Are you the one?

It's a bit played out by now, but do you remember Neo from the Matrix?

Hopefully you remember Neo.  He was a big deal in the early 2000s, with the extreme popularity of the Matrix series, and by that, I mean extreme popularity of the first matrix movie, and then the middling popularity of the second movie, and then the massive unpopularity of the third movie.

The plot of the movie revolves around Neo, and the name 'Neo' is a very clever anagram.  I'll let you run it through an online anagram solver before I tell you the answer. The answer, of course, is One.  As in, Neo is the one.  This is a theme that runs through a number of films, stories, radio dramas, all that, the idea that there is a one chosen hero who is foretold, who will come to save the people from their existential angst and temporal troubles.  A, dare I say it, Messiah, who will come.  

Now, if you know your Old Testament, you will know that there are a lot of references to the Messiah, to the Lord's anointed, the one who will come to save Israel, not just for a time as though he were Judas Maccabeus,  but for eternity.  There are a lot of prophecies about the Messiah who would sit on the throne of his father David, and of his kingdom there would be no end.  This is a wonderful prophecy, one that all the people of Israel certainly wanted to be fulfilled, but there is always a question about that, which is 'are you the one?'

You have to ask this question very carefully, and listen very carefully for the answer, for even Jesus tells you that many will come appearing as false Messiahs, and he has been proven to be right, as he always is, by the sheer number of people claiming to be the Messiah from Israel and beyond.  With all these people claiming to be THE Messiah, people had the healthy question, asking 'are you the one?' You could ask each of these Messiahs this question, asking them one at a time if they are the one or not, and finding out what the answer would be.  Because if you are going to have faith in the Messiah, if you're going to follow the Messiah wherever he leads, if you're going to ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name, and if there is one and only one, you're going to want to make really sure that the one you're following is the one.

Do you know that John the Baptist had this exact same line of questioning? He certainly did, and for good reason.  Unlike you or I who can shake our heads and cluck our thick tongues and think so very delicately on the subject of which church to join, that kind of thing, John the Baptist was in jail. He had been locked up in jail because he spoke truth to power, and had the gall to mention to Herod that his relationship wasn't on the up and up.  And while John was in jail, while he was behind bars, he sought word about Jesus of Nazareth.  If you're going to be behind bars, if you're going to be stashed away, far from polite company, imprisoned by the powerful  who want you and your morality to be obliterated, you're going to want some words of assurance that the one you're following is the one.  And when the disciples of John come to Jesus, Jesus tells them to tell John what they had seen:

Luke 7:22-23 ²²So he replied to the messengers, "Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. ²³Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me." Jesus shows his majesty through what he does, not just what he says.  The work that he does is phenomenally important, given the ability for him to do what he does.  But it goes one step further, because the work of Christ is important not just for what it is, but for what it says. Think for a second about that popular Christmas carol 'Joy to the world.'  Think most especially about the third verse:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.


There was a curse placed on humans in the garden, once they had fallen from Grace.  They had sinned, and through their sin, death, disease, illness, blindness, deafness, all those things entered into the world.  You know, everything that the people who came to Jesus were suffering from. All the things that were signs and evidence of the curse of sin: illness, scarcity, injury, sinfulness itself, and death itself, are all things that Jesus comes to solve.  And when Jesus exhibits his power, he shows himself as being God with us.  He shows himself as the Messiah, the only one who can undo the curse that had plagued us.  He is the one whom the wind and waves obey.  He is the one who absolutely unpicks all the stitches, who untangles the barbed wire, who shows that for the first time since the fall God and man are on the same side. This is shown most firmly and concretely at the cross, when Jesus dies, and the temple curtain is torn in two.  At that moment, the visible barrier between God and man was removed, at the death of Christ.  But that curtain was just a visible marker of the spiritual separation between us and God.

That barrier is gone now.  And now, eternally, God is with us .

You're a mean one

It can't just be me, and I don't think that it is, but at this time of year, I seem to be genuinely thinking that the grinch has a point.

