December 9, 2012
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Baseball in San Francisco was great this year! Besides the Giants winning it all in the World Series, Major League Baseball saw two perfect games tossed before June 15. Two perfect games in one season! It was the second time in three years that two perfect games had been tossed in the same season (not merely a no-hitter, but a perfect game—27 batters possible, 27 batters out). But here’s the weird part: Before that two perfect games in the same season had not happened since 1880! That’s when our church was first founded, over 133 years ago! It’s interesting how extraordinary things bunch up like that.
And THEN, on Wednesday, August 15, Felix Hernandez of the Seattle Mariners pitched the THIRD perfect game of the season. That has not happened ever!
For us baseball fans, this has been an amazing baseball season. But here’s another oddity, perhaps not nearly as exciting, but still an interesting statistical “bunch-up,” at least to students of biblical history. Jesus’ appearance on the scene 2000 years ago followed a 400-year period often known as the “silent years.”
This is the period of time between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament. It’s the time between reading Malachi, the last book in the Old Testament and reading Luke, one of the first books in the New Testament. In that period of time, there’d been no major prophetic activity, no Hebrew seer thundering a “Thus saith the Lord.” After Malachi spoke of God as a “refiner’s fire’ who will heat up the fire to burn away impurities and to judge Israel of her sins, no other prophecies were to be found. This is not just 133 years of two perfect games in one season in baseball let alone three perfect games, but 400 years without any prophetic activities!
So, now here’s the odd part. Suddenly, things start popping! First, “the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah in the wilderness,” so our text says. John bursts forth into the region around the Jordan River “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” and his hearers quickly conclude that the time of prophetic silence is over.
In the Gospel of John (1:19-23), John makes it clear that he himself is not the Messiah, the crowd immediately jumps to the notion that perhaps he is Elijah come back or “the prophet” (a Moses-like figure, predicted to come—Deuteronomy 18:15). But John accepts neither of these identities, describing himself only as “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness,” a quote from Isaiah. But no matter how John describes himself, the people hear him as a prophetic voice from God.
Then comes along another prophet! Four hundred years, nothing. Now John, and—Jesus himself. Jesus appears on the scene, more than a prophet, to be sure, but the crowds recognized the prophetic in him as well (Matt. 21:11). In Luke 4:24, Jesus even called himself a prophet on one occasion.
And then, not too much later, along comes Paul! Nobody seems to have called him a prophet per se, but the Lord described Paul’s work to Ananias in prophetic terms, calling him “an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel” (Acts 9:15).
So what is going on here? No prophets of great stature for 400 years, and suddenly there are three! While there were some people identified as prophets, none of them played such central roles as did John, Jesus, and Paul.
From a statistical point of view, we would say John, Jesus, and Paul were outliers. Outliers refer to something or someone situated away from the main group. That is, John, Jesus, and Paul were prophets in a way quite different from others who also had that title during the same time.
Fullness of Time
As Christians, we see these developments as the “fullness of time,” meaning that the time of the Incarnation of Christ in the world occurred on God’s schedule. This means that what God had plan in his timing is injected into our calendars.
A few years ago, Malcolm Gladwell, a former business and science reporter for the Washington Post, addressed this clustering of genius in his best-selling book Outliers. His research suggests that high IQ itself is overrated and that many people are smart enough to succeed when they have cultural advantages that are present with the right opportunities—meaning that they are in the right place at the right time as certain historical developments are occurring.
Here’s an example from Gladwell. People like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others became power-players in the computer industry, were all born between 1953 and 1956. Gladwell explains this by noting that Silicon Valley veterans agree that the most important date in the history of the personal computer revolution was January 1975, the month when the magazine Popular Mechanics ran a cover story about the Altair 8800, a desktop computer you could build from a kit at home. This was a significant departure from the huge mainframes that were up to that point the only computers available and were so expensive that only corporations, government agencies and universities could afford them. But now, here was a $397 computer kit you could assemble in your garage.
Gladwell argues that those in the best position to take advantage of this breakthrough were people who were born between 1953 and 1956. Those in Silicon Valley interested in computers but born before those dates had jobs at IBM which made mainframes. Once you were part of the mainframe industry, you saw little value in small desktop machines. You belonged to a different paradigm. Likewise, those born after those dates were simply too young to get in on the ground level of the personal-computing revolution.
In other words, it isn’t that there aren’t people just as smart as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and others born in the several years before and after them, it is that the same opportunities weren’t available to them.
