Seeing Beyond the Conventional
John 1:29-42
January 16, 2011
The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.” The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”
The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o”clock in the afternoon. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter).
You know, something kind of sad happens to many of us when we get to our thirties. What happens is that as we move into our thirties we start putting our thinking into boxes. We all start to harden in our thinking, and as the years pass we have a harder and harder time thinking outside of our self-created boxes.
Before our thirties, much of our thinking is pretty open. Children have the ability to look at the world with a sense of awe and openness, looking in wonder at everything going on around them. For them, the world is a place of wonders, filled with bugs, snow, seasons, games, beaches, friends, learning, and so much more. As we move into our teens, we get to try out new ideas and consider new possibilities as we become more abstract in our thinking. If we get to go college, we get inundated with new ideas and new concepts (not all of them healthy), and our head is filled with possibility. As we move into the workplace, we become very open to new ways of doing things and new ideas as we learn our craft.
Then we move into our thirties and things start to harden. We start to create boxes that contain the extent of our thinking. We want to create order in our own little universes, so we create boxes that we place the world, God, and ourselves into so that we can have neat and tidy explanations for everything. At first, our boxes are made out of paper. They are thin and easily torn apart and changed as experiences warrant. By the time we get into our forties, though, we replace the paper walls with cardboard. We can rip our thoughts down and replace them, but it becomes a bit harder. By the time we get into our fifties we reconstruct our boxes out of wood. By our sixties we build them out of steel, which requires a chainsaw to tear them down. By the time we get into our seventies and beyond, our thought boxes are built out of concrete, and it requires dynamite to change our thinking.
All of us are guilty of creating little boxes for our thinking. And what’s odd about all of our boxes is that we are not very aware of our own, but we are distinctly aware of other people’s. In fact, that’s part of what irritates us about other people. We can’t understand why their thinking is stuck in such rigid boxes. Why can’t they understand the world like we do? To paraphrase Jesus, we recognize the paper boxes that contain other people’s thinking, while ignoring the steel vaults that constrain our thinking?
We all have boxes to some extent, but we rarely realize it. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Back in January of 2007, a solitary man stood in the Washington, D.C. Metro Station, playing a violin. He played for 45 minutes as almost 2000 people filed by to get their subway trains to other parts of the city. He played six Bach pieces, of which one is considered to be among the most difficult of all in classical music.
During that time, ten people out of the two-thousand stopped to listen. After three minutes, a middle-aged man stopped and listened for a few seconds. Four minutes later a woman paused, threw money into his empty violin case, and continued walking. After ten minutes, a three-year-old boy stopped to listen. His mother tugged him along. Each time the child stopped, the mother pulled him forward.
Over the next thirty minutes, six more people stopped to listen for a while, none pausing for more than thirty seconds. When he finished all six pieces, he put his violin away and left the station. Twenty people had put money in his case, and he had collected $32. The irony of it all was that two nights before, people had shelled out $100 each to hear him play in Boston.
You see, this man, Joshua Bell, is considered to be one of the greatest violinists in the world. The violin he played in the station is worth about $3.5 million. Typically, when he plays, people give him thunderous standing ovations, but not in the D.C. Metro. No matter how well he played, he couldn’t fit into their boxes. They were in work mode. They were in subway mode. When we are in those and other modes of thinking, it is hard for anything to penetrate our boxes.
It’s difficult for us to look and think beyond our boxes, yet to be a Christian means to think outside our boxes—despite our attempts to create Christian boxes. And we Christians can often be guilty of creating the hardest boxes of all. Despite that, Christians aren’t called to create hard and fast theologies that explain everything. We are called to be open to God in all areas of life, and that requires flexible boxes that are easily changed as we experience God in new and different ways. The problem is that the harder our boxes get, the more we demand that God fit into our beliefs, rather allowing our beliefs to fit into God’s realities.
John the Baptist, in our passage this morning, is a great example of being able to move outside the box. You wouldn’t recognize this just by reading it, but what the story it presents of John the Baptist is quite radical: “The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.”’”
Seeing Jesus as the messiah would not have been easy for John. The reason has to do with John’s background. You see, John was an Essene, or at least he came out of the Essene tradition. You know what the Essenes produced, even if you don’t necessarily know the Essenes. The Essenes were the ones who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, scrolls of ancient scripture found in caves by the Dead Sea that the Essenes inhabited 2000 years ago. They were a Jewish sect that believed that all of society was evil and corrupt, and that the only way to achieve salvation was to separate themselves from it and live apart. They believed that they were children of light, and that everyone who lived in the cities and villages were children of darkness. They believed in a rigid life of strict observance of law, restricted diet, and regimented prayer life.
