Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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My grandmother remembered Buffalo Bill. She claimed she saw him marching down Main Street in Stubenville, Ohio, at the head of a parade for his Wild West Show. In small town America, travelling shows and circuses met a need - they broke the boredom -- and added a little spice to life. A show's success or failure depended, in large part, on someone called "the advance man." He was always two or three weeks ahead of the show, in some small town, talking fast, making arrangements, putting up posters, and generally raising the people's expectations. If the advance man did his job, when the show arrived, with its Main Street parade, the town was ready.

John the Baptist was Jesus' advance man. In a bazaar and pathetic way, John's job (his only job) was to work up the crowd for Jesus. For this he was born, and for this he died. His constant text was from the prophet Isaiah: "Prepare a good road for God, build him a smooth, straight highway through the rough and crooked wilderness of this world, for he's on his way." That was John's role on the world's stage, the one thing God had in mind for him. When the actual show arrived, John lost the spotlight, a fallen star. Some of his disciples became disciples of Jesus. After a bit he was arrested by Herod, toyed with for a while, and then beheaded in a ghastly way, his head used as a party favor for a young girl. Such a great man to have died in such a way!

The saddest event in John's life took place just before his death, when he was in prison. In that cold, dark place - all by himself - John began to lose faith. Had he done his job? Had he gotten it right? He had declared publicly, with much fanfare, that his second cousin, Jesus of Nazareth, was Israel's long-awaited Messiah, but nothing had happened. Jesus had remained the same meek and mild person he had always been. He had gathered no armies. No rebellion had started. No power structures had crumbled. So, from his cell, John sent a messenger to Jesus with this question, full of self-doubt: "Are you the one?" I hope John lived long enough to receive Jesus' reply: "Go tell John that the blind see, and the lame walk, that lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and good news is preached to the poor." I hope he heard that before he died.

He had gotten it right. Jesus was the Messiah. Not what John had expected, but Messiah none the less. He got something else right, too: that the kingdom of God, whether on earth or in the human heart, must begin with repentance and humility. Only people who know they need help will enter the kingdom. Only those who go to the doctor will be seen by him. A recent article in our conference newsletter, contained some excellent suggestions, by a young minister, on how to make churches grow. I liked a lot of them, but this was my favorite: "Always run a dysfunctional church. Let your people know that you, yourself, are dysfunctional - full of sin and doubt -- and set up your church to welcome and minister to others who know that they are desperately ill. Nobody else wants to see Jesus, anyway." It's not the desperate, doubting ones who are hard to help, it's the ones who think they already know it all, who've arrived. In Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, Prodigal Summer, one of her characters, Garnett Wilson, an old curmudgeon, thinks some ugly thoughts about the local Pentecostal Church. Kingsolver writes, "Garnett smiled, feeling secure in his understanding of what God's word did and did not mean to suggest." Feeling secure…a dangerous place to be.

For John the Baptist, of course, it was those hypocritical Jewish leaders who felt so secure, and therefore, who were so hard to reach. They felt secure because (they told themselves) they were children of Abraham. Abraham (two thousand years before, for heaven's sake!) -- Abraham was chosen by God, favored by God, they said, so we, his sons and daughters, Jews, can rest assured that we too are favored. They would inherit salvation. It would come to them as a patrimony. John called them snakes, and asked them why they had bothered to come! It was with just the opposite spirit that John, Luke says, went into the Jordan valley, "proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." So the story of Jesus begins with the need for forgiveness, that's what his advance man told the crowds. And it ends there, too. On the last night of his life, Jesus passed around a glass of wine and said, "This is … my blood, shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins." If you don't think you need forgiveness, you don't need Jesus. Why did you bother to come?

The good news, of course, is not that we are sinners, but that God has delivered us from sin and death. What we do here on Sunday mornings is not group psychotherapy, where we come to commiserate. This is a hospital, where we come to get well. When we leave the hospital and go out into the world, we still have the evil microbes within us, microbes of sin and death, if you will. And every day our healthy immune systems fight off their evil influence. From time to time they overwhelm us, and we become chronic, still, that is true. But that's the reason for the hospital. The song says

Jesus died to save our sins,
Glory to God, we're going to need him again!

From time to time, like John in prison, we lose faith. And, of course, we are all heading toward death. But only physical death, never spiritual. My grandmother's dead.

Buffalo Bill's defunct,
He could shoot one, two, three, four, five pidgeons, just like that!
Jesus he was a handsome man!
And I've got just one question:
"How do you like your blue-eyed boy, mister death?

Expectations are important. We often see what we expect to see, and sometimes we fail to see the truth because it is not as we expected. That is why the Jews failed to see Jesus. Psychologists have an interesting experiment. They take an ordinary deck of cards, and flip ten of them in front of a subject asking him to remember as many as he can: two of hearts, ten of clubs, and so forth. First time through, with the cards being flipped quickly, most people can remember four or five. The psychologist then slows down the flipping and goes through the same ten cards again. This time people remember seven, eight, maybe nine. And again, even slower. But very few people get to ten. The secret is that, one of the cards is the six of spades, but it is colored red. It is not what people expect to see, so they can't see it. It scrambles their brains.

Jesus was the red six of spades - was and still is. He was the stone that the builders rejected…who would have thought it would become the cornerstone? We bring so many expectations to Jesus, and to Christmas. Maybe, this year, let's try something different: let's let Jesus be Jesus and Christmas take its course. And let's get ready as John said we should: by repenting and asking forgiveness, and thus giving Jesus a straight heart-road to travel, one not blocked with pride, and stubbornness, and with our own expectations of what a messiah should be.