- Lawrence Moore, Director, The Windermere Centre
Would-be John the Baptists
The vision
“God’s people, transformed by the gospel, making a difference for Christ’s sake”
That’s the vision we in the United Reformed Church have ourselves - if not who we presently are, the people we can become. We want to make a difference. We are God’s people. Part of our task - our mission - is, like John the Baptist, to point to Jesus, and in so doing, point people to God. “There! Look at Jesus - that’s what God’s like!”
Pointing to Jesus
“[John] confessed and did not deny it but confessed: ‘I am not the Messiah’” (John 1:20)
Have you ever wondered what sort of god God is? We’re usually pretty good on what God does (creates the world; elects Israel; does interesting things with long-haired strong-men, kids taking on giants, people camping out with lions, ‘Let’s see who’s really God!’-competitions; sends Jesus; raises the dead; sends the Spirit … and that’s just a tiny, tiny sample). Yes, we can go on at length about all the events in which God figures, but that’s not the same thing as answering the question, “What sort of god is God?”
That’s a slightly tricky question! If you really want to shock yourself and keep yourself awake with worry for the next half-century, try asking a cross section of ordinary (ie non-church-going!) people what impression they’ve got of the god of the Bible from Christians and general ‘rumour’! It’s a salutary experience! What I have found coming up time and again is a sense that God basically disapproves of the world and is itching either to nuke us all with a divine thunderbolt, or rubbing his (yes, God is almost always a ‘him’) hands with positive glee at the thought of throwing people into hell (understood as some sort of cosmic BBQ that lasts forever). It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the connection between that sort of idea of God and the fact that the vast majority of people want nothing to do with Church.
Advent brings the question of what God is like into sharp focus. Advent is about waiting for God. The underlying supposition is that we will be waiting eagerly and anxiously - that God’s advent will be a good thing; that it’s something we’d obviously want. Yet if we could persuade people that God was genuinely just in the wings, about to appear, most people would regard that as thoroughly Bad News. In fact, it would absolutely ruin their Christmas! And why? Because the God they anticipate arriving is to be feared or disliked or appeased or grovelled to. Nobody wants to see the person who dislikes them the most appear - especially when that person has absolute power over them! If God doesn’t like you, and God has the power to consign you to hell, or do whatever other sorts of things God might do to express disapproval, disappointment and dislike of you, you will not be anxious to see God!
And for goodness’ sake, let’s not shake our heads regretfully, or tut at people’s capacity to get things so wrong: the reason they think like that about God is because that’s the message they’ve got from the Church! And if not actively, they’ve at least heard nothing to act as any strong counter or corrective.
I find myself getting really angry and desperate at the self-satisfaction of so many church people - generally, people who have spent most of their lives in and around Church. Theoretically, they ought to be the most eloquent, effective testimonies to how wonderful faith in Jesus Christ is and how rich and fulfilling life in the community of faith - the Church - is. The reality is so often so different! I worked for the Eastern Synod of the United Reformed Church as the Training & Development Officer. I remember sitting talking to the Finance Officer one day about the huge resistance people seemed to have to Church - even when they valued what their own local church might be doing. He looked at me, nodded, sighed, and said, “Yes, Lawrence. But that’s because the people who keep churches open keep them empty!”
That was a moment of deep insight. The Christian Church - at least in the affluent West - is often the most public disincentive for having anything to do with the God of the Church! That’s true - and it’s absolutely tragic! If there is any sense in which the Church’s ministry and proclamation is about pointing towards Jesus and saying, “There - that’s what God is like!” we’re doing a pretty poor job of it! At least John the Baptist was sufficiently in tune with his message to cause people to confuse him with the Messiah! I wonder how many of our churches and church people run the same sort of risk?
Excited about deliverance
“Our mouths were filled with laughter and our tongues with shouts of joy!” (Psalm 126:2)
Psalm 126 is a psalm sung by exiles who, against all the odds, have returned. It is a ‘Song of Ascents’ - a worship song sung as they make their way up Temple Mount to what they had lost all hope of ever seeing: a rebuilt temple in a rebuilt city! “Yahweh has restored the fortunes of Zion!” They are like the reapers at harvest (v6) who return from the fields, singing because the harvest is good and the people are guaranteed daily bread to live another season. The people are ecstatically happy because they are reaping the harvest of God’s deliverance.
What is God like? God is ‘the God-who-delivers’! God is a saving God. Through all the many startling, wonderful, disturbing, terrible, devastating and inexplicable things that God does runs the golden thread of salvation. This is what knits together God’s actions in human lives and communities: God saves. And when God acts to save, people can only stand by and be gobsmacked - like the ‘nations’ in Psalm 126 and also in Isaiah 61:9b: “All who see them shall acknowledge that they are a people whom Yahweh has blessed”.
