everything's changin around me,
Prayer: Lord, may the meditations of all our hearts take no offense at thee. Amen.
Intro: Did you all know there used to be a Ferris wheel where this church used to be? That’s pretty fun… I guess when they were building is some of the material must have been from the Middle East.
I say that because earlier this week I was clearing my head, so I took a little walk around the basement. Guess what I found: John’s diary! It must have been in the mix of materials building the Ferris wheel.
Here it is, though, you can see Johannes’s diary, it says it in Greek. Well, mostly Greek.
Pretty wild, right? That is what I thought.
(Pause)
So, when I first found the diary I was elated.
“I’ll publish this finding! I’ll be a celebrity! …Well, at least on the seminary campus.” So, I started to read the diary, so I could publish my first article about this amazing find.
As I started to read it, though, I was struck by this dairy… You see, a lot of the diary deals with this instance of John sending word to Jesus.
Since it is Advent, that season of waiting, I thought I would do something a little different.This diary could serve as a way to think about waiting for the messiah. After all, that is what Advent is about, and that is what John’s question is about, too.
What I will do today is read entries from John’s diary, and then talk a little about how that has to do with the different parts of the spiritual journey we experience.
I won’t read all of the journal, just parts that help us think about the spirituality of waiting. This is part of the first entry in the journal:
• My life has been building to this. I am setting off to the wilderness. Society is too corrupt, I have a mission and nothing can deter me. I’m supposed to proclaim the messiah, the one Israel has been waiting for. Not only am I to proclaim the, he is living right now; during my life!
His name is Jesus, and there are rumors that I leapt in my mother’s womb when I was next to Jesus while he was in his mother’s womb. I believe it, that is how clearly my life has been building toward all this.
All of the hopes of Israel are finally being met! And I am the one to proclaim this messiah! That is my mission. I am ready to live in the wilderness, I am ready for a pure diet, I am ready to purge all the eccentricities!
Okay, this is all I will read from that entry.
I chose this part, one because it puts John’s preaching, and baptizing into context of his mission and his relation to Jesus and the early Jesus movement.
I also chose it, though, because it relates to the periods of excitement, clarity, and fervor we all experience in our spiritual lives. I am sure you can all remember moments when you were clear about how to serve God, or remember moments when you felt God so strongly. In fact, during the season of Advent, you may be experiencing this clarity or fervor acutely right now. This is a part of our personal worship of God. This period of passion is often invigorating and renewing.
As I talk about other spiritual movements, I want to remember that the order of the movements are specific to John. Not everyone experiences these movements of the spirit in this order, and that is just fine. In fact, not everyone experiences every moment John did, and that is fine, too.
I am going to skip a few entries the second entry I will read must have been from when John was in the wilderness for a while:
• I almost froze when he said it. (Pause)
I would have been floored if Jesus just came out to visit me, it would been a great validation of my ministry. When Jesus came, though, he asked to be baptized by me. I’ve been preaching about him. It just didn’t seem appropriate that I baptize him.
Yet, he said it was necessary. Who am I to argue Jesus, the messiah? I did it.
It is confusing, though. Jesus isn’t acting all that royal, in fact he is acting like a common sinner. I don’t know. I am walking around with knot in my stomach over it all.
Okay, this is all I will read from that entry.
I choose this entry because it highlights another dimension of the faith journey: confusion, and anxiety. Often these ambiguities come out of nowhere. In this entry we see that at first John was glad to see Jesus, but then suddenly something strange happens.
Jesus asks to be baptized.
This request upset John’s expectations, and in ways in challenges many of his assumptions. Often, when our assumptions are challenged we can feel threatened. It is scary, being when we realize we weren’t exactly right. It makes us question ourselves, and that can be difficult.
After this John doesn’t really write a lot about that moment. I will say, and you might see, his entries are never as confident as that first one. It appears that John continued to baptize and preach, though.
The third entry I will read from comes sometime during the period of John’s life we heard about today:
• How could this be? In jail? How does this fit with my mission? Why hasn’t the messiah come to liberate me? In jail?
My world has shrunk.
This repentance and messiah I preached about, the baptisms I gave, and here I am? This is not what I expected. It was this mission that landed me here. Herod, the Judean king, had no business marrying his brother’s wife, so I spoke against it. And that is what brought me here… I was only doing my mission. Where is Jesus?
Okay, this is all I will read from that entry.
I chose this entry because it really speaks to that all-out doubt, or at least the struggle with doubt we experience. This is the kind of doubt we feel really deeply within ourselves, and we also tend to try to fight this doubt off.
This fight itself is exhausting. Martin Luther described it as anfechtung. It is that dark night of the soul. It is a period of experiencing our uncertainty, doubts and fears extremely acutely.
Different things will bring this struggle of doubt on. For John it was an outcome he never expected. For others it may be more subtle. Perhaps it has more to do with the little ways our expectations were upset. One way or another, many of us experience this doubt. It is often painful, I know that. But I also want to say that not only is it painful, it is also common in the spiritual life. I know that doesn’t diminish the pain, though.
While that last entry I read from was during John’s time in prison, this entry is explicitly during our reading, it comes from when John sends his disciples to question Jesus. Here is a snippet from the fourth entry I choose:
• I did it.
