Sermons

Message Delivered at Christ Church

The Weekend of December 15th & 16th, 2007

TEXT:  Matthew 11:2-11

Delivered by Paul A. Johnson

 

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            One of the finest priests in the Anglican Church during the 20th-century was a man named JB Phillips.  He was born in 1906, and was an Englishman.  He studied at Cambridge, and was ordained a priest in 1930.

            About the beginning of WWII he was doing youth ministry in a London church and realized that the kids he was serving weren’t reading their Bibles.  So while he sat out the German bombing raids in bomb shelters he began translating the New Testament into language kids—and really, anybody—could understand.  You’ll still find people who read the Phillips translation of the New Testament.

            About a decade later, when he was in his mid-forties, Phillips wrote a book on his own that was powerfully received when it was published in 1952, and which is still worth reading today.  It’s still in print, and it’s called Your God is Too Small.  It’s a short book; only about 125 pages long.  It isn’t what one would call a scholarly book, but it is certainly thoughtful and challenging. 

            His assumption in this book is that generally, people are religious.  Most people really do believe that God exists.  But for all sorts of reasons—too many to go into here and now--it seems to be a human tendency to want to make God manageable; to take our human notions of what is or what should be, and apply them to God—actually, make them characteristics of God.  We take our human categories, our human expectations, and place them upon God, and make God fit into them; put God into a box of our own making.

            So in Phillips’ words, there is God as the Resident Policeman, always there to point out what we’re doing wrong.

            Or, that God is really a Grand Old Man, who is very, very religious…usually, religious the way we’re religious.

            Or, that God is a little bit like Santa Claus…making a list a list of the naughty and nice, and disposing of kindness according to which list we end up being placed on.

            And his thesis, of course, is that God is bigger than all of these notions.  That no human categories can suffice to capture God. 

You see, it is the human condition that we want to give order to our existence.  It is the pattern of human life to seek control over our environment, and make it behave according to our expectations.  Every scientific discovery; every technological achievement; every new philosophical understanding in the history of humanity—every one of them--has grown out of this desire to control; to put everything in its box, and wrap it up so that we’re never surprised, and we’re always safe.  If we can figure it out—whatever “it” is—we can control it; if we can control it, we can make it conform to our will; if we can make it conform to our will—and the “it” may be our bodies, or our minds, or our environment, or whatever—we can be safe.

            We do this even with God…that’s the point Phillips makes in his book.  Make God fit what we expect.  Erect spiritual walls around the Almighty so that God is tidy and polite and comprehensible.  Take the surprise out of the whole thing.

            Except that this notion we can control our existence doesn’t always fit.  Ask someone who is sick; or ask someone who has done everything they can to keep their marriage together but still can’t seem to do it; or ask someone whose child or spouse is addicted to alcohol or drugs; or ask someone who has always done what their boss has asked them to do, and still gets laid off…these are people who know that some of the most important things in life are beyond our control.  Or ask someone who’s in prison unjustly, and who maybe for the first time needs to know some hope he never knew he needed when he walked freely.  These are the ones who’ll be looking for a God bigger than their understanding.

            John the Baptist is in prison.  He was the last great prophet of Israel.  And what makes a prophet a prophet is that they know the mind of the Lord.  A prophet is the one to whom God has offered a special revelation, and then who communicates that to the world.  And John was a prophet.

Scripture tells us that he and Jesus were blood relations…second cousins.  He preached in the wilderness, by the River Jordan.  And for Israel, the wilderness was always the place of emptiness they went to find, and be found by, God.  No soft robes out there.  Just hardness.  Scripture says that all of Jerusalem went out to see him, and to be baptized by him as a sign of repentance, of turning back to the Lord. 

One of those he baptized was Jesus.  The Gospel According to Matthew says that he did so reluctantly.  “You should be baptizing me,” he says to his cousin.  But he baptizes Jesus, and speaks of the one who is to come because John the Baptist is the prophet.  Not just any prophet, but the new Elijah, and that’s what Elijah does.  Elijah precedes the coming one and points in his direction…and when the one who is to come comes, John tells us that it will not be pretty.  The One who’s coming has a winnowing fork in his hand, and he’s gonna do some winnowing.  That’s the message.  There’s gonna be the wheat, and there’s gonna be the chaff.  And I’ll tell you, in John’s understanding of how this is all going to play out, we want to be the wheat.  The wheat ends up in the barn, and the chaff ends up on the unquenchable fire.  If you want to see some fireworks, if you want to see the bad guys get what’s coming, you just keep your eyes open because John tells us it’s going to be spectacular.  I mean, John the Baptist knows what’s going on…the One who is to come is on his way, and he’s going to be a little bit like the Terminator…the good Terminator, not the bad Terminator.

