Advent 3 B - Dec 11, 2011

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY --- Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC
Advent 3, Year B - Sunday, December 11, 2011

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24
John 1:6-8, 19-28


Poets, writers, artists, and preachers get ideas and inspiration from unusual or surprising sources.  For me, the idea or inspiration for this sermon came as I was at the photocopy machine in our mail room on Friday.  I had been thinking about today's readings for some time, wondering what my take on them might be... or perhaps better, what their take on me should be.  And I looked up and saw posted on the bulletin board an Advent calendar published by Morehouse and edited and designed by two friend of our community, Jay Sidebotham and Susan Elliot.

Like most things on bulletin boards, I had pretty much ignored it, despite its poster size.  But as I was waiting for my copying to finish I thought: why not see what the message is for today?  And here's what it said:

Get ready for this coming Sunday.  Read the gospel ahead of time.  It's John 1:6-8, 19-28.  Imagine that you were asked the question that John the Baptist was asked.  How would you answer?  What would you have to say?  WHO ARE YOU?

Not a bad way to enter in to today's Gospel passage: Who are you?  Who indeed are you?

St John baptizes the people
painted 1633-35 - Nicholas Poussin - Getty Center, Los Angeles

If we were asked that question, there are any number of normal and expected ways that we might go about answering it.  We might focus on genealogy or even genetics, on nationality, ethnicity or social class, on sex or sexual orientation, on education, health, physical attractiveness, marital status, certainly job or profession, perhaps income and wealth or lack of it, and even religion.  These are all part of the picture, of course, all components of our identity.

But I wonder: Do they get to the heart of things?  Does any of these, or any combination of these factors, capture with any degree of accuracy the mystery of you or me or adequately express who we are?  I think not.  Too many things are left out, and they are precisely the things that matter most about you and me, that define us most deeply and most richly.

It is helpful to examine how John the Baptist went about answering the question.  He begins by stating clearly who he is not: “I am not the Messiah.”  This he knows for a fact.  And then the questions start: Are you Elijah?  No.  The prophet?  No.  It all sounds a bit like a skit from Monty Python.  But in fact this is the way people, you and me, go about finding out who we are.  It happens by considering and eliminating or saying “No” to various possibilities throughout our lives... and this often at the questioning or challenge of others, friends and foes alike.

Finally, John comes to a place where he sees more clearly and is able to talk about his identity: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.”  We might say that in this sentence, in this statement, John has discovered and given voice to his identity, to his vocation, to his deeper and truer self.  John finally had an answer, or at least the first stage of an answer, to that perennial and troubling question: Who are you?  Who am I?  It is an answer that will deepen over time and be refined in the fire of life.  But John seems to have found his true self.

Something very similar happens in the life of our Lord.  In his case it is not others who ask, it is Jesus himself.  “Who do people say that I am?” he asks his friends.  “Elijah,” they answer, “... or one of the prophets.”  “And you, who do you say that I am?”  And here Peter makes his confession: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  And here Jesus comes to know fully, perhaps for the first time and with startling clarity, who he is and what he is called to.  It was the community of others who knew him well that made it possible for Jesus to understand more fully who he was and what he was called to.  And perhaps for the first time he is able to accept that more fundamental and primary statement of his identity that came to him from the Father at his baptism: “You are my beloved Son, my beloved child.”

What is true of John the Baptizer and of Jesus is true also of us. What is most central to us and to our identity is approached by and appropriated through listening... to ourselves first but also to others: their questions, their counsel, their reactions.  But most of all this happens by listening to God.

And what does God say both in Scripture and in tradition about you and me, about who we are?

• In Genesis 1:26, God says: ” Let us make humankind in our own image, according to out likeness.”
• In Psalm 8:4-5, God says: “...what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?  Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.”
• Indeed in Psalm 82:6 the Holy One says: “You are gods, and all of you children of the Most High...”  What an amazing claim, and yet this is the truth about you and me.  This is the deepest truth and the most profound answer to that question posed in today's Gospel: Who are you?

Our late Br. Douglas Brown loved to tell a story about the late Byzantine world.  In that society, images of imperial authority were treated with great respect, and when the emperor himself could not be present at an imperial function, his image was escorted in with great pomp and ceremony, with heralds shouting out to the crowd: “Make way for the image of the emperor. Make way for the image of the emperor.”  Once a rabbi watching this ceremony from the sidelines, observing the elaborate ceremony, commented: “Before every human being goes an army of angels shouting: “Make way for the image of the image of God.  Make way for the image of the image of God.”  The story is apocryphal of course, but not the quote.  It is from the Talmud, that great compendium of Jewish wisdom.

Rabbi Joshua ben Levi said: "A procession of angels pass before each person, and the heralds go before them, saying, 'Make way for the image of God!' (Deut. Rabbah, 4:4)

This is true of you and me, of course.  But it is true also of the person ahead of us at the checkout line and of the homeless person at the street corner; it is true of the corporate executive and the abused child; of the mentally handicapped man and the nurse and the solid citizen and the single parent and the addict and... well, true of just about everybody, saint and sinner, near at hand and far away, long ago and now and as far as we can see into the future.  Images of God — that's who we are.

On this foundation, on this truth, all the rest is built.  And in this, we can all rejoice.  And from this fact much is demanded and expected of us: lives lived in deep mutual respect, where violence has no place, where hatred is given no foothold, where justice is pursued and mercy and love.  Because that's how one treats the image of God.  We can do no other, we God-worshipers, we the community of the redeemed, we Christians.

 St John the Baptist
Valentin de Boulogne (lived 1591–1632) - private collection

Then they said to him, “Who are you?  Let us have an answer for those who sent us.”  (John 1:22)