The Proclaimed Word
Preached by the Reverend Canon Robert Griffin at
the Sunshine Cathedral on
Sunday, January 20, 2008, at the 11:10 am service.
Come and See — what an invitation. Come, see, and contemplate where Jesus
might be among us today. Come, see, and witness how Christ is visible in our
world today. Come, see, and experience the in-breaking of God’s presence.
Come, see and realize for yourself how God is working miracles in the lives of
people associated with the ministry of Sunshine Cathedral in Fort Lauderdale
and Jamaica … Come and see the abundant life, promised of old. Come and see —
that is a powerful invitation.
In our reading for today from the Gospel according to St. John the
Evangelist, John the Baptizer — whom, we remember, is the son of Mary’s
cousin, Elizabeth — has been out in the wilderness, preaching and begging
people to turn away from their former way of thinking and living and prepare
the way for the One, the one who would offer hope to the people suffering from
oppression and bondage under the current political system.
Reading the whole story of our text today, we notice that John the Baptizer
sees Jesus coming, and recognizes him not as a near relative, but as the Lamb
of God. Now this John has known that Jesus was special since before he was
born, because we are told that when Mary found out she was pregnant, she went
to visit Elizabeth, who had, herself, become pregnant with John in a
miraculous way. When the infant “leapt in her womb” as Mary approached,
Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and cried out, “Blessed are you
among women… why has this happened to me, why am I so favored, that the mother
of the Messiah should come to me?”
Now, that’s Luke’s version of the story. John the Evangelist does not seem
to mention anything about John the Baptizer being a close relative to Jesus.
In fact, John the Evangelist does not mention any of the details surrounding
the birth of Jesus that we have learned from Matthew and Luke. There are no
angelic announcements to Mary or Joseph, no shepherds, no Magi, no slaughter
of the innocent children by King Herod while Jesus is in hiding. Like Mark,
who also does not seem to care about Jesus’ early life or whether he and John
the Baptizer were related, John begins with the baptism of Jesus. He starts by
proclaiming that the Word — which in some way is both God and eternally in the
presence of God — has become flesh and stayed for a little while among us, and
by showing that this Word is the one that we have come to know as Jesus of
Nazareth.
However, according to John the Evangelist, John the Baptizer didn’t even
recognize that Jesus was the one he was looking for — or maybe didn’t even
know his name — until he baptized him with water and saw the Holy Spirit
descend upon him like a dove.
So what are we to make of these discrepancies? Should we read these stories
as absolute truth, handed down by God, harmonizing away any differences? Or
should we accept the verdict of cynics, who say that since the Gospel stories
do not agree with one another, and they are filled with impossible things
anyway, all that we know of Jesus is untrue? Or should we pay attention to the
teaching of historians, who say that each of the Gospels was written with the
concerns of a specific community in mind, and that different communities
preserved different stories about Jesus according to their own memory.
Many of us have learned to trust that God speaks to us precisely through
the incomplete, the mysterious, and sometimes even through reflecting upon the
incompatible stories of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. The messiness of
the gospel stories, as we have received them, is itself a message about the
gift of our own, imperfect lives that can transform us and, through us, begin
to heal our broken world. As Jesus said to Andrew and another disciple of
John, who asked where he was staying, the simple reply was “Come and see” so
how might this invitation speak to us today?
I believe that it speaks to us through the 1st Point of
Progressive Christianity which was our first reading today. It said that by
calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who have found
an approach to God through the life and teachings of Jesus.
Historically, we read that in Genesis, God is said to have rested after
every act of creation, and God called it good; we read later that Jacob has a
vision of a heavenly staircase, representing a token of God’s love and care
for him. The dreamer, Joseph sees his family in a dream as sheaves of wheat,
or sun, moon, and stars, foretelling his future position of importance in
Egypt. The judges are said to have lived in a time without kings, when
everyone did what was right in his or her own sight.
In the Gospels, Jesus gives sight to those who cannot see, and — as we have
heard in our reading this morning — we are invited to come and see the wonders
because in our approach to Jesus we have find healing, we have found comfort,
we have found grace, we have found understanding, we have opportunities to
grow in our faith, we find liberation, and most importantly, we have found
hope.
I believe that God does not invite us where God cannot take us. On our
journeys as progressive Christians we are invited to come and see for
ourselves, and that is a personal invitation to find that approach that works
best for each of us to develop and/or rekindle our relationship with God as we
understand God.
Being progressive Christians does not mean we live in a perfect world, of
course. I am reminded of this on this Martin Luther King Jr weekend, I was
recently moved by reading some words of Dr. King’s in a sermon many years ago,
he said: “There is so much frustration in the world,” he wrote, “because we
have relied on gods rather than God. We have genuflected before the god of
science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and
anxieties that science can never mitigate. We have worshiped the god of
pleasure only to discover that thrills play out and sensations are
short-lived. We have bowed before the god of money only to learn that there
are such things as love and friendship that money cannot buy… money is a
rather uncertain deity. These transitory gods are not able to save or bring
happiness to the human heart. Only God is able. It is faith in God that we
must rediscover.”
And I believe that we are able to rediscover this faith because God does
not invite us, where God cannot take us on this journey to find an approach to
God through the life and teachings of Jesus. And that is the truth as I
understand it. Amen.