12/15/19
In the season of Advent we talk in church about the coming of Christ; and there are three principal ways in which we understand what that means. One is the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, that we look forward to celebrating at Christmas; another is the Second Coming of Christ, at the end of the age, the final establishment of God’s kingdom; and the third – the one which is most immediately important for us – is the coming of Christ into our own lives. Some evangelicals talk about that as a single, overwhelming and life-changing event. That can certainly happen, but it’s rare, and to limit our understanding of the coming of Christ into our own lives in such a way is a big mistake: it’s usually a gradual process: Christ much more often soaks his way into our lives.
Of course, when Jesus was alive and walking the earth, it was much less gradual, much more immediate: we see this all through the gospels. But there’s an aspect to today’s gospel story that may be useful to us as we think about that soaking process in our own lives. I want to talk a little about that, and then give a contemporary example.
Last week we heard John the Baptist’s proclamation of the one who would come after him, whose sandals he wasn’t worthy to carry: the Messiah: a figure who had been the hope of the people of Israel for over 500 years. They looked for a human being, chosen by God, to come among them and establish God’s kingdom on earth. Most people expected some kind of political/military figure. John has a different idea: as we heard last week, the Coming One that he sees “will baptize…with the Holy Spirit and fire.” That’s a Messiah who’s going to change people, not just the political structure. By the time of this week’s story, John has landed in prison, but he’s heard about what Jesus has been doing, and from jail he sends his disciples to ask Jesus directly: Are you this one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?
Now: the way Jesus responds to that question is important in several ways. In the first place, he directly involves John’s disciples in his ministry: he says, Go and tell John what you see and hear. So they’re not just messengers. Jesus invites the disciples to confront for themselves the meaning of what they’re seeing and hearing right in front of them. And it’s not simply the miracles of healing: Jesus ends with, And the poor have good news preached to them: the good news of the kingdom of God: that’s what changes people’s lives.
And Jesus finishes all this with these words: “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” This sounds curious, given the way we normally understand what it means to take offense at something. Why would we “take offense” at Jesus? What could he be talking about?
As it happens, it’s not a small thing: it has to do with understanding just who Jesus is: with preparing for Christ to come into our lives. The Greek word here translated “take offense at” is skandalizo, which means literally to put an impediment in someone’s way, something they could possibly trip over. Sometimes that’s the way it’s translated: in a famous verse in First Corinthians, Paul writes, “But we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” That’s to say, it’s a stumbling block for some in the kingdom of Israel to believe other people when they say that this guy, whose life ended in brutal execution, in a manner reserved for the lowest, most contemptible kind of criminal, this man is the one we’ve been waiting for all these centuries, the one who’s going to make everything right; the Chosen One of God.
It’s an important idea, and one that comes up many times in the gospels. There’s another in which Jesus goes back to his home town to teach in the synagogue, and the people there say, Where did this man get this wisdom and these deeds of power? This is someone we knew as a boy, we knew his father, we know his mother and brothers, his sisters are right here with us; where then did this man get all this? And the gospel tells us, “And they took offense at him….And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief.” Their familiarity with Jesus was the stumbling block; they couldn’t believe that God could be present in someone who was so much a part of their lives.
The basic idea that governs all of this is that we insist on defining the ways that God is active in our lives; that God has to be at work in certain specific ways, certain times and places; and cannot possibly be present in others. Getting rid of this idea is part of the work that we do here.
Now, for the contemporary example. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “the power of one”; which refers to the truth that individual people, beginning alone and on a very small scale, can start great movements, that affect many people. And the phrase, the power of one, is an encouragement not to be deterred, not to be daunted, by the fact that it happens to be just you alone that feels a particular, little, spark; that sees something worth doing that hasn’t occurred to anyone else, or that no one else thinks has a chance of success.
In the mid-1970’s I became part of a theatre group in New York that had a loosely organized membership of actors, directors, playwrights, and designers, and had a small performing space and a couple of dingy offices in a mostly abandoned warehouse way over on West 52ndSt., in the district known (for good reason) as Hell’s Kitchen. One of the actors in the theatre was a kid in his mid-twenties named Willie Reale (picture Harpo Marx as short, Italian, and talking: that’s Willie.) Willie hung around the theatre, because there was a lot of good stuff going on there, and lived in an apartment not too far away; so he spent a lot of time in that part of town.
In 1981, Willie decided to do something to improve the quality of life for the kids he saw hanging around the neighborhood, with nothing to do. So he started a program in which he put an individual kid together with a professional playwright and director, and under their guidance each kid wrote a five-minute play; they then rehearsed the play with professional actors, at the theatre and the Police Athletic League across the street (Willie called it the 52ndSt. Project, to acknowledge them both.) And the plays were performed in front of an audience of family and friends and whoever else was interested. And these were people who lived in the neighborhood, so it was the underclass: poor, Latino, African-American, a lot of broken homes, a lot of single-parent families. And all of a sudden, these people were involved in theatre: and there was a dimension of life now open to them, that hadn’t been there before.
There was no formal structure to any of this at the beginning; it was just done by whoever happened to be around, and available for Willie to tap; and you made it up as you went along. Well, in four years the program had grown to the point that there was an organization; it became necessary to move the performances to a bigger theatre on 42ndSt.; several years after that their big annual performance was at Lincoln Center; and the 52ndSt. Project today creates over 80 new plays, and serves hundreds of kids from all over the city, every year, with half a dozen different theatre and education programs; and is currently being replicated in 14 different cities around the country and around the world.
On the Project website, their mission statement includes this sentence: “The Project is about giving a kid an opportunity to prove that he or she has something of value to offer, something that he or she alone possesses, something that cannot be taken away.” And Willie himself writes, “There’s no way to fast forward and know how the kids will look back on this but I have seen the joy in their eyes and have heard it in their voices, and I have watched them take a bow and come up taller.”
Folks, this is the power of Christ coming into people’s lives. That was the power of Christ that came into Willie’s life: it may not have had that label on it, but blessed are those for whom that’s not a stumbling block, because that’s what it was: opening a little door, and saying, there’s something that needs to happen here: there’s a wound that needs healing: there’s life that wants to grow, and needs room. And it can happen this way because the truth is that what we call the power of one is really the power of God, working in us: and that’s Christ coming into our lives. Let us never take offense at that. Let us not stumble over it. Let us Christians look for it, name it for what it is, welcome it, and as it works in us, do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Thanks be to God.