Untied
Isaiah 61: 1-4, 9-11; John 1:6-8, 19-28

December 11, 2005

As I have related and hinted in the bulletin, the dilemma of a United Church is that it is always in danger of becoming “Untied,” and not just through typographical errors. Advent is a fertile season of spiritual journey in which not everything is clear and certain and loose ends are lying around all over the place. You and I are not required to tie together all the loose ends. But what we need to be about the business of tying and connecting at least one or two.

The Gospel story in John is déja vu all over again from last week: the appearance of John the Baptist with ever so slightly a different twist. He was not the light, the evangelist made very clear, a very emphatic negative for someone who is supposed to be so good.

Priests and Levites came investigating from headquarters in Jerusalem wanting to know just who John was. John wanted no insinuations, so in the older versions “He confessed, he did not deny, he confessed, ‘I am not the Christ.’”

He knew what the point was. The Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One, is the one who was supposed to unite all the Jews together and lead them back to the Promised Land. Of course, they already lived in the geographical Promised Land, but after centuries of foreign domination, including the current Roman regime, the Promise had left. A kind of new Exodus was needed, one that initially took place in their hearts and in their relationships.

The investigators had all sorts of categories by which to label John: another Elijah, the Prophet of Prophets. They wanted a neat concise answer with all loose ends tied, and they hoped John would be the answer. It seems pretty apparent he was not the answer they wanted; but someone with the wrong heretical answer works just as well for these types, because it would be easier to get rid of him.

A voice crying in the wilderness often is a solitary, unique voice, seldom listened to, a non-unifying voice. Yet such a voice has a habit of untying our old connections and attempting to tie different ends together. John is not worthy to untie even the sandals of the Real One all are waiting for. He is preparing us to wait more alertly, refusing to tie together the loose ends they want tied. With John the Baptist we start to tie it all together and become unified.

Jesus went back to his home synagogue in Nazareth and was invited to read the assigned scripture for today from Isaiah 61. “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted.” Anytime anointing, putting sweet perfumed oils on a person is mentioned, the Messiah or Christ, the Anointed One is mentioned and that got people excited back then, just as we perk up when saying someone is crowned. Royalty is thrown into the mix; power is suggested, promised, and threatened; hopefulness for a new beginning is rampant.

When the Spirit of the Lord comes upon us, envelopes us like a mist, it unites us. The feeling that occurs when there is a silent prayer with several hundred people sitting around you is not just a feeling - it is the Spirit drawing us together, uniting us if for a second.

There is no pretension that we are united in thinking or even praying the same thing. No creed or statement of faith is capable of disciplining our theological thoughts. Our unity is more important and impressive when we are not thinking or responding to the same thing. The Spirit is tying us one to the other, so that even as very different human beings you and I are brothers and sisters.

There’s that children’s game in which the end of a ball of string is wrapped around one person and then another across the room and back and forth until all are physically entangled. When the Spirit of the Lord is upon us, we are emotionally, spiritually entangled with one another. You know about the health problems of that person in the pew on the north side, about the family problems of that one in the south pews, about the death of a family member of one in the central pews, about the aspirations of one of those sitting in the choir loft, about the singularity of those who sit in the balcony. Those strings are empathy, disappointment, elation, pride, anger, tears, unmitigated joy.

Sometimes you think of these strings as burdens that tie you down, inhibit you from doing better things, but it is in being connected to one another this way, united, not untied and uncaring, that we live at the highest level of human existence. You can’t be more gloriously human than when you are tied to another person, threaded together by the Spirit of the Lord. Call it the kingdom of heaven, call it Eden, when we are members of one another, when we are part of you and you are part of us, who needs to wait for the kingdom?

You know by name the afflicted and beaten down, so bringing good tidings of great joy are not just empty words. Listening to the hurt and loss of the brokenhearted saddens your heart too, but when we are tied together we mend our hearts together. The names of captives and prisoners are not random, but human beings you have visited. How can you not want to proclaim liberty and release from prison for the people you have come to know?

When you get untied from others, and untied from the Spirit, all those hurting and lonely and oppressed and imprisoned people are not even names to you, just an anonymous statistic, and you delude yourself into believing you are the only real human being. When you are untied, you have no connections, nothing makes real sense, and frankly, you don’t make much sense to others. There are a lot of ways in which we are the United Church: the most important is the way we can be one in the Spirit with a wild diversity of fellow pilgrims.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan