A Fourth Church Sermon by John W. Vest

December 6, 2009 | 4:00 p.m.

The Gospel of a Madman

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Malachi 3:1–4
Luke 1:67–80

“When the 4:00 worship team sat down to plan out our Advent services, we decided that each week would focus on one of the themes drawn from the traditional Advent wreath. Last week was “Hope,” and this week is “Peace.”

There was an obvious sense of immediacy for me as I reflected on the theme of peace for this week, a week that saw the announcement of President Obama’s strategy for the continuing war in Afghanistan. After eight years of war, we will soon begin sending 30,000 additional troops to that country, and even with withdrawals slated to begin in 2011, everyone knows that we will have some kind of military presence there for years to come.

As military and civilian deaths continue to add up in both Afghanistan and Iraq and in other areas of conflict around the world and as conflicts rage between people because of differences in language, religion, skin color, gender, and sexuality, we humbly come to this Second Sunday of Advent looking for both hope and peace—looking, of all places, to the birth of a little, baby boy named Jesus just over 2,000 years ago.

But before we get to him, our story today begins with the birth of a different boy—a relative of his, as it turns out. His name was John, and his mother, Elizabeth, was related to Jesus’ mother, Mary.

Elizabeth and her husband, a priest named Zechariah, were old and past the years of having children, so the very fact that Elizabeth became pregnant is one of those great biblical stories of God’s miraculous intervention that indicates something special is about to happen. According to the story, Zechariah was struck with such disbelief when he heard the news that as a result God caused him to become mute, unable to speak, until his son’s birth.

When the long-waited-for day finally arrived, Zechariah proudly named the child John and was immediately able to speak once again. So amazed were the people that witnessed this, they wondered to themselves what this child would become. What was so special about him?

And that brings us to our scripture lesson for this afternoon, in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 1, verses 67 to 80. These are the prophetic words Zechariah spoke on the occasion of the birth of his son, John.

• • •

This boy, John, would be the prophet to prepare the way for Jesus. This boy would grow up to be a fiery man who cried out in the wilderness, who waded in the waters of the Jordan River and baptized those who repented in preparation for this great new thing that was soon to happen through his relative Jesus.

John’s father, Zechariah, described this great new thing in this way: “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

“To guide our feet into the way of peace.” The baby boy Jesus would grow into a man whom his followers would call the Prince of Peace. According to these faithful disciples, there was something about the way he lived his life—and they way he gave it up—that embodied God’s peace, God’s shalom. His life, his death, and his way are meant to lead to peace. He came “to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

After nearly 2,000 years of following in this man’s way, of supposedly having our feet guided into the way of peace, the cynic in me (and I am a cynical man) wonders what happened to these words of hope spoken by John’s father, Zechariah. Where is the tender mercy of God? Where is the dawn from on high? Where is the light for those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death? Where is peace?

By any account you can consult, we are no closer to peace than we were 2,000 years ago or at any moment in the history of humanity. In fact, our ability to wield weapons of mass destruction and cause mass casualties, the likes of which our predecessors did not even envision in nightmares, leads a cynic like me to conclude that things are actually tending toward the other direction. To a cynic like me, things have gotten worse instead of better.

Christian writer C. S. Lewis once made an argument for Jesus’ divinity that has become rather famous among Christian apologists. Countering the often-made claim that Jesus was a great moral teacher but nothing more and certainly not divine, Lewis wrote this: “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse” (Mere Christianity, p. 52).

Reflecting on Christ’s divinity and Lewis’s argument would take a sermon of its own—or more realistically, a series of sermons. Such is not my intention this afternoon. Rather, I’d like to suggest that a similar choice exists when it comes to the church’s claim that Jesus is the Prince of Peace and that his way is the way of peace. If Jesus showed us the way of peace, we have either shown his teachings to be utterly false or we have so utterly failed that we would be mad to profess faith in this 2,000-year legacy of failure.

There is an old saying, usually misattributed to Albert Einstein, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Has that been the church’s lot for 2,000 years? And if so, what does that say about the one whose name we claim and whom we consider our Savior and Lord? Was Jesus the Prince of Peace, or was he a madman who rode a wave of empty promises and false hope? Or are we the ones who are mad, claiming to live the way of peace while our world is consumed by violence, hatred, and war? This possibility is even more challenging when we consider that religion—ours included—is so often the cause or justification or sanction of war, rather than a deterrent or end to it.

Where is God’s peace? Where is God?

Our tradition tells us that Advent is a season of waiting and anticipating, waiting for God’s entrance into the world through Jesus Christ, waiting for Emmanuel, for “God with us” or “God among us.” But once again, I return to my favorite inversion of this traditional formula: I don’t think Advent is really about us waiting for God. Rather, I think God is waiting for us. God is waiting for us to follow the path of peace. God is waiting for us to be instruments of peace and reconciliation. God is waiting for us to bring about the kingdom Jesus promised, the kingdom Jesus lived for, the kingdom Jesus died for. God is waiting for us.

Peace isn’t some nebulous thing that we pray for, some pie-in-the-sky vision that never comes true. Peace is a tangible thing that we are called to work for our entire lives, called to work for with our entire lives. Peacemaking is an active endeavor. If we are to move beyond hope into the realm of reality, we must take those steps ourselves. We must stop tarrying. We must stop waiting. Because God is waiting for us.

Pastor and theologian Brian McLaren talks about a “peace insurgency.” And of this peace insurgency he says this:

People who believe in Jesus’ creative peacemaking strategy, then, are never bored, never complacent. The work of peacemaking is always urgent for them in peacetime as in wartime. Without people giving themselves to this important (and according to Jesus, blessed and rewarding) work, the entropy and gravity of war will exert their hellish, downward, destructive pull. It is hard for us sometimes even to imagine a world where this work of peacemaking would be taken seriously. (Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope, p. 181)

I agree that is a hard world to imagine. But John’s father, Zechariah, had such an imagination. John had such an imagination. Jesus had such an imagination. And we can too.

Just this morning I told our confirmation class that Jesus’ teaching can be boiled down to two simple things: love God with all your being and love other people as much as you love yourself. So simple, yet so hard. Can you imagine what the world would look like if we actually lived like that? Where would there be hunger? Where would there be poverty? Where would there be hatred? Where would there be violence? Where would there be war?

There would be only peace.

• • •

A year ago, my wife and I were a month away from the birth of our son, Noah. Advent is an interesting time to wait for a child to be born, especially if you spend a lot of time at church, as I obviously do. The imagery and drama and Advent mixed with my own emotions of anticipation and longing as we waited for Noah to enter this world.

On Christmas Eve last year, our Pastor, John Buchanan, said that God comes among us in the birth of a child. God enters the world in the birth of a child. Those words stuck with me during the days that followed, as we waited for our own child to be born.

Now don’t get me wrong, even at the pinnacle of my paternal pride (and believe me, I have plenty) I don’t harbor messianic delusions of grandeur when it comes to our son. Quite to the contrary, I was struck by the commonality of it all, this notion that God enters our world afresh with every child that is born; that as the world is renewed with each birth, God’s presence grows wider and deeper.

As I held my newborn son after he was born and wept tears I had never known before, I knew the kind of hope Zechariah felt as he held his son, John. I had never felt that kind of hope before. I had never before held hope in my arms, and it was a fragile hope to be sure. But there in my arms was the future, a new generation. There in my arms was the image of God, without hatred, without prejudice, without violence. There in my arms was a clean slate, untarnished by the ways of the world. There in my arms was only love. There was my opportunity to walk in the way of peace.

“By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

Amen.