Go and Proclaim!

Sermon planned for 3rd Advent Sunday, December 12th, 2010

Texts: Matthew 11:2-15; James 5:7-10


I want to start by reading a segment of a letter written by early Anabaptist Maeyken Wens. Maeyken Wens was married to her husband Mattheus Wens, and she was the mother of two sons, Adriaen and Hans. She wrote numerous letters to her family while she was in prison, awaiting her execution for being an Anabaptist Christian. These letters have been published in the early Anabaptist Martyr’s Mirror, an anthology of martyr stories compiled by Thielemann van Braght in 1660. In a letter to her husband Maeyken Wens writes, “after all these words of greeting, I want to let you know that I’m still doing tolerably well, in terms of my bodily health, and even better in my spiritual life… we should thank the Lord in our struggles just as we thank Him in times of plenty; because the stuff that God takes away from us is the same stuff that he gave to us as a gift. If only I could thank the Lord as joyfully in times of struggle as I do in times of plenty – then we would be truly thankful indeed! Oh how I miss you, my dear friend, I never thought that saying goodbye would be as hard on me as it has been. To be sure, the imprisonment hasn’t been easy, but that’s because I’m being treated so brutishly; but saying goodbye to you and the boys is hardest of all.” (adapted from Martyr’s Mirror, 981)

I’ve read Maeyken’s story several times since I first bought my copy of the Martyr’s Mirror. I’m impressed with her story because it’s so personally touching. There’s numerous stories, like Maeyken’s, where you can read a parent writing a goodbye letter to their spouse and children. It’s heartbreaking, but also immensely powerful and moving.

It’s hard for me to imagine what prison life is like. Even after spending three years participating a prison inmate visitation program in Saskatchewan, prison life still is a bit of a mystery to me. Every month I would join a van-full of Mennonite men and we would drive forty-five minutes to Prince Albert, where we’d spend the evening visiting prison inmates in a maximum security penitentiary. I visited with Dwight Friday; a man in his mid thirties who was handed a life sentence for murder when he was nineteen years old. I got a small taste of what prison life was like. I visited with Dwight for two hours, once a month, and played Scrabble with him – I lost every game except once. But every time our visit came to an end, I knew that I didn’t really understand what my friend Dwight was going through. I could leave whenever I wanted to. He could not.

We don’t really know what was going through Maeyken Wens’ mind, but her letter to her husband and sons gives us a glimpse. And what do we see? We see hope; some despair, but mostly hope and joyful longing for a deeper fellowship with God. The obvious difference between Maeyken and my friend Dwight is that Maeyken was on death row, sentenced to be burned to death, with her mouth clamped shut and her tongue screwed down. During her ordeal, her sons fainted as they watched her being tied to the stake – and when they woke up, she was already gone. Her older son, Adrian, sifted through her ashes and found the tongue screw. He picked it up and kept it in memory of his mother’s testimony to Jesus. Dwight, on the other hand, will not be executed. We don’t execute prisoners in Canada anymore – although we still find creative reasons to kill others – including our enemies and unwanted children.

But why am I telling you about my friend Dwight and about our sister Maeyken Wens? Well, because they both help me to understand what was happening with John the Baptist, while he was locked-up in prison. King Herod had put him in jail. John’s situation was similar to Maeyken’s in that his sentence ended in death. But his sentence was also different than Maeyken’s in an important way. John the Baptist died before Jesus’ death and resurrection, while Maeyken died as a baptized Christian. She had heard the good news of Jesus’ resurrection, while John had been the one to point to the gospel. John was the forerunner. He pointed people to Jesus. Maeyken could read about the Resurrection, while John could only hope for it. John the Baptist hoped that Jesus was the promised Messiah, who would bring a revival to God’s people. That revival wasn’t taking off as quickly as John thought it should.