Now apply all of this to the Jewish population of the first-century Roman Empire. Obviously Jesus, as the Son of God, is a special case, and we certainly are not suggesting that given the right timing of birth and the right geography, any smart Jewish child could have become the Messiah. But we can take this seemingly bunching or clustering of events to mean that many born in the years before or after Jesus and John and perhaps Paul had the potential to become great prophets, too, had the timing been right.
In Galatians, we read that, “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children” (4:4-5). What Paul is saying here is that there is a divine agenda behind what happens in the world, and that’s a prophetic understanding of life.
Repentance
What is this prophetic understanding of life? When John started peaching in the region around the Jordan, his primary message was not a call for all of us to treat each other better or to keep the Ten Commandments or to ensure social justice for all. Rather, his main call was for a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. In other words, the first thing people needed to do was to align themselves with God’s plan by repenting and receiving forgiveness of their sins.
If we continue to read more of the Luke 3 passage that we read this morning, we will see repentance would lead to a change in behavior. Those with two coats should give one to those who have none; tax collectors should collect no more than the owed amount; soldiers should not extort money, and so on. We would bear the fruits of our repentance.
When we repent, we are getting right with God.
Most of us don’t like to be reminded that we are sinful people. It’s not that you have gone out and robbed a bank or committed murder. While those behaviors are criminal and sinful, all of us would say that we have not done such things. The sin that we have is that we behave as if we belonged to ourselves. We think that we are simply imperfect creatures who need improvement.
But the truth is that we are sinners because we are rebels who must lay down our arms, surrendering, saying we are sorry, realizing that we have been on the wrong track and we are getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor up. This process of surrendering is what we call repentance. The Greek word means “changing the mind” or “turning around,” and it’s what John was calling for in his prophetic preaching.
Notice that repentance is not something God demands of you before he will take you back and which he could let you off the hook if he chose. Repentance is simple a description of what going back to God is like. We cannot be right with God without repentance; it is like asking God to take us back without actually going back.
Repentance is something that we can do on our own accord giving us an opportunity to be in the right time and at the right place to be in a relationship with God. Later this afternoon, you will have an amazing opportunity to hear the testimonies of 6 candidates for Baptism and church membership. These persons are putting their lives in the hands of God in order to be at the right time and at the right place to become faithful disciples.
A Generation of Prophets
John, Jesus and Paul indeed were a genius cluster. Jesus, of course, is unique because of his divine identity, but, if the outlier research is correct, giving the right timing of birth and upbringing in a culture steeped in the Old Testament, many of us might have been able to fulfill the roles of John and Paul did in the introduction of Christ in the world.
In October 1989, San Francisco was struck by a powerful earthquake. Many of you were here for this. Huge cracks appeared in the walls of Candlestick Park, where thousands of fans were waiting to watch the third game of the World Series. Sections of the freeway twisted and buckled; some collapsed. At least 27 fires broke out across the city; the largest, in the Marina District, consumed dozens of buildings.
At the edge of the Marina District, a crowd of curiosity-seekers gathered, watching the firefighters as they battled the flames. After a few minutes of this, a police officer came up to the crowd and began shouting at them. “What have you come to look at?” he said to them. “This is no time to be standing around. There’s been an earthquake. You all have work to do! Go home. Fill your bathtubs with water (if you still have water). Prepare yourselves to live for the next several days without electricity. The sun’s going to set in another hour, your time is running out. The firefighters will do their job here. Now you go home and do yours!”
That police officer spoke the truth, as John the Baptist spoke truth. The officer spoke with urgency, as John the Baptist spoke with urgency. His message, like John’s, was what people truly needed to hear.
What’s the message we most need to hear, in these ever-shortening days of Advent? Is it a message of spending and partying and over-consumption? Or is it a message of repentance and forgiveness and faithfulness?
The times when Jesus came into the world and John the Baptist introduced him at the Jordan and Paul bore witness of Jesus to the Gentiles have passed, of course. But there’s still the opportunity to introduce Christ to new generations, and to tell them of repentance, the path to getting right with God. We can be a John or Paul to those who have not yet understood that. Can we as a church be a cluster of outliers calling the world for repentance? Would we be this generation of prophets to proclaim that Good News has come in the life and saving power of Jesus Christ, our Lord? I pray that we will!
So rise up, all prophets of this generation and speak the words of Isaiah:
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
Prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.
Every valley shall be filled. And every mountain and hill shall be made low,
And the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth;
And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Luke 3:4-6)
Let us pray.
Come, Lord Jesus, not to fulfill our desire for you, but rather in accordance with your desire for us. Be truthful with us and then give us the grace to be able to endure your truth of our need to repent for our sins. Stir up in us fresh desire to meet your expectations for us. Purify us and transform us into the people whom you would have us be. Amen,