I find myself wondering why people don’t look at us in churches and have the same reaction. I assume the answer is because we don’t display the same joyful incredulity and enthusiasm at God’s salvation. Why is that? Is it because we have substituted an immediate, rich experience of the saving God for a ‘Christian culture’ - a lifestyle that is easy with God and unsurprised and untouched by anything that God might do? Is it because our vision and passion are so small - that our equivalent of God “restoring the fortunes of Zion” amounts to little more than a return to the 1950s, when society was ‘respectable’ and people looked to the Church as the bastion of those respectable, middle-class, ‘civilised’ values? Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that our comfortable, western, consumerist lifestyle leaves us with remarkably little sense of the crying, urgent need for change - for salvation.
The world of the ‘little people’ - a world in need of deliverance
“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1: 52-53)
The Magnificat is a reminder of a fundamental truth of God’s salvation in Jesus: it is for the ‘little people’ first! It is the ‘little people’ who know about Advent waiting! Theirs isn’t the world of excess, where the presenting problems are eating disorders, but the world of hunger, where the ‘daily bread’ that will keep them alive for the next 24 hours is less likely than not to appear. This is the world of the ‘lowly’ - the victims of the people and policies whose laws, decrees and personal whims decide who and how they live or die. Their waiting is desperate and engaged. If God does not come, they are doomed. They have no help but God.
Contrast out own situations and lifestyles with the ‘have-nots’ of our world. Whether we’re talking about the AIDS victims of Africa (and other places); the starving in Darfur; the people of Zimbabwe, the Palestinian villagers whose homes are being pounded by Israeli gunships; the homeless people on our cold streets and the people whose mental illness, disabilities, gender, sexuality, ethnic origin or political beliefs condemn them to a life of (sometimes literal) rooting through the garbage cans of our throw-away lifestyle, we cannot, with any sort of integrity, fail to recognise that their needs are far greater than our own.
What Jesus shows us is that God responds to human need with deliverance and salvation. God begins where the need is greatest. And what these other ‘little people’ need from God often boils down to this: they need deliverance from us! They need deliverance from the power that we have and the choices that we make. They need deliverance from our insatiable greed and our conviction that we have the right to exist in luxury at their expense. They need deliverance from the fact that, left to ourselves, we would opt to live for today at the expense of our planet’s survival - and from the fact that we have that power!
Why are we so shocked and offended that Jesus proclaims a God who makes what liberation theologians have termed, ‘The Preferential Option for the Poor’? If God is ‘The-God-who-delivers’, how can God do any differently? God is the Exodus God - the one who hears the cries of the Hebrew slaves in the brick pits of Pharaoh. God is the One who comes, not to Jerusalem, or to the palace, or the seat of Roman government, but to a young, soon-to-be-unmarried mother in the wilderness of the Galilee. And if the peasant girl Mary is chosen to be the mother of the Saviour, then God cannot be other than the one who ‘lifts up the lowly’ and ‘fills the hungry with good things’!
If these are God’s Advent choices, perhaps the reason that we have failed so signally to point to the God-who-delivers is that our own choices are so far away from those of God; that we choose different sides from those God chooses. Perhaps the reason for our absence of astonished joy at the salvation that God brings is because there is actually very little in it for us; we already have the whole world, so what is there left to ache for?
A witness to the Light
“He himself was not the Light, but he came to bear witness to the Light” (John 1:8)
‘To see Jesus is to see God’. That’s John’s message. Look at Jesus, and we discover what God is like. Jesus reveals God in a way that no other human being has ever done or can do. Why? Because Jesus is God in the flesh. That is the very first thing that John wants us to know about Jesus, so that when we hear the Baptist’s voice as he points to Jesus, we already know that we are simultaneously being pointed to God.
Jesus, our Advent hope, is not a man of God but God as a man. Incredible as it seems, we look at Jesus and we see God. Yet the point is that we see what God is like most clearly in a human being. We’re used to reading John’s gospel as a testimony to the divinity of Jesus; what we frequently miss is John’s insistence that it is in Jesus the man that we see God most clearly. John’s Jesus shows us what God is like - and also what it means to be truly human. Jesus is no apparition, or some sort of super-hero. Jesus is a real human being. He is God because he is ‘from above’; he is shown to be God through his human obedience to God’s will. To be truly human is to be human in the way that Jesus is - to relate to God as Jesus does and to other people as Jesus does. It is, in Jesus, to discover the very Life of God, because Jesus is the one who baptises with the Holy Spirit.
The God whom we encounter in Jesus is not anaemic or judgemental or middle class or a spiritual snob. The God whom we encounter in Jesus is a saving God, absurdly and obscenely passionate about human beings, fiercely, savingly compassionate about the messes we get ourselves trapped into, and inimically opposed to everything that denies and threatens Life. In particular, God is the One who is attentive to the cries and groaning of the ‘little people’. God is their God first and foremost; if God is to be our God as well, then we must make common cause with them because that is God’s cause. We need to - because only in so doing will they be able to teach us what Advent hope and waiting is really about, and only in so doing will we begin to have to fend off the confusion of the people who will mix us up with the Jesus we proclaim.
Amen.
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