I sent some of those closest to me to question if Jesus is the messiah, or if we are to await for another.
It is hard to imagine we have to wait for another. We’ve been waiting for so long, but it doesn’t seem like Jesus is the one.
I’ve been in prison for much longer than I expected. I’ve thought about everything, and I couldn’t ignore the question any more. Maybe Jesus is not the one. It hurt to even think it, and even more to ask the question, but I couldn’t sit and wonder any longer.
I can feel the tension all the time, especially when I remember those days and nights in the wilderness so clearly. There was no doubt then. I could see God’s work in everything. I remember the clear dark skies and all the stars. I remember that feeling of doing God’s will, of seeing that work being done and people responding. I remember that sheer joy. That is all gone now.
Okay, this is all I will read from that entry.
That is a painful entry to read from. I choose that entry, though, because it speaks well to the grieving we do in our faith journey. Often when we think of grief, we think of losing someone. That certainly is a way we experience grief, but when a part of our faith life changes, we grieve that loss, too. We grieve any loss, and that grief is real and has an impact on us.
Grief is part of the spiritual life for many: A loss of innocence, or certainty, or way of living. We will grieve those losses. Many try to avoid this grief. We can’t do that, though. This is because the spiritual life is an on-going thing. Trying to avoid the grief is like trying to stop the tide from coming in…
When we experience that grief it is hard to imagine we will even be able to keep the faith. But even the ability to admit your grief or pain, that is a deep expression of faith. I remember during my summer as a chaplain and grieving with a woman who just found out her daughter died, at one point she said, if this is what God is like I don’t want to believe in ‘em. All I could do was cry with her and say thank you for speaking what is on all our hearts… I still believe that confession was just as meaningful as any creed.
For the final entry I will read from an entry that takes place a after the reading today, but John does mention the answer Jesus’ response to John’s inquiry:
• When I first heard about Jesus’ reply to my question I was really confused. I asked a simple yes or no question, are you the messiah, or are we to await for another. A simple, “yes, I am,” or “no, I’m not,” would have sufficed.
Instead Jesus told those I sent to tell me what they hear and see. The blind receiving their sight, the lame walking, the lepers cleansed, the deaf hearing, the dead being raised, and the poor having good news brought to them.
I didn’t understand, and I was just as confused as before. Why would Jesus answer that way, especially when I am in jail. I don’t see any of that happening. That night I went particularly restless, it was different than most nights. There wasn’t a knot, or struggle. I struggled with Jesus’ answer, happy to know he responded, but confused by his response.
Finally I began to realize what was going on. Jesus was doing something more than just answering my question, he was preaching to me.
Jesus was preaching that the dominion of heaven which is why the messiah would come:
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.
This is what the messiah came to do. I imagined a powerful messiah, but the power of Jesus is such a radically different power I missed it at first. It is the power that gives itself for the sake of another.
I had thought my mission was only about the messiah. While the messiah was part of it, it wasn’t all of it. The preaching about the messiah is about all those the messiah came to liberate, preaching the messiah is about the hope of the world, the dominion of heaven. I had thought my mission was about one thing, but it was about much more than that. It is much bigger than I had thought and that is good news.
Or, gospel.
The journal ends there.
When I was reading the journal as an academic discovery I figured the journal ended there because after that John was beheaded. As I have worked on this sermon, though, I have come to think that the journal ended there because John was too busy preaching the dominion of heaven, along with Jesus. John talks about a different kind of power, and maybe he found a different power that created freedom in that cell…
Certainly there were other people in prison who needed to have the good news brought to them. And maybe, although it wasn’t John’s ideal place to preach, maybe he became too busy to journal preaching there.
It seems that Paul came to realize that his mission didn’t end with Jesus, in fact in many ways it had just begun. Paul’s faith and mission had been renewed. (Might even say it went full-circle, which is to say it didn’t even end there.) Certainly there were bumps and struggles along the way.
A Spanish Mystic, St. John of the Cross, once said that those who want to be sure of their path should close their eyes and walk in the darkness. When he said this he was talking about the necessity of experiencing confusion and doubt. John the Baptist experienced this, and after that time of struggling came out with a mature faith.
These readings from John’s journal are a great illustration of the spiritual disciple of waiting during our time of Advent. Often when we think of waiting we think of being passive, but John’s example show another way of thinking about waiting. And often when we think of faith we think of certainty. In these journals I think we see another type of faith, a faith that struggles to be faithful while whistling in the dark (as Fredric Buechner describes faith).
This waiting is difficult, but it is that same Jesus who preached to John, that gives us the strength to go on waiting. Often they say North Americans are not good at waiting because we’re used to immediate gratification, and I think there might be something to that assessment, but I think there is more, too. Often though, I think people are afraid to wait because they are unsure their expectations will ever be met.
But, just as Jesus preached to John, and John preached to many, and you all so often preach to me; let me preach to you: This Jesus, the fulfillment of hopes for:
the blind receive their sight,
the lame walk,
the lepers are cleansed,
the deaf hear,
the dead are raised,
and the poor having good news brought to them
We are assured this in Jesus. Jesus didn’t admonish John when John questioned him, Jesus preached and this preaching created faith. Even now as you hear faith is bring created.
Wait. Wait expectantly.
Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment