Isaiah 49:3, 5-6 | 1 Corinthians 1:1-3 | John 1:29-34

Almighty, everliving God, who governed all things, both in heaven and on earth, mercifully hear the pleading of your people and bestow your peace on our times.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

This is our first ordinary Sunday of the year.  It means we’re going to take time to review a biography of Jesus, primarily looking at the gospel of Matthew, and one of the things that we’re going to be doing clearly is trying to open your eyes to who this Christ is and what he’s revealing to us about who the Father is and who the Spirit is.  We have a triune God.  We know that he’s one, and there’s no way exactly to describe why he reveals himself as three different persons, but he did.  So the point is what does it mean.  It’s a richer, I think, understanding of God than we could have if we just said God is a Father, God is  brother, God is a spiritual force.  He’s all those things.  So I don’t think you could expect a church, a religion to sit down and explain to you something as mysterious as what I might call the personality of God, how he manifests himself in the world.  He is in the image of a creator.  He is in the image of a savior who comes and intimately dwells with us.  He’s in the image of a mysterious power that flows through us.  Our task is to be crucified to it, to suffer it, to surrender to this great, great mystery.  So it seems to make sense.  If we’re beginning a biography of Jesus, we need to ask you — I say we.  That’s the church.   The church is inviting everyone to answer a question.  Who do you think he is?  Do you know him?  It’s interesting.  In the gospel, we have someone like John who knew Jesus most of his life.  At least they were related.  They were cousins.  I don’t know how much time they spent together, but there’s a strong tradition that they were close friends, as well as relatives, in the time Jesus was working through who he was and what he was here to accomplish.  And the one thing I think is interesting about a relationship you have with someone: you can know them for years and years and years and say, “I know him.”  And then they can reveal something about themselves that you never saw before, and you’ll say something like, “I never knew that part of you.  I never knew you as that, yet you are that.”  

So what I think is happening in this gospel, as we get to the end of the ministry of John, at least I believe he knew somehow that where he was, in prison for having irritated Herod’s wife, who really wasn’t his wife, he knew that his days were numbered.  He knew that this was probably the end.  He wasn’t naïve.  He knew the hatred that the temple had for everything he stood for and Jesus stood for.  So somehow he knew in his heart that maybe this was the end, and so he started really concentrating perhaps on who is Jesus.  Who is this man?  And as he’s sitting in prison, perhaps he’s contemplating.  He says, “Well, I remember in scripture it said that there would be a man upon whom the Spirit would descend, and he would be the Messiah that the Old Testament talks about over and over again.”  Three hundred times it makes reference to a Messiah that fits the description of the God/man of Nazareth, Jesus.  Imagine.  It’s all written in the Old Testament.  If there’s any gift I receive from the Old Testament now that I’ve been preaching on it for 50 years, since the Vatican Council, is how clear it was in the work of the Old Testament who Jesus was.  It would strike me again — I’ve said this to you often — as a kind of horrific feeling when I realize that perhaps those who rejected him most vehemently were the ones who knew he was real, and what he was coming to give was real, and it was terrifying to them, because what he wanted to do is those famous three things he said.  “I want to open the eyes of the blind so they can see the truth, who they are, who the church is supposed to be, who I am, and I want them so much to drink in the knowledge that I have given to the world.  And the world, if it receives it, will be free of excessive authority, will be free of a power over them, will be not surrendering itself to a way of life that someone explains, ‘This is what God wants, even though you see it as an enormous burden.’”  They knew he would just chip away at their core of the way in which they connected to people.  They weren’t serving people.  They were robbing them.  That’s why Jesus called the house where they worked the house of those who steal, who rob people, who turn religion into a kind of business where they get something for whatever they dole out to you.  So they were frightened.  They should have been frightened, and the church is still frightened.  It is the part of the church that is really wedded deeply to wanting to control, to make decisions for people, and all that can be seen.  Of course, it’s like, well, what a terrible thing to do to an adult, but there’s a lot of people that need control.  There’s a lot of people that need to be told what to do, and they’re in infant stage, so to speak, of their own growth of consciousness and awareness of who they are.  But the point is that, when one realizes that the person they’re teaching has passed the training time, when they need to be protected from themselves by being told what to do and how to act, where to be, well, it makes obvious sense that then you treat them differently.  And the difference is, when that awakening happens in a human being, when a people are gathered around us teaching of Yahweh, and Yahweh wanted a people, a chosen people he could work with — he wanted them to manifest the thing he was teaching them about relationships, which is the core of everything.  “I need a people who will witness who I am to people.  I will need the Israelites, and I want them to be formed into an example, not just a family of human beings that love one another and forgive one another and support one another, but no, I want them to be a source of life for everybody else.”  It’s what witness is all about.  Nothing convinces people of a way of life more than watching someone live that way of life and find such deep joy in it, and since everything that we’re ever asked to learn from God we’ve known before, and it’s always the knowing is like a remembering, and when we see somebody acting the way that we know we’re supposed to act, it is amazingly effective in bringing about something wonderful.

