William H. Willimon - "Hoping for Christmas" (December 12, 1999)
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| - | I can't stand it when people | 0:13 |
| (clears throat) | 0:15 | |
| ask that | 0:16 | |
| (clears throat) excuse me, | 0:17 | |
| favorite pre-Christmas question, | 0:18 | |
| usually addressed to some child, | 0:21 | |
| "Well, what are you getting for Christmas?" | 0:24 | |
| Or, if they're more polite, | 0:27 | |
| "What are you hoping to get for Christmas?" | 0:28 | |
| Not long ago I overheard that question | 0:31 | |
| addressed to a child and the child responded, | 0:33 | |
| "Well how do I know? Depends on what they give me." | 0:38 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 0:42 | |
| Which showed a great deal of wisdom. | 0:43 | |
| As Christians we know that Christmas is not about | 0:47 | |
| gifts or greed, it's about the birth of Christ. | 0:50 | |
| The one whom, as we sing on Christmas, | 0:55 | |
| the hopes and fears of all the years are met. | 0:59 | |
| And yet, one can learn something | 1:06 | |
| from the pre-Christmas question, | 1:08 | |
| "What are you hoping to get for Christmas?" | 1:11 | |
| Because if you know our hope, you fairly well know us. | 1:17 | |
| For what are you hoping? | 1:22 | |
| I expect that's what most people think | 1:26 | |
| religion is all about: the fulfillment of our hopes. | 1:28 | |
| We hope to find peace amid anxious lives, | 1:34 | |
| and so we come to church, and we hope that the music | 1:38 | |
| or the words or something will give us | 1:43 | |
| some sense of reassurance and well-being. | 1:45 | |
| We hope for thoughtful, reflective lives, | 1:50 | |
| and so we come and we hope that the sermon | 1:53 | |
| or some of the ideas expressed in the scripture | 1:56 | |
| will help us to think about things in a new way | 2:00 | |
| and use our brains, and... | 2:03 | |
| Or we hope for beauty. | 2:07 | |
| There's a lot of ugliness in this world, | 2:09 | |
| and maybe that's one reason we draw apart, | 2:11 | |
| particularly at a season of the year like this. | 2:14 | |
| As days grow shorter, and the darkness comes earlier, | 2:19 | |
| and we gather amidst the beauty of a place like this | 2:23 | |
| and music like we have heard, for what are you hoping? | 2:29 | |
| Church is where we get our hopes met, | 2:36 | |
| where our yearning is fulfilled. | 2:40 | |
| Maybe that's why people keep coming to church. | 2:43 | |
| Though their hopes are often disappointed here on Sunday, | 2:47 | |
| maybe there are enough Sundays where | 2:53 | |
| at least you are able to say, | 2:55 | |
| why that service really did something for me today, | 2:58 | |
| and what you mean by that is | 3:01 | |
| that service really did fulfill my hope. | 3:03 | |
| My hope about what good worship is, our hopes were met. | 3:07 | |
| Maybe I ought to prepare my sermon | 3:15 | |
| by therefore meeting you at the front door | 3:16 | |
| and handing you a questionnaire, or take a poll. | 3:19 | |
| What is your expectation for this service, | 3:22 | |
| what is your hope? | 3:24 | |
| It seems to be a major point of religion, | 3:27 | |
| the fulfillment of hope. | 3:30 | |
| Of course, trouble is if you know much about the Bible, | 3:34 | |
| you know that the Bible is, | 3:36 | |
| conducts an ongoing critique of our hope | 3:39 | |
| and our expectation. | 3:44 | |
| Jesus was light into our darkness, | 3:46 | |
| but problem with Jesus was | 3:49 | |
| He wasn't the sort of light everybody was expecting. | 3:52 | |
| That's where the trouble started, | 3:58 | |
| He was the hope of the world, but when the world's hopes | 4:00 | |
| collided with who he was, the world found out | 4:03 | |
| that he was not the hope for which they were hoping. | 4:08 | |