So why did John send out his disciples to question Jesus? Why was he mixed up about Jesus’ identity? It seems that, at first, John was clear about Jesus, about his identity, his Messianic mission, and his divine origin. But now, in our passage from Matthew 11, we get the sense that John doubted. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Although we as readers know something important – we know that Jesus’ deeds prove his identity as Messiah – John the Baptist himself was out of the loop. He expected a quick time of judgment. After all, last week we heard my friend Patricia tell us about John’s expectation. John proclaimed that God’s final Day of Judgment was imminent – it was just around the corner. The axe lies at the root of the tree, and all the unfaithful will be burnt up like the chaff on a farmer’s field. John’s expectations weren’t being met; and now that he was stuck in prison, his doubts were really starting to get to him.

Life in prison often becomes a life of confusion. I once asked my friend Dwight if he had any friends in prison – he chuckled. He then went on to tell me that friendship was discouraged among inmates and even actively undermined by the guards and the Warden. He told me that every friendship he had made in prison was broken-apart by rumours. It’s as if the inmates were being isolated from one another. The only community that could resist these tactics were the gangs, whose social ties were based more on fear than on love and care. So, on the one hand, you have the institution telling my friend Dwight that he should re-socialize and prepare to re-enter society, where friendship and community are key; and on the other hand, you have guards and Wardens actively undermining friendship and community between inmates. I’m sure the guards figured they had good reason to isolate inmates – after all, building distrust among inmates would decrease the chances of a mob mentality. It would decrease the chances of a prison riot. Nevertheless, these mixed messages lent themselves to a very confusing life for the inmates at Prince Albert Penitentiary.

We also find confusion in the story of John the Baptist. John, who was so sure about Jesus’ messianic identity, was now questioning his earlier judgment. “Are you the one to come, or should we wait for another.” What caused this confusion? I’m sure it was something different than what happened to my friend Dwight. The confusion that gripped John had everything to do with John’s expectations about what kind of Messiah Jesus would be.

In the beginning of Matthew, we hear John speak about a Messiah whose “winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” This is what John the Baptist expected of Jesus. And yet, when Jesus came, he healed the sick, cleansed the lepers, calmed the stormy seas, casted out demons and he fed the hungry; he brought peace between the zealot fighter and the sell-out tax collector. This was not quite what John had envisioned. Or, at least, something about his time in prison confused him about Jesus’ identity.

One thing that I realized, pretty quickly, when visiting Dwight in prison, was that there wasn’t all that much difference between him and myself. At first, when I went to the prison to visit, I thought I was going to see a room full of evil men, with blood still on their hands – and that I, a twenty-three year old Christian pastor, would come in and speak words of healing and hope to these brutish men. But what I found was a room full of guys who loved to laugh, tell stories, share jokes and even tear-up with emotion. I met a room full of guys, some of them Christian others not; some of them kind, and others were jerks – just like the rest of us. These guys were stuck behind prison walls, but that didn’t make them all that different from you and me. They dealt with some of the same questions you and I deal with. If all this bad stuff is happening to me, where is God in all of this mess? I know I’ve done something wrong; can I ever be forgiven for what I did? Does God love me even though I committed this horrible sin?

When we’re thrown into times of struggle, we all end up behaving similarly, whether we’re stuck in jail for murder or whether we’re ‘free’ on the outside. When life throws us sour grapes, we all find ourselves asking questions like John the Baptist? God, are you really who you say you are? Are you really powerful, righteous, good and just? Are you here close by, or are you distant from me? Why are you letting this happen to me? Are you really the Great Creator of our world, or should we be looking for another? Last week, my friend Patricia told you about some of her struggle, after her daughter Morgan died of cancer. Andy and Trish wrestled hard – they struggled with God; kind of like Jacob wrestling with God at the river. That’s what we as humans do when we face impossible pain and anguish. It’s what happened with John the Baptist; and it’s the same thing that I saw in the faces of many men in Prince Albert Penitentiary.

You may be facing a struggle or a pain in your life, and you may be asking similar questions about God. I want you to know that you’re ok. You’re not wrong – you are not sinning when you struggle hard with God, with who He is. If we learn anything from our bible about how to survive a personal crisis, we learn that we can be absolutely honest with God about how we feel, about what we want from God; about what kind of Savior we want Him to be for us. We’re allowed to ask God to be what we want Him to be.

