Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Paul Kolbet, December 11th, 2022
In the name of the one Holy, Undivided, Trinity.
Sometimes when I hear the scriptures assigned for a given day, I wonder why of all the things we could read, we read that. Today is one of those days. My experience though, is that, whatever my first impressions may be, the scriptures always have the word we need to hear, if only we listen well enough. So let’s try together, not so much as me speaking to you, but rather as all of us listening together for what we might need to hear today.
In our run up to Christmas, rather surprisingly we are given a story of the famed John the Baptist in prison near the end of his life. The man who had baptized Jesus and proclaimed him to be “The Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world,” now sends his followers to find Jesus and ask him, “Are you [really] the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” John the Baptist is wrestling with his own despair in his death row prison cell preparing for his own execution. It was not long after this that Herod, the very ruler whose injustice and corruption John had criticized publicly, would have the great prophet beheaded and give his head away on a silver platter as gift to his wife. Facing that fate and knowing that he would never live to see the end or goal of his movement, John sends his question, arising from the most understandable of crises of faith, to Jesus asking, “Are you [really] the one who is to come, or are we to wait for, [to pin our hopes on] another?”
What does Jesus do for his despairing friend? He does two things. Let’s start with the second thing. Notice that there was a crowd there to witness this apparent moment of doubt on John’s part. They probably also wanted to know the answer to John’s question, had their own doubts with John in prison and wanted to hear Jesus say directly, “Of course, I am the one.” That is not at all what Jesus does. Instead, Jesus asked them a question. He asked it three times. He asked them, “When you went into the wilderness to see John, what did you go out there to look at?”
I assume you have your own conversations with Jesus. If you do, then you’ll know that this is exactly what he does. When I complain to Jesus about this or that thing in the world that I am sure needs to be changed, or complain about this or that person, just as he did with John’s disciples, Jesus usually says something like, “But what about you?” When the crowds were intensely interested in John the Baptist’s plight, Jesus asks them, “What did you go to see, what was it about you that led you to go out into the wilderness to see John? Jesus was interested in talking to them about them. He always is.
It is easier to spend time talking to Jesus about other people, isn’t it? Isn’t that what good people do? “That poor John the Baptist.” It can seem downright selfish to bother Jesus with oneself. Who wants to hear that? He does. That is who. Just because he is talking to you about you does not mean that there is any less of him for others. You are valuable to Jesus as you are, not for what you can do for him. He asks, “What did you go to see?”
What Jesus’ question reveals is that John is far from the only one peering out into the world with a sense of disappointment because it falls short of his ideals of justice and equity. Were those followers of John as disappointed in imprisoned John the Baptist as John apparently was in moment in Jesus? Wasn’t John’s ministry supposed to change the world a lot more than it did? If God was on John’s side, wouldn’t Herod at least have been rid of rather than living to execute John, eventually put Jesus on trial, and have his own later family members execute some of the first apostles? And the world in every time since has always had its “Herods.” What a difficult scene this is in the gospels and why would it be inflicted upon us in the lead up to Christmas?
If you allow yourself to sit with the great John the Baptist in his prison cell the hard lesson you learn is that although we often act and live otherwise, we all live in these in-between times in an unfished story. That is only a crisis of faith if somehow you had been led to expect an ending or resolution of your life in this life. No one ever sees the end of the human story they inhabit. God has reserved for Godself both the beginning and the end. It is knowledge unavailable to us. The purposefulness of human life, if it is not to end in disappointment, must be found elsewhere.
That “elsewhere,” that purpose beyond the limits of politics, is what Jesus’ message to John is all about. Jesus tells John’s followers to return to John’s prison cell and tell him the following: “Go and tell John what you hear and see,” that is, don’t talk to John about Herod and his minions, don’t talk to John about other people. Talk to John about you and what you have experienced with me. Don’t go global. Tell him of your of local experience here. Tell him your experience where the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”
Surely, John wanted more than that. What he wanted was for all of Israel and for the Gentile nations to take notice. What John’s followers witnessed with Jesus right then and there was no less real because it was local.
Even though their eyes were on their nation and the nations, Jesus called them to attend first to something else. That something else would become what we call the church. Oh yes, smaller than the nations, less powerful than the empires, and from that perspective it can seem relatively unimportant. It can seem merely local. It can seem like less than the sum of our hopes for this world.
If, however, we truly hear Jesus’ question, “What about you, what did you come to see?” then matters begin to appear in a new light. Right here, in our local church, there are important real things that happen that somehow never manage in any century to be scaled up to be available everywhere, no matter how much with John’s followers we may wish it to be so. But responding to Jesus’ admonition we testify to what we have seen and hear. Here the hungry are fed, the poor have good news brought to them, people who for whatever reason could not see what they needed to come to see, the sick are cared for, those who came to believe they could walk no further, walk on anew. If you are frustrated by the world where the possible has a way of becoming impossible, where the fulfillment of the promises of the prophets always seem to recede from view, turn your attention to your church and witness story after story where you can be proud to tell of what you see and hear.
Perhaps why we read the story this Sunday, is that our Gospel begins to turn our attention this week from the word of the prophet to the presence of Jesus. Advent, in this way, yields to Christmas as the longing for this or that justice in our time and place is gathered up, and caught up into a feeling far larger and more spacious. What that Christmas feeling is is worship. It is what we do at Christmas where we discover a wonder un-mistakenly present before us that somehow exceeds the limited possibilities of our best efforts. John the Baptist and all the other prophets became less and less while Jesus becomes more and more. In the seemingly ever-expanding darkness, a light comes to be seen that ultimately engulfs all, as Christmas comes to reframe what is possible right here in our midst locally where we are as we are now. And our response to this newness Christmas introduces into our world is to say to Jesus, “This is what I came to see.” That acclaim, that worship, is truer and more authentic than any human kingdom because it is the human heart truly responding to the wonder set before it by the very God whose glory is the final end of every story.
Amen.