| Maybe that's why the church in its wisdom | 4:13 | |
| on the third Sunday of Advent confronts us | 4:17 | |
| with John the Baptist on this Sunday of Advent. | 4:20 | |
| Because here we are just a couple of weeks before Christmas, | 4:26 | |
| hoping for Christmas. | 4:29 | |
| But the first person we meet on the way | 4:32 | |
| to the Jesus child is John the Baptist, | 4:35 | |
| strange figure, odd preacher, who doesn't really | 4:39 | |
| match up to anybody's hope. | 4:44 | |
| It is interesting that the story of Jesus begins | 4:47 | |
| with the dissonance of John. | 4:50 | |
| And what does that tell us? | 4:54 | |
| Hear today's Gospel. | 4:56 | |
| This is the testimony of John, | 5:01 | |
| when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem | 5:04 | |
| to ask, "Who are you?" | 5:07 | |
| John confessed, he did not deny, but he confessed, | 5:09 | |
| "I am not the Christ." | 5:15 | |
| They asked him, "Well, what then? Are you Eli'jah?" | 5:18 | |
| John answered, "I am not." | 5:22 | |
| "Well, are you the prophet?" | 5:26 | |
| John answered, "No." | 5:29 | |
| They said to him, "Well, who are you? Let's have an answer | 5:33 | |
| for those who sent us; what do you say about yourself?" | 5:37 | |
| John said, "I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, | 5:43 | |
| 'Make straight the way of the Lord,' | 5:48 | |
| as the prophet Isaiah said." | 5:50 | |
| Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. | 5:55 | |
| So, they asked him again, "Well then why are you baptizing, | 5:59 | |
| if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, | 6:03 | |
| nor the prophet?" | 6:06 | |
| John answered, "I baptize with water; | 6:08 | |
| but among you stands one whom you do not know, | 6:11 | |
| even he who comes after me, the thong of whose sandal | 6:16 | |
| I am not worthy to untie." | 6:20 | |
| Here is the story of John, a man sent from God. | 6:29 | |
| John says he came as a testimony to bear witness | 6:36 | |
| to the light, that all might believe through Him. | 6:41 | |
| He was not the light, but he came | 6:46 | |
| to bear witness to the light. | 6:49 | |
| This is the Word of the Lord. | 6:54 | |
| Thanks be to God. | 6:56 | |
| Well, we're not just meeting on this third Sunday | 7:00 | |
| of Advent John the Baptist. | 7:02 | |
| We're meeting John the Baptist | 7:05 | |
| as he is presented in the Gospel of John. | 7:06 | |
| John's Gospel paints a peculiar picture | 7:13 | |
| of peculiar John the Baptist. | 7:16 | |
| Unlike the other Gospels, and John the Baptist appears | 7:19 | |
| in all the Gospels, the fourth Gospel, for instance, | 7:21 | |
| reports nothing on the way John was dressed | 7:26 | |
| like the other Gospels. | 7:29 | |
| Luke says John had an odd diet and lived | 7:31 | |
| out in the wilderness, but John tells us nothing of this. | 7:36 | |
| Luke also says that John called people to repent | 7:40 | |
| of their sins, to set their lives right. | 7:44 | |
| When people asked John what they ought to do to get saved, | 7:47 | |
| Luke says John told them, "If you've got two coats, | 7:51 | |
| give one away to the poor. | 7:54 | |
| Here's what you've got to do to get right with God." | 7:56 | |
| But not in the Gospel of John. | 8:02 | |
| In John's Gospel, John the Baptist | 8:05 | |
| isn't even called John the Baptist. | 8:07 | |
| He's called a witness, he's called a witness | 8:09 | |
| to the light. | 8:14 | |
| The light; this time of year, in our pre-Christmas | 8:18 | |
| celebrations, we string up lights everywhere. | 8:22 | |
| We string lights up lamp poles and framing windows | 8:26 | |
| and over our streets and twirling around trees, | 8:29 | |
