Advent 3 Sermon - John the Witness

Sermon

Text: John 1:6-8, 19-28

Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ who asks for repentance and asks us to bear witness.

So, John the Baptist. After the second week with a Gospel lesson featuring him, I guess I aught to talk about him, huh?

We have lots of images to pull on for John the Baptist. Usually a big bushy beard in mind, and Matthew and Mark tell us he wears a coat of Camel hair, a belt, and he eats wild honey and locust. So, now we now what he looks like for the most part, a somewhat wild looking and behaving man in the wilderness. This is often described as an ascetic, a person who purposefully lives in poverty and littleness.

Luke tells us all about his lineage. He is born of Elizabeth and Zechariah, Elizabeth is Mary's cousin, and she is barren. Now, in our read through the bible Adult Sunday School we have mentioned that if any Woman is mentioned as barren, two things are going to happen, she's going to end up giving birth soon, and that baby is going to be important.

Ok, so there we go, John, to Matthew and Mark, John the Baptist, or John the Baptizer, an ascetic man who lives in the wilderness, and to Luke, the second cousin to our Lord, who is born in a manner signifying that he will be very important.

But, there is one more Gospel to look at, the Gospel of John. And John is interesting here. Well, John is interesting most places, it is different than the other three Gospels, John tells different stories, and in a different order than the others. And when we read the Gospels it is tempting to take all these different stories and smack them together, but it is just as important to look at them differently, especially when they all connect with each other.

John the Baptist's story is one of those places where all four Gospels connect, and in the Gospel of John John is asked the question we have been looking at so far. The priests and levites ask him, Who are you?

And John answers in a way we wouldn't expect, definitely not how we would answer. He says, well, I'm not the Messiah. He then goes on answering, are you Elijah? Nope! Are you a prophet? Nope. Not only is he not saying who he is here, in the Gospel of John he is even named differently. He is simply John. Not John the baptist, John the Baptizer, John the son of Zechariah, just plain John.

And so in this Gospel when he is finally able to speak for himself about who he is, he says, John 1:23 "I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the Lord,'"

John is not primarily the Baptist here, He is the one crying out, he is a witness to the one who comes after him.

In Gospel of John he is John the Witness. A witness to the need to prepare and make straight the way of the Lord.

But, in many ways the four gospels do tell the same story. Here John is a witness, the others he performs baptisms of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The connection is in that repentance. Repentance is one of those words that I think brings guilty twitchs and tinges in people, I know it does in me. I start thinking, umm... ok, what have I done, there's got to be something I'm forgetting about. And I start to go through a whole inward system's check, ok, didn't insult anyone, hopefully didn't hurt someone. Anything else... I don't think so.

But, did you see what happened there? What did I start concentrating on? Myself. When we think repentance and we think forgiveness, we immediately start thinking only about ourselves.

But, John the Witness asks us to witness, and witnessing is pointing elsewhere, here pointing towards Christ. John the Witness does not talk about or point to himself at all, he spends it saying no, nope, nothing, and points towards Christ.

We spend so much time in repentance looking into ourselves, trying to figure out what we have done wrong. But, repentance should be that no, nope, nothing of John. We are not, we are nothing without Christ. That is the fundamental understanding of repentance, to understand that we can trust solely on Christ and therefore turning back. And that's witnessing as well. Showing and pointing solely to the one who gives us worth.

As John the Witness says, “the one who is coming after me, I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.”

Children of God, the Church in Waiting, spend this time of advent preparing the way for the Lord, not by concentrating on ourselves, but pointing towards the one comes.

Let us pray,

God of strength, guide us when we turn away and run astray, lead us back towards you, help us to shine your light, pointing towards your Son who comes to us.

Amen.