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Sunday, Dec. 11, 8:30 - 3rd Sunday of Advent
The one who was not
Sean O. Allen
Pastoral Resident
 John 1:6-8; 19-28 December 11, 2005 - On December 2 of this year, a woman looked into a mirror, paused, and being unable to speak because of a breathing tube in her throat, wrote a note, “Merci.” Thank you. Then she cried. One of her surgeons cried too. Just two days earlier, this surgeon was part of a team of doctors that performed the first-ever partial face transplant. The woman who had been disfigured by a dog bite earlier this year, received a nose, lips and chin during the surgery. Prior to the operation, the woman couldn't chew her food. She had trouble speaking. Whenever she tried to drink something, most of the liquid dribbled from her mouth. People in the street would recoil from her in horror, so she wore a surgical mask to protect her from the stares. Even one of her own two daughters found her appearance unbearable. When she spoke to the press for the first time since the surgery, she talked about seeing herself with her new face. “When I looked at my new face, I knew straight away that it was me.” She knew it was her. She had rediscovered her identity and begun the healing process back towards a more normal life.
The holiday season is a far from normal time of year. As the days tick away, crowds become denser, gifts harder to find, traffic unbearable, children more excited, and each of us a little bit more frazzled. The more decorations that are put up, the more Christmas trees and cookies we smell, the more we are reminded of all that must still be done and how little time we have to do it. Now less than two weeks! The increasingly frantic nature of the holiday season whittles our lives down to lists of things to be done and leaves us with little energy or time left to soak in the season and each other. Our identities are slowly stripped away, you might even say unwrapped, until we are ready for the season to be over so things can get back to “normal.” Don’t get me wrong I love Christmas. I love the family, the friends, the festivities, and let’s not forget the food. But by the end of the season, I am exhausted and life feels far from normal.
On December 2 of this year, a woman looked into a mirror, paused, and being unable to speak because of a breathing tube in her throat, wrote a note, “Merci.” Thank you. Then she cried. One of her surgeons cried too. Just two days earlier, this surgeon was part of a team of doctors that performed the first-ever partial face transplant. The woman who had been disfigured by a dog bite earlier this year, received a nose, lips and chin during the surgery. Prior to the operation, the woman
Enter John the Baptist. Well, that is what we are used to calling him. He too is waiting for the arrival of the Christ. Yet, John’s waiting did not have a designated ending period, like our does on December 25. He was waiting until the Christ came, but he did not know when that would happen or whom that would be. As the wonderful preacher Barbara Brown Taylor phrased it, “Until Jesus came, John’s life was a long Advent!” Most of us remember John the Baptist as the guy in the wilderness who wore a crazy camel hair coat, had the unusual diet of grasshoppers and honey, and preached the message that all should repent and be baptized. This is exactly how three of the gospels depict John the Baptist. Matthew, Mark and Luke, the synoptic gospels, all cast John in the light that we are familiar with, as the freakish forerunner of Jesus.
Our text for today from the Gospel of John does something different. John the Evangelist, not to be confused with John the Baptist, helps clarify who John the Baptist was not. John the Baptist was not the light, though he had come to testify about the light. John the Baptist was not the Messiah. John the Baptist was not Elijah. John the Baptist was not “the prophet.” John the Baptist is not identified as the forerunner in this gospel. John the Baptist is not even called John the Baptist in this passage, only John who also happened to be baptizing people.
This version of John the Baptist is elusive. He is stripped of all his distinctive features. He will allow no attention to himself. He doesn’t want us to look at him, but at someone else. Even as we meet him, he is passing from us. Notice how short his introduction is. "There was a man sent from God." That's all. He is no longer the hairy insect-eater of the Synoptic Gospels. He has become someone more mysterious. It is harder to place him in any box, or wrap him up in any category. There is no bow that fits on this package. This John stands among us as one we do not know.
John becomes, essentially, the One who was not. Let’s recap. He was not the light. He was not the Messiah, Elijah, or the prophet. He is not even who we are familiar with him being. So really who is John? And why is he here? This is exactly what the priests and Levites from Jerusalem came to find out. “Who are you?” they asked. After all the negative answers, it makes you wonder if they understood his one positive answer. “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’” He is no longer John the Baptist, now he is John the Voice.
His prophetic pronouncement did not make things any clearer. So the religious right, no political pun intended, asked about what he was doing. Why was he baptizing if he was essentially nobody of religious significance. The one who was not answered, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.” How is that for clarity? The one who was not, called himself a voice who was not worthy of being the slave of a mysterious one coming after him. A voice subject to one coming after him, how is that for an identity.
