A Sermon by Fr. Davenport
14 December 2008 - Year B
Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
1 Thessalonians
5:16-24
John 1:6‑8,19‑28
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Last week a parishioner sent me a passionate email describing the extent of God=s love for us and our brittleness and fear and confusion about accepting his love, about how hard a time we have believing his love for us. It was a powerful witness to the gospel, good sermon material. So I replied, joshing with an offer to use the pulpit this Sunday. My offer was declined on the grounds that she had expressed such views to another parishioner and received criticism for it. I fired back that if a preacher doesn=t offend once in a while, then the preacher may not be saying anything.
It=s a healthy, even essential for Christians to discuss their understanding and experience of God and to wrestle with differences respectfully. That=s fundamental to learning and to discovering truth. I regret that we often have a narrow tolerance for differing views, that we fail to respect fully those who challenge us. It limits us.
I have to remind myself of this when I come upon John the Baptist. While he certainly enriches the diversity of the Church, he=s not someone to whom I naturally warm, not someone I hear easily. He strikes me as fierce and feral, uncouth and unwashed. He=s radical, unflinching, even offensive B certainly he was to many of his contemporaries, especially the respectable ones, people like you and me. The Baptist challenged conventional religiosity and called people to repentance, to change their attitudes, habits, values. He was a real threat to the stability of their culture, and almost certainly he would challenge us as severely as he did the people of his world.
Repentance is about the transformation of our hearts. It=s about the renewal of our relationship with God. That begins with acknowledging all our attempts to make ourselves like God. The way we seek and desire and fantasize about influence, power, wealth, achievement, status, moral righteousness is usually motivated, at least to some degree, by trying to be superior to other people. It=s the sin of Adam and Eve B trying to be like God. Even when we do turn to God, we can still mess up the relationship. We sometimes try to put God in our debt, to earn his grace and love by our acts of charity, by sacrificing for the church, by serving those in need. Repentance is about learning to trust God not our own effort, to accept God=s grace and love for us as a gift, no strings attached.
Repentance is a continual process, always turning back again to God, renewing the relationship, gradually allowing the gospel to change us and shape us, but every day is full of decisions, and sometimes we trust and serve God, and sometimes, like Adam and Eve trying to be like God, we trust and serve ourselves.
What we see in today=s gospel is John
reversing Adam and Eve. When the priests
and other religious authorities from
Then John upbraids his respectable, conventionally religious, self-important contemporaries B that brood of vipers. Such harsh criticism often comes from self-righteousness and trying to build ourselves up, to make ourselves special, but John has a profound humility. He=s clear that he is not the Christ, nor the light, nor Elijah, nor a prophet. Unlike most of us, John=s not concerned about being special, set apart, important. John attracted a large following and became very well known in his day B a person of historic significance mentioned by Josephus, a first century Jewish historian, but John didn=t claim special status.
To the contrary, he points out that he baptizes only with water. The one coming after him will baptize with the Holy Spirit. John claims that he is not worthy to loosen the sandals of the one coming after him. John says of him, AHe must increase, and I must decrease.@ John points away from himself to Jesus. What we need is a right relationship to Jesus.
John claims nothing for himself other than being a voice in the wilderness. In other words, John is a witness, and he provides testimony that forces others to make a decision. It=s courtroom imagery. John is in the witness stand, and his audience, the jury, has to judge what he says. He forces a decision, and he wants all to believe through him. He can inspire us, that we too might stand up and witness, boldly, purposefully, powerfully. Jesus said, AYou will be my witnesses.@ (Acts 1:8)
Witnessing to Christ is a daunting. Being up-front, direct about our relationship with Jesus is a challenge. It is frightening. We may fear that an authentic witness would mean that we have to be as wild and socially awkward as John the Baptist, that some would no longer accept us, that we=d be abandoned, left in a lonely wilderness. We may fear that we lack the integrity and commitment of John the Baptist. We may fear not because of our lack of belief, but because we do believe, and it=s important to us. The more important something is to us often the harder it is to discuss, to find words that aren=t trite or glib, but worthy and expressive of our belief. But we must try. We must allow some vulnerability B to show our inner selves, to share our experience of God, and we must risk giving offense, even to people we esteem.
Tobias Wolff, an
American author, tells a great story about how he came to faith.[1] When he was at college at
In the cold nave before the film, the vicar greeted everyone, and then Ahe bowed his head and asked [everyone] to join him in prayer. [Wolff writes] Rob and I exchanged arch glances: so this wasn=t quite free.@ The film, Wolff says, didn=t allow any more wisecracks because of Aits adamant seriousness, the unguarded, naked urgency of its story, and the challenge it presents both to believers and to skeptics to assess the depth and consequences of their convictions.@
The film=s protagonist, Tomas, is a Lutheran pastor in a small Swedish village. He suffers a serious crisis of faith. As he loses his faith, he becomes angry, apathetic, despairing. He is not alone in his suffering. Other characters in the film Aare able to bear their pain into a still deeper faith and capacity for love.@ Wolff says, AWhen the movie ended, we all sat there as if stunned. ... Truly I felt harrowed, crust broken, buried things churning to the surface.@ The vicar stepped to the front and gave his interpretation of the film: Ahumanity in peril, lonely, afraid, as we seek power and find only more fear and loneliness, hiding from one another and from what we really want and what would give us true strength and friendship and new life... .@
Wolff says that up to this point he had been listening, really listening, eager for an answer to the bleakness of our situation. The vicar had an answer, and Wolff felt a sense of grudging assent. But then the vicar projected onto the screen an image of a noted Pre-Raphaelite painting, AThe Light of the World.@ Wolff hated the painting B garish, melodramatic, sentimental, pretentious and completely unlike the stark, cold, hard lines of Bergman. While I understand, even agree, with Wolff=s characterizations of the picture, I rather like it. It speaks to me, and coincidentally I preached upon it this Sunday three years ago when we last read this gospel
But Wolff couldn’t
stand the painting, and he turned to Rob, ALet=s get a pint.@ But Rob was enthralled. AYou go on.@ AThat night B to some extent, that
picture B changed [Rob=s] life. He enrolled in Bible classes at the church,
and went on to become a missionary in
Wolff would eventually be drawn back to the possibility of faith. For him it was poetry B George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot. He says, AOne night, I was reading the last lines of [Eliot=s] >Little Gidding= to a friend, my voice thick with emotion, and when I looked up he was staring at me with kindly amusement. >So,= he said, >you really like that stuff?=@
There are many different ways to bear witness to Christ. Our work is to give testimony of our experience of God, to share what speaks to us with love, passion, gentleness, courage, humor. One of our greatest resources is the diversity of our testimony. We need one another for the work Jesus has given us. Each of us has a voice, a different voice, our own voice that prepares the way of the Lord. We cherish that gift.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Fr. Lane Davenport, Rector
[1] Tobias Wolff, >Winter Light,= The New Yorker, June 9, 2008.