Well, good morning. Let me invite you to stand with me for the reading of the gospel.

I’m going to be reading from the prologue to the gospel of John, starting right at the beginning and reading down through verse 18.

I’ve been thinking back over the last decade or so. And I realized that probably with one or two exceptions, I’ve had the privilege of preaching at least one Sunday during Advent all those years. And I’m very, very grateful for that. I love the Advent season. I love themes of this season. I love the individual biblical characters that by liturgical tradition are associated with a particular Sunday. I love Advent.

But as I was thinking back over this last decade, it also seemed to me that I had ended up with more than my fair share of John the Baptist Advent Sundays. And I’m not complaining. John the Baptist is a great prophet. But, you know, if you look at the text we have to work with, he’s in the wilderness, he calls people to repent. He dresses weird and he eats weird things. And that’s about what you have to work with year after year on John the Baptist.

So you can imagine that I was pretty grateful when I learned from Dan that we were going to shift back from that traditional approach and stand back and look at this grand and glorious prologue to the gospel of John. I was very grateful until I looked at the verses assigned to this Sunday. Verse 6. “There came a man who was sent from God. His name was John.” I think I’m just destined to be the John the Baptist Advent guy.

Let me begin by just reminding you a little bit of what Dan told us last week about the Prologue. Remember that it is in the form of a hymn. Most scholars believe that either it was a hymn that was actually sung, or a hymn composed for this gospel. There’s a little debate if it’s three or four stanzas. But it is basically a grand hymn, and if you listen carefully you can kind of hear the hymn pieces of it.

• In the beginning was the Word.
• The Word was with God.
• The Word was God.
• He was in the beginning with God.

You can get a sense of a hymn that runs through this text. Also, scholars would say that there are a few places where the hymn is interrupted with kind of an insertion; really just a parenthetical. And the first of these parentheticals is actually our text today. So we don’t have one of these grand, glorious stanzas. We have a little parenthetical.

“There came a man who was sent from God. His name was John.”

So I want to talk about John the Baptist. But, I suppose, to be more accurate to the text, I want to talk about the prophet who was named John, who we typically refer to as John the Baptist. And let me see if I can explain why I am making that distinction.

In this gospel, the 4th gospel, John clearly is seen as one who does baptisms. But his role as a baptizer is not as central to his function in this gospel. Now that contrasts to the others. If you look at Matthew, Mark and Luke, and particularly in Matthew and Luke it is John the Baptist. That’s because it’s very central to his role in those gospels. In those gospels he is calling people to repent and then he is enacting this repentance through the action of baptism.

But in the gospel of John he has a slightly different function. While he does baptisms, he is really not here primarily as John the Baptizer. He is here primarily as John the Testifier. Verse 7,

“He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all men might believe. He himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the light.”

Different translations will use slightly different words but the word “witness” or “testify” or “testimony” tend to run all through this, and they’re all the same Greek word. And it’s a Greek word that’s really central to the gospel of John and actually to the Johannine writings in general. It shows up over and over in the gospel. It shows up in John’s letters – 1st, 2nd and 3rd John. It shows up in Revelation. Not much else in the scriptures. In John, this notion of testifying – witnessing – is central.

So today, what I really want us to think about is, “What does it mean to look at John the Testifier?” And then to ask from that that might have to tell us about:

• sharing our faith
• giving testimony
• bearing witness
• testifying.

Now, I have to say at the outset that I don’t like any of these words. I don’t like ”testify.” I don’t like “bear witness.” I don’t like “give testimonies.”

The reason is because these words have bad connotations for me. Invariably when I think of somebody “testifying,” the image that comes to mind is a Christian speaking to, or at, a non-Christian. I don’t think of it as Christian-to-Christian. I don’t think of it as dialogue. It’s somebody speaking at somebody.

And I have lots of old pictures that come to mind when these words show up.

When I was in college there was a guy that would come out to the big square on the campus, kind of like Red Square at the U-Dub. He was known as Holy Hubert. And Holy Hubert would stand there and he would shout at students who would pass by, and he would try to draw them into debates about the scriptures, and so forth. And I remember going by just kind of cringing a little bit, feeling like, “I don’t think that’s the way that God would want to do it.” I feel that when I go downtown and I see the guys on the corners with their Bibles, shouting about how we need to all be saved.

When I was in college, and I don’t know if they still do it or not, there were organizations that would do these evangelistic campaigns. They had a different name, but it was sort of a “beach sweep.” And you would line up in the morning (let’s say at 10 o’clock) at one end of the beach and you would plan to be at the other end of the beach by lunch time.

