Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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This is a sad story. John the Baptist, firebrand of the Jordan valley, announcer of the coming of the Kingdom, wild, incorrigible spokesman for God, is in prison. Herod's got him. John could have remained free if he had stuck to preachin' and not gone to meddlin', as they say. Even his strongest pronouncements -- even when he called the Pharisees and Saducees "a brood of vipers" - never landed him in jail. But when he said that King Herod should not have married his brother's wife, he touched a royal nerve. Herod's wife threw a hissy (because John's preaching threatened her gravy train), so Herod had John arrested and then toyed with him. This Herod, like his father Herod the Great, was paranoid and ruthless in the extreme. (He had had two of his own sons murdered because he suspected them of trying to usurp his throne. That's what the world was like in those days.) The smart money said John the Baptist did not have long to live. And John knew it.

He sits on the hard, stone floor of that cold dungeon under Herod's palace, and wonders. "Did I get it right? I only had one job to do. Did I identify the right man, or did I blow it?" The one he had chosen to introduce as Messiah was Jesus of Nazareth, his second cousin, not a household name -- yet there had, indeed, been impressive signs when John baptized Jesus. But, up to now, Jesus looked like anything but a Messiah. He had not become a warlord In fact, he had not garnered any power unto himself. Instead, he was diddling around in the countryside, teaching nice things and performing a few miracles. John, like the rest of Israel, had expected more, a great deal more! "Was I wrong? Was I supposed to finger someone else?" Self-doubt was not characteristic of John, but believing one will soon die concentrates the mind.

From his jail cell he sends messengers to Jesus with a pathetic question, "Are you the one, or shall we keep on looking?" Jesus thinks the about question, when they ask if of him, and then leans over and says to them: "Go tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them." John had gotten it just right. "Be patient, John, there's more to come." I hope those messengers got back to John in time, before Herod, in a drunken frenzy, ordered him beheaded. These would have been wonderful words for a condemned man to think on.

There are few today who would reject Jesus outright. Few who will say, "He is not the one. We need to look elsewhere." But there are many who doubt. Even John, this great man of faith, doubted. And in this Advent season, when we welcome guests into our church, and talk about angels and magic stars, we need to make room for doubt - others'and our own. Doubt is not he opposite of faith. Unbelief is the opposite of faith.

Doubt is the human side of faith. I like what one writer said, "Faith is a belief held in the presence of doubt, not a belief that removes all doubt."

When we demonize doubt, and make people feel guilty when they express uncertainty about faithful things, we draw a line in the wrong place and separate good Christians from each other. Years ago we had some church members I described as "super-Christians." Whenever someone else in the church expressed even the smallest doubt about something in the Bible, or about the power of God to help us, they would announce that ever since they met Jesus they had no such doubts. It was supposed to be a positive faith statement, but it sounded a lot like scolding. Other church members said they made them feel dirty. There is no need for that. Surely God, who made us and gave us brains to think, understands that we will not always be certain about spiritual things. These are the people, we are the people, God has to work with. And doubt comes with the territory. Doubt comes with Christmas, and Easter, and all the rest.

Worse yet, I think we sometimes make doubt the enemy so that (since we can never be doubt-free) we should have a good excuse to reject the faith altogether. If I can't have a perfect world, then I don't want any world at all. Like two people who get married, and when their marriage isn't perfect in every detail - not full of love and bliss every day - they seek a divorce. Instead of understanding that love has its tough times. That's the human part of love. Faith has its tough times, as John the Baptist discovered in that prison. We don't have to divorce Jesus just because we have unanswered questions about him. (Frankly, there are unanswered questions about everything!) Faith means acting and being in a particular way, even when we are not certain. If we had certainty, acting that way wouldn't require any faith at all. That means, among other things, that we cannot use doubt as an excuse to slip out of our faithful covenants. We have to hang in there. If we accept our doubt, it cannot serve as an escape hatch for us.

Jesus uses facts to disarm John's doubt. Tell John what you see: that the blind receive their sight, that the lame walk, the deaf hear, and the dead are raised. That's how we know Jesus. These are things that cannot be doubted. Somehow Jesus' people, who are in touch with him, do wonderful things, things that are so contrary to the world's way of doing that they can only be explained by some power from the outside. They raise other people's unwanted children. They touch the lepers. They educate the poor. They feed the hungry. That should be our answer when the world asks if Jesus is really the one. Look and see what he does. In the sixties we asked the question, "If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?" Well that is the point. The world lives by power, we live by the law of love and grace.

Can we prove it? What can we show to bear witness to, to give evidence of, our faith? Only our works.

The next day after the Berlin wall fell a sign went up on the front lawn of a tiny Methodist church in Prague, Checoslovocia. It said, simply, "The Lamb Wins." The lamb, you see, is "our horse" (to destroy a metaphor). Others in life bet on the lion, some bet on the bear (the Russian bear, in this case), but Christians say that (at the end of the race, and sometimes along the way) the lamb wins. Love and grace will destroy money and power anytime. Christmas says that. That's why he was born so poor. That's why they "wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger." It was exactly right. That's why the poor have always heard the story of Jesus as good news, indeed. John Jacob Niles, the great collector of folk music from the dirt-poor people of Appalachia, one day heard this little Christmas tune:

		Jesus, Jesus, rest your head,
		You has got a manger bed.
		All the evil folk on earth
		Sleep in feathers at their birth.
		Jesus, Jesus rest your head,
		You has got a manger bed.
	

Christmas says the lamb wins. A poor girl bares the son of God. Valleys are lifted up. One who lies in a manger becomes king. The stone which the builders rejected becomes the cornerstone. Christmas proclaims unlikely things. Very good news for us losers.