To Bear Witness about the Light.
John 1:6-8,19-28
Third Sunday in Advent
Grace, mercy and peace from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ amen. The sermon text for the third Sunday in Advent is the Gospel reading John 1. Most people like to talk about themselves whether they admit it or not. I am sure that there have been times when you were having a conversation with someone when you suddenly realized that you were taking about yourself the entire time. Even if we don’t talk about ourselves, we certainly think about ourselves often. We turn inward and focus only on ourselves. It is very easy for us to be self-absorbed. It is easy for us to be self-centered. It is also very dangerous.
When God created the angels they were good. They were perfect. Then one of the angels became self-centered and rebelled against God. This angel lost his place in heaven and he became known as Satan. He is self-centered and therefore hates God. Soon after his rebellion he turned his attention to human beings. Satan successfully tempted Adam and Eve to also be self-centered. They took their eyes off God and focused on themselves. They became self-centered and passed their self-centered nature on to their descendants.
Humans have been self-centered and self-absorbed ever since. It takes a miracle of the Holy Spirit to restore our nature to the God – centered sate of the original creation. Left to our own devices we tend to think about ourselves quite a lot. We tend to spend an enormous amount of time thinking about our own problems. We sometimes forget that in many cases the problems of others are far worse than our own. We tend to think about ways we can get ahead of other people forgetting that those people may need our help. Sometimes we are willing to damage and even destroy relationships that we have with family and friends because we refuse to back down when we are wrong. At other times we refuse to forgive sins committed against us. We have the desire to turn inward and only think about self.
Of course the world around us tells us to be self-centered. It is one of the main teachings in our culture. We are told to focus on our selves. We are even told to look within our self to see God. The world is not referring to the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, but the world is saying that we should look to our own thoughts and feelings to find the will of the Lord. We are told that we are our own god. It is the same temptation that Satan used against Adam and Eve. “If you eat the fruit, you will be like God.” Satan, the world, and our own sinful nature will always tempt us to be absorbed in ourselves.
If anyone should have been tempted to be self-centered it was John the Baptist. In our reading for today the apostle John tells us that many people around the country went to see John the Baptist. They went to hear John preach and be baptized by him. Historians of the period don’t know exactly how many people John baptized, but they all agree the number would have been in the thousands. That is a pretty sizable following. He was such a force that the Jewish authorities decided to send a delegation to investigate this phenomenon. John was very popular. The crowds loved him. The people in authority were interested in him. It would have been very easy for all of this attention to get to his head. He could have used his popularity to get in good with the Jewish authorities. He could have kept his popularity going by telling the people what they wanted to hear not what they needed to hear.
But John did not do that. When the Jewish leaders asked him if he was the Christ, John responded with these words. “He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, I am not the Christ”. It is a tribute to the power of the Holy Spirit that John did not revert to his sinful, self-centered nature and use his immense popularity for his own power. John did not hesitate to answer the delegations’ question. “I am not Christ”. So if John the Baptist was not self-centered, where did his focus lie? Our Gospel reading gives us the answer. “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light”. The light that John pointed to was Jesus Christ. John pointed people to the Son of God. John was called to be a voice announcing the coming of the Lord. He was the voice that would announce the coming of the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. John did not want to talk about himself because he was sent to talk about the Savior of the world. So he called people to leave behind the old ways of sinful pride and self-centeredness and to turn to the Lord and receive the mercy of God.
Every Christmas tree is a family’s John the Baptist: it is not the light, but it sure bears witness to the light. The tree is not what Christmas is all about, but each evening as the family relaxes in that special room, all those tiny lights remind us of the one who came to be the light of the world. You know how it is when you decorate your Christmas tree. You have to put the strings of light around the tree, spacing them as carefully as you can, trying to spread a web of lights uniformly over the whole tree to avoid any bear spots. But there is only one way to judge whether you have succeeded. You plug in the string of lights and step away from the tree. When we focus our attention on the lights the string of wires disappear from our vision and all we see is the lights. John has a way of enabling people to just see the light. John said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness; make straight the way of the Lord”. Everything else out of the way! No detours, no curving off course. No sins, no false gods, no distractions. Get those things out of the way. The light of the world is coming and He is the only thing you want to see. John even made sure that he, the tree, faded out of sight so that we could see the true light, Jesus Christ the Lord.
In this life we will always be tempted to be self-centered. But what Satan and the world does not tell us is that self- centeredness only leads to misery. Our only true source of joy is in the Lord. John urges us to repent of our self-centered thoughts and actions and directs us to the true light of life. He focuses our attention on the one who has saved us from sin and death. He points us to Jesus Christ. The focus of the Advent/Christmas season is the Lord. It is the Lord who has freed us from the prison of only thinking of our selves. It is the Lord who renews our minds so that we can see the glory of God. Christ came into the world to be a servant. He took upon Himself our sins when He died on the cross. He died in order to save us and in His resurrection overcame the sharpness of death for us all. Jesus is the perfect light that shows us the goodness of God.
Through Christ working in us our attention is turned to the glory of God. Through Christ our attention is also turned to the people around us. We have not been placed on this earth to be self-centered. We have been placed on this earth to bear witness to the Light. Let me share with you something that Luther said that is very true. “Through baptism, we take on the role of Christ bearers. Like John’s proclamation at the river Jordan, we ae called to be witness of God’s love by the love we extend to others; precursors of his justice by our unfailing commitment to what is right and good; lamps reflecting the light of God’s Christ in our forgiveness, mercy and compassion”.
We are here at this place at this time to be a witness to the Light. We are here at this place at this time to point people to Jesus with our words and our actions. We do have a lot to talk about in the church don’t we? We have good news to share. Jesus Christ is the light of our salvation. He is the light that no darkness can overcome. Amen.