Maybe I’ve been listening to too much talk radio, or reading too many letters to the editor, but this year I feel especially ready for Advent to come. With the news bouncing from the Ebola crisis, to the protests across the country over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, to ISIS, to the summer rush of unaccompanied minors, to the release this week of the torture report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, this has felt like a year of crying out with the psalmist, how long, O Lord. How long must we wait for your coming. And so Advent, a season where we wait with hopeful anticipation, like one waits for the promised arrival of a dear friend or family member, feels sweet on my tongue and long awaited. A deep sigh of relief that God really will come and really will make all things new. [pause]
So I don’t find Paul particularly helpful this morning, with his laundry list of things to do. Rejoice!, says Paul. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances. Do not quench the spirit, do not despise the words of the prophets, test everything, hold fast to what is good, abstain from every form of evil. Paul! I want to say, take a breath, take a look around. Rejoice? Give thanks in all circumstances? Seriously? Hold fast to what is good, abstain from every form of evil, ok, yes, probably I ought to be doing those things, but they are way harder to do than they are to say. Give me a break here Paul!
I think the Thessalonians probably struggled with Paul’s laundry list of activities as well. Life was not always awesome in Thessalonica either; they dealt with economic insecurity, threats of terror, a Roman governmental system unfairly weighted to benefit natural-born Roman citizens, really a lot of the same issues and concerns we face today, the writer of Ecclesiastes put it well, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Plus, the first letter to the Thessalonians was written not all that long after the time of Christ. They were expecting an imminent return that should have happened, well, yesterday. Faithful believers, of the generation whom Christ had addressed, remember the ones who would not pass away? Well they were passing away, and the Thessalonians didn’t really know what to do about it, what that meant for the promise. So for Paul to give them this checklist in the middle of all this, probably felt pretty overwhelming. But then, Paul closes with these words: “May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.” May the God of peace himself sanctify you. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this. Paul ended this laundry list of ways to live with a promise. A promise that God is faithful, a promise that all things will be accomplished by God.
So Paul says: Rejoice, be thankful, cling to what is good, abstain from evil. But in the end, whether you rejoice or not, whether you are thankful or not, whether or not you cling to what is good or abstain from evil, the one who is coming is faithful, the one who is coming is blameless, the one who is coming is good, conquers evil, and on this lies the promise. So these things we are to be and to do come not out of our own abilities, but out of Christ who fulfills all that is promised. God is the actor in the sentence. We rejoice because God is faithful, not God is faithful because we rejoice.
I think John is a great example of that in our Gospel reading for today. Right at the beginning we learn that John was sent by God. John’s very existence in the story came out of God’s action, and not of John’s own doing. John did not hear God’s voice and respond; he did not discern a need. No, John was sent by God to testify to the light. He didn’t even have light himself, he was just supposed to talk about it. He was just supposed to stand in what felt like darkness and say, hey, guess what guys, I know you can’t see it, but there’s light. Now that feels like something that even I could do.
So John was talking about the light, and people started to get confused that, even though it still seemed pretty dark, maybe John was the light. So then we get this amazing little interchange between John and the religious leaders. Where the religious leaders are like, “who are you?” And John gives possibly the most unhelpful response ever, “I am not the Messiah.” Great, so we’ve checked that off the list. Who else aren’t you? A dinosaur, Governor Snyder, Justin Verlander, the Pope? Some studies put the number of people who have ever lived at around one-hundred and eight billion, so if we try to figure out who someone is by listing who they are not, we could be here for a while. But for John, who he is not is the most important identifier of who he is, it is the detail that makes everything else in his life make sense, that makes everything he does worth doing; the knowledge, the confidence that there is a Messiah, and it is not him.
Well the religious leaders want more than that, so they prod more. OK, so you’re not the Messiah, “are you Elijah?” “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” “No.” “So who then are you?” He said, “I am the voice of the one crying in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord.” And then he redirects the attention of the crowd, “Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me.”
Because the thing John knew was, dark as it seemed, there was light. They could see John not because John was the light, but because the light of Christ had already come into the world. All John had to do was show it to them.
So I have an example of this for you. I’m not someone who hears God’s voice audibly. Some people have deep, verbal conversations with God, and that’s great but that’s just not the sort of prayer life that I’ve ever had. But I remember the summer I was working as a chaplain in a retirement community when I was called upon to visit one of the residents who was in the Intensive Care Unit at the local hospital. To gain entrance to the intensive care wing, you had to ring the buzzer outside a set of menacingly large grey doors. I remember staring up at those grey doors, feet shaking in black dress shoes so new they still squeaked, I’d purchased them specifically for that summer, shiny nametag labeling me as a “student chaplain” pinned to the collar of my shirt, thinking, “dear God, I have no idea what I am supposed to do here. I don’t know this person, I don’t know what to say, I don’t even know what it means to be a chaplain.” I didn’t even realize my words were a prayer until what I can only describe as a voice from within my chest responded, “I don’t know what you’re going to say either, but quite frankly, it doesn’t matter. Your presence is not the one that matters here, mine is. What I do know is that whatever you say, you’re not going to say any of it from this side the door, so you might as well walk in.”
You are not the messiah, I am not the messiah. But what we can do, what we do, what God uses us for, is to point to the Messiah. To point to the one whom John the Baptist said, stands among us whom we do not know. John is a great example for us of how to say, you know what, I’m not God, I’m not going to get it right all the time, I can’t save the day. But I know the one who is, I know the one who can, and I can point the way to that one for you. I can show you, I can tell you about the one who is that in my life, about where you can find that one in your midst.
This is what God sends us into the world to do. To testify to the light. To testify that in the midst of whatever is going on, Christ is there. And because we are confident in who we are not, we can be confident in whose we are. We can be confident in Christ’s presence. And we can be confident that the one who sent us into this world is faithful. Amen.
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