| but you hear John telling us that when he speaks | 8:33 | |
| of the light, the light coming into the world, | 8:38 | |
| the light lighting our darkness, | 8:43 | |
| it's a very different light than the light | 8:47 | |
| that we have in our conventional Christmas celebrations. | 8:51 | |
| When John began preaching, he didn't stand | 8:57 | |
| on a city street corner and preach to the multitudes. | 8:59 | |
| He didn't stand in a carved limestone pulpit. | 9:04 | |
| John went out to the wilderness, | 9:07 | |
| he called people out into the desolate desert | 9:11 | |
| to make straight the path of the Lord into their lives. | 9:15 | |
| And it was out there in the desert that, | 9:21 | |
| according to today's Gospel, representatives | 9:23 | |
| from the department of the religion came out | 9:26 | |
| to do what they do so well: give examinations. | 9:30 | |
| They didn't know what to make of John. | 9:36 | |
| These religious experts say, "Shine the bright | 9:39 | |
| flashlight into John's face," and they demanded, | 9:43 | |
| "Well, who are you?" | 9:46 | |
| He certainly didn't act, he didn't dress | 9:50 | |
| like anyone religious whom they had encountered before. | 9:53 | |
| "Who are you?" they demand. | 9:59 | |
| "What is your denomination? | 10:02 | |
| Are you Calvinist, pre-millennium, Armenian, | 10:04 | |
| high church, low?" | 10:06 | |
| Interestingly, John answers them by, | 10:09 | |
| not by saying who he is but by saying who he is not. | 10:14 | |
| "I am not the Messiah," which is an interesting answer | 10:19 | |
| because that isn't what his questioners ask. | 10:25 | |
| His interrogators regroup, "Well, what then? | 10:30 | |
| Are you maybe the prophet Elijah?" | 10:34 | |
| "No, I'm not." | 10:38 | |
| "Well then, maybe then you're some new prophet." | 10:41 | |
| "No, I am not." | 10:45 | |
| See what they're doing? | 10:49 | |
| They want to put him in some pigeon hole, | 10:51 | |
| they're determined to place John in their preconception | 10:53 | |
| of what religion ought to be, | 10:57 | |
| what religious person ought to be. | 10:59 | |
| They want to place John within their conventional | 11:03 | |
| expectations, they want to see John fit into their hopes | 11:05 | |
| for the future of Israel. | 11:13 | |
| But no matter what they suggest, | 11:16 | |
| John just says, "No, no, no I'm not that, | 11:18 | |
| No, no." | 11:20 | |
| Some of them hoped maybe he might be | 11:23 | |
| the great prophet Elijah come back from the dead | 11:25 | |
| to deliver Israel. | 11:27 | |
| When Elijah was on earth, Elijah the prophet showed | 11:30 | |
| great power of God in the deeds that he did. | 11:33 | |
| Well, now if he's maybe not Elijah, | 11:37 | |
| maybe he's one of the minor prophets like Obadiah, | 11:39 | |
| who didn't do such great works but he spoke great words. | 11:42 | |
| And who needed great words from God and great works of God | 11:46 | |
| any more than Israel, with the heel of Rome on their neck. | 11:50 | |
| They were an occupied people. | 11:54 | |
| What hope had they for deliverance | 11:57 | |
| if it didn't come from God? | 12:00 | |
| "Who are you?" they attempt again. | 12:03 | |
| "Let's have an answer for those | 12:07 | |
| who've sent us out here to inquire. | 12:09 | |
| What do you say about yourself?" | 12:12 | |
| John refused to say anything. | 12:16 | |
| He is Dr. No. | 12:19 | |
| We are given no details, nothing about his dress, | 12:21 | |
| nothing about his message other than negation. | 12:24 | |
| John is the one who comes and says, "No." | 12:28 | |
| The only positive thing John says here | 12:34 | |
| about himself is that he is a voice. | 12:38 | |
| "I am the voice crying in the wilderness, | 12:42 | |