Specifically, it's about the noise.  Everything is noisy at this time of year, and not the nice sort of sleigh bell noise.  No, it's the noisy noise.  A long, long time ago, I saw a performance by the Calgary philharmonic orchestra of 'Emily saves the Orchestra,' which is a show that I'm not entirely sure anyone else remembers.  Anyhow, the point that I'm trying to get to is that the villain of the performance was a monster called Cacopholous (the monster that I saw was 40 feet tall, but had to be retired due to not traveling well).  Back then, I'd never heard of the concept of cacophany, but it was in the show, noise personified.  Cacopholous was a monster who lived to remove music and replace it with cacophany, with noise, for the sake of noise.  No rhythm, no music, no tune, nothing.  Just noise, grating noise.  

And yeah, at this time of the year, the grinch has a point.  There's a lot of noise. The noise isn't tuneful, rhythmic, or pleasant.  It is, honestly, noise.  It's loud, and it's unpleasant - and there's plenty of it.  And that's what makes the start of Advent so jarring - this first week in Advent doesn't start with noise at all.  It starts with silence.

In the Advent and Christmas seasons, we tend to focus on a few people who carry forward the spirit of Advent.  We think about John the Baptist, the forerunner of Christ who prepares his way.  We think about the family of Jesus, of Mary and Joseph and their journey to Bethlehem.  We think about Andrew and Peter, the men who were disciples of John before they were disciples of Jesus, but we rarely think about someone very special, and very specific. We very very rarely think about the father of John the Baptist - Zechariah.  It's easy not to think too much about Zechariah, of course, given that he has very few lines in the Bible, and he is quickly overshadowed by other people in the Gospel account. But hold on just for a second, because Zechariah's story is pretty important as far as these things go.

Back in the day, Zechairah is visited by Gabriel, that great angel, and Gabriel announces to Zechariah that his wife will conceive a child, and will give birth to an incredibly important person in history. "He will be great before the Lord ... he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.'  And you know what Zechariah's response is, of course.

It seems unlikely that Zechariah and Elizabeth will have a child in their dotage, and Zechariah doubts this message openly when Gabriel informs him of what will happen. And Gabriel has a stiff rebuke for Zechariah when he hears it: 'Behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time."

And thus begins the perfect pregnancy for Elizabeth.  For once, while a woman is with child, her husband isn't talking about how tired HE is, isn't whining about how hard the pregnancy is on HIM, isn't discussing how he would much MUCH rather be watching sports than buying gravol, etc. Instead, he's completely silent all the way through her pregnancy, all the way until the naming of John, as the law requires in the scriptures.  

And this is the part that is interesting, is important for us, especially this time of year.  The grinch, when he reacts negatively against the noise, we can feel him on that, we truly can.  But more than anything else, Zechariah does what so few of us do, especially not in Advent: He listens. And this is genuinely important, given who Jesus is and what Jesus is all about.  For at this time of year, in the hustle and bustle, it's really easy to want to look at Jesus, to observe him from the outside, to see him as a baby in the manger, and then to take in all sorts of other things. But it's not as easy to do what the voice of God from the cloud counsels all of us to do, in all circumstances and in all seasons - "This is my son, my chosen.  Listen to Him." In the Christian faith, we are people of the word, people who listen.  At this time of year, we are told to listen to John the Baptist, the voice of one crying in the wilderness.  We are told to listen to Mary, who speaks the magnificat, the song of response to Gabriel's annoucement of her own pregnancy.  We are told to listen to the Old Testament prophecies of prediction of Jesus Christ, and what he will do.  

And in all this, the only way we are going to get to do any of this is to follow what happened to Zechariah - spending Advent listening.  

Now it isn't that Zechariah doesn't talk, though.  He sure does.  But when he talks, thanks to the silence, he really only speaks when he has something remarkably important to say.  He only speaks when he has something vital to say, and after he names his own son what Gabriel had told him to, his tongue is loosed, and he exults forth with such a magnificent song of praise that it forms part of Morning Prayer in our Lutheran liturgy even today.  

So it's not about silence for silence's sake, nor is it about noise for noise's sake.  It's about taking the time to listen for what is important, and then responding with words of equal importance.  It's about fulfilling the directives in the book of James, that we should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.  For if we listen to what God's word says at this time of year, if we hear the voice of one crying in the wilderness, we will hear of sin, of pain, and of redemption and sacrifice. We won't hear about the meaning of friends and family, of food. We'll hear about a fallen creation, a wounded world, a world straining against darkness and desperately seeking a light for the nations.  And as Christmas approaches, we will see that light come into the world - Christ the Lord, the propitiation, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  

You'll catch all that.  If you listen.