Third Sunday of Advent, December 14, 2014 | 4:00 p.m.

Who Are You?

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 61:1–3a
Luke 1:46b–55
John 1:6–8, 19–28

I don’t know about you, but for me—more so than usual—it seems very hard to find good news during this season of Advent. Our typical laments about the commercialization of Christmas and remembering the “reason for the season” don’t even scratch the surface this year.

A few days ago I went to see the film Interstellar, because I knew I would find it evocative and inspiring, which I most certainly did. But before the movie began there was a trailer for a soon-to-be-released dramatization of the 1965 civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery. As the trailer highlights, the internationally broadcast images of marches, demonstrations, riots, and police brutality were a turning point in the civil rights movement. But I couldn’t help thinking what I’ve been thinking a lot over the past several months: not much has really changed in fifty years. As the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and many other young black men continue to incite sadness and rage, we don’t need to wait for a global catastrophe like the one in the back-story of Interstellar to know that humanity desperately needs saving.

The relentless stream of bad news continued this week with the release of a Senate report on the use of torture by the CIA in our nation’s so-called war on terror. The details described in this report are horrific and sickening. And the fact that the overwhelming response to this report among our national leaders has primarily been partisan bickering makes this matter even more shameful and despicable. I don’t believe it matters whether or not torture does or does not lead to “actionable intelligence.” I don’t believe the context of our post-9/11 world justifies torturing our enemies. It doesn’t matter that the majority of detained suspects did not receive this kind of treatment. If only one person is tortured, that’s one person too many. There is no end that justifies this means. There is no context in which it is OK to dehumanize another human being. There is no way to justify these actions, and the fact that some of our leaders are trying to do just that is an abomination.

Lord, have mercy. Come, Lord Jesus, and save us from this darkness.

We need light. We need hope. We need joy—true joy, not just superficial merriment into which we can escape because our culture tells us that now is the time to be happy. As the prophet Jeremiah said long ago, some among us insist that “all is well, all is well” when in fact nothing is well (Jeremiah 6:14).

Come, Lord Jesus. Come. We need light. We need hope. We need joy.

According to the Fourth Gospel, when John the Baptist was brought before the religious leaders in Jerusalem, they asked him a rather pointed question: “Who are you?” They wondered if he was the messiah. They wondered if he was Elijah. They wondered if he was the prophet. He claimed none of these and instead testified that he was the one preparing the way for the messiah. He had clarity—crystal clarity—about who he was and what God had called him to do. He understood the role he played in the unfolding of God’s plan through Jesus.

“Who are you?”

It’s easy for us—in the reverent ways we tell and hear these biblical stories; in the ways we portray these characters in Christmas pageants and nativity scenes and greeting cards and blockbuster movies—it’s easy for us to forget something very important: the heroes of these stories are actually no such thing. By and large, these people aren’t much different from you and me. They don’t have special powers or skills. They aren’t necessarily people of exceptional character.

Take John the Baptist, for example. If someone like that walked into this sanctuary right now—dressed in camel’s hair and eating locusts, raving about the coming of God’s kingdom, demanding that we change our hearts and lives, speaking of an apocalyptic messiah who is coming to judge humanity and bring about the end of the world as we know it—if such a person were to walk in here now, we’d call the police. We’d think he was mentally ill. We’d treat him with medication so that he didn’t sound so . . . crazy.

“Who are you?”

John knew who he was and what God had called him to do.

Think about Jesus’ mother, Mary. It’s likely that she was just a young girl, twelve to fourteen years old, when she was engaged to Joseph. To those unaware of or unconvinced by the story of her miraculous pregnancy, it looked to all the world like she was unfaithful to Joseph and had betrayed her engagement vows, thereby bringing shame upon her family and her fiancé. She hardly seemed like the person God would choose to give birth to the savior of the world.

“Who are you?”

According to Mary’s song—known in Christian tradition as the Magnificat—Mary also knew who she was and what God had called her to do. Despite the difficulties of her situation; despite the way it looked and the stories people told; despite what must have been incredible, crippling fear; despite all of this, Mary discovered joy in her calling. She understood how she fit in the big picture of what God was doing in the world.

“Who are you?”

Again, it’s easy for us to lift up John and Mary and all the rest as something like superheroes. In our minds they seem radically different from us. We could never do such things. We could never be like them. God could never use us in that way.

“Who are you?”

The Gospel of Luke and our Christian tradition lead us to hear the words of Isaiah that we read together as a description of Jesus. While it is true that some ancient Jewish rabbis taught that this and similar passages from the prophet Isaiah referred to the messiah, the majority of Jewish interpreters have insisted that these servant songs were really about ancient Israel as a whole, about all of the people. Such an interpretation suggests that these signs and wonders—bringing good news to the poor; binding up the brokenhearted; proclaiming liberation; comforting those who mourn—are not simply the works of heroes and saviors and special people radically different from us. Rather, these are the works that God calls all of us to participate in. Put another way, we all have the potential to be heroes. We all are special. We all are called.

“Who are you?”

In recent years this fundamental question of human identity has been illuminated for me by our growing understanding of transgender people who have experienced more and more freedom to share their stories in public. Just this week Krista Tippet’s public radio show On Being features a fascinating interview with Joy Ladin, a name that couldn’t be more appropriate for this third Sunday of Advent. Joy is the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish school. While that fact alone is remarkably fascinating, what I found most compelling about her interview is the way Joy described her transition from male to female. “I had never seen myself,” she said. In fact, she thought that if her real self ever saw the light of day, it would be unspeakably ugly and monstrous. It was revelatory for her when people didn’t run away screaming, when people told her that she is beautiful.

She clearly remembers the night she first looked in the mirror and saw herself, her true self, though she could not bring herself to talk about it because the emotions are so intense. It was like being born again.

For a while she could only do that in a temporary and superficial way by putting on makeup. Before her transition she would have to remove her makeup and change back. Looking in that mirror, it was as if her true self, only there for a fleeting moment, would disappear. Until her transition, she couldn’t discover who she truly is.

I will confess that at first I struggled a bit with how to theologically understand gender identity and transformation. For me, the most perplexing theological question is the notion of intentionally altering the bodies we are born with, which we say we believe are created in God’s image. If we believe that God also creates some people with gender identities different from their physical bodies, how do we reconcile all of this in a theologically coherent way?

Just over a year ago I posed this question to a transgender leader in our denomination. He told me that that his theology is grounded in the notion of being called and the process of becoming.

I think Joy Ladin would agree. She told Krista Tippet that all human beings are a balance between being and becoming. After childhood, most of us think that our lives are more about being than becoming. When the balance shifts to more becoming than being, we think of it as a crisis—a midlife crisis, a vocational crisis, a gender crisis. According to Joy, for trans-people becoming always outbalances being. Being constantly involves becoming.

I think that perhaps it’s that way for all of us. We are always involved in the dynamics of change. All of us are called to change our hearts and lives as we trust the good news and live into God’s kingdom. All of us are called. All of us are becoming.

“Who are you?”

This isn’t just a provocative question that advances the narrative of the gospel. This is an existential question that each of us must face. How many of us, when we look in the mirror, see our true selves? How many of us can see past our imperfections and our futile attempts to achieve perfection? How many of us can look beyond the stories people tell about us and the stories we believe about ourselves? How many of us have never seen our true selves?

“Who are you?”

In a world shrouded in darkness and suffering pain after pain after pain; in a story in which regular people like you and me are chosen by God to bring about something as radical as God’s kingdom on earth; in the midst of an Advent season threatened to be undone by a relentless stream of bad news—who are you?

Amen.