Third Sunday of Advent
December 14, 2008
John 1: 6-9, 19-28

Who Are You?

About a year after I became the pastor of this church, we had a visit from a representative of one of our Presbyterian seminaries. The man was scheduled to arrive on Sunday morning, talk to the Inquirers’ Class, and give the sermon in worship.

Around 8:30 on the Lord’s Day a man showed up in the church office. "Good morning," I said, "May I help you?"

"Yes, son," he said. "I’m looking for the Pastor."

"I’m the pastor."

"No, son. I’m looking for the Senior Pastor."

"Well, if you put it that way, I’m the Senior Pastor."

Alas, this kind of thing doesn’t happen to me anymore. I can’t imagine why.

John the Baptist also had an identity problem. People kept thinking that he might be someone else – maybe even the Messiah. Clearly he was a striking figure: a coat of camel’s hair, a belt of leather, a voice that carried over the crowds like a bullhorn. All four of the gospel writers agree that John drew huge crowds from Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside – crowds large enough to get the attention of both the religious and the political authorities. His fiery sermons and his come-as-you-are baptisms in the Jordan River were all the buzz in Palestine.

But who exactly is John the Baptist? Inquiring minds want to know. Is he Elijah come back from the dead? If so, where are the chariots of fire? Is he Moses? If so, why doesn’t he divide the Jordan River instead of baptize in it? Is he some other prophet? Several of our modern-day celebrities are famous merely for being famous. What about John?

A credentials committee is dispatched from Jerusalem. "Who are you?" they ask, which is a polite way of saying "Who the heck do you think you are?"

John gives them as straight an answer as they’re ever going to get. "I am not the Messiah," he tells them. "I’m a voice – the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’"

This is not the voice of modesty. John was a lot of things, but modest does not seem to have been one of them. No, this is the voice of vocation. John’s style is without doubt flashy, but there is method to his madness. He is drawing attention to himself in order to point away from himself. "Among you stands one whom you do not know, he says, "the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals."

To point away from himself – that was John’s calling. "He must increase," he says a little later in the fourth Gospel, "but I must decrease." That’s a pretty good way of describing the mission of the church and the call of every Christian.

The task of pointing away from ourselves and toward the Coming One begins with the admission that you and I are not, in fact, the Messiah. This will come as a great surprise to some of us.

In one sense, of course, we are all messiahs with a small "m." "Messiah" means "anointed one." Remember what happened at that font? It was there that we were anointed and called into a community set apart for service to Jesus Christ. As a messianic community, we are called to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners. Martin Luther said that Christians are called to be "little Christs" in the world and to one another. In that sense we have a messianic calling.

With all due respect to Martin Luther, however, I’m not sure it’s a good thing for you and me to think of ourselves as "little Christs." We are witnesses to Christ, followers of Christ. We are also sinners in need of salvation, beggars in search of a crust of bread, sheep in need of a shepherd. We need a Messiah as much as everyone else.

A man came to see me the other day. I’ve known him for years. He’s been in and out of prison and various drug-rehab programs. He’s living on the streets just now, having been banned from the Shelter for disruptive behavior. I walked into the church office and there he was, waiting. You could say he was waiting for my advent.

I assumed he wanted me to give him money or food or to help him pay a fine to keep him out of jail. In other worlds, something messianic.

He didn’t want any of those things. He just wanted someone to hear his story and pray with him. He was scared, and he wanted someone to hear how scared he was and ask Jesus to help him.

I was scared, too. Not of him. I was scared of how little he was asking of me. He didn’t want me to do anything. He just wanted me to seek the Messiah with him. Obviously, he had no idea how intimidating it is to a Presbyterian to be asked not to do something.

It’s a well-know fact that Christians are at our worst when we forget that the world has a Messiah, and it ain’t us. It’s Jesus. We point to him. We serve him, and we stand under his judgment.

John Stendhal, a Lutheran pastor, writes:

"The messianic impulse . . . can diminish and destroy." I think Pastor Stendhal is onto something there.

Take the war in Iraq as a spiritual/political example. It was with something very close to messianic fervor that our nation invaded that country. We had it in our heads that we were under a divine mandate to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. We thought that, because he was so manifestly evil, and we so manifestly well-intentioned, the Muslim world would shout "Hosanna" and greet us waving palm fronds.

Clearly some good things happened as the result of that invasion. But as the war wore on, our claims to the moral high ground grew more shrill and less convincing. First came the images from Abu Ghraib. Then came tales of "stress positions," "water boarding," and "extraordinary renditions" (Orwellian doublespeak for political kidnap and torture).

Our halo began to slip. Our allies began to look for ways to distance themselves from us. Who are you? Messiah or pariah?

As some of them leave office, the best our leaders can say is, "Mistakes were made." Somehow I don’t think John the Baptist would have accepted that as "fruits that befit repentance."

We must leave it to the historians to sort this out, but I have the strong impression that a certain kind of Christianity has had a role in all of this. This kind of Christianity is eager to attach itself to the powers and principalities of this world. It welcomes alliance with imperial authority. It turns a blind eye to the arrogance of power because, deep down, it longs to share that power with the emperor.

John bears a very different kind of witness because John’s Messiah is a very different kind of Messiah. His power is expressed by lifting up the powerless. His authority is not propped up by armies of occupation. His rule has begun already and he stands among us now, even though we do not always know it. He is the light that has come into the world, and the best way to see the light is to get down on our knees and look up.

"He must increase but I must decrease."

John was not the light. He came to bear witness to the light. For all his showy tendencies, he points away from himself and toward a nondescript figure whose name turns out to be Jesus. That same Jesus, that same Messiah, stands among us now, easy to miss but impossible to mistake for the false messiahs who are so clamorously pointing to themselves.

John was not the Messiah. You and I are not the Messiah. The Church is not the Messiah. We are but witnesses to the one who has pitched his tent among us, full of grace and truth. He shows us that the darkest forces in the world are not finally so powerful as they appear. In fact, they have already been defeated by the life, death, and resurrection of the one whose sandals John was unworthy to untie.

Look for the light, beloved. Look in the direction John is pointing. In that direction lies the way, the truth, and the life.

　

　

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