John the Baptist wanted Jesus to come as a fiery Judge, ready to sweep all the sinners into the fire pit. And to be sure, in Jesus we come face to face with God’s “NO” to us. In Jesus, we hear the clear call to repent and turn from sin; to repent and turn towards the life of discipleship; to repent and become a child of light, leaving behind the ways of darkness. To be sure, in Jesus we come face to face with Judgment. But that’s not all folks. In Jesus, we also come face to face with God’s “YES” to us, his mercy and grace. Just like you and me, John was allowed to ask this from Jesus – to ask for a fiery Judge; and admit it, there’s days we want this from Jesus too. We want Jesus to smite the evildoers of our world. Like John, we want a Jesus that helps clear the threshing floor. And we’re allowed to want that.

In the raw human experience of pain and suffering, we’re allowed to be completely honest with God. But don’t think, not even for a second, that our own wants, needs, and desires are determinative for who God really is. Our wants don’t define God. We are allowed to want a Savior who stands up for us against all our enemies – we’re allowed to desire a territorial god, God doesn’t forbid us our emotional response – but that has nothing to do with who God is, and the kind of God He chooses to be for us.

In Jesus, we get the clearest picture to date – not of what we want Him to be for us but of what kind of God He is. And when Jesus described his own mission – his own identity as Messiah – he focused on passages and prophecies that spoke about healing the sick, setting prisoners free, cancelling financial debts, forgiving sins, cleansing lepers, comforting widows & orphans, and preaching good news to the poor. All year long we’re allowed to tell God what kind of God we want Him to be for us. We’re allowed to be completely honest with God in our struggles and pain. We want God to heal Matthew. We want God to bring peace to our conflicts, our relationships and our marriages. We want God to be who we need Him to be. But this Advent we hear about Jesus; we hear the same report that was sent back to John the Baptist: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: 5 the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. 6 And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” We can want God to be and do all kinds of things – but in Jesus we come to see who God is.

Maeyken Wens, John the Baptist, Dwight Friday… they’re not all that different from us. Sure, you and I may not be stuck behind bars… we may not be on death row; but we’re all human. We’re all bombarded with suffering, brokenness, with physical or mental illness, with grief, the chains of addiction, with the monstrosity of abuse, both sexual and otherwise, from strangers and even from our own parents. We may not live in a high security prison, but even some of the relationships we share can feel like lock-down. A father-son relationship can be more like Guantanamo than a picture of God’s love for us. And in that difficult space, we need to be honest with God. John expressed his doubt and confusion: “are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

John may have been confused about Jesus, but Jesus wasn’t confused about John. After he sent John’s disciples back with a report, Jesus went on to tell his followers about who John really was – John was really Elijah who was to come. We may be confused with God at times; we may wonder whether God has our interests in mind. Let me tell you some good news: God is not at all confused about us. God is not at all confused about the kind of God He wants to be for us. There is no confusion about the kind of God that He has chosen to be for us in Jesus Christ. He is Immanuel – God is with us! We may be 100% sure of where criminals belong; we may think we know how God feels about those who commit crimes and how they should be punished. Let me tell you some good news: God’s care and love for the prison inmate is not at all determined by our feelings towards them; just like God’s grace and love for us is not at all determined by whether or not we have sinned. Sinners and Saints, criminals or not, He loves us the same. His name is Immanuel, and he has come to set the captives free – to forgive sins and proclaim good news to the poor.

Maeyken Wens knew this good news. She couldn’t stop talking about it, even in a goodbye letter to her husband and her sons. May you hear this good news as well – AND PROCLAIM IT! And as you suffer, or find your life fractured with pain and brokenness, may you see this woman as an example. May you hear the good Word from James, who tells us to strengthen our hearts, for Jesus’ coming is near. Come Lord Jesus, come soon!