But over that course of time the students would kind of walk in a line to make sure nobody slipped through their “net.” And each person on the beach would get a sharing of the gospel in a quick little fashion so they could get here to lunch. And so that was another picture of testifying that kind of made me cringe.

I cringe today when I get letters from mission organizations that justify their work in terms of how many converts they’ve made. These things make me cringe. I’m willing to admit they probably don’t make God cringe as much as they make me cringe. And I suspect John the Baptist might have looked a little bit like Holy Hubert. So there are some pieces of this that I think are just my issue.

But in general when I hear the words “testify” or “bear witness,” they seem to be associated with words like “persuade,” or “convince” or “convert” or “win them over” or “badger” or “overwhelm.” Invariably the picture I have is that the person who’s receiving the testimony is ending up as just some object in a Christian work project.

And I don’t feel like that’s what God has in mind. And yet at the same time I believe strongly that each one of us is called to be prepared to give account of our faith. To be able to testify. To be able to be God’s witnesses to the ends of the world.

And so, for me, as I thought about these words or this topic, I said, “I need to come up with some better associations than these old pictures for me.” So I started to look at what John the Testifier was doing. And actually, if you want to, you can look at the passage that comes right after the passage that I read, in verse 19. It begins, “This is the testimony given by John.” So you can see what he did in his testifying.

But in large part, it seems like what John the Baptist was doing was just pointing. “Look! That’s the guy. That’s the one I was talking about. Right there!” He was, in a sense, simply revealing. And I like the word reveal. That kind of works for me with testify.

A lot of the image in the Prologue is the image of light, the light come into the world. And so I have a picture of a house all filled with light. And all surrounding it are these dark woods. And there are people in the dark woods that can’t see, and they’re stumbling. And what the testifier does is simply pull back the curtains so the light can shine out. He doesn’t have to go convince anybody of the light. He doesn’t have to carry the light. He just reveals where the light is, and the light pours out. So I like reveal.

I like another word that kind of works for me. It’s the notion of reflect. Again, with light, if the light of Christ is shining on me, I’d like to live a life so that it would be reflected out to others, so that what God is doing in me would be reflected to others – kind of like a mirror. Now, I admit, in my case it’s sort of like one of the mirrors in a fun house, where you get kind of a distorted image that comes out. But still I would like to have that sense of reflection. And one of the reasons I like this image is because its more holistic. Sure, it involves the words I speak. But it also involves the character I have. It involves the actions I take.

I was reminded on this about an old story of St. Francis of Assisi. He was with his disciples a fair bit outside of town but he said, “Let’s go preach the gospel in town this morning.” And so they made the long walk to town and Francis led them into town, around the town and back out, without ever stopping.

And one of the disciples ran up to him and said, “You’ve forgotten, Father, that we went to town to preach.” And Francis replied, “My son, we have preached. We were preaching while we were walking. We’ve been seen by many. Our behavior has been closely watched. It was thus that we have preached our morning sermon. It is no use to walk anywhere to preach unless we preach everywhere as we walk.”

Or another quote that’s often associated with St. Francis of Assisi.

“We are called to preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary use words.”

So the notion of really letting your whole life reflect what God is doing is another way of thinking about testifying.

So we have reveal and reflect. And we have a third word that has helped me is announce. Because that’s also what John the Testifier was doing. He was announcing.

He’s announcing in the same way we would think of the old tradition of a king sending a herald ahead of him to say, “Look! The king is coming!”

We got a hint of that in the Isaiah Old Testament passage where we read, “Get ye up to a high mountain, o Zion, herald of good tidings. Lift up your voice with strength. Lift it up, do not fear. Say to the cities of Judah, “Here’s your God.” And that’s really what John was doing. “Here is your God.”

I thought about that. We don’t actually have in our society this day very many visual pictures of this kind of herald. The closest I could come to was the president’s State of the Union address each year.

You remember, in the State of the Union address, it invariably begins with the Sergeant at Arms standing at the back of the chamber. He’s usually a fairly big and burly guy. And he stands there and he says…at least now he says, “Madam speaker, the president of the United States.” And then the doors open and down comes President Bush.

But I thought about that. I remember wondering, “What if they didn’t do that? What if they skipped that step and George Bush walked in without the announcement?” Would anyone not know he was the president? Yea, they would all know he was the president.

So what’s the function of the announcement?

In one sense the announcement honors him. It honors the office. It honors the person coming through. But in a deeper sense, it prepares. It basically says, “Senator, stop talking. Congress woman, pay attention.” Right here, right now, the big event is about to happen.The president is coming.

