The Prophetic Butterfly Effect

Sermon for Dec. 17, 2023
Isaiah 61:1-4,8-11; John 1:6-8,19-28

I want to start today with what may be the central question of this Advent season.  It’s a bit of a personal question, actually:  Where is your hope?

I’m guessing I’m not the only one here who looks at each day’s news anymore not so much with alarm as with exhaustion.  I think it was alarm, a while back.  But by now, my reaction to war in the Holy Land and Ukraine, unconscionable national debt, a degrading planet, record-high murders in Kansas City, and the political circus that occupies our cathedral of democracy in Washington … my reaction to all this, sadly, isn’t outrage anymore but simply shaking my head.  I think that’s because we can’t function in a state of constant alarm, even if it’s merited.  We’re not wired that way.  If, every day, we see our people and our politics and our planet on fire, at some point we find ourselves wondering what more we can do than just watch it burn.

Meanwhile, Advent flickers before us like a holy flame, persistently asking:  Where is your hope?  Because, through this season, God whispers insistently that neither alarm nor exhaustion are the paradigms of God’s world.  Instead, God has a better plan.

And today, like last week, to get us ready for a redeemed world, God brings us the patron saint of strangeness, John the Baptist.  John is both a preacher’s conundrum and delight because, for 2,000 years now, we’ve never really been able to wrap our minds around him. 

Even the Gospel accounts of John the Baptist don’t speak with a common voice.  In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we get John the hairy wild man, the baptizer who needs a bath.  In the series The Chosen, he’s described as “Creepy John,” someone even the soon-to-be disciples want to avoid.  This John the Baptist sticks it to The Man, castigating both religious and Roman authorities for exploiting people in poverty and powerlessness.  “Bear fruit worthy of repentance,” this John cries, for “even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire!” (Luke 3:8-9)  The Savior is coming with “his winnowing fork in his hand,” Creepy John says, and those who don’t meet the standards of God’s reign and rule will find themselves facing “unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:9).

On the other hand, we have John the Baptist from the fourth Gospel, who we heard today.  This John is much more conrolled but also much less clear.  He’s introduced as a man “sent from God … as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.  He himself was not the light,” the gospel writer is quick to say, “but he came to testify to the light.” (John 1:7-8)  In this account, there’s no Creepy John leading a mob in the desert.  Here, John the Baptist is calm, cool, and collected – more a TED Talk idea-generator than a prophet with a bullhorn. 

But this John’s still a threat to the religious authorities, who come asking just who he is and what he thinks he’s doing.  TED Talk John answers by refusing to meet the authorities’ expectations.  “Are you the Messiah?” they ask?  “Nope.”  “What then?  Are you Elijah” – the Old Testament miracle worker and killer of the priests of other gods, who many thought would return as a harbinger of the Day of the Lord.  “Nope, not Elijah,” John says.  “So, are you the prophet?” – the new Moses others thought would herald God’s coming victory over Israel’s oppressors.  “Nope,” John says.  “Well,” the authorities demand, “then who are you?” (John 1:19-22)

Indeed, who is this guy?  And what does he represent – then and now?

The preaching purists would say I shouldn’t conflate these different Gospel accounts, but I think it makes sense in the case of John the Baptist.  Whether you see John as a rebel with a bullhorn sticking it to The Man, or whether you see John as a TED Talk speaker silencing critics who aren’t as smart as he is, both Johns are saying this:  “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’” as the prophet Isaiah said (John 1:23).  And along that straight path is coming “one … you do not know” (1:26), the King whom the world won’t recognize, the one who’ll save us from oppression and fear and unholy misrule not by crushing the power structure but by transforming it from the bottom up, from the inside out, one heart at a time.

If there ever were a Biblical figure for our time, it’s John the Baptist.  Whether you see him leading a mob in the streets or giving a TED Talk, John’s message for us is consistent:  Yes, our people and our politics and our planet are on fire.  And that’s not OK.  In fact, it’s evil, and buying into it is sinful.  When we don’t care enough about our children to take both national debt and climate change seriously; when we tiptoe around the killing of 19,000 people so far in Palestine because we think one horror deserves another; when we see the folks wandering our streets as annoyances to be moved along rather than people needing mental health care and affordable places to live – when we watch all this and just shake our heads, both Creepy John and TED Talk John look at us and say, “You might want to rethink that.  After all, the reign and rule of God is close at hand….”

