I expect most of you know by now that we have a homegrown preacher next week. Our newest deacon, Drew Johnson, is going to be my sub on December 26 while I’m off basking in sunny Minneapolis. He’s been up here before, of course: many of you remember when he was a shepherd in our Christmas pageant a few years ago. Imagine what you’d think if, when he came to the pulpit to speak, he started out by saying:
“The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because YHWH has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of YHWH’s favor.” [Is 61:1-2]
Well, no big deal, right? I mean, after all, we just read those very words. It’s the Old Testament lectionary reading for this Sunday, after all. And that’s just the same sort of thing that happened back in Jesus’ time, also. This was what Jesus was supposed to read, that long-ago Sabbath day. But he didn’t stop there. Luke tells us that after he read the Scripture, he said to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” I suspect that that wasn’t all Jesus said, because at first everybody was nodding in approval, enjoying listening to Mary’s boy preach, no doubt pleased as punch that the hometown boy had come back to share what he’d learned, maybe pleased, also, that he’d found his calling in life at last. At least that what Luke seems to imply, because at first “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” But then the import of what he was actually saying began to sink in. And they were shocked. “Is this not Joseph’s son?” they asked? [Lk 4:22-24]
They were waiting for the Messiah. They had been waiting for hundreds of years. But they didn’t expect the Good News to come wrapped in the all-too-familiar disguise of Mary’s oldest boy, Yeshua bar Joseph, the head-in-the-clouds dreamer who had taken off for parts unknown some years back, leaving his father’s business to his younger brothers.
So they didn’t believe him, and Jesus was angry with them, and they got angry back, and ran him out of town.
Why were the people so upset? Was it just that they couldn’t believe that someone they’d known all their lives was really who God had chosen to save them? Or was there something else going on?
I think there was something deeper at stake here.
You see, the Messiah promises were part of their secret dreams, part of the hopes the people cherished when life got too hard. They could look around at the people around them who ignored the laws of God and prospered anyway, the Romans who sneered at YHWH God and laughed at their claim to be “chosen” people, the tax collectors who called themselves Jews yet preyed on their own people, the rich priests down in Jerusalem who looked down on the Galileans because of their lack of sophistication.
It was a comfort, you see, to believe that “God would get ‘em” someday. Sometimes it was the only comfort they had.
But their hopes had been raised and dashed too many times over the past few hundred years. The Maccabees had come the closest; they had kept Judea independent for almost a hundred years. But it didn’t last, and Egypt and Syria and Rome had each taken their turn stirring the political pot, and the common people just kept getting trampled on. Not a generation before there had been a tax revolt, and well over a hundred Galileans had wound up being executed in the crackdown that followed. And the Zealots, the Sicarii, kept playing around with plots and ambushes and the like that only got the soldiers edgy and prone to assaulting innocent travelers just in case.
No, hope was too fragile a thing to be playing around with. It still is.
Listen again to those words... “YHWH has... sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.”
How painful it must be, to be a prisoner waiting for freedom who has been told he’s getting out on a certain date, only to be told at the last minute that it was all a mistake and he has to go back behind bars. How painful it must be, to be told after you’ve come out of the anesthetic after surgery, that it didn’t work, that nothing has changed. How painful it must be, to await a promised legacy and discover that the stocks are worthless and the land is mortgaged. As the book of Proverbs says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” [Pr 13:12]
You remember in the Peanuts comic strip, when the football season begins, and Lucy holds the football for Charlie to kick? He always believes that - this time - she’ll come through. And at the last minute she pulls the ball away, and Charlie Brown falls flat on his back, again. How many of you could keep on doing that, always the optimist, even in the face of repeated betrayal? I think it could only happen in the funny papers.
In stark contrast to Charlie Brown’s experience, I’ve read that wherever Queen Victoria of England went, she never looked to see if there was a chair waiting for her. She just sat, and it was always there.
Those are examples of two different kinds of perfect faith. And neither one is a good model for us. Because for most of us, unlike Charlie Brown, repeated disappointment inoculates us against hope. We lower our sights or walk away rather than risk disappointment. The Jews of Jesus’ day believed in the Messiah but at a distance. They couldn’t afford to believe in the possibility of redemption in their own time and space. It hurt too much when it turned out to be false.
Queen Victoria’s example is a better one, because her faith was well-founded in reality and reinforced by experience. But sometimes God’s provision is not quite as solidly immediate and visible as the chairs which Victoria’s servants so obligingly held ready for her. Often God answers our prayers in ways that we do not expect.
A very good friend of mine, a devout Jewish woman whom I’ll call Rachel, asked me once why I believed that Jesus was the Messiah, since he didn’t restore the Kingdom or rebuild the Temple or do any of the other things that she understood the prophets to promise. Since he doesn’t like what Rachel expects a Messiah to be, when she looks at Jesus she doesn’t see him.
And so the people of Jesus’ home town looked at Jesus and saw a home town boy grown too big for his britches, and ran him out of town.
That is why he needed John.
John looked like a prophet. He was exactly what the people of first century Palestine expected of their holy men. He lived out in the Judean desert - that’s the barren, rocky gullies between the Dead Sea and Jerusalem - and went barefoot and wore camel’s hair and ate honey and carob seeds (that’s probably what is meant by eating locusts, incidentally, the fruit of the locust tree). And not only did he look like a prophet, he sounded like one. He walked straight out of the Bible stories they had grown up on, breathing fire and brimstone and calling the wrath of God down on sinners. And so when people looked at John, they were inclined to believe what he said. It was only after John authenticated his credentials that Jesus began his ministry.
People need to be prepared for Jesus.
It isn’t enough just to announce the good news.
But a messenger like John the Baptist won’t prepare the way for Jesus message in this day and age, will it? Most people don’t believe in sin, except maybe other people’s. God should accept us as we are, isn’t that what Jesus is all about? We’re not looking for salvation, either. For a while people believed in political salvation, but that’s gone as we’ve seen how hollow so many of the promises of progress have actually been. Salvation is too much to ask for; most people are just trying to survive.
And our wilderness is very unlike Judea’s. It’s almost impossible to pick out any single voice from all the conflicting messages that fill our world. We could stand on the street corner and shout doom and destruction, but who would listen? Even if we stood on a street corner and shouted salvation and peace we wouldn’t get a much better hearing. Most of us have seen street-corner preachers, and crossed to get out of their way. No, that kind of voice crying in the wilderness isn’t what’s needed.
Something very different is needed. Instead of going out and shouting, what we need to do is listen to the weeping, the crying in the wilderness that is taking place all around us. The amount of sorrow in this world is absolutely overwhelming... How people live without the hope that God gives us in Christ is completely beyond me. Some self-medicate with money or drugs or possessions or sex or busy-ness. Some get by on sheer will-power. And others break apart. How will they hear, when the Good News has been so emptied of meaning and power, by trivialization and corruption and broken promises?
The only way to draw people to Jesus is to actually be about binding up wounds, and comforting the broken-hearted, and working against injustice of all kinds. Like John, who baptized with water to prepare his hearers for the baptism of fire, the comfort which we can give prepares people to believe in the comfort Christ can give. Christmas is a time to celebrate, yes. But it is also a time to recommit, to be people who not only announce the good news, but who live it.
Because if we don’t live the Gospel, how will people believe that Christ also lives? People must see that we are real, before they will believe that Jesus is.
