Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity (Eve of the Nativity of John the Baptist)

admin | 23 June 2024

“He was not that light but was sent to bear witness of that light”

What light? The light which is Christ. Christ is “essential light” without whose light we are blind, and, like the parable in today’s Gospel, “hypocrites,” who lead one another astray, the proverbial “blind leading the blind.” It is an ancient commonplace about a critique of leadership, on the one hand, and about a self-critique of our own self-certainties and judgmentalism, on the other hand. But who is the “witness of that light?” John the Baptist. We stand on the cusp and eve of the midsummer’s festival of the Nativity of John the Baptist. In a way his witness marks the beginning and end of our summer reflections (at least here in the Maritimes!) with his Nativity tomorrow and his martyrdom, the Beheading of John the Baptist, in late August, itself another kind of nativity. Birth and death go together. As dying, we live.

There are only two nativities that belong to the major and scripturally based festivals of the Church: the Nativity of Christ and the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. The latter coincides with the summer solstice, the longest day, and points us to Christ’s winter birth, the fons et origo of Christian life and faith, the longest night in which the greatest light is made manifest. John’s Nativity celebrates the purpose of his very being and so, too, of our lives. It is captured in our text: “He was not that light but was sent to bear witness of that light.” Along with the witness of Christ to himself and the witness of the Father to his only-begotten Son, there is the witness of human testimony as inspired by the Spirit. The whole life of John the Baptist is a witness to the one who comes who is greater than himself, the one for whom he is sent to prepare his way.

He points not to himself but to Christ but even more to Christ in us. Such is the necessity of the preaching of John the Baptist. He comes for the purpose of “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Yet John is not himself the forgiveness of sins; only the instrument of God preparing us for the coming and indwelling of Christ in us. This is what Paul in the Epistle reading from Romans, too, is reminding us: “the whole creation is waiting for the revelation of the sons of God” in whom we “shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” That mercy is what Luke highlights at the same time as showing what stands in its way: our being blind to ourselves and to one another is about our being blind to God and his will and purpose for our humanity.

The same interplay of ideas about what is wanted to be known and what negates or denies that desire is present in the Matins readings from 1st Kings and from Acts. In the first King Rehoboam acquiesces to the judgement of the young men over and against the wisdom of the elders. The latter had advised him to “speak good words” to Israel for “then they will be your servants for ever.” The young men advise increasing the burdens upon the people greatly and harshly. It ends in rebellion and discontent. Paul in his sermon on the Areopagus proclaims to the men of Athens God not as unknown but made known as the one “who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth,” who “himself gives to all men life and breath and everything” and who “is not far from each one of us for ‘in him we live and move and have our being,’” even quoting some of their poets.

As the Collect so beautifully puts it, only through God being “our ruler and guide, may we so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal.” There is no denying the realities of “the sufferings of the present time,” even more how “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together,” “waiting for the revelation of the sons of God,” in which is the fullness of redemption.

The necessity of repentance is the central message of John the Baptist and while we may think that is negative, it is profoundly positive. It is about the constant motions of our return to God, “a kind of circling back to him from whom we have turned away in our sins,” as Lancelot Andrewes defines it. Repentance is metanoia. It is literally about thinking after God and the things of God as opposed to trusting in ourselves and standing in judgement over one another, utterly blind to both ourselves and one another. Thus the repentance that John the Baptist preaches is exactly about “cast[ing] out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.”

These things speak to the confusions and contradictions of our times as knowers without knowledge in the various identitarian claims, or knowledge without knowers in the techno world of AI, or worse, neither knowledge nor knowers in the extreme form of narcissism which can’t distinguish between self and other: narcissism as nihilism, an empty world of empty selves. Our readings show us the redemption of ourselves from ourselves by pointing us to Christ and his life in us.

In a rather judgmental and divisive world we need to be reflective by way of repentance in its deeper meaning as a kind of contemplation of the light of Christ given to guide us and rule us from within. It requires self-awareness, a self-critique of knowing and doing that opens us to Christ. John the Baptist, like us, is not that light but is “sent to bear witness of that light.” That light is Christ without whom we are but darkness and blind in our ignorance and our arrogance. And why? Because of the self-righteousness that trusts not in God but in ourselves and which leads to the condemnation of others.

We easily forget who we are in the mercies of Christ and the reciprocal nature and power of those mercies so profoundly signalled in Luke’s sermon on the plain: “Be ye therefore merciful, as your father also is merciful, Judge not, and ye shall not be judged; condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: give, and it shall be given unto you.” This an explication of Christ’s beatitude in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.” Mercy for mercy is the reciprocity of Christ’s grace moving in us. “Be ye therefore merciful.”

The meaning of Christ’s death and sacrifice for us is found in repentance and forgiveness and in lives of service and sacrifice; in short, learning and serving. The witness of John the Baptist shown in the wonder of his nativity reminds us that Christ is our life and our light. Our lives are to be witnesses to that essential light which enlightens and redeems our sinful humanity.