WHEN EXPERIENCE & EXPECTATIONS DON’T MATCH.

INTRODUCTION

Whether it’s the movies, a sporting match or social circle, we look to identify an individual we can celebrate or praise for their performance. Typically, it’s the main actor on screen, the quarterback of the team, or the most charismatic leader. We often look for an individual that we can identify as the face of such success or accomplishment. 
But that’s never the whole story.

Behind the performance of the quarterback, the starring actor, or the dynamic leader, there are a slew of people who made the accomplishment possible. One of these overlooked characters in the story of the Bible is John the Baptizer. And here is my hope:

That the story of John would both resonate and produce resilience in us as followers of Jesus in this moment of history.

THE ARC OF JOHN’S LIFE

The story of John’s life begins with the miraculous taking place. John’s mother Elizabeth is unable to have children. In God’s unbelievable grace and kindness, so many of the central moments in God’s story begin like this: with a woman who is struggling with infertility who miraculously has her womb opened. But an angel of the Lord appears and a promise is made of John’s birth, one who will go before the Lord and prepare his way.

After Elizabeth becomes pregnant with John, Mary comes to visit her. The moment Mary greeted Elizabeth, John leaped in the womb. Don’t miss this moment. The first witness of King Jesus and the gospel comes from an unborn child, someone who isn’t able to verbally speak. There is too good of an insight here that I can’t help but share. John’s witness in the womb declares boldly that sisters and brothers with a host of intellectual and physical disabilities are not excluded from being a witness of the gospel but rather are central to the declaring and demonstrating that Jesus is Lord!

After John is born, everyone can sense his special anointing in God’s redemptive story. And John begins a life of training and preparing in the wilderness. We don’t know exactly from the text, but John could have been part of a number of training schools including the Essenes who were a Jewish sect at the time. 

About 30 years go by, all those years of training and preparing have brought John to this place of incredible opportunity and ministry. He begins calling anyone who would listen to get ready for the coming Messiah. He brought them to be baptized as a symbol of readiness and preparation in the Jordan River. The very place where the Israelites crossed over the Jordan into the Promised Land centuries before. John was declaring that a New Exodus was taking place! Crowds, Tax Collectors, Roman soldiers wondered what they might do to get ready for the coming King and John invited them into a life of generosity and justice in their everyday work.

Then one day as he is going about his work of preparing people, he spots Jesus coming towards him. The gospel of John says that John the baptizer shouted out: Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!! The pinnacle of the preparation and devotion and service is John gets to baptize Jesus. And as Jesus comes out of the water, John hears a voice from heaven say: "This is my son, whom I love, with him I am well pleased.” Incredible. Can you imagine experiencing this? The gospel of Mark says, when Jesus was baptized, heaven tore open. John gets to experience literally heaven invading earth. It just doesn’t get more satisfying than this! But then this happened:

“But when John rebuked Herod the tetrarch because of his marriage to Herodias, his brother’s wife, and all the other evil things he had done, 20 Herod added this to them all: He locked John up in prison.”

(Luke 3:19)

What?

After the pinnacle of John’s ministry and life, he is thrown in prison for speaking truth to power. And then his story goes silent. Chained in a dark dungeon as a criminal with no getting out. Yet, Jesus begins to announce the inbreaking kingdom saying in Luke 4. The Spirit of the Lord is on me:

• To proclaim good news to the poor

• To proclaim freedom from the prisoners

• Recovery of sight to the blind

• Set the oppressed free

• To proclaim that the year of the Lord’s favor is here!!!!

Yet, John remains in prison. 

After a while, John gets anxious and maybe confused. So this is what he does:

“John’s disciples told him about all these things. Calling two of them, he sent them to the Lord to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”When the men came to Jesus, they said, “John the Baptist sent us to you to ask, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?’” At that very time Jesus cured many who had diseases, sicknesses and evil spirits, and gave sight to many who were blind. So he replied to the messengers, “Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.” (LUKE 7:18-23)

Interestingly, Jesus leaves off the part about prisoners being released in his response… And then a couple days or months later, John is handed over to an executioner who cuts off his head and then presents his head to Herod’s wife and dinner party. Story over.

What are you feeling right now?

As you hear this story, I want you to put yourself in John’s shoes.

What emotions or feelings are coming to mind?

Jesus brought Lazarus out of a tomb, but why not his cousin, John? 

John was the second Elijah, but instead of a chariot of heaven, he was chained in a hellish place.

DEALING WITH DISSONANCE

A word to describe what John experienced and what we often experience as we seek to follow Jesus is dissonance. Dissonance is the experience of a growing awareness of the gap between what we believe to be true and our present circumstances. Dissonance could look like this:

• I believe God can heal and yet I find myself facing a scary diagnosis.

• I believe God is peace and yet I find myself in paralyzing anxiety and experiencing mental illness.

• I believe God is a God of restoration and justice and yet I find myself in the midst of a broken and unjust system.

• I believe God welcomes all to belong but all I seem to experience is loneliness and isolation.

• I believe God has sent me to serve and love a particular group of people, and yet all I have experienced is disappointment and failure.

• I believe God is a liberator and yet I find myself crippled and unable to escape a corrosive pattern of sin in my life. 

Right now, where are you experiencing dissonance? An awareness of a gap?

SO WHAT DO WE DO WITH DISSONANCE?

So what do we do with dissonance? 
Dissonance can destroy and deform us. Modern words we used to describe what dissonance can do is create doubt & deconstruction.

But it also can be a threshold for transformation. This is what we call a “liminal space” where dissonance and disorientation become the birthplace to hope and healing.

To produce resilient disciples of Jesus.

We don’t know how John responded after his disciples came back to him to report what Jesus said, but I think we can see two things John did and knew from this story. One that is explicit and one that is implicit in the arc of his life and trajectory. So what do you do with dissonance?

WE