The Hour Strikes
Isaiah 40:1-5; 9-11
Matthew 3:1-17
January 10, 1971
John M. Buchanan

He came out of the desert, as had the people themselves, and as had their
prophets time and time again in the past. He was a strange man; mad — some
would have said: "a little touched" - which is one way men have always
described an individual "touched" by the hand of God. He was strange, and yet
compelling in a deep and irrational way. The people knew about the prophets:
the prophets had been strange too. They had dressed, eaten, spoken and acted
differently. But in their long history, the prophetic individual had played
a major role in keeping the people in touch with the word and will of God.

So, in spite of misgivings and suspicion and fear they came out of the
towns and cities to hear a man by the name of John the Baptizer. Like a
prophet from centuries past he zeroed in on the facade of piety they used to
disguise immorality. He told them to repent: turn around: start all over
again. And as a sign and seal of this fresh beginning he invited them to join
him in the Jordan River, in a ritual known as baptism. Thus, his name — John
the Baptist. To Christian tradition John.is important because he was a sign
that something was about to happen. In the idiom of the Old Testament — he
was one breaking new ground for a unique coming of God himself.

Of all the personalities presented in the pages of the Bible, John is
one of the most interesting - and, in a sense, disturbing to our button-down
mentality. Like the Jesus who came out to hear him, we find him at the same
time compelling and repelling. 3

We know next to nothing about his origins. The New Testament tells us
only that his mother, Elizabeth was a relative of Mary, the mother of Jesus:
that his father was a priest; and that the conception of the child was a very
surprising event because it happened when his parents were far beyond the
ordinary, age for things like that to happen. We know, that is to say, that

there was something special, something out of the ordinary, about his birth.

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But no more than that.

There are, however, some very interesting and very educated guesses about
his early life. And I would share with you the one which makes most sense to
me. Around the year 200 B.C. a small group of deeply devoted and pious Jews,
withdrew from society, organized themselves in a rigid community out in the
desert and called themselves the Essenes. Archeological research has revealed
mach about these people. They shared everything they had and scratched out a
living by rudimentary farming. They practiced absolute celibacy; private owner-
ship was forbidden. They held to the religious law in the most rigid way
possible. They saw themselves as the remnant of the faithful and cared little
about the fate and welfare of the rest of the nation. Perhaps the most
distinguishing characteristic of the Essen community, however, was its obsession
with cleanliness. Ritualistic bathing was practiced daily, before and after
every meal, after every natural function, and in connection with the prescribed
prayers, sacrifices, fast and religious rites. Much of the information we have
about these people came from the spectacular archeological finds at Qune Rair,
along the Dead Sea. That particular group wrote a great deal which has been
discovered and translated — and much of it deals with their conviction that a
messianic figure, a new prophet or teacher, was about to be sent by God.

The educated speculation, to which I referred, is that John's parents,
quite old at his birth, died and left him an orphan at a very young age. And
that the Essenes, as they did as a practice, adopted the boy and raised him to
manhood in their community.

This would account for his coming from the desert: his uncompromising
ethical demand: his strange dress. and eating habits: his practice of ritual~
istic baptism and his sensitivity to the coming of the One promised by God.

The best guess is that John, as a young man, began to disagree with the narrow~
ness of the community's focus and way of life, and left it to address himself

to the entire nation, bringing with him, however, mich of the theological,

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ethical content and the peculiar style of life.

His message was one of repentance, renewal and preparation for God's
activity. In this sense it is not unlike the prophetic message of his
predecessors. But John practiced Baptism, a rite common.to many of the
Eastern mystery religions, but within Judaism reserved soley for Gentile
converts. A Jew, by birth, never in history had been baptized. A Gentile who
wished to become a Jew, had to submit to circumcision saorifice and baptism.
So John, standing in the river and inviting Jews to repent and be baptized
was, in effect,excommunicating the whole nation: he was saying that something
so great, so important was about to happen, that nothing short of a total
renewal experience was adequate as preparation. It did not, needless to say,
win him friends from among the Pharises, Saduccess and Temple Priests.

The hour struck for John the Baptist, when Jesus of Nazareth appeared in
the orowd one day along the banks of the river. John sensed that He was the
one; said it and at Jesus request - baptized him. John maintained a following
after that, was in correspondence with Jesus and his disciples — but was
arrested and executed finally by the puppet king as a favor to a step~
daughter.

The one who was baptized, Jesus of Nazareth, comes to the center of the
stage with little more history than John. We know about his birth: we know
about a trip to Jerusalem for the Passover when he was a boy and that is all.
Again, educated speculation is that he grew up in a Jewish home in the town
of Nazareth: that he was schooled in the Synagog: that he learned his
father's trade: that he had brothers and sisters: that his father Joseph
apparently died and accotding to custom, Jesus would have assumed responsibility
for the care and support of eu family.

The debate about when Jesus knew that he site the Messiah has raged for
years, and often times, I think, reflects our discomfort with his manhood.

A recent book suggests that he mast have been married liegt and while there

is no evidence for that, the suggestion does remind us of his humanity, his

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commonality with all men. I've never been comfortable with the idea that he
lmew = Prom the beginning — who he was, and what he would do. I would rather
think in tens of a unusually sensitive young man, with a growing conviction
that he had something special to do: that God somehow had singled him out for
a unique role. I sense him growing, waiting for something to happen, not
PTE what it would be — or when ~ or how = but increasingly certain that at
the right time — he would know. :
William Barclay writies: "It may be sazd that there are two great begin-

gs in the life of every man who has left his mark upon history. There was

the day when he was born into the world: and there is the day when he dis-

covers why he was born into the world. ‘There was a day in the life of Jesus

when he made that great discovery." [p. 3 The Mind of Jesus, Harper & Row]

The experience in the Jordan River with John the Baptist was thet day.