And in a far more profound say, John the Baptist says, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”

And so for me, if I start to think about what it means to testify in terms of to reveal, to reflect, to announce. It begins to change the tenor of those words for me and makes me more ready to receive this as a calling. So perhaps that will help you.

What I thought I would do here at the conclusion is to share 3 observations about what it means for us to testify. Observations that I think can come from this little snippet of scripture that we’re looking at this morning.

First. When you and I testify, we’re doing nothing more and nothing less than participating in God’s work of self-revelation. We are participating in God’s work of making himself known to the world. In fact, if you look at the whole Prologue, the dominant theme of the Prologue is a picture of a God who wants to make himself known. It begins with, “In the beginning was the Word.”

I mean, if you pick this metaphor for Christ at the very beginning, in the beginning was the Word, the Word itself means something to be communicated, something to be shared, something to be shown. In the beginning was the Word.

The second image is of light. Light that shines in the darkness. Think about this. Think as if you were out in the dark seas at night and the clouds cover all the stars and its pitch dark and you don’t know where you are. And then suddenly somebody turns on the lights at the lighthouse. You see it. You can see where you’re going. It has revealed itself to you.

And as you get closer, the light at the lighthouse reveals the surrounding topography, so you can see by it. This is the C.S. Lewis quote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” God is revealing Himself to the world.

The hymn goes on to talk about the incarnation. The light. The Word made flesh, coming into the world. And it ends in verse 18 with this statement, “No one has seen the Father except the Son. The Son knows the Father’s heart and the Son comes in the world to show it to the world.”

You see, if you want to know from the Gospel of John’s standpoint what Jesus’ mission is in coming to the world, his mission is to make known the heart of the Father.

Now in the middle of all of this self-disclosure, we have this verse, “There was a man sent by God.” The word “sent” in Greek has curious connotations of “sent with portfolio”, “sent with authority”, “sent with a mission.”

And what was the mission of John the Baptist? Only to point out the true light that was coming into the world.

In a sense, John the Baptist is part of God’s overall strategy of making Himself known, of revealing Himself to the world. Its just one piece of what God was doing. A God who desires to be known.

Now you and I are called also to testify. We’re called to bear witness to the ends of the world. You remember at the end of the gospels when Jesus says to his disciples, “I want you to go to Judea and Samaria and to be my witnesses to the ends of the world. But then he says, ‘But don’t go quite yet. Stop first and wait for the Holy Spirit to come on you.’”

Why? Because when we go to the ends of the world, when we testify, it’s the Holy Spirit that is doing the work. It’s not us that is doing the work. We participate in doing the work of God. God is the one who is spreading the knowledge of Himself.

And I think this is really important. Because it corrects some things. I think sometimes we tend to think of God as far away, high, inscrutable, mysterious. We could never really know Him. That’s not our God. Our God is pouring Himself out and trying to get us to know Him better. He wants us to known Him. He doesn’t want to hide from us. He doesn’t want us to try and figure Him out. He wants us to know Him. And that’s the God we worship.

But also, I think it’s important to know this because – at least for me – it takes the pressure off. It’s not my job to go out and convince somebody to believe. To convert somebody. To persent a powerful testimony. I’m just a vessel of the Holy Spirit. It’s the Holy Spirit doing that work. I make myself available. And, in a sense, I’m kind of along for the ride.

And so it takes a lot of the pressure off this call to testify when we think of it in this sense. When we do this, when we testify, we are doing nothing more and nothing less than participating in God’s own work of self-revelation.

Second. We should be testifying from a place of humility. If you look at the text, John is placed in a very humble status. He himself was not the light. He came only as a witness to the light. Kind of the picture here is that the gospel writers are saying John isn’t really anything other than someone who points to the true Light. It’s a very humbling statement about John.

Scholars believe that this was put in here because around this time some people in the community were beginning to focus on John and were actually starting to worship John. And they wanted to correct this and said, “No, no, no. John is nothing. John just points to the Light. John is humble in his position, as are you and I.” We should share from a place of humility because we are in a humble place.

Except it seems so often when I think about people sharing their testimonies or sharing their faith, it doesn’t sound very humble at all. People share testimonies about what God is doing in their life and often it seems to focus more attention on them than on God. People sometimes share the gospel with someone and what you get a sense is of someone saying, “I have the answer. You don’t have the right answer. I’m going to give you the answer so you can be in my club.”

You know, that isn’t very humble, and as you might guess, it’s not often very well received. We are called to speak from a place of humility.