| 'Make straight the path of God.' | 12:47 | |
| I am God's megaphone, I am the smell of the coffee | 12:51 | |
| that wakes you up in the morning, I am that | 12:56 | |
| alarm clock that shatters your sleep. | 12:59 | |
| I am that annoying voice you can't get away from | 13:02 | |
| in the restaurant, no matter how far you move your table. | 13:05 | |
| I am the voice. | 13:08 | |
| Furthermore, I am the voice | 13:10 | |
| that's got only one thing to tell you: | 13:14 | |
| The light is coming." | 13:17 | |
| John doesn't say of Jesus, "There is one coming | 13:21 | |
| who is coming who is going to call you to repent, | 13:25 | |
| to take away your sins. | 13:27 | |
| There is one coming who's going to tell you | 13:29 | |
| just what you ought to do to get right with God." | 13:30 | |
| He just says, | 13:32 | |
| "Mr. Light is coming. | 13:35 | |
| I'm a voice that's before the light." | 13:39 | |
| If you don't know what to make of somebody | 13:45 | |
| who says he's nothing but a voice, | 13:47 | |
| what do you make of somebody who's nothing but light? | 13:49 | |
| Light, light has got to be one of the most | 13:53 | |
| difficult to define, to limit, of human experiences. | 13:57 | |
| In the mornings about this time of year | 14:05 | |
| when the leaves are off the trees | 14:07 | |
| and dawn seems to come earlier, | 14:10 | |
| light streams into the bedroom, | 14:12 | |
| and no matter how tight you try to shut the curtains, | 14:15 | |
| light coming in at such an inopportune time. | 14:18 | |
| John says, "I am not the light. | 14:24 | |
| I'm a witness to the light; I'm a voice. | 14:27 | |
| I'm somebody who points to the light, | 14:31 | |
| I am somebody who tells you that the light is coming | 14:34 | |
| but I am not the light." | 14:37 | |
| To those religious experts, who do what religious experts | 14:39 | |
| tend to do, to define, to classify, to characterize, | 14:44 | |
| to pigeon hole, to know by God, know, | 14:47 | |
| John says, | 14:52 | |
| "I'm among you as one you don't know, | 14:54 | |
| and furthermore there is one who stands among you | 14:58 | |
| whom you do not know." | 15:02 | |
| Out in the wilderness, at some place distant | 15:06 | |
| from Western civilization, far from the places of power, | 15:10 | |
| far outside the city walls and the boundaries | 15:16 | |
| and the limits, beyond the doctors of religion | 15:20 | |
| and their definitions, John tells them, tells us | 15:25 | |
| "You do not know, you cannot define, | 15:33 | |
| you do not know the light that is coming into the world, | 15:37 | |
| into the darkness. | 15:42 | |
| All he says is to negate our definitions | 15:45 | |
| and our expectations. | 15:49 | |
| At this point, we're given no substance, | 15:52 | |
| no defining content. | 15:54 | |
| Rather, at this point in the story, | 15:57 | |
| up here at the beginning in Advent, | 15:59 | |
| we are told that our hopes are going to be fulfilled, | 16:01 | |
| but not necessarily fulfilled as we expected, | 16:06 | |
| by the light that dawns to our darkness. | 16:10 | |
| Our expectations are going to be met, | 16:15 | |
| but not met or managed by light | 16:19 | |
| that dawns among us. | 16:25 | |
| John does not tell his questioners | 16:28 | |
| that he doesn't know the light, | 16:31 | |
| rather John says, "You don't know the light." | 16:33 | |
| He tells simply, "You don't know." | 16:39 | |
| That's kind of a radical thing to say around here, | 16:44 | |
| because we know a lot. | 16:48 | |
| One Sunday, I was reprimanded for a student, | 16:51 | |
| I read this passage of scripture and I was, | 16:53 | |
| and I talked about it a bit, and I said, | 16:58 | |
| "Does it mean this, does it mean that?" | 17:00 | |
