses himself had suggested this, years ago.  But, John said “No!”

 

Finally, in exasperation, they asked. “Then, who are you?” and John answers, “I am but a voice crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord.”  “I am a man who is not fit to untie the sandals of the one who is to come!”

 

Now it was here that John was really flirting with trouble.  He was out there demanding that his fellow Jews submit to baptism – and they were walking into the waters with him!  Jews were not supposed to be baptized.  They had already been made clean by their relationship to Father Abraham. Only Gentiles who converted to Judaism were to be washed of their previous life. But John insisted that everybody – Jew and Gentile – had to be cleansed of their sins. This is not what the folks from temple at Jerusalem wanted to report back to the chief priest and the Pharisees.

 

Now this is the way the first day of John’s gospel ends.  The very next day was an extremely important day:  it was the first day of the ministry of Jesus Christ in the world!  John, knee deep in the Jordan river, looks up and sees Jesus approaching.  And John makes his announcement, the one that he has been brought into the world to make.  He says, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”  And this is how the first season of Advent ended for a lot of people who missed the birth announcement some thirty years before!  The One for whom they had been waiting had come!

 

And here we are again:  waiting for the grand occasions – first, the celebration of the birth of a baby in Bethlehem and then the celebration that will break loose at the coming again of the Lord.  Is that too confusing?   Do you sometimes wish you could just take things, one at a time?

 

We ought to be used to waiting.

 

     We’re never less than third in line at the drive window of Toot and Eat.               

         There’s always a three minute wait to make a left turn into the

         shopping mall and ten more minutes looking for a parking place

.

           And, you could read the new book you want to buy for Aunt Ellie

           while waiting your place at the register to pay your way out.

 

But sometimes waiting is more serious.

     A frightened child waits forever for dawn’s first light to break the

     darkness.

 

A frightened adult waits for what seems an eternity for the doctor to  bring back the test results.

 

And new about-to-be parents suffer through the gestation period of   an elephant before the nine months pass.

 

 Waiting ought to be second nature to us now.

 

Here we are waiting again, waiting through Advent.  Are we in line behind some smelly shepherds fresh off the field, and some wise looking foreign kings laying down their gifts?  Are we ever going to get up close where we can look down and see the baby boy through whom, in some great mystery, we have been promised eternal life?    The problem with Advent seems to be that God’s clock is set on a different time than ours.  We tend to think in terms of minutes and seconds:  God thinks in terms of ages.  And so, we are left waiting again. What in the world will we do to wile away the waiting time?

 

Well, the world has made some suggestions.  You might have seen them when they came in your Sunday paper – all twelve pounds of them, page after colorful page displaying those “gizmos, gadgets and whatchamacallits” you cannot live without one more Christmas! The most recent Gallup poll tells us that the average American family will spend $735 on Christmas this year.  That sounds like a lot of money to me, but it is better than the latest number attached to the gifts in The Twelve Days of Christmas:  that tops out at just a smidgen over one million dollars, depending on the local cost of ten lords a’leaping and eight maids a’milking.

 

But, the esteemed Greek philosopher Socrates, might have a word for us.  It was his custom to wander though the marketplace of Athens, looking at everything but buy nothing.  One day a companion called him on it:  “Why do you walk, look and not buy?”  Socrates replied, “I am always amazed to see all the things here that I don’t need.”

 

The third candle of the Advent wreath is the candle of joy.  Its purpose is to remind us that the Advent promise is a promise of joy.  Sad experience has taught the world that joy cannot be bought. 

 

       Joy is what settles when fear has been chased away.

          Joy is hearing good news, when bad news could have been expected.                     

              Joy is finding love that overcomes loneliness.

                 Joy is what remains when hope has been fulfilled.

                     Joy is a light when darkness has overwhelmed. 

 

There are two more weeks of Advent, time enough to lay aside all those irrelevant questions of life and faith, time enough to concentrate your mind, body, heart and soul on the important things that cannot be calculated, measured, catalogued, or carbon dated.  Sit quietly and listen for an angel’s song.  And if the angel asks you to go to some far away Bethlehem stable to see what God has done, leave everything that is not essential and important and go!  I do not now how a baby in a borrowed stable can promise abundant life;  I do not understand the full mystery of how a cross atop a far away hill can set free the world from its sin;  I do not know how a borrowed tomb in a distant garden can solve death’s mastery over us.  But, this I do know:  there is forgiveness that allows all God’s people to find a dwelling place in God’s eternity.  And this is joy, pure joy!