            But you know, life throws us curve balls that slow us down, and make us wonder, and sometimes even open us up to experience new truth.

            It’s from prison that John sends his disciples to ask Jesus whether he is the one or not.  The whole purpose of prison is to limit the prisoner’s freedom…what they can hear, what they can see, where they can go.  He’s there because he’s spoken out against Herod’s immoral behavior.  He has taken on the power of the land, and what he has to show for it is jail.  No more preaching, no more baptizing.  Just walls, and bars, and darkness.

            So to Jesus he sends his disciples.  Because there have been no fireworks; no winnowing forks have been wielded; the chaff is not on fire; and the bad guys appear to still be winning the game.  After all, they’ve put God’s prophet in prison.  None of what is supposed to have happened has happened.  You see, it doesn’t fit the schema.  It’s not working out as expected.  It’s not going down according to John’s plan. The box doesn’t fit anymore. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

            And here’s the answer:  “Tell John what you hear and see…the blind receive their sight; the lame walk; the deaf hear; the dead are raised; and the poor have good news brought to them.”

            And scripture doesn’t tell us what happened when John’s disciples returned to him.  But I think when he heard the answer, he smiled.  Because this answer that Jesus gives is a code, and John would have picked it up.  It says something to John that isn’t obvious to us.  You see, John is asking the question from the perspective of Elijah who is full of fire and brimstone.  And Jesus answers with Isaiah, who promises healing, and wholeness, and hope.  And whether the scales fell from John’s eyes in prison is something that’s left to our imagination, but what he learned when he heard Jesus’ words is that the Messiah we await is a whole lot bigger than we imagine, and is filled with a whole lot of good surprises; who says to the fearful of heart “Be strong, do not fear.” Who carries not a winnowing fork, but the balm of healing and wholeness and joy. 

            So it is that we take our walk to Bethlehem.  And the themes of Advent are expectation, and anticipation, and waiting, and hope.  But as we walk this journey to the manger, I want to ask us a couple questions that I think matter…

            Here’s the first:  What’s our prison?  What’s tying us up?  Can we name it?  I don’t think it’s an insignificant detail that John sends his disciples to Jesus when he is in prison; that he finally asks the question “who are you?” from the midst of his suffering.  Because it seems in life that we are only really open to an answer to that question when we are willing to ask it from a place of weakness.  In my own spiritual walk, God never seems to have much to say to me when I think I have God all figured out; and it is when everything is going really well that I am most convinced that I have figured God out.  But from the darkness, when there seems no place to go other than to our knees, and when we are more convinced of what we don’t know than of what we do…maybe that’s when our asking becomes true asking, and maybe that’s when our ears are finally ready to hear, and our eyes to see.

            Here’s the second question:  Are you willing to be surprised by Jesus?  If we think we’ve got him figured out, are we willing to let him show us something new?  Or if we don’t think he has anything to say to us, will we give him an ear?  Are we willing to let him blow out the sides of the box we put around him?  And will we let him surprise us?  John the Baptist sends his disciples to Jesus looking for an answer, and what he gets is one he didn’t expect.  So I just wonder where the place is of the unexpected, for it may be that that’s where Jesus will reveal himself most fully.  There are lots of things in life we’ve figured out.  But the Good News is that Jesus isn’t one of them.  There’s more there.  If we’ll let ourselves be surprised, there is something new in him for each of us.

            So Christmas is coming, everybody.  Again, Jesus arrives anew.  A baby is a pretty small package.  But as many of us know, a baby is also full of surprises.  The baby may be small, but our God is not. 

            Our God isn’t small at all, but is mighty big.  Bigger than us.  Bigger than the box of our assumptions.  Big enough to carry our burdens; big enough to handle our fears; big enough to give hope to the hopeless; big enough to carry us when we are weak; big enough to soothe our grief; big enough to bring light out of darkness; big enough to give us life, not just for today but always.  And that’s pretty darn big.

            Our Lord starts among us as a package as small as a baby.  That’s Christmas.  But sometimes, it’s the small packages that contain the gifts that are the greatest…and also the most surprising.