The Very Rev. Anthony R. Pompa
Surely you have heard that the entire world is off balance. You’ve heard that? As a matter of fact, folks are making lots of money right now writing books speaking to the reality that, at least on the level of the cosmos, we are in an unprecedented paradigm shift. Folks in church circles are also making lots of money writing books talking about what that means for the church. The truth of the matter is it is connected to the hole we have seen in the world in which we live to be living through a time of shift. This has never come so more evident than reading the front page of The Morning Call.
My element is the earth. My ruling planet is Saturn. The symbol of my life for 46 years has been the goat. My stone is garnet. As a good, old-fashioned Capricorn, my life pursuit has been to be proud of my achievements. My vibrant energy coming from the cosmos is powerful and resilient. My secret Capricorn desire is to be admired by family and friends, but who needed astrology to know that?
It seems that everything is off balance now. It seems my whole understanding of who I am, the signs that I look for in the sky, seem now to be pointing to a new truth. I am a Sagittarius, for God’s sake. I am not so sure about my element, the fire. I am so fond of Saturn as my guiding planet that I don’t know if I can give my allegiance to Jupiter. I have to tell you, there are some advantages to the archer as opposed to a goat, but my stone – I’ll never go turquoise. My life pursuit is to live the good life. I am not sure what that means, but it sounds good. The vibration for my new Sagittarian existence coming from the cosmos is overly expressive, leading to frequent burnouts. I have no interest in that. Ah, but my secret Sagittarian desire is to make a difference in the world. Maybe I’ll take that one.
OK, I’m making fun. For one thing, isn’t it amazing what one person in one small part of the world might decide on our behalf? That is that the cosmos has shifted and the paper publishes it all over, whatever. This is really a cheap way of taking astrology, that for which many look to the sky—you know what astrology is about. Astrology is about trying to find the signs that point to some piece of meaning in life. That is astrology. For some of us, it is frivolous and fun. For others, it is a bit more serious. For me, it’s frivolous and fun. My point, however, is that in all of humanity, we do share one thing. That is that we are all trying to make sense, find purpose, and find things with which we can align ourselves. We are often looking in places for the signs that will reveal these truths to us. This, I think, we all can agree on.
That is a long way of getting into John’s Gospel which, if you have ever studied John’s Gospel to understand what John is trying to tell us, revealed to us the truth that John is trying to convey to us. You have to understand that John is about signs. John’s entire Gospel is filled with signs. Signs, you know, are those things that point to something we cannot necessarily see or put our hands our hands on, but signs that point us to a truth about something. In today’s Gospel, we engage John’s first sign. That, of course, comes after his setting the stage, the theological and poetic stage. In those first 18 verses of the first chapter where John, in that beautiful poetry, tells us about God acting not only in the lives of individuals, but even more so, acting to come to redeem the entire creation, the entire cosmos. In John’s Gospel, God is hitting the “justify” button on the computer, resetting the stage. In today’s portion of that Gospel, John now translates that setting and begins to tell the real life historical story of how, indeed, God is pushing the justify button.
The sign that John gives us is, of course, in the person of John the Baptist. John makes the move to begin to tell the story of how the Word became flesh, it being rooted in the historical event in the person of one named Jesus, who one day walked across the wilderness and walked toward this figure, John. It is John the Baptist who John, the gospeler, chooses to tell us and point to the truth of what is happening. For John the Baptist, he will be the first signpost. You remember his words, not all that long ago in Advent and, of course, in Christmastide, when John says “I am not the light, but I have come to point to the light.” Well, today is the day. The light has walked into John the Baptizer’s presence, and he becomes the first witness in John’s Gospel because he sees the Holy Spirit descending and resting on Jesus like a dove. John points to the truth, he witnesses to it, and he announces to all who will hear it. What is this truth? This person is the Son of God. This person is the Lamb of God. John the Baptizer will be a witness and an announcer to a truth that is to be revealed, that God has come in time and in history, not only to redeem the cosmos, but also to deliver those who would hear him and receive him, and become children of God like him.
John’s Gospel announces to us today the code of discipleship that is to follow and bear witness to this Son of God, to this Lamb of God. To John’s audience, Son of God would have been a familiar term that they were expecting to hear and to see. It is one that they would hear, and know that God was acting in a particular way to bring a message of hope and freedom to a particular people. The Lamb of God, to an audience filled with Jews, certainly would have conjured up their knowledge and expectations that in that person, the way to freedom would be through sacrifice. This is the Son of God. This is the Lamb of God, and the entire rest of John’s Gospel would be about Jesus performing those signs, pointing to redemption. All those who would hear it would need to do is follow, and then witness to what they saw. So today in John’s Gospel, the sign points to that code of discipleship, to follow in witness the Son of God, the Lamb of God.
