Dwindle
A Reading from John’s Gospel:
After this Jesus and his disciples went into the Judean countryside, and he spent some time there with them and baptized. John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim because water was abundant there; and people kept coming and were being baptized —John, of course, had not yet been thrown into prison.
Now a discussion about purification arose between John’s disciples and a Judean. They came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, the one who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you testified, here he is baptizing, and all are going to him.” John answered, “No one can receive anything except what has been given from heaven. You yourselves are my witnesses that I said, ‘I am not the Messiah, but I have been sent ahead of him.’ He who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. For this reason my joy has been fulfilled. He must increase, but I must decrease.”
The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks about earthly things. The one who comes from heaven is above all. He testifies to what he has seen and heard, yet no one accepts his testimony. Whoever has accepted his testimony has certified this, that God is true. He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but must endure God’s wrath.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Homily:
Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
You know, typically when I think of John the Baptist, I imagine a wildly successful charismatic preacher: forceful, irascible, magnetic, drawing people from every class of society out from the cities into the wilderness, into the desert. One might almost picture him as having a modern megachurch, but with hard truths in place of the usual chintzy theatrics.
Yet this is not the John we get in our Gospel reading this evening. Rather, we find a John whose congregation is waning and whose followers are fretting over their dwindling numbers, dwindling influence. “The guy whom you built up,” they tell him, “the guy for whom you laid all the groundwork—everybody’s going over to him now! He’s the hot new thing.” It’s like John gave Jesus His start, and now John’s followers are all Jesus’ followers. Where’s the justice in that? Shouldn’t they respect the O.G.?
“But this is how it has to be,” John assures them. “This was the plan all along. Do you think that the success of my mission, of my calling, was ever really going to be measured in numbers, in statistics? My job,” John says, “is not to succeed by the metrics of this world. My job is to be faithful, to point the people to the Christ. The rest I leave in God’s hands. He must increase, you see. Christ must increase. But I—I must decrease. I must dwindle.”
A man doesn’t go out to wander the desert wastes because he’s looking for worldly success. He doesn’t wear camel’s hair and feed himself on locusts and wild honey in order to gain societal respectability. John doesn’t care about attendance. He doesn’t care about giving. If anything, he seems frankly aghast that so many people have shown up. Here we are in the postmodern West, talking about “seeker-friendly” services; meanwhile, John’s over there across the Jordan yelling, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath that is to come?”
Put that in a congregational mission statement.
Success in the eyes of God is very different from success in the eyes of the world. If the Bible has a theme, that’s probably it. We call it Theology of the Cross—that is, God where you’d least expect to find Him. God, for example, choosing an old man “as good as dead” to be His father of many nations; God championing homeless Hebrew slaves over the might of the ancient Egyptian Empire; God selecting the second son, the younger brother, the spare over the heir.
God choosing women. God choosing thieves. God choosing foreigners. Over and over again the same pattern, until at long last God appears in the flesh, in the fullness of time, as the least likely Christ whom anyone could imagine: a Crucified Rabbi. Tortured, naked, mocked, stripped, whipped, beaten, abandoned, cursed, pierced, and hauled up high to bleed and die. I did not see that one coming. None of us did.
Yet it is by this least likely Savior, this inside-out Messiah, that our upside-down world is turned aright upon the axis of His Cross—so that death is trampled down by death, hell is harrowed, heaven hallowed, and all the ransomed dead are raised to new eternal life. What looks to the world like utter defeat is the victory of our God. And what is true of Him is true of us in age upon age upon age.
In every generation the Church has been killed. Back in the days of Israel there was always a faithful remnant, only a faithful remnant, a single seed sowed by God to bring forth 60- and 100-fold. We were scattered by the Crucifixion. Executed by the Roman state. Corrupted by the wiles of empire. Butchered by the depredations of the Northmen. Split by schism and ravaged by reformation. Co-opted by the nation-state for wars of blood and soil.
And in every generation, we have died. The Church has died. Yet in every generation are we raised—for we have ever had a God who knows the way up and out from the grave. We try, we rise, we fall, we fail—and the Word still works. The Spirit still moves. Christ still rises up at Easter every Sunday morn.
The great challenge of our time is what theologians have called acedia, the deadly sin of sloth. And this doesn’t mean just sitting around eating chips and watching Netflix. Acedia means despair, self-pity: the melancholy of our condition and the self-centeredness upon which it is founded. People suffer spiritual sloth not because they hate the Church or reject religion for reason, but because they just don’t care.
And it’s hard to blame them. In a society which keeps us virtually connected 24/7, one has little time, little energy, for real community, real connection. Anything that involves civil society, voluntary in-person commitment, is dying or already dead. We are beset by economic stresses, political extremism, environmental destruction, and religious leaders who span the spectrum from wicked to outright insane. And everything we ever say or do is on display, on permanent record, on social media.
We are tired, we are burnt-out, because we live in mad times, bearing individual burdens that previous generations could only shoulder as family, community, and society. Why aren’t people coming to Church? It’s because we don’t know what it’s for. We don’t have categories anymore for true community, for time and energy spent on activities other than entertainment or consumption. We don’t know what a soul is. So yes, we’re slothful, despairing, acedious; trapped inside our heads, curved-in upon ourselves.
Thanks be to God for the Gospel of Jesus Christ: for the Good News of infinite grace that conquers death and the grave; that raises the dead to new life; that liberates all peoples from the oppression of ourselves and our sin! So long as we preach that—so long as we faithfully minister to the people, giving them Jesus in Word and in Sacrament—then we have success, because we have Christ.
I don’t care how many or how few people fill up these pews: so long as we preach Christ and Him crucified, then we are His Church, and where two or three are gathered He is surely here among us. But if all we offer is entertainment, or nationalism, or hatred, or prosperity, then I don’t care what the budget is, I don’t care how many services there are during the week, that is no Church but the chapel of Satan! And he’s already got his own religion.
Be like John the Baptist, my brothers and my sisters. Wander the wastes. Baptize the repentant. Preach truth without worry of metrics or money. Give Christ to the people, and the people to Christ, so that we in faith may say: “He must increase, but we must decrease.”
Then come what may, it cannot harm us, even if the powers that be should sever our heads and serve them on platters! For we have Jesus Christ, Crucified and Risen. And all of hell does tremble at His Name.
In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Comments
Post a Comment