Can we really do anything about problems like these?  Well, if you accept my premise that John the Baptist, and Jesus Christ, came to transform hearts that would then transform the world – well, in that case, we can absolutely do something about problems like these.

It’s the prophetic butterfly effect.  You know about the butterfly effect, right?  It’s a scientific metaphor of the interconnectedness of life on our planet – that the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings on one continent effects one tiny change after another, eventually causing storms continents away.  I don’t know anything about climatology, but I do know about the baffling way God chooses to work – and it’s very much a butterfly-effect kind of thing.  Seven days and a few hours from now, on Christmas Eve, we’re going to celebrate the astonishing fact that the sovereign of the universe chose to bridge the gap between us by coming to be one of us, redirecting history by being born into poverty and oppression in a backwater of a tyrannical empire.  Inhabiting that world for 33 years or so, God changed the heart of one individual after another, leaving the world forever changed and millions of us forever looking to the future with crazy hope.  So, yes, Jesus says, the world is on fire.  It’s been on fire for a long, long time now.  And that’s not good.  But it’s also not the end of the story.

So, back to the question I started with:  Where is your hope?  Your hope is to be the next in line for the butterfly effect of the world’s salvation.  And you do that by being exactly what John the Baptist is in today’s reading: a witness, in both a spiritual and a legal sense.  John the Baptist “came as a witness to testify to the light” – light that the darkness cannot overcome – “so that all might believe through him” (John 1:7).  John isn’t changing the world in a flash, through his own power.  John just points to what he knows and who he knows, reporting God’s truth about this world we’re blessed to inhabit.  The oppressive forces around you actually aren’t in control, John says – God is.  OK, say the regular folks in the crowd – what should we do?  Well, John says, it’s not enough to assume you’re on the right team.  You’ve got to act:  Share your food and your clothing with people who don’t have enough.  OK, so what should we do, ask the tax collectors and the soldiers?  Well, you’ve got change how you act, John says:  Stop exploiting people who have less power than you do just because the system lets you get away with it. (Luke 3:10-14)  Well, why, they ask?  Because, John says – as he channels the prophet Isaiah – because the reign and rule of God is about bringing good news to the oppressed, and binding up the brokenhearted, and freeing the captives, and releasing the prisoners, and forgiving impossible debts (which is what “the year of the Lord’s favor” means), and meeting the needs of those suffering from their land’s devastation. (Isaiah 61:1-4)  That’s God’s plan.

It turns out, you and I get the chance every day to witness to that divine light – the Light that the world’s darkness cannot overcome.  How can we do that?  Here’s one idea.  You can come back in seven days and a few hours, and testify to God’s dominion over our world through a very worldly action.  On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we’ll gather to remember the stories of how God’s light came, not in blinding victory over the armies of the earth but flickering in a cave on a hillside.  We’ll remember how that light sets our own hearts on fire, turning grinches and scrooges into Love’s witnesses.  And we’ll then get the opportunity to flutter our own butterfly wings in an outward and visible way.  As we remember the Son of God who came as a child with nothing, we’ll give in order to change the lives of one child after another.  The gifts from our worship here at Christmas will go not to the church but to children we serve – 300 kids at a school in rural Haiti, 100 percent of whose graduating class passed the national exam last year; as well as 43 families at Benjamin Banneker Elementary in Kansas City, who are pairing with 39 St. Andrew’s members and friends to put food on the table and get to know each other.  Here in the candlelit brightness of our Silent Night, with each gift we make, our butterfly wings will heal a broken world.

And that’ll be just the start.  Butterflies flutter their wings over and over again as they cross continents, changing the world in ways they never see.  And so do we, if we choose.  Even in a world on fire, hope is as real as your next act of witness to the Light that shines in the darkness – God’s light, which the darkness cannot overcome.