"I Am Not."

John 1:6-8, 19-28

December 17, 2017

I.

Before we encounter Jesus, who is the great I Am, Emmanuel, God-with-us, we are in all 4 gospels faced with his forerunner, John the Baptizer.  In todays reading he says, or has said about him, 4 times that he is not the One.  This tells me that before we can recognize the One who is, we have to encounter the one who is not.  Before we can participate in Jesus’ life, we have to admit in our own hearts that there is a sense in which we are not.

After the narrator explains in the Prologue that John is not the light, John himself answers “I am not” twice when he is interrogated by the officials from Jerusalem.  When he finally does talk about Jesus, John affirms his own subordination.  “I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.”

Jesus will make the same point in different words in his ministry.  He will talk about losing yourself, losing your life, losing your soul.  He is saying that before you can receive what he has to give, you have to let go of everything you already have… or think you have.  Before Jesus covers us with his I Am, we have to recognize and relinquish everything we are not.  We have to be able to say with John, every time we imagine or someone suggests that we are something great, something amazing, something good, that we are not.  Not only are we not those things.  We aren’t anything.  We don’t strictly exist, beyond our physical nature as water and a handful of minerals — and we’re barely even conscious of that.  Everything else about us is imaginary.  Everything by which we normally think and approve of about who we are is self-serving lies we have fed ourselves.

John is saying we can’t be filled with the Truth until we are empty of our own lies; we can’t follow the Way until we stop running the wrong way; we can’t participate in resurrection Life until we realize how dead we are.

When the representatives of the religious authorities traipse inconveniently out to the desert to find out who John is and what he is doing, they give him several appealing options: the Messiah?  The return of the great prophet Elijah?  The fabled, unnamed prophet-who-is-to-come from Deuteronomy 18?  Any one of which would be a really cool thing to be.  But to each one John says “Nope!”

When they finally in exasperation say, “Well, who are you then?  What should we tell the bosses in Jerusalem who sent us to find out who you are?” John says, in effect, “I am nobody.  I am the nobody who only points to Somebody Else.  I am just a voice telling people to get ready because Somebody is coming.  I am the sign telling you what is ahead.  No one gets to the Father except through him; and no one gets to him except through me.  Which is to say, no one gets to Somebody without going through Nobody.  You can’t get to I Am without passing through I Am Not.”

II.

This ritual that John has of dunking people in the Jordan River is a symbolic washing away of everything you are, everything clinging to you and stuck to you.  It is even a symbolic dying as you go down into the river, leading to rising again as you are raised back out of it, into the sunlight, dripping and shining and new.  It washes away your old self.

The Jerusalem delegation, which we now discover is really from the Pharisees, the party that would be the main competition for the Christians for at least a century or so, doesn’t get it.  They say, “Wait, what?  Why are you baptizing, again?  If you’re not the Messiah, Elijah, or the Prophet?

And John says, “You’re asking about me again.  It’s not about me.  I am nobody.  I’m just saying that the Lord is coming.  Indeed, he’s already here standing right next to you!  He is in your midst and you don’t see him!  After me, he’s coming into view.  I am nobody.  I am not worthy even to untie his shoes.  But if you become nobody like me, instead of well-dressed, important, privileged, titled priestly-scribey types, maybe even you will see him.”

I love that, where he says “among you stands one whom you do not know.”  If we read the gospel carefully we realize that Jesus’ baptism has already happened and he is himself standing there with everyone else listening to this conversation between John and the officials.  The One Who Is to Come is right there and nobody is recognizing him!  Only Mr. Nobody, John, knows who he is.  We who are hearing the gospel don’t even know.  But he’s already here.  He’s already with us.  He’s “coming” in the sense of Someone coming into view who is really here all along.

It’s like the more transparent we become the more Jesus becomes visible to us and even in us.  John will later say about Jesus, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”  The more we decrease, the more he increases.  The more we become nothing, the more he becomes everything.

The hotshot somebodies from Jerusalem don’t see Jesus for who he is, even though he is standing there among them.  Somebodies just don’t get it.  The problem with somebodies is that they block the light and leave people in their shadow.  They create darkness.  It’s all about them.  They’re opaque.