Here are the three things that I really want you to leave here with today. What does it mean to encounter this Lamb of God, this Son of God? These are the three things that I think it means that we are called to follow and then witness. Number one: All of us are in need of redeeming. All of us are in need of redeeming. Number two: We can’t do the redeeming. We just can’t pull off the redeeming. Have you noticed? Somehow, as hard as we might try, whatever program or campaign or statement or ideology we seem to come up with, we human beings, not just now in our time but forever historically, we can’t seem to get it all right. We can’t do the redeeming. Number one is admitting that we are in need of redeeming. Number two is that we can’t do the redeeming ourselves. The third thing is that once we encounter the one who redeems us, we must be a witness to that redemption.
Case in point: I was fortunate enough some years ago to spend a couple of days in study with Rabbi Ed Friedman, who was the incarnation of Family Systems Theory. (Actually he was the second generation of Family Systems Theory, but he is the one whom we knelt before to learn about Family Systems Theory.) In the class I attended, someone innocently asked Ed Friedman, “Rabbi Friedman, why do you think people come to church or to temple?” He said people come to church and to temple to show their home movies. Do you get that? What he is saying is that all of us take our humanity, we take our brokenness, we take our dysfunction, we take our sin, we take our failure, we take our hope, we take our joys, and we bring them to a safe place, and we show those movies on one another and on God. Sometimes that’s not so pretty. Sometimes it’s absolutely beautiful. You get it?
It’s been interesting to me to reflect again and to watch, which is what I do, reflect and watch our common response to the shootings in Arizona. If you pay attention to our national tragedies, if you pay attention to the home movies that are shown, isn’t the dialog that rises up around such events interesting? This isn’t the first time we have had a tragedy – it’s an awful tragedy, but it’s not the first time. If you pay attention at any tragedy, our response to it is to bring our home movies. That’s why, pastorally, when there are difficult things going on in our own personal lives, it is such emotional labor because all of our home movies come to be shown. Are you getting this yet? Isn’t it interesting that the dialog that occurs in the midst of a national tragedy raises things to which, perhaps, we need to pay attention? It’s not about what points people are making. It’s about what movies they are showing.
David Brooks, writing in his op ed piece in The New York Times in response to the shooting, showing his own home movies, perhaps offers us what I am really trying to get at. Making a statement about our common place that perhaps as a common group in our nation today, he is suggesting that perhaps what we need is to come to terms with our human limitations. Perhaps we are trying so hard to figure things out for ourselves that we are getting lost in our rhetoric and in our ideologies. Failing to name the reality, which is my point, a theological reality, we need redemption. All of us need redemption. We need to admit that we need redemption. We need to admit that we can’t do that redeeming on our own. We have tried, historically, and we have failed. When we come, you and I, into the realization that we hand our failure and our weakness and our sin over to a greater power than ours, then and only then, can we meet redemption. When we meet redemption, we need to witness to it.
David Brooks writes this about coming to that place of understanding our need for redemption: “Redemption is a tree with deep roots and without the roots, it can’t last.” So what are those roots? They are failure and sin and weakness and ignorance. I know it’s not Lent yet, but it seemed like today would be a good day to have it. We need redemption.
Tomorrow we will celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in our country. Tomorrow, in Sayre Hall, there will be a group from the Lehigh Valley who will gather in celebration, and I have been asked to say a few words at that celebration. The words that I have been asked to reflect on are about the progress of race relations in our country. I am not sure why I agreed to that, and I don’t know what I’m going to say yet, to be honest, other than we need redemption. All of us need a little redemption. We can’t do that redeeming by ourselves. For those of us who are people of faith, we must come to that place where we recognize the waters of baptism in which we have been baptized and know there is one who promises us redemption, and that admitting our weaknesses and our sin can only lead us to that place of redemption.
I tell this anecdote. As a young priest in Virginia in charge of my first congregation, somewhere in the mid to late ‘90s, you will remember that there was a rash of church burnings in the south, African-American congregations’ buildings being burned. I received a telephone call from an 80-some-year-old woman who was a member of the Presbyterian congregation down the road. I didn’t know her from Adam, but she invited me to a meeting at her house. Someone in my congregation advised me that this would be a good invitation to accept. So I went to the meeting and there I found myself sitting with three other clergy, me and this 80-year-old woman and three other clergy—myself, the Presbyterian pastor, the Methodist pastor, and the pastors and the deacons of the black Baptist church down the road. She looked at us and she said, “I have lived here all my life and I’ve lived in the south, and I’ve lived through much, and I’ve seen this movie before. They’re burning churches again. What are you all going to do about it?”
You see, we are in need of redeeming. We can’t do that redeeming by ourselves. When we come together, which is what we did, to name again before one another and God that we are in need of redeeming, that we can’t do that redeeming ourselves, and we invite the Lamb of God, the Son of God, to come with us and be with us, and to hand over our weakness and vulnerability, our prejudices and our sins, and ask for them to be redeemed. We are met there, by that Lamb of God, and then we are called to witness to it. In this scripture today, Jesus says to those who would listen, “Come and see,” just come and see. So I leave you with these words from Reinhold Niebuhr, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime. Therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe, as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.”
Amen.