He was baptized in a way that differed not at all from the others. I would
suggest that those who saw it thought nothing other than “Jesus of Nazareth

is joining us too." But for him — the hour struck. The text in Matthew notes
that heaven opened, the Holy Spirit descended on him, and a voice was heard

, seying "This is my Son, my Beloved, on whom my favor rests." But in Mark -
the earliest account — and Iuke ~ the voice comes to Jesus — “You are my son";
and the "feel" of the passage is that no one heard it - or sensed anything
spectacular happening, but him.

I think Jesus came to this event in his life — open, waiting. I think
he sensed in this experience, on a deeply personal level, that God was reaching
into his life, touching him in a unique way. And it called forth in him a
total commitment to follow wherever his Father led. It is helpful to remember
that the leading was into the desert again for a period of lonely struggle
and agony — and not, immediately into a Messianic ministry with the whole
game plan in his pocket.

We have, up to this point, been learning a little New Testament history,

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by reviewing very familiar material. Let us now go deeper — and think together
about the issues raised by this event. It is really one issue — a very important
one ~ a very immediate one for your life and mine. The name of the issue is
"Revelation", and the question is “Does it really happen?" "Does God do it?¥ —
or is it all the issue of the fertile imaginations of peculiar people?

The importance of the issue is documented by the number of books in which
theologians have struggled with it. In semi-academic terms it is stated this
way. Is the truth of the Christian Gospel born out intellectually - in the
theological, philosophical brilliance of the human mind? Or are we dealing,
in the final analysis, with something so totally subjective - so intensely
personal — that its truth is validated in each heart and each set of emotions?

Scholars of equal capability line up on both sides. But the real problem
is that Western man stopped paying much attention to the subjective -— the
feeling, emotion side of things several centuries ago. The soientific method,
the rational approach to every problem dragged civilization out of the middle
ages and gave birth to the machine age, modern science and the age of tech~
nology. And in things religious it said "if you can't prove it, it isn't
true. if you can't weigh it, measure it, analyze it, place it in a certified
category, and make a scientific law out of it, it doesn't exist."

Now, you and I wouln't say it quite that way, but we are very much the
childfen of Western civilization. As Middle Class Americans, we are very much
the ultimate result of the scientific method. The very rich consult the stars:
the very poor consult their emotions and empty stomachs: we consult our
computers. And the effect of it all is the word "revelation" has very little
meaning to the vast majority of Middle Class American Protestants. Revelation
after all, is not a very scientific idea.

It is, however, a very important theological idea. Our faith is built
on the idea that Almighty God, in his eternity and power, does intrude into
human history at certain times and places. Correspondent to that idea is that

God does intrude into the lives of individual men and women: that he reveals

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—6-

himself end hie will through events that happen to people: ‘that in this sense,

he is a very personal God who breaks into our lives on a personal level. We

are not saying that God always makes the events happen: that he structures

every jot and tittle of our lives. We do affirm, that God does come through

events which he choses to use for the purpose of revealing himself,

Listen to the words of a great pastor and theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr,
who wrote a book on the subject. [The Meaning of Revelation. ]

When we speak of revelation we mean that something has happened to us in
our history which conditions all our thinking and that through this happening
we are enabled to apprehend what we are, what we are suffering, and what our
potentialities are." (p. 138)

For Jesus, the Baptism experience was that kind of revelatory event. In
it, he discovered who he was - what his life was about - and the direction he
should go in the future.

Listen to H. Richard Niebuhr again: “Revelation means the moment in our
history through which we know ourselves to be known from beginning to end,
in which we are apprehended by the knower; it means the‘self—disclosure of that
eternal knower. Revelation means the moment in which we are surprised by the
knowledge of smbsee there in the darkness and void of human life. .. When
we find out that we are no longer thinking him, but that he first thought us,
that is revelation . . . . What this meams for us cannot be expressed in the
impersonal ways of creeds or other propositions but only in responsive acts
of a personal character. We acknowledge revelation by no third person
proposition, such as that there is a God, but only in the direct confession of
the heart, Those art my God." (p. 152-154)

My concern this morning is that we may be missing the moments of revelation
in our own lives when they happen, because our eyes and ears are closed. Bither
because we have intellectualized that which is never totally intellectual, or

because we are repelled by the clains of our Pentecostal brethren whenever

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they sense their own brand of revelation, we simply are not alert to the self
disclosure of God when it happens right in front of our faces.

The most incredible affirmation of Christian Faith, and that which distinguishes
the Judeo-Christian tradition from all the religions of the world, is that it is
God's nature to disclose himself to men. And that at given points in time and
space he comes into the lives of individual men and women — into, that is, your
life and my life.

The word of God in all of this, it seems to me, is for Christian people to
tune in ~ to be alive to every event, to keep eyes and ears open to the revealing
of God. And whan it happens, as it will, to give thanks for it: to rejoice
in it: to repent and commit oneself; and to begin anew that life in the new

Kingdom which it heralds.

Our father, awaken us to your continuing revelation. Keep us from the
sterility of intellectualized religion: ‘tune our hearts and minds and senses
to the miracle of your presence in the common events of our lives. Through

Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.