| And I just said, "I don't know." | 17:02 | |
| And he said, "But, you're a preacher! | 17:05 | |
| We pay you to know, you're expected to know!" | 17:07 | |
| Maybe here with John, right now, | 17:15 | |
| we're not supposed to define | 17:18 | |
| or characterize or categorize. | 17:20 | |
| Maybe we're just simply to do | 17:24 | |
| what human beings naturally do | 17:26 | |
| when light streams into darkness. | 17:28 | |
| We're just to open our squinting eyes to the light. | 17:33 | |
| Maybe we're just to sit here in this darkened room | 17:38 | |
| and allow our eyes to get adjusted to the light that dawns. | 17:41 | |
| It's enough to make you ask, "For what am I hoping | 17:49 | |
| for Christmas?" | 17:54 | |
| It's an important question because, | 17:56 | |
| like some of those people who questioned John, | 17:58 | |
| we may miss something so fragile | 18:00 | |
| and mysterious as Mr. Light | 18:03 | |
| if we're too full of our explanations, | 18:07 | |
| too full of our definitions and expectations. | 18:10 | |
| For what are you hoping? | 18:15 | |
| Well, if you're like many people around here, | 18:19 | |
| maybe you're not sure. | 18:21 | |
| What brought you to church on this third Sunday of Advent? | 18:25 | |
| Maybe you didn't even know it was | 18:29 | |
| the third Sunday of Advent. | 18:30 | |
| Maybe you were called here by some strange, | 18:34 | |
| indefinable tug at the heart | 18:38 | |
| that you find difficult to define or describe. | 18:42 | |
| And maybe John is saying, "That's okay." | 18:47 | |
| An open heart may be a lot better than one | 18:52 | |
| that is just so chock full of definitions | 18:55 | |
| and preconceptions and preconditions, | 18:58 | |
| that there's no room left for any light. | 19:03 | |
| Later in John's Gospel, Jesus would make a lot of | 19:09 | |
| "I Am" statements. | 19:13 | |
| He would say, "I am the light, | 19:16 | |
| I am the vine, you're the branches. | 19:19 | |
| I am the way, I am the truth, I am the... | 19:21 | |
| I am the bread." | 19:26 | |
| But right now, here at the beginning, | 19:28 | |
| before we meet Jesus, John simply introduces Him | 19:30 | |
| as light whom you do not know. | 19:35 | |
| John says, "I am not the light, I'm just a witness | 19:39 | |
| to the light, I am the voice of the light | 19:42 | |
| coming into the world whom you do not know." | 19:45 | |
| At times, you've heard me say that I'm bothered | 19:52 | |
| by some of this spiritual outburst | 19:54 | |
| that's going on among us in our culture. | 19:58 | |
| There seems to be a great resurgence of | 20:02 | |
| something vaguely called spirituality. | 20:04 | |
| And most of the time, a lot of this strikes me | 20:09 | |
| as rather thin stuff, a kind of free-floating | 20:11 | |
| vague openness to something, something called spiritual. | 20:15 | |
| Spirituality becomes this great basket | 20:20 | |
| that we just dump everything into | 20:23 | |
| and we call that "spiritual," just vague yearning. | 20:25 | |
| I was at a dinner a while back | 20:31 | |
| and our host, in lieu of a blessing, | 20:33 | |
| urged us all to have a moment of silence, | 20:35 | |
| and we all bowed our heads. | 20:38 | |
| And I'm sitting there at the table, | 20:40 | |
| and I'm thinking, because I know some of these people, | 20:41 | |
| "I wonder what Godless secular people do | 20:45 | |
| when they bow their heads for a moment of silence | 20:47 | |
| before a meal? | 20:49 | |
| What are they thinking? | 20:51 | |
| They don't believe in God, so there's nobody | 20:52 | |
| to be grateful to for the meal." | 20:53 | |
| "Oh Lord, if there is one, save my soul | 20:58 | |
| if I happen to have one." | 21:01 | |
| (Congregation laughing) | 21:03 | |