Mike Sargent recently had an identity shaping experience. He scratched off a winning lottery ticket to the tune of $25,000. He bought the ticket at a convenience store outside of
Fort Worth , filled in his name and address, and somewhere between that moment and arriving home, he lost it. He lost $25,000. Over the next few days, friends joined him in the search for the lost lottery ticket. They combed fields, roadside ditches, and sifted through garbage bins. Sargent even put out a $2,000 reward for anyone locating the lost ticket. Five days after the ticket was bought, Geraldo Ruiz found the ticket while reading meters in Midlothian. He returned it to Sargent who gave Ruiz a reward of $2,500, and then cut a check to his church for $1,750 (not quite a tithe). In reflecting on the experience, Sargent said he felt like God was telling him that he needed “to be dependent on God and not on lotteries and jobs and anything else.”
John, the one who was not, models for us the lesson learned by Sargent through a lost lottery ticket. Our identity, our sense of who we are, how we live our lives, should be dependent on God and nothing else. John understood that. In his waiting for the Christ, John recognized who he was not. He was not the Messiah, Elijah or the prophet. John was also not who the crowds expected him to be. He refused to be defined by anything except his relationship to the Christ. He found his identity in Christ.
The gospel of Christ challenges each of us to understand that what we do must flow from who we are, from our identity as children of God, from who we are as the body of Christ. John claimed this identity for himself, and lived his life accordingly. We too need to claim who we are. We need to claim our role as voices, and arms and legs, and point others to Christ as John did. We need to claim our identity, especially during the season of Advent. This entire season is about bearing witness to the life altering birth of the coming Christ child. We wait for that which we know will change life and bring comfort. But do we wait with a clear sense of who we are, voices bearing witness to the truth of Christmas? Or do we wait simply for the season to pass so life can get back to normal?
As you all know, Christmas falls on a Sunday this year. Since I work for a church, if I were going to be in town for Christmas, my decision about going to church would be made for me. That is not the case for most of you, and since I am going to be with family in Tyler, Texas for the holidays, I am in the same boat as you. Do I go to church on Christmas morning? I always thought it seemed like a no-brainer. It seems like the one day we would most want to be in church. The day of the birth of our Lord? Of course! Surprisingly, some churches are canceling services on Christmas morning. I won’t name names, but some prominent churches, including some here in Dallas, are canceling Sunday services to allow church staff and members to spend time with their families. Other churches, like Wilshire, are scaling down Sunday morning by having one service and no Sunday School. Both sides have been answering questions in the media the past few days explaining their rationale for their decisions. Maybe it isn’t such a no-brainer after all.
Can I be confessional? Prior to preparing this sermon, I hadn’t planned on attending church on Christmas morning, open or closed. The majority of my family are not church regulars, and since Jamie and I work at a church, I just figured we would enjoy time with family and relax. But there is this issue of identity that I cannot ignore, or better should not ignore. I am a child of God, all of us are children of God, and on the day that celebrates the birth of the Christ child, I thin
k w e need to be together as the family of God.
Showing up for church on Christmas morning is not the only way to claim our identity. We, like John, must recognize that we are not the light, by rather are in need of the light. We are not the brightest bulbs on the tree, the Messiahs of our day. We are not able to see on our own, or call others to see as prophets often do. We are not without darkness in our lives. We are ones who are not. When we recognize this reality, that we are ones who are not, we are able to claim our identity from the one who is, from Christ. This recognition, this claiming of our identity, changes how we live our lives. Some of us are thrust into the spotlight, preaching and teaching, proclaiming and pointing, but all the while acknowledging that we are not and are dependent on the One who is. Others of us are more behind the scenes type people. We provide the energy and resources to accomplish the purposes of the one who is, but are always aware of our place as ones who are not.
John then becomes the best model of what it takes to be a follower of Christ. That does not mean we should stand in the wilderness and call for all to repent and be baptized, not all of us at least. But it does mean we should live our lives as those who are not, pointing to Christ. Feeding the hungry at the Stewpot, caring for children at the Wilkinson Center, sharing the love of God through Kid’s Heart mission trips to the Valley and to Africa, these are just a few of the numerous ways we can and should live our lives so that they point to Christ and the miracle of the Christmas event.
And really isn’t that what this season is all about, the miracle of Christmas. Sadly, society has secularized the story so much that it has become cute and almost harmless. Christmas is marketed to the masses, and it’s meaning is often lost in what holiday season can do for us. This is nowhere more evident than in the insane number of Christmas albums that are out. Everyone who is anyone has released a Christmas album or two in an effort to make an extra buck. We can all find one artist who fits our ear and makes us feel good. My personal favorite: James Brown. Nothing like the Godfather of Soul to point us to the Christ child.
But now Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, and for that matter so does John. John shows us that Christmas and all of Advent is not about what it does for us, but what it does to us. The coming of Christ gives us hope; it gives us comfort; it gives us our identity. John got this. He understood what it meant to be one who was not. May it be the same for each of us. Amen.
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