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Isaiah 35.1-10 Luke 1.68-79 Matthew 11.2-11 James 5.7-10
December 15, 2013
Following Jesus is not a casual pastime. You have to plan. You have to decide. You have to make an effort. You have to put your skin in the game. In the words of Jesus, you have to go out.
Speaking to the crowds about John the Baptist, Jesus put to them the question: Why did you go out in the wilderness to see him? What made you take the effort, spend the money, use up your time, and say No to many other options so you could go out to see John the Baptist?
It wasn’t an easy trip to go from Jerusalem to see John in the wilderness. From places like Nazareth or Jerusalem, it was a journey of over 20 miles through mountainous, dangerous, inhospitable country. The only way to travel was by foot or mule. When you arrived, you were in a desert wilderness, the worst possible place you could be.
You had to want to do it. “Why did you go out?” Jesus asks. Why did you spend your money, take up your time, put out the effort and say No to many other pleasant options to make your exodus into the wilderness?
And when you got there, was it worth the trip? Were you satisfied with what you saw? “What did you find when you got there?” he asks them. He knew the answer already, for Jesus had made that trip himself from his boyhood home in Nazareth to be baptized by John. When you got out there did you find somebody weak and bendable like the bulrushes are? No. John was strong, fearless and commanding. Well, when you got out there did you find somebody attractive, showy, beautiful, aristocratic? No, again. John was about as counter-cultural as they come. He dressed in the skin of animals. He scrounged what he could find to eat by robbing the hives of wild bees and turning over rocks to grab locusts. He was as far removed from power or prestige as you could get.
So what would draw someone to make a trip like this into the wilderness, away from everything familiar, solid, comfortable, and secure to seek out somebody so weird? Why would you listen to the preaching of someone so weird, and take on faith as true for you what he said?
What compelling connection could this weird man make with your life?
Think about it. John announced the coming of a new way of living. John put himself out there as the harbinger of the coming reign of God. God would turn the world upside down. Something new; something awesome. A moral world. A world where actions are clean, wholesome, trusting. “Get ready!” hammered John. Well, who would believe this wild man’s ranting about a new world? You would if he spoke to some deep dissatisfaction festering in your life, some emptiness gnawing at your soul, some pining of your spirit, some deep cavity!
I ask you to consider with me the possibility that the thing that would motivate you to go out to John would be because you were unhappy with your life as you knew it. You put out the hard work required to go out to see John the Baptist because you were driven by a compelling realization that you needed to do something that would be a game changer in the way you experienced life.
And so it was that Roman soldiers, tax collectors, ordinary working folk came out to John. “What must we do,” they asked him. The leaders of institutional religion came out, too, but for different reasons.
Roman soldiers—of all people!—came out to John and asked him, “What must we do?” Dissatisfied with being a hated occupying force, the perpetual target for ambushes, the grunts who had to bully and intimidate an enraged population, they weren’t happy campers. But they couldn’t desert. They were along way from home with no chance of getting back soon. Talk about anger issues! They weren’t even Jews but they made their exodus out into the wilderness to John. What must we do?
Hard faced tax collectors—can you believe it!—came out to John asked him, “What must we do?” They were fed-up with being spit upon by fellow Jews, for they were the guys that brought down upon their neighbors the hated Roman imperial system of crushing taxation. Their job made them tools and patsies of the Romans; consequently, their neighbors put them and their families outside the pale of acceptability. That wasn’t how they wanted to live, but they were caught in the web of their own making. Talk about depression! What must we do?
And then there was that great sea of the multitudes. Guys and gals who were just trying to get by—penny pinched, hand-to-mouth, day laborers. Tired of being cramped and put upon and squeezed. Talk about a bitter life! Anything’s got to be better than this. What must we do?
And then there were the religious elite who came out to watch, just to gawk. They wanted to inspect this weird prophet. They wanted to see for themselves the spectacle of that great unwashed sea of working stiffs, scruffy soldiers and shady tax collectors all jostling to get in line with their question: What must we do? They wanted to point their figures, giggle, put a handkerchief to their noses and be entertained. Imagine people having dirty Jordan water poured over them! Gawkers did not ask the question, What must we do?
