From us to I, me, mine ...... testimony and John the Baptist

 In today's Gospel we focus on John the Baptist.

John is a romantic figure, arriving out of the desert, eating locusts and wild honey and dressed in camel skin.

This is no effete evangelist eating caviar and smoking cigars.  He is not dressed in an elegant camel coat, he is not seeking to impress but he has a distinctive role in the story that is being told, he is as Marvin Gaye sang and the Rolling Stones agreed, a witness.

There is in St John's Gospel a judicial dimension which allows us to imagine John Baptist on the witness stand being interrogated, as indeed would happen later after his arrest by Herod.

So the leaders of the establishment ask John 'Who are you'?

But John clarifies who he is not, he is neither Elijah nor Jesus.

He quotes a biblical text, his is the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.

He also admits how limited his words and actions are, I baptise with water but the one who comes after me will baptise with the Holy Spirit.

Testimony is central to worship in many churches but it often falls short because it focusses on one element of the concept of testimony, my experience of God.

As a kid growing up in inner city Manchester the key word was 'our', our Mam, our kid, our house, and of course by implication our community.

I have always thought that there were two key moments that heralded the end of 'our' in this context.

One crept up on us unwittingly, the first time I heard the Beatles sing 'I, Me. Mine.' I though nothing of it. But that song was a key insight into a changing world.

The second was the Comment made by Mrs Thatcher, 'There is no such thing as society'.

As Christian folk, members of the Church, committed to maintaining a faithful relationship with God and Neighbour, we, like John, are required to offer testimony, not in the Billy Graham style but in the modest style of John Baptist.

We need to acknowledge what we are not ....... as John acknowledges, he is not the one who is to come, he is not the Messiah, he is here to witness.

This scripture will clue you in to what I am about.

If you really want to know what I am about you need to know that .......... I baptise with water.

Of course in this story there are things going on, St John in his Gospel is also witnessing to his relationship with Jesus and so speaking through the character of John Baptist he is able to alert his readers to certain basic truths about Jesus.

Jesus is the true light, the light that creates and maintains life, Jesus is exalted, the name above every name, John Baptist is not worthy to untie his sandals. Jesus is the lamb, the passover lamb who symbolises  the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Jesus is the means by which the world's brokenness is healed by God. Jesus has a special relationship with God and reveals God, through his Holy Spirit with whom He baptises.

This is a massive witness. This is a massive testimony. This is not I, Me, Mine. This is the restating of the importance of the 'ours', of society.

The story is the key to sharing deep and personal truths, it is the way we can share our own faith, the relationship that we have with Jesus is a relationship born out of much discovery about who we are, about what our needs are, about how we live with our neighbours, about how our personal story overlaps with the larger, communally held story.

Stories not only team us how to act they also inspire us to act, they have the remarkable capacity to communicate our values through the language of the heart, our emotions.

Harvard professor Marshall Ganz has written about testimony:

We must always be clear that our story of self, our story about what God has done for us and how we have known God? Must be set in the wider story of 'us' the community, what God has done for us and how have we in community, known God?

And these two settings, the personal and the social need to be set along a third challenge: What is God up to now?

In our present, immediate context these are challenging questions and yet we have continued to tell the story faithfully.

Our worship has been maintained week by week, our new experimental worship via zoom continues to attract those of us who wish to share Good News in a new ways. On Saturday a video was made for Facebook so that those who wish to can continue to share the yearly celebration of Christmas in the Crib Service, which cannot be held in Church this year.

John bore witness to Jesus and we too must bear witness, we each have a story to tell of God's accompaniment in our life and what that means.

In my experience faith grows from telling these stories.

  

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