Year A
 Isaiah 49:1-7
 Psalm 40:1-12
 1 Corinthians 1:1-9
 John 1:29-42

Behold the Lamb of God… who takes away the sin of the world…

We find these words… or some variation of them… not just in today’s Gospel… but in the Gloria that we just sang… in The Great Litany… in some versions of the Angus Dei we sing during Communion… we proclaim… as John the Baptist did… that Jesus has taken away the sin of the world…  but what does it mean… to take away the sin of the world…

To help us answer that… we need to be able to see the water in which we swim… we need to see that we’ve inherited centuries of theology which can demean who we are as God’s creatures…  we need to pray that God’s will be done… it’s true that in our separation from God… we will make some really big mistakes… but God… who already knows our needs before we ask… has already forgiven us…

And when… in our prayers… we ask God for mercy instead of compassion… we may put ourselves in the mindset of a courtroom… and throw ourselves at God’s mercy… hope to get a lighter sentence than we may deserve…  hope that if we do sixty hours of community service… or serve on Vestry…  our sins will be forgiven…

In the prologue to John’s Gospel… the Word… the Logos… is the original Way that  God and creation are in communion… but this initial condition has been compromised by human sinfulness…  one way to say it is that creation has become the world…  that the world is creation in it’s alienated state… creation that does not acknowledge…  or has forgotten how…  to open up to its Divine Source…

For the ancient Jews… temple sacrifice… the sacrifice of lambs… was a liturgical process designed to overcome sin and effect reconciliation… at-one-ment… with God…  while I was growing up…  we would go to synagogue on Yom Kippur…  and ask God to forgive our sins of the past year…  so we could start the new year on Rosh Hashanah off with a clean slate…  but in John 2:13…  Jesus frees the temple animals because they’re no longer needed… Temple sacrifice is no longer the way that we need to overcome sin… it’s in the person of Jesus that God and the world are permanently united… Jesus has come to heal the estrangement and reestablish communion with God… so Jesus reverses the direction of salvation…  and in doing so…  rejects works righteousness…  the idea that we earn our salvation by the works that we do…  but Jesus is not the lamb of sinful humans… Jesus is the Lamb of God… and so the chasm between God and the world is overcome by divine initiative…

Fr. John Shea writes that in today’s context… sin doesn’t refer to the many individual transgressions of the human race… sin points instead to our corporate alienation from God…  and this is the separation that Jesus bridges… he is the way to God… the door leading to life… and it’s not our initiative… but God’s… which takes away all estrangement and reestablishes the original created order… ]  and when we receive communion at this Table…  we’re not asking for the forgiveness of our sins… we’re celebrating and thanking God for having already restored creation through the death and resurrection of Christ…

And John testified… I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove… and it remained on him…  most of us don’t testify too well… testimony is the domain of those who wear camel hair and leather belts… and those who eat locusts and wild honey…  the word itself comes from the Middle English… which comes from the Latin… and means…  a witness… or to witness… and what do witnesses do… they simply tell what they saw… as John did…

And what he saw was that the Holy Spirit… the same Spirit that in the beginning moved over the waters…  that same Spirit descended from heaven… and didn’t just momentarily touch Jesus… but it remained on him… and the One who sent John to baptize… told John… that the One on whom the Spirit remained… is the One who would baptize with the Holy Spirit… and if Jesus baptizes with the Holy Spirit… then that means that Jesus is the Son of God…  and the next day… John told his two disciples… Look… here is the Lamb of God… and they followed Jesus… who noticed them… and asked… What are you looking for… and they asked… Where are you staying… 

They want to know where he’s staying… where he abides…  this is one way of asking…  what are you really all about…  what is the structure of your selfhood…  and the timing of their question coincides with the timing of Temple worship… and instead of sacrificing at the Temple… it’s through relationship that Jesus overcomes their alienation and unites them with the Father…  when he says…  Come and see…

In a little while… we’ll conduct our Annual Meeting… we’ll look back across the last year… and look forward towards the future… we’ll have some discussion… and ask some questions… though we may be unable to get every answer we’d like… when do we ever get all the answers we’d like… but Jesus says…  Come and See…

In our opening prayer… we acknowledged that God illumines us with Word and Sacrament…  so that we can shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory…  but another way of understanding it…  is that we are being invited to… Come and See…  we are being invited into the prophetic work of those like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr… whose birthday we celebrate…  and whose work helps us better see the water in which we swim…

Fr. Rohr wrote that seeking God means that we’re ready to change…  because true spiritual encounters change things like our relationship toward foreigners and the poor and the weak…  our attitude towards money…  our attitude toward war…   our use of time… and our citizenship in God’s Kingdom transcends everything we call political…  so be prepared to have a different life… he wrote…

In Luke 8:39… after Jesus healed a man possessed by demons… Jesus said… Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you. So the man went away…   proclaiming it throughout the city…  Jesus asked the man to testify… it may be challenging for us to testify…  we may not see ourselves as able to do that…  but we can certainly talk about what we’ve seen… and tell the stories about the many and varied ways this congregation lives into God’s invitation… but our stories will not be an endpoint… they will be part of Holy Trinity’s own story… one more step on our collective journeys…  as we go and tell everyone how much God has done for us…