And even at a deeper level it seems to me interesting that even when we speak from a place of humility, we are modeling the way God discloses Himself. God is gentle. He’s modest. He’s humble as He seeks to make Himself known.

I mean, think about it. God could light up the heavens. He could do such powerful works that nobody could resist. He could drive everybody to their knees, where they would say, ‘Yes, you’re the Lord.’ He could present himself in such an irrefutable package of logic that anybody who thought about it for a second would be driven to the conclusion, “Yes, you are Lord.”

But he didn’t do that. He sends his son who lives as a human being for 33 years. And after his son dies, he trusts the spread of His name – the spread of His gospel – to very fallible people like you and me.

He’s very gentle and humble. God never coerces belief. He never uses force to get belief. He may let us get hungry so that he can feed us, but he never coerces us. He always woos. There’s this sort of gentle, “I’d rather win you over with love than force your belief.” And that ought to also be the perspective that we bring when we testify. We need to come from that place in God.

Third. To testify to God in a whole sense means we need to be very broad in the sort of time frame that we think about. Now I don’t mean that you have to do this every time you open your mouth to share something God’s doing in your life. But across time, we ought to be sharing across time horizons. So let me see if I can explain what I mean.

First, it seems to me that if we want to give accurate testimony to God, we need to reveal what God has done in history. And often that means pointing people to Scripture.

Look, Scripture is a record of God’s activity in our world, the Old Testament, the New Testament. We ought to be prepared as part of our testimony to say, "Look what it tells us about God, who became a human being. Who was born in a manger. Who died. Who was crucified. Who was really, really dead. And yet we know He rose from the dead. He appeared to witnesses. The people touched him. We affirm, we testify to the truth of those historic activities.” And that ought to be a part of our testimony.

But it can’t be the whole of our testimony because we also need to reflect what God is doing in our own lives, in the immediate present so when God has comforted us when we’re feeling frustrated, or when God has turned our anger into compassion, or when God has turned our sense of being right into a call to repentance. These places where God is interacting with us in the present, we need to reflect those out to the world as well.

So we need to reveal the past. We need to reflect the present. But if we want to be true to the whole testimony, we also have to announce the future. We have to announce what we know to be true –

• that the kingdom of God is coming
• that there will be a day when God will have His way, when shalom will prevail... shalom of peace and justice and harmony when there will be no more tears, sickness, death, war, violence, injustice, and everything will be as God intended.

And part of our testimony is to announce that that is coming – announce it in words and in our behavior to live signs of that future reality into the present day. That’s what it means to give the testimony. We reveal the past. We reflect the current. We announce the future.

You might ask yourself,

In my life, have there been people that have been helpful in pointing me perhaps to scripture, to see and think about what God has done in the past?

Have there been people who have shared with me what God is doing in their lives in a way that has changed my thinking about who God is?

Have there been people who have announced this future in such a way that it has filled me with excitement and longing?

Are there people like that in my life?”

And then you might ask yourself,

Have I done that for other people?

When I talk about sharing my faith, do I tend to gravitate toward one of these places?

Do I tend to want to point to scripture?

Do I always want to talk about what God is doing with me right now?

Do I always focus on the future?

Where am I in terms of bringing the whole of the testimony to those around?

You know, Advent is a wonderful season for this whole testimony, because it is a season that encompasses all of these time dimensions.

In advent we go back to prepare for a historical event – the birth of Christ. We are aware of the fact that we have the magnificat, the enunciation, that Mary’s going to be walking to Jerusalem, that there’s going to be the shepherds… All of these are historical facts that we affirm, and we reveal them during this season.

But its also a season where we reflect on God’s activities in our lives right at the present. For many of us this is a season where right now, we are preparing our hearts: simplicity, silence, repentance.

But its also the only season during the church calendar year where we explicitly focus on the 2nd coming of Christ. We not only get ready for the first, to celebrate, but we also point to the second. So in a way, advent is a perfect season for testimony.

And this table. This table here is also a place where all of this comes together. When you come to this table for communion, you are revealing the past. You are saying, Jesus, a human being, Jesus Christ was killed. His body was broken. His blood was shed. For me. That’s a historical fact.

But this table is not just a memorial for a past event. When you come to this table, something happens. You encounter God in this place in a way that is unlike anything else. And in that encounter you are changed and your life can reflect that change so you reflect the present activity of God.

And when you come to this table, you come with those words ringing in your ears,

“Do this in memory of me until I come again.”

When we come to this table, we are proclaiming that Christ will come again. So as we come forward for communion, we reveal the past. We reflect the present. We announce the future. When we come to this table we testify.

Let’s pray.