So we see that what God is saying in the first reading, through the reading — Isaiah is speaking.  What he’s really saying is, “I want you all to not just be following rules and laws, but I want you to be a witness to other people of who I am and who you can be with me.”  And that’s described so beautifully, I think, in the story of the gospel where John the Baptist is saying, “Now I think I see who you are.  I was always told somebody would come, and upon that person the Spirit of God would descend, enter into them.”  What an interesting image of being assured.  The final, absolute sign that Jesus is the Messiah is the fact that he dwells in human beings.  He dwelt in Jesus.  Indwelling is so core to the teaching, and isn’t it interesting that it was the one thing that John needed to convince him that Jesus was always who he said he was, when he saw God entering into him in the form of a dove, the sign of peace and grace.  

So the second reading is a wonderful celebration, in a way, of Christianity, because Paul is just talking to a church, the church of Corinth.  He’s giving them a greeting, and he’s saying, “It’s amazing what’s happened.  We have been made holy — holy by this mysterious thing of God dwelling in us, and the presence of this divinity is something that can be felt and touched and understood.”  And the way in which Paul uses these words he uses is so interesting.  He said, “It’s going to be manifesting in you as grace and peace — grace and peace.”  Grace is an interesting word.  It has many meanings.  It means beauty and something that’s well-formed and well-done, but it also means there’s something that is beautiful and effective and powerful in bringing something to another human being that we call peace.  And what is peace?  I see.  I know.  I’m at one with what I see and what I know.  I am capable of things I never thought I was capable of.  I’m loved.  I’m safe.  I’m valued.  That’s the effectiveness of this wonderful thing called grace, and again, the best way to describe it is how it was seen by John the Baptist.  “I see the one who has been baptized, and if he’s been baptized, then he has a power within him, and the power within him is he can baptize other people.”  Now, that’s really interesting.  Remember how John didn’t want Jesus to baptize him [sic], because he seemed inappropriate, because he saw Jesus as greater than he.  So why would the greatness of God be manifested as such a radical servant unless that’s the point?  Jesus wanted to serve John, not have John serve him.  He wanted to be baptized by John, because it was a way of manifesting to John who he was and what he could do for everyone else, what he could do for us, somehow make the Spirit’s presence in us a reality.  

What’s the big obstacle, always the obstacle to indwelling presence?  At least when I was growing up in the church, it always seemed to me clear that the church taught me that my human nature, which was something that I was stuck with — actually it was sometimes seen as a curse from God, when we were kicked out of the garden, which we weren’t kicked out at all really.  But the thing that’s so interesting about our human nature being the thing that causes us to sin, and sin is the thing that causes God to leave is, and when God leaves us, we are on our own, and we are devoid of the benefit of the presence of God, his favor — his grace is gone, and we start we start wallowing in shame, mostly shame.  “Something wrong with me, my humanity.  I’m ashamed of being a human.”  Can you imagine God listening to the soul of a human being who said, “I am so sorry, God.  I am a human being.  I am disgusting in your sight whenever I do something selfish, impure, when I lie, when I cheat, when I have sex in a way that isn’t healthy for me”?  All that, that just makes you, human beings, feel, makes God turn away almost in disgust, and yet he created that humanity.  He created it in a way that it is beautiful.  It has such great potential to freely act in a direction of giving life and love to someone and has the same freedom to do the opposite and destroy and control and abuse.  Why both?  Because it’s something about freedom.  You can’t have freedom that is a free response of a person to something that God asks, you can’t have the freedom to say yes to that and then somehow through grace be never given the freedom to do something negative.  That would mean one part of you surrenders.  The other part is still under control.  By under control I mean only God can make it do what it has to do.  That’s not the way God works.  He doesn’t make things, make your will do anything.  It’s the antithesis of a loving relationship.  A love that demands and requires actions consistently in order for that relationship to continue doesn’t understand the first thing about what a real relationship is about.  It’s about a flow of something called spirit.  The flow of the spirit between us has something to do with the indwelling presence of God the Father, and that indwelling presence is made manifest — or the possibility of this indwelling presence is made possible by a witness, Jesus.  I’m fascinated by his humanity.  We’re told he never sinned, but he lost his temper.  He didn’t do everything perfectly.  He certainly wasn’t perfect in some kind of intense way of saying he never offended, he never did anything wrong, he never made a mistake.  We tend to turn mistakes into sins, but they’re also literally part of the process of being a human and growing and changing into something more conscious, more loving, more effective.  

How often has the church, how often have I as a priest in the past fed this idea that your sin is your problem?  Sin is, I think, mostly a resistance, a resistance to what is true, what is real, what is good.  It’s a blindness that we choose.  At least when we choose it, that’s the sin.  Choosing blindness, choosing not to be free, choosing to be in pain, choosing to do all the negative things to ourselves in the name of a religion that says, if we suffer, we’ll go straight to heaven.  That’s what has to change, and the change is now.  It’s here, because the indwelling presence is becoming more and more and more a reality. 

Your deepest longing is for us to know you, and knowing you, falling in love with you and then becoming a light, a figure in the world that is resonating an inner presence, an inner grace, an inner force that tends, on its own, without even necessarily being talked about or used directly, is influencing the world — the world.  You never work, God, on your own with just us.  You work with us, for us, in us.  That’s our task, to believe this, to understand this great mystery, our personal relationship with you, as well as the most beautiful relationship we have with the world, and we ask this through Christ, our Lord, amen.