Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri

The Worship of God · January 10, 2010

Litany of Praise and Invocation

From Psalm 29  

Name the power of God!

            We find glory, strength, splendor, and power,

            all wrapped like light around the darkness.

Name the power of God!

            In the seen and unseen, the remembered and anticipated,

            the certain and the mysterious, we find the markings of the Spirit.

Let us pray:

            Open us to every sign of your presence of God:

            Here, there, everywhere!  Amen.

Pastoral Prayer

Jacob Thorne

Spirit of the Living God, God of Light, God of Revelation, whose Epiphany we celebrate this morning; we pray you will shine in us, and through us, in order that we may become beacons of truth and compassion. You, O God, are the creator of all, and you dwell among us.

This morning, we pray that you will hear the cries of your people. Bring healing to all wounds. Help make whole that which is broken. Speak truth to all illusions and shed light in every darkness. We pray for those in need and for the ministry and mission of this church. 

Call us by name, O God. Speak to our hearts. Stir us with your voice. Enlighten our lives with your grace in order that we may give ourselves more fully to you. Let us move forth into the new year with love that knows no boundaries, with dreams that have no fears, and with the knowledge that your love for each of us will never fail.

Hear us now as we say together the prayer that your Son taught us…

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever. Amen.

New Testament Lesson

Luke 3:15-17; 21-22

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove, And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Message

 More Powerful than I

Tim Carson

People are looking for answers. They always have and always will be. You and I are searching for answers to our life questions, our existence, too. We always have and always will be. So when we read about the crowds gathering around John the Baptist out by the Jordan River, looking upon this man who dressed like a cave man and ate bugs, they thought he might be the answer.

And he brought some answers. He proclaimed a kingdom of God that was crashing in and the need for repentance.  He told people to make the wrong right and get their act together. And he said it needed to be fast because the fuse has already been lit, and it’s a short one.

So they looked at him and said, “Maybe he’s the one we’ve been waiting for.” 

If you think twice about it, we’re a lot like that. We’re looking for a place to invest our loyalty and hope. What’s worthy of that? When we do find someone or something that looks like it qualifies, we consider opening a spiritual account. The problem is that our loyalties and hopes are often misplaced. As one spiritual light once said, “We’re running from pain and running to pleasure but scarcely stop our running long enough to plunge into God.” 

Maybe it’s this. Maybe it’s that. Maybe I’ll try this new fad in the New Year, and it will make me happy, fix everything, or provide the solution. Maybe this is the one.

Addictions are like that, whatever yours or mine happen to be. The objects of our addictions are our misplaced Messiahs. Our emotional or spiritual hunger becomes attached to a misplaced object to which we give our adoration. They end up owning us in the end, of course. And shaking free from its grasp inevitably requires a spiritual solution, shaking free from the false Messiah by returning to the ultimate object of our attachment, the One beyond our attachments.

So we understand the crowd that has gathered around John because they are a lot like we are. There were lots of Messiah-wanna-bes floating around the Middle East in Jesus’ time. And there was a high degree of Messianic expectation. The religious writings we have from 100 years before Jesus to 100 years after him are full of all forms of expectation. One of those forms was a highly apocalyptic one and we find remnants in our New Testament.

Now John had a following. He had disciples who followed him around just like Jesus eventually did. In fact, the John-the-Baptism movement continued through history and its remnant exists today. I remember just after the Iraq war broke the first time, they had some scenes from the Euphrates River. They showed some folks having ecstatic baptisms in the river. That was the Sect of John the Baptist.

It was very important to the writers of the Gospels to portray John as one who knew the difference between himself and the one who would follow him, the one to whom he would point. “I might baptize you with water,” he said, “but one is coming who will baptize you with fire and the Spirit.” 

John became Elijah, the prophet to portend the conclusion of it all, the figure who would show up at Passover and sit in the empty chair that has been saved for him through the centuries. John would pull up that chair, sit in it, and talk about the one who would come.

If you are looking for a contemporary elucidation of this relationship between John and Jesus, I think you can find it in the Sci-Fi thriller, The Matrix.

In the epic struggle to retake their civilization from the system of illusion and control called the Matrix, a band of revolutionaries wage spiritual warfare against the powers and principalities. Their leader, Morpheus (whose name means, “The Changer”), continues to wait for the “One” to come. He has learned through a prophet, the Oracle, that this One would come to save Zion. And in time, the One appears, though he doesn’t know who he is until the Spirit of enlightenment and self-awareness descends upon him like a dove. His name is Neo (whose name means “the New One”) and Morpheus knows that his whole purpose and identity is wrapped up in waiting for and then proclaiming that Neo is the One.

