Setup and payoff

Let's talk about my favourite kind of films just for a second.

Horror movies.

Yes, I know I know, these sinful things, but I like them for a few reasons. First of all, they're the only genre of movie that discusses the supernatural with any degree of seriousness. There can be demons, necromancy, devil worship, possession, witches, sorcerers, and all these things are treated with utmost seriousness. Secondly, they are the movie genre that treats violence with its necessary impact. Aside from the saw movies, if there's violence happening onscreen, unlike in action movies, you feel bad, scared, like you would if there was actual violence happening in front of you. 

But with all these supernatural issues, you have to set up how to deal with them. In an action movie, the solution to the problem seems to be 'use gun on man', but horror movies set up other expectations. You have to use a silver bullet on the werewolf, a wooden stake on a vampire, shoot zombies in the head, that kind of thing. If you feed a mogwai after midnight, it turns into a gremlin. This is all simple enough, and unlike in an action movie, you need some setup before the payoff. It would be strange if the setup was that vampires had to be hit with a wooden stake through the heart, then the end of the movie just had you stabbing them to death. It would be unusual if you set up that a silver bullet had to be used on a werewolf, but at the end of the movie you just ran it over with a car. And not even a rolls royce silver ghost, either.

The setup is what makes the payoff work. The payoff doesn't work in a vacuum. Unless you know that the vampire has to be killed with a wooden stake, it won't make any sense to just not shoot him, you know? And in the scriptures, you have a very very long setup. Thousands of years, in fact. In the Old Testament, there was a lot of prophecy about what it would be when the messiah arrived on the scene. And this setup, as I say, was thousands of years in the making. For thousands of years, the people of Israel would have been hearing and reading these words. The words about the messiah would have been clear and things that the Hebrews would have been expecting to see for a long long time. In fact, that's why the Christ was sent to Israel at all - because of the setup. 

You see, we happen to have access to the whole story already, the finished book. And we, in the church, don't tend to read through the Bible chronologically. So that means that we end up in a world where we don't give a lot of time to the setup and payoff, though we really should. The reason we should be taking this seriously is that the Old Testament spends a lot of time, and spills a lot of ink, on the topic of God. Who he is, and what he does. What his attributes are, and what falls within his purview. The Old Testament is crammed full of stories about God's activity, showing what is his responsibility, and demonstrating clearly the things that only he can do. 

And that's the setup, right? Say what you will about the Disciples, but they were not blindly credulous, you know. The Life of Brian bit doesn't hold water, when you consider that the people of that time followed leaders, sure, followed after strong men, followed the advice and guidance of prophets, but didn't consider them as gods. That really did set them apart from the rest of the world at the time. All sorts of people all over the world would elevate their leaders, prophets, kings and generals to being gods. Really only Israel didn't. Israel had a situation where they had a setup - only God can create, only God can forgive, only God can have power over the seas, over life and death, and then Jesus shows all those things. 

Setup and payoff, right? And the setup of the virgin giving birth to a child, and calling him Immanuel, is shown in Christ. It's not about predictions and prophecy so much as it is about spending hundreds of years telling a particular people who God is, and what he is like, then when God steps into the world, he does those things. He shows himself to be God, and if you know the setup, unmistakably so.

Vampire - Wooden stake

Zombie - destroy brain

Werewolf- silver bullet

God - Power over life and death, creation and salvation.

If the setup and payoff are there, then you don't have to believe it, but you at least have to see that the story is consistent.

cut it down

I've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating, especially in early Advent. As GK Chesterton put it, the accusation is almost always that Jesus had a simple religion of peace and love, and that the church corrupted it over time to be something hurtful and judgmental. When in reality, the opposite is the truth.  The church endeavors to be as forgiving and welcoming and tolerant of almost everything as possible, meanwhile it hides and conceals any time that Jesus may be slightly wrathful. The church conceals or downplays the anger in the Temple and the whips and shouting. The church doesn't dwell on the wrath directed at the "brood of vipers". So much easier to just discuss the nice parts of Scripture, where Jesus has the little children come to him, etc.

But Christ is wild and untamed, and refuses to be boxed in by us, and the God of the scriptures is being discussed in no uncertain terms by John the Baptist in the Gospel reading for today. Here we are in the Gospel, and John is being approached by a generous number of people who are repenting, and being baptized. All good so far. But there are some from the Pharisees and Sadducees who are coming to see the baptism as well. And that's when John lays into them.

You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath that is to come? So starts John's address to the people who have come to witness the baptism, and we immediately take notice. For John, the wild man of the wilderness, demands attention. True, you could look at him in his locust-eating, Camel-hair wearing way, and dismiss him as a madman, but he doesn't talk like a madman. He talks like one who is obsessed. 

So let's talk about 'geek culture' for a moment. Yes, it's a bit more mainstream than it used to be, but I still think it works. So geek culture works like this, that the individual geeks or geekettes would be single-minded about their hobby, be it video games, art films, whatever, and would be so obsessed that they would abjure any grooming or niceties. That's about it. And when it comes to John, he is single-minded in his purpose to the point that the message of Jesus Christ is all he's interested in. He doesn't have time for niceties, greetings, politeness, nothing like that. He's really really into the Gospel, to the point where everything else seems like nothing. He's not going to put himself together, go through the rigmarole  of greetings, small talk, being presentable, nothing like that. He's going hard on the kingdom.

And boy is he ever. Man, We have a church, bills and all that here at the church. I can't go off like John goes off, and truly, when he goes off, he goes so hard that he goes to jail and gets killed. Every once in a while you see someone with nothing to lose, and John is one of those guys. Locusts, wild honey, and spitting straight truth. He fires at the crowds and holds nothing back whatsoever - Christ's winnowing fork is in his hands, he will gather the wheat into his barn but he will burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. Unquenchable fire? That's a lot. It's a lot to take in as people who assume that the concept of hell is rather out of date now, and that we don't have to worry about it. Well, apparently we do, because John certainly talks about it in.....glowing terms (glowing like an ember). 

The question that goes before the Christian, then, is to ask if John is right. Is John accurate in this, or is he wrong? It's almost always dangerous to put yourself in the position of assuming that you know far far better than John does. Oh sure, the Elijah who is to come, the greatest on earth, the one who was such a big deal that people assumed that Jesus was the second coming of him, you know better than that guy? Realistically, the story of the Bible works very well when it is allowed to speak for itself, far less well when we speak over it. If you're going to interrupt John and tell him, and by extension God, that there is no fire, no damnation, no wrath, none of that, then you have to make the rest of the story make sense. You have to understand that John feels as though the arrival of Christ is a big deal. When he points to Jesus and say 'behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,' there's a reason why it's a big deal. If all that stuff about the axe being at the root of the trees, the wrath to come, unquenchable fire, if that's all wrong and stupid, then why is it a big deal that Jesus is born? Why is it such a big deal that John would point to him and say 'behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world?" Why is Christmas a big deal if we're not getting something very very important?

For any of you who are frightened and troubled by the words of John, ponder this: You can dismiss him out of hand as a crazy person, someone who is just a nutcase. But he sure doesn't sound like it. He sounds deadly serious, and is very convincing even now. You can talk over him, but the rest of scripture seems to agree, and you do too, if you're honest with yourself.

Or you can listen to him. When he says of Christ 'he must increase, and I must decrease,' that's exactly what happens. The increase of Christ is that he is the lamb of God. Enough to take those warnings from John and swallow them up in victory.