John came out of this tradition to baptize people to make them aware that God was coming soon. He baptized in the Jordan River to call people to live clean lives. In many ways the Jordan was the membrane between the eastern desert wilderness of the Essenes and the western cities of Israel. He would go no further because to walk west of the Jordan was to become corrupted by civilization.
Yet John recognized Jesus as the messiah, despite the fact that Jesus ate, drank, and lived as one of the civilized people the Essenes saw as so corrupt. Jesus did not observe a strict diet, he played fast and loose with much of the Law, and he had a different message from John. Jesus did not fit into John’s box, but John could see beyond it. He was able to recognize God’s presence and actions despite his beliefs. Not an easy thing to do.
You see, what John overcame is a common problem we all have. Our problem is our “ologies” and “isms.” We all have our own personal theologies about how the world works. We all have our particular “isms”—Capitalism, conservatism, liberalism, idealism—about how things should work. And these become the walls of our boxes. They blind us. They keep us from truly seeing what God is doing because we can only see what God is doing if it fits our ology and ism
How do you tell if you’ve put yourself in a box? The answer is somewhat easy. When your life is in trouble, how easily do you find God? The harder it is to find God, the stronger your boxes are. If you are going through grief, unemployment, divorce, illness, or something else, are you available to God? Do you find God working with you, or do you wonder where God has gone? I think that many people have a hard time sensing what God is doing because their boxes cause them to expect or even demand that God act one way, while God is really acting another. Their boxes cause them to miss completely what God is doing.
For example, over the years I’ve talked with a lot of people about where God is during their unemployment. Typically people ask, “When is God going to get me a job? I’ve been praying, doing all the right things, but I’m hearing nothing.” I have to be careful how I say this, but eventually I say something like, “What if getting you the next job isn’t what God is focusing on? What if God is saying to you, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll get you a job. But first, I want you to focus on your life. I want you to get you to look at what’s important in your life. I want you to do a reappraisal.’” That’s a perspective that’s outside of most people’s boxes. Whether we are going through unemployment, divorce, grief over the death of someone close, an illness, or something else, what God is doing, and how God is present, may be off our radar because of our expectations. How well we find God depends upon how flexible our boxes are.
James Sevigny is a good example of how boxes can make it tough to experience God in hard times. Back in 1983, when Sevigny was 28, he and a friend decided to go rock climbing in the Canadian Rockies. It was a climb,... until they heard a deafening CRACK, and then a thunderous roar overhead. It was an avalanche. They were hurtled 2000 feet down the side of the cliff and the mountain. After what seemed like an eternity of falling, he stopped. He could tell his body was broken. He could feel fractures in his back and busted knees. He also had internal bleeding.
A number of years ago he had what he thought was a premonition that he would die this way. So he lied there in the snow thinking, “Okay, this is it. This is how I was meant to die.” As lied there, he heard a voice and felt a presence. As he later recounted, the voice said, "No, you can't give up. You have to live." He also said, "It was right over my right shoulder. It was like if I would sneak up to you and put my nose a quarter of an inch from your neck. It was that kind of physical sensation."
The voice not only told him to get up, but it told him how to rearrange the blood in the snow into an arrow pointing the direction he was walking. For the next several hours he was directed until he finally stumbled into a camp. There he fell before three campers. As he recounted later, he could not have imagined three more expert people to fall in front of in his condition. One was a nurse, another a mountain guide, and another an elite cross-country skier. They took him to safety.
Years later he still can’t talk about the experience without starting to cry. When asked about the experience, he has a hard time explaining it, especially because it didn’t and doesn’t fit into his box. You see, Sevigny is an atheist. He says the experience didn't make him religious. He sees himself as a scientist and has little use for organized religion. As he has said, "I don't give it great thought. I'm not a spiritual person. I don't say it was God or a guardian angel. I have a Ph.D. in chemistry." What he will say is that mysterious presence was the only reason he got off that mountain alive.
All of us have boxes, and depending on how strong our boxes are, it can inhibit our awareness of God. Sevigny was gifted to discover God’s presence in a time of crisis, but even now he has a hard time with the idea that it was God or something from God because it doesn’t fit into his box. When it comes to experiencing and following God, sometimes the stronger our beliefs are, the harder it is to see what God is doing.
The question I’d like you to reflect on today is this: are you able to develop an open flexibility to what God is doing? Are you able to move beyond the conventional?
Amen.