John has also waited, found, and then heralded the One who would come after him. And after Jesus was baptized and was praying, the heavens of his consciousness opened and a voice declared, “This is my son, with whom I am well pleased.”

Like Neo, Jesus goes on to see through the domination system of the world that masquerades as the power of life when it is not. The kingdom he proclaims is subversive, cutting through the lies and illusions that pretend to be real, true, and lasting. For this, of course, he is abused by the system, and like John, the system eventually attempts to extinguish him.

This morning, I would like us to entertain a possibility that is also a challenge. Though we Christians are essentially one as the body of Christ, we are also called to embrace the role of John, of Morpheus, and here is why:

Though we all comprise the Body of Christ and are individually members of it, there is always a danger of equating ourselves too absolutely with the One who is to come. Let me explain.

We want to become Christ-like, live in the currents of the love and ethics of Jesus, and be united with the presence of the Risen One, but to avoid any false Messiah complexes, making claims for ourselves that we cannot fulfill, becoming filled with hubris and pride, it might be worth our while to assume the role of John. It might have more integrity if we became very clear about who we are and are not, as John did. We are pointing to the One who has come and is always coming. Our job is proclaiming, pointing, heralding, finding where God is at work in the world, and then joining in.

Here’s where we’ve gotten in trouble, and by “we,” I mean the Church universal through the ages.

Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God, and what the world ended up getting instead was the Church. That’s problematic, because they are two different things. The Church is not the kingdom of God. This was not the intent of Jesus’ preaching or of the earliest churches who continued to proclaim Jesus and how God is working in the world through him and through us. But as the Church institutionalized and became a part of the power system of the world, often colluding with secular government to become a part of the system, the Church, as institution, came to be worshipped as though it was the kingdom of God. It was a short leap to end up pointing to the Church as though it were the kingdom of God and making claims about the Church that are untenable and indefensible. In a terrible reversal, the affirmation that salvation could be found through the church changed into, “There is no salvation outside the Church.” Whenever the Church, as institution, is viewed as God’s indisputable agent or the mediator of God’s presence on earth, you know we’re in big trouble. And that’s often what happened.

So to avoid that, to make it crystal clear to ourselves and to the world: We do not proclaim the Church or have our ultimate faith in the Church. We believe in the Church. We might love the Church. We might serve the Church, but we don’t have the Church as the object of our faith. Rather, the Church, at its best, acts like John the Baptist, a community of faith pointing beyond itself to the One but not itself.

As one spiritual writer has said, “As the finger points to the moon, you must not confuse the finger with the moon.”

The Church is a community of faithful and fallible, saints and sinners, who have found the desires of their hearts met in Christ. Sometimes we even act like it. But the ultimate hope of our life is in God known in Christ. And that’s what we dare to proclaim, carrying the treasure of the Gospel in these earthen vessels, these clay pots of our lives.

And so, we will not absolutize any system, tradition, or set of human-made doctrines as though they were God. That would be idolatry. That would be to bow down at the altar of a false Messiah. No, we demystify those and instead point to the real mystery of the universe, praying that we can participate in it, be a part of it, live by it, and share it.

What’s the source of your authority? God known in Jesus Christ.

What’s your calling? To live in the currents of the Spirit and become like that to which we point.

What’s your ultimate destiny? Utter communion with the same Spirit that came to Jesus at his baptism.

“Are you a Christian?” That’s the question that we may be asked by well-meaning people from time to time. We think we know what that means. In other words, does that knowledge of the action of God in Christ make some kind of claim on your life, a claim that makes a fundamental difference? Have you given yourself to it?

If we take on a John-the-Baptist response to the question, the answer sounds a bit different: 

“I have found God working in my life through Christ, and I am compelled to follow that, to find where God is at work and to go that way, and to allow my story to be folded into that story. But I know that I am not the thing to which I point, not fully; I am so fallible, so self-centered, and inclined to worship the wrong thing. But I trust nevertheless. I trust in God who has revealed this. And I trust in the One who did the revealing. If you mean that being a Christian depends on the degree to which I give myself to the One to whom I point, then yes, I am most surely a Christian. But more than being a Christian I am becoming one, a little bit more all the time, for it’s one thing to believe in that to which you point and quite another to become like it.”

And John said, “One who is more powerful than I is coming.”

Benediction

And now, children of the water and the Spirit, go forth into this world proclaiming through your life and your vision the Christ who goes before us. Amen.