| But you know, this Sunday, this Sunday | 21:08 | |
| with John the Baptist, I'm thinking, | 21:11 | |
| amidst all of his denials and negations, | 21:14 | |
| I'm wondering if maybe that, | 21:17 | |
| a kind of silent waiting is not a bad place to begin. | 21:21 | |
| A kind of inarticulate yearning. | 21:27 | |
| Later, during the course of the church's year, | 21:31 | |
| we're going to have lots of occasions | 21:34 | |
| to find out a lot more about Jesus. | 21:38 | |
| There's going to be a lot of opportunity | 21:41 | |
| to give more substance to this shining light. | 21:43 | |
| I will stand up here and I'll tell you how to vote | 21:47 | |
| and how to spend your money and how to live your life, | 21:50 | |
| but this Sunday, with John, | 21:54 | |
| let's just simply lay aside our hopes and expectations, | 22:00 | |
| and let's just let the light dawn among us. | 22:04 | |
| Let's allow light to enter our inarticulate darkness. | 22:09 | |
| Let's simply admit we're in the dark. | 22:15 | |
| There is much that we just don't know. | 22:20 | |
| Meister Eckhart says, | 22:26 | |
| "God is the one who has no name. | 22:29 | |
| God is the Word that speaks itself before you speak." | 22:34 | |
| You know that one of Jesus' great problems | 22:41 | |
| by the time that his ministry got going, | 22:44 | |
| after this encounter between the authorities and John, | 22:46 | |
| one of Jesus' big problems was people who thought | 22:50 | |
| they knew exactly how Messiah was supposed to act, | 22:53 | |
| and exactly what a Messiah was supposed to say. | 22:57 | |
| People decided that what they needed was | 23:01 | |
| a good general to come in here and raise an army | 23:03 | |
| and run these Romans out. | 23:05 | |
| When Jesus didn't do that, He was rejected. | 23:09 | |
| They decided maybe that they needed somebody | 23:14 | |
| to come in and speak some cool, reassuring, soothing | 23:16 | |
| spiritual words, and when Jesus didn't do that | 23:19 | |
| they turned against Him with murderous intensity. | 23:23 | |
| A scientist was telling me that | 23:30 | |
| the most difficult thing, when you're a research scientist, | 23:33 | |
| is to go engage in an experiment and look for something, | 23:39 | |
| but at the same time to expect to be surprised | 23:45 | |
| by the data that you receive. | 23:50 | |
| Most bad research, he said, begins in thinking | 23:54 | |
| that you know what you know. | 23:58 | |
| Thus John says Jesus will be known | 24:04 | |
| by knowing what He is not before you know who He is. | 24:08 | |
| A faculty member just last week was explaining to me | 24:14 | |
| why, though he's a great, high-powered academic, | 24:17 | |
| he always loves to teach a freshman seminar, | 24:20 | |
| because he says, "Freshman know enough to know | 24:24 | |
| that they don't know. | 24:28 | |
| You take juniors, for instance, who know just enough | 24:30 | |
| to render them impervious to any new knowledge." | 24:33 | |
| (congregation laughing) | 24:37 | |
| It's okay if you've come here empty. | 24:42 | |
| It's okay if you're not too sure. | 24:46 | |
| We ought to be cultivating a receptivity | 24:50 | |
| for surprise, wonder, shock of God who is not the God | 24:53 | |
| we thought we knew, and not even the God | 24:59 | |
| we thought we wanted. | 25:02 | |
| Light comes into our darkness. | 25:05 | |
| Today I stand among you as witness to the light, | 25:09 | |
| the light coming into the world, | 25:13 | |
| the light that the darkness of the world has not, | 25:15 | |
| despite over 2,000 years, overcome, | 25:19 | |
| of the Father's love begotten | 25:23 | |
| ere before the world began, He was light. | 25:25 | |
| And the light is the light of all. | 25:29 | |
| Amen. | 25:36 |