Even in the church where we’re supposed to know better, we’ve forgotten, over the last 2000 years, that we need to decrease so Jesus can increase.  Not that we haven’t decreased on a lot of other more quantitative scales over the last 50 years.  And maybe that’s a disguised blessing.  Maybe our decreasing is God’s way of preparing us for the Light to increase in us.  Maybe if we embrace our own institutional shrinkage, invisibility, and transparency, we will be more effective at pointing beyond ourselves to Somebody Else.  Maybe people will see through us more, and see Jesus.  

And that Somebody Else is not someone sitting up in the sky; not someone who will finally appear at the end of time, or who we will get to see when we’re dead.  No.  John is referring to someone who is standing among us, whom we too often just don’t know, and therefore cannot see.  

If we don’t recognize God’s living presence among us in each other, or even in ourselves… if we don’t recognize God’s presence in other people, especially the poorest and powerless, then we’re not seeing God at all.  The gospel has earlier told us that “the Word” of God, “became flesh and dwelled among us.”  So we’ve been warned where exactly to look for God: here; “among us.”  

III.

If we do become invisible nobodies, if we do focus on “I am not,” if we do lose ourselves, then we can begin to see the truth of God’s presence in Jesus Christ all around, among, and within us.  If we let go of everything that separates us from God, we will start to see God’s presence emerging everywhere.

That presence will look like the vision of the prophet Isaiah we just heard about in our reading from the Hebrew Scriptures.  Jesus himself quotes from this vision when he defines his own mission, in Luke 4.  It is an active presence in which we participate.  And it has to do with reversal.  God’s Kingdom is a kind of “oppositeland,” in which we realize that the-world-as-we-know-it is all wrong.  

In the world as God intends it, it is the nobodies who become Somebody.  It is the empty who are filled.  It is the losers who gain.  The powerless are lifted up and empowered.  Prisoners are released, the broken are bound up, the mourning are comforted, and the ruined and destroyed places are rebuilt.  The debts of debtors are canceled and remitted.

And the gospel community that Jesus Christ establishes is supposed to be the place where this begins to happen.  John the Baptizer kicks it off with his ritual and ethic of self-emptying; then Jesus comes into view, with his good news of what we have to be ready to receive from God.  John says we have to be empty vessels; Jesus says the empty vessels will be filled with life.  Then he gives his own life, the very life of God, to us.  He gives us God’s Spirit, the breath of the Creator.  He gives us his Body and Blood in the Sacrament.

All who see us will have no choice but to acknowledge and admit that we are a people whom the Lord has blessed.  People will see the joy.  People will see the unity.  People will see that we who were once blind can now see, and that we who were once bound are now free, and that we who were once mourning are now dancing.  That’s how it’s supposed to work.  The church is a place where nobodies become Somebody, proclaiming by our example to the world that this is God’s intention for everyone.  Not only is it God’s intention, it is the way things really are, deep down.  It is the Truth.  We simply witness to the Truth.  We merely live the Way God intends for everyone to live: in generosity, humility, honesty, equality, justice, peace, and joy.

IV.

As we enter this last week of the Advent season, we need to realize that we are not waiting for God to come into the world in Jesus.  That happened 2000 years ago.  Indeed, there is a sense in which that happened at the creation when God’s Word was embedded in everything simply by being spoken into being by God.  God is already here, folks, among us, and within us.  John talks about One who already stands among us whom we don’t know.

Advent is not about waiting for God to do something.  Advent is about our learning to see and participate in what God has already done, and is always doing.  What we are waiting for is for something to happen in us, something that lets go of our self-importance, self-righteousness, and self-centeredness, something that allows the screen to fall in our hearts so we can see God’s Presence.  We pretend for a few weeks that the manger is empty to remind us of how empty we have to make ourselves, if God in Christ is going to come into view.

For Christ’s Nativity is not so much God breaking into our world, as it is the breaking down of our barriers, enabling us to participate in the Way, the Truth, and the Life, who is always present.

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