When you and I left for church today, we saw lots of people going out. Going out for a jog, going out to walk the dog, going out for brunch, going out to the park, going out to shop. Going out to a ball game. Sunday is a going out day. However, to be in church on a Sunday morning is increasingly going to be seen as weird. Church is not the place where culture looks to see who’s important or powerful. Church is not the place where a majority of our population turn to see what a true man or woman looks like. People go out to the entertainment media, to professional sports figures, to captains of industry and finance, and to politicians to see what the man or woman who has it all together looks like, whose aim in life is to stay healthy and wealthy in order to enjoy the good life, whose circle of concern doesn’t go much beyond their neighborhood.
Increasingly it is the case when more and more people come to church that it feels strange to them. Most of the time they just look around. Some don’t open their hymnbooks or Bibles or read their bulletins. Some leave before the benediction.
But I can’t blame them. When Pope Francis, whom TIME magazine has just named Person of the Year, is called a socialist or a communist by Christian talk-show hosts because he says that the rich need to use their wealth to help the poor, that’s an off-ramp from religion to many sincere people. When the church persists in saying that two people of the same gender who love each other enough to become life-partners cannot be married in the church, that’s an off-ramp from religion to many people, especially young people. When Southwestern Baptist Seminary installs stained glass portraits in their chapel to glorify the high-jacking of an honorable tradition of congregational witness and fellowship and make Baptist life oppressive to anyone who is not male and heterosexual, that’s an off-ramp from religion for people who pay attention to see just how loving our actions really are.
But Jesus makes it personal. He asks you today, “Why are you here? Why have you gone out this Sunday morning and come to church? What made you take the effort, spend the money, use up your time, and say No to many other options?” How will you answer him?
I cannot say what your answer would be. I can only testify to you why I think it is worth it.
What worries me more these days has to do with pain rather than with guilt. Ask yourself if pain doesn’t have something to do with why you are here. I believe there is no one better than Jesus to deal with pain. Let me remind you what yesterday was. Yesterday, Saturday, marked the one year anniversary of the school shooting at Newtown, CN. It wasn’t the first mass killing, and I’m certain it won’t be the last. But it has become the symbol for many of the brokenness of our world. The Sandy Hook shootings are the result of the eruption of a deep pocket of unreason. Our world is a minefield of deep pockets of unreason. We put names on them—alienation, terrorism, fanaticism, partisanism. Try as hard as we may, we are not able to plug all these pockets of unreason. They blow up in our faces leaving as their spoils of war carnage and sorrow and sighing. Deep pockets of unreason cause brokenness and chronic pain.
There is a pain we all share over the brokenness of our world. We feel this pain as deep dissatisfaction in our lives, as emptiness, as yearning, as a deep cavity. What is your pain-point? Your marriage? Your relations with your children? Your prospects for old age? The meanness of society? Your job? I believe that pain gets in the way of enjoying peace of mind a lot more than guilt does. When Jesus asks us why we are here today, we can tell him it is because we have owned up to our pain. We can tell him that we are here today because we have come to the conclusion that there is no other place to take our pain than to Jesus.
We have come to hear Jesus say, “Be strong, fear not!…Behold your God …will come and save you.” And we say, “Yes, Lord, I believe it.”
In our wilderness we have come to hear Jesus say, “[T]he eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; …the one who is lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing for joy.” And we say, “Yes, Lord, I take your promised hope in my pain.”
It is Jesus who enters into the thicket of our messed up lives and proclaims, “A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not pass it by, but it shall be for them, no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.” And we say, “That’s for me, ‘cause I am that goof-up and screw-ball.”
It is Jesus who rises up out of the carnage of our broken world and says, “And the ransomed of the Lord…shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”
That, my friends, is why we come out to hear on Sunday.