Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the third Sunday of Advent, December 15, 2002, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; I Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-23

What do you say about yourself?

     What do you say about yourself, and how do you say it? There are lots of ways to say things about yourself.

     What are you saying about yourself, for example, when you dress up in camel skins and eat locusts and wild honey and go around shouting at people to repent and dunking them in a river? Quite a bit, I'd say. Certainly enough to get their attention and make them curious to know more about you. So the folks in Jerusalem send out a deputation, a delegation, to check him out. They arrive bursting with questions.

     What do you say about yourself? Some of us, hearing that question addressed to us, will respond eagerly: I thought you'd never ask! and we will drone on at considerable length about what is, after all, our favorite topic. Others of us will shrink tortoise-like into our shells and give out as little information as possible — by doing which, of course, we speak unintended volumes about ourselves. Still others can be either forthcoming or reticent by turns, depending on the circumstances.

     If you succeed at getting people curious about you, they will proceed immediately to make guesses about who you are. Are you the Messiah? No. Are you Elijah? No. Are you the prophet? No, no, no. All right, then, what do you say about yourself? It's important to know who you are, and just as important to know who you are not. This is the essential principle of our bodies' immune systems: to tell the difference between what is oneself and what is not oneself, so that one can attack what is not oneself to keep it from taking over what is oneself. If our bodies get confused about which is which, they can make themselves sick.

     This principle applies to our whole being, not just our bodies. It applies also to broader entities like families, communities, churches and nations. In order to function well, you have to know who and what you are and who and what you are not. You have also to be ready to spell it out to yourself and to others as the occasion demands.

     We have available to us a great repertoire of identities by which we can specify who we are and who we are not, and they all evoke specific and sometimes powerful responses when we invoke them. For example, if I say, "I am a Catholic," this weekend I could count on most people to offer me their sympathy and condolences. If I say, "I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the Lord!'", then I can count on most people to treat me like a head case. So I have to be careful how I identify myself. But if I'm too careful I can create confusion about who I am and who I am not, with the unfortunate consequences I just mentioned. Thus we are caught between clarity and caution. Each has its dangers.

     John the Baptizer throws caution to the winds. He doesn't care who they want him to be or who they want him not to be. He's willing to surprise folks, even to infuriate them, by telling them exactly who and what he is and is not and, for that matter, who and what they are: They are sinners in great need of repentance and redemption. For making this choice he gets thrown in jail and eventually beheaded, thereby leading us to believe that clarity may be overrated.

     With all that in mind, What do you say about yourself? Consider your options in light of our readings. You might be an oak of righteousness. You might be the planting of the Lord. You might put on a garland to identify yourself as a bride or a bridegroom, or you might put on ashes to identify yourself as a mourner or a penitent. You might be one who expects God to arrive any minute. You might be one who planted in tears but expects to reap with joy. And we, all of us, might be a people whom the Lord has blessed and a people for whom the Lord has done great things. Or we might not. God bestows these options on us, but not even God can impose them. Like Adam in the garden, we have the power to give a name to everything we meet, including ourselves. So what do we say about ourselves?

     We have just been matched up with a partner church in the United Church of Christ in Zimbabwe, of all places. (The initials for that denomination are UCCZed, by the way, owing to their British colonial heritage. We also have a British colonial heritage, of course, but we dumped it about 200 years before they did.) I imagine most of us have next to no idea what this relationship might mean, even though we did take a vote last January to apply for it. I don't think I have any better notion of what will develop from it than the rest of you, but it does occur to me now that being in an extended conversation with a congregation of Africans ought to get us thinking about who we are and who we are not.

     The congregation which has agreed to make this covenant with us is in the capital city, Harare. It calls itself the Marlborough church, which doesn't sound terribly African to our ears, does it? That's a sign that Africa is complicated, like America. Such complications as that we can understand, even if we didn't anticipate them.

     Consider the few other things that they have told us so far about themselves. One is, they are mostly made up of young families. Which should not surprise us, given the difference in life expectancy between Zimbabwe and New Hampshire. AIDS, civil war, starvation, poverty — a lot of us who are here today would be long dead if we lived there.

     But by far the most stunning thing that they have told us about themselves is this bombshell: that they are a tithing church. Can you imagine? They have made this covenant among themselves, that all the members of their church are expected to support the church by regularly giving it one tenth of their income.

     People keep asking Miriam and Sheryl and Dean what sorts of concrete things we might actually do in cooperation with the Marlborough church. I have a suggestion: I think we should invite their stewardship committee over here to show us how they do it!

     If they had half the resources available to us and we had half their level of commitment, both churches would be drastically different from what they are now. And we have to wonder which of the two congregations has more to learn from the other, and which of the two is really the people whom the Lord has blessed.

     Last Sunday at the budget meeting we talked a lot about what we can afford. Worrying about what we can afford is a habit among us, and not just at budget meetings. It's become a way of life. It's become a prison. We're hemmed in by that worry. Do we have enough? Enough to do this? Enough to do that? If our Zimbabwean partners were to ask us, "What do you say about yourselves?" and if we were to choose clarity over caution, we might have to answer, "We are people who worry about having enough."

     And that would launch quite a conversation, wouldn't it, given the fact that by their standards we are immeasurably, we are incomprehensibly wealthy. God help us to learn something from these people!

     What you say about yourself is not just factual. What you say about yourself is always, at least in part, a confession of faith — faith being the confidence that in the face of all the world's dreariness and meanness God is on the loose, God is active, God is doing something with you, with me, with us. God is sanctifying us.

     We think it arrogance when someone claims to be an oak of righteousness, and it is, but we sell ourselves short, and what's worse, we sell God short if we expect ourselves and one another to be lukewarm, half-hearted, mildly faithful, spirit-quenching Christians. God is a better planter than that.

     So I end as I began: What do you say about yourself? And how do you say it?

     Amen