Sermons from the Pulpit

     This is my Millennium sermon. This is my last shot at it. I figured I ought to mention this, because I think the Millennium has practically no theological significance whatsoever, so this is as close as I'm going to get and I wouldn't want you to expect me to get any closer.

     Of course, if I change my mind about that, I'm still scheduled to preach on January 2, so I'm covered.

     This is one of those times when I'm tempted to ask for a show of hands. I won't do it. I'll never do it. It's a dumb thing to do in a sermon. But if I were to ask for a show of hands, which I'm not, I would do it this way. I would ask: How many of us actually expect the Millennium to change life as we know it?

     There is Y2K, of course. I try not to notice those TV preachers as I surf the channels. They're embarrassing. But sometimes the remote malfunctions in my hand, and I wince and moan and frantically push its buttons as I'm forced to observe the spectacle of grown men and women who discern the activity of God in a computer bug. The only divine activity I can see is, I can imagine God having a good laugh at the programmers who created the bug and the preachers who invented its theological significance.

     It's OK with me if you stock up on food and batteries. It's always a good idea to be prepared for human arrogance, short-sightedness and stupidity. But being prepared for God is a whole nother subject. On that subject we have to listen, for the second week in a row, to John the Baptist.

     And what does John have to say today? This is the testimony of John: The priests and Levites came out from Jerusalem to pester him with questions about who he was, and he directed their attention to someone other than himself. Among you stands one whom you do not know.

     Picture the scene, right there at the River Jordan. Nowadays that river is the boundary between the West Bank, occupied by Israel, and the Kingdom of Jordan, and I read in the paper this week where some Jordanian archaeologist claims to have found the exact place where John did his baptizing. Remarkable. All the Israelis on the West Bank snorted at the news. They found the place years and years ago, and of course it's on their side of the river. Everybody was getting very huffy about it, largely because there are big Christian tourist bucks riding on it, and then somebody said, "You know, in the New Testament, John did his baptizing in the river, not on either side of it." I think it was a Jew who pointed this out.

     So there's John, up to his whatever in the muddy river, and everybody else likewise, all crowding around him, expecting something big to happen soon. The air is thick with anticipation. Some of them are getting baptized, which involves a certain amount of splashing and thrashing and spluttering and stuff, like when you bathe a dog. Some are there to cross-examine him, and they're trying to look dignified and important. I imagine most of the crowd is just having fun. In those days you had to take your entertainment where you found it.

     And John says, "Among you stands one whom you do not know." And with those nine words he transfers the focus entirely away from spectacle to mystery, from expectation to reality, from future to present, from himself to . . . . whom? One whom you do not know.

     How often does it happen that someone captures that much attention and then uses it to point away from himself toward something greater? Been a long time since that's happened in New Hampshire! And they look around at each other, wonder. What does he mean? Whom does he mean? Somebody must be right there, hidden in plain sight.

     So then what should they do? What should anyone do when they've missed the boat? Wake up and smell the coffee! (How's that for a mixed metaphor?) The point is, they've all been waiting and watching for God to do something big and important, and now it turns out God has already done it and they didn't notice.

     So stop anticipating! Stop speculating and calculating and prognosticating, and start recognizing. Start paying attention to what's right in front of you, beside you, all around you. God isn't sitting on some cloudtop making up your future or counting down to some apocalypse, God is on the loose now in the world in which you live and move and have your being. Can't you tell?

     But how then can it be that there are still wars being fought, and the rich are still getting richer and the poor are still getting poorer? How can it be that God is among us, and people are still claiming that God is on their side against the Catholics or the Protestants or the Muslims or the Jews or the fundamentalists or the liberals or the gays or the useless? That last one I saw in a letter to the editor about those six firefighters who got killed in Worcester, and the two homeless squatters who apparently started the fire by a stupid accident. The letter called those two people useless. How can God be abroad in the land, and people can still call other people useless? How can God be doing this, and children still get brain tumors and leukemia and AIDS, and love still dies, and the wrong leg can still get amputated, and the killer can still get away while someone else goes to jail?

     But John has heard all those objections, and he still insists that it's true. And so does Paul, saying: Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances. That's the key to the whole thing, isn't it, a basic outlook, a confidence, whatever you want to call it, that does not change with the circumstances.

     Mary has the same impossible confidence: My soul magnifies the Lord, who has done great things for me, who has shown strength and has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts and has brought down the powerful and lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good things. She has no reason to carry on this way, especially as if it were already true; no reason at all, except God's promise to her.

     I've never read anything by Christopher Lasch, because like many of you I try very hard to avoid reading anything that might be good for me, but I ran across this quotation. He wrote that the various progressive and optimistic ideologies of this century have "dwindled down to a wistful hope against hope that somehow things will work out for the best," and in his view that's just not enough. He says, "We need to recover a more vigorous form of hope, which trusts life without denying its tragic character." I'd put it a little differently, of course: We need to recover a more vigorous form of hope, which trusts God without denying life's tragic character.

     Now trust is an attitude, and we can't manufacture our attitudes. But we can choose our activities, and there is an activity that goes with the attitude of trust and is so integral and essential to it that they can hardly be separated. And that activity is praise, just such praise as we have heard today in Isaiah and John and Mary and Paul. They all sing praise to God, sing it so memorably that their successors have remembered and resung the same praises for two thousand years, and now it's our turn, and that's why we're here. One preacher said, and I wish I'd said it, "Praise is our duty and our delight. Praise is hope set to music. Praise says that the cosmos, despite all appearance, is not in the hands of the evil powers but in the hands of God. God's hands reach down to us in love and we reach up in praise. Tragedy is never the last word. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to God. We can offer praise. And for today, at least, that is enough." And for the Millennium too.

Amen.