Sermons from the Pulpit

Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the third Sunday of Advent, December 16, 2001, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.

Isaiah 35:1-10; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-10

Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.
    -Matthew 11:6

     I wonder why Jesus said that. What's for John the Baptizer and his followers to be offended at? Blind people are seeing, lame people are walking, lepers are cleansed, deaf people are hearing, dead people are getting resurrected, and there's good news for the poor. What you see is what you get. Any of us got any problems with any of that program?

     There is one thing that might bother John: In this catalog of the mighty signs and wonders that are happening across the land, Jesus makes no mention of prisoners being set free, but John's in the jailhouse. King Herod Antipas, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Roman Empire, had him arrested for publicly criticizing the marital behavior of the royal family. John is not happy about this. He would like to get out of there while his head is still attached to his body, in which hope he was, as we know, ultimately disappointed.

     Clearly Jesus has in mind all those old good-news prophecies in the Hebrew Bible, like the one from Isaiah that we just heard: Deserts in bloom, God's people redeemed from captivity. One of the great themes of those old poems is freedom for people in captivity, and Jesus is saying that the old prophecies are coming true at long last, but he leaves the freeing of the prisoners this time around. Maybe it's an oversight, maybe he has other priorities, who knows?

     Even fools are protected, but John gets his head chopped off because a pretty girl wants it delivered to her mama on a platter. I would have thought a man who ate locusts and wild honey and dressed himself in animal skins would qualify as a fool and therefore be eligible for rescue, but I guess not.

     So the question is, can John put his faith in a Messiah who is good news for almost everybody else, but not for him? I wonder how you or I might feel in John's position.

     Our passage from the Epistle of James would counsel John to be patient like the farmer who can sit and watch the crops grow, which sounds pretty similar to watching paint dry. I don't know how I'd receive that advice, if it was my head on the chopping block. I might actually get offended. But Jesus said, Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.

     To be fair to James, he's not counseling passivity. His heroes of patience are the prophets of old, who had no tolerance at all for the wrongness they saw around them. The kind of patience that they practiced isn't what we think of as patience. It's more like what we'd call persistence or endurance - hanging in there, refusing to be sidetracked, staying on task against all discouragements.

     The thing is, John's already doing everything he can, but how much can you do when you're in the slammer? Quite a lot, actually: Look at Paul, and Gandhi, and King, not to mention Boston's own James Michael Curley. Still, all things considered, I think John's entitled to wonder what kind of a Savior Jesus is, if Jesus can't be bothered to save his neck.

     You don't have to be John the Baptizer to wonder about that. All it takes is some rotten luck to get you going. All the sick people who aren't going to get better, all the children who won't have a chance to get spoiled by their grandparents, all the folks who got on the wrong airplanes on September 11 - There's no end to the list of predicaments you can get into through no fault of your own and you just can't get out. What use is a Savior who isn't going to save you from that?

     Maybe you're beginning to understand why it occurred to Jesus that people might take offense at him. But maybe those people had the wrong idea about what kind of Savior God was going to give them. Or to put that another way, it's been suggested many times that if Jesus doesn't offend you or disappoint you or frustrate you or infuriate you, you probably don't understand him.

     John the Baptizer, as we heard last week, greeted the people who came to him for baptism by calling them a brood of vipers. He warned them of the wrath of God. The Christ he proclaimed to them was going to be carrying an axe and a pitchfork and he was going to light an unquenchable fire. He was literally trying to scare the hell out of them.

     Well, if that's what he had in mind, no wonder he's got doubts about Jesus. It all depends on what you expect from God.

     So maybe we should scale back our expectations of God and get them in line with reality. There's a whole school of thought in theology that says you can't hold God responsible for everything that happens. God doesn't micromanage the universe, orchestrating every breath you take, every sniffle, every sneeze. God's not involved with who catches a cold or who catches cancer or who gets hit by a train. God's not like that. God has more important, grander things to do than meddling in the details of our lives.

     Would that satisfy you, if you were John the Baptizer sitting in that jail? I tell you, it would leave me absolutely cold. I have a very limited interest in defining God. What I want is to be connected with God.

     So there's a problem with the whole approach I've been using here, isn't there? I've been asking what we can expect from God, what do we get in return for our faith, what does John get for sticking his neck out for example - but that's all wrong. Faith isn't something that you offer up to God in order to get God to give you a hand or a break or a favor in return. Faith is something you practice, yes practice, for its own sake.

     Faith isn't about rewards and punishments, causes and consequences. It doesn't depend on what God does for you. Faith is worship and faith is prayer - things that we do, in the end, simply because we've discovered that we can't not do them. They are as imperative and as essential as the next breath we take.

     So who's to say if John the Baptizer had it wrong? Sitting there in jail, trying to face the probability of his own death, he needed to ask Jesus who he really was. Well, we ask that all the time too. I guess we'll be entitled to judge John's faith when our own faithfulness begins to approach his in persistence and endurance and the kind of trust that takes risks. Those, and not long life and prosperity, are the fruits of faith.

     We live in a world that teems with endless varieties of misplaced faith and false faith, on both sides of the battle lines. They are powerful. They seduce you if you let them, and they punish you if you don't. So many bad things happening to good people. So many ungodly remedies for wrongs both real and perceived. So much noise flooding over every mind in search of quiet and every soul in search of peace.

     I wish you faith's independence and freedom from it all. I wish you the courage, the persistence, the endurance and the foolishness of the Baptizer. I wish for us all that if anyone were to walk in here and ask us, Is this a church where God is served and worshiped, or should we look for another? we will be able to say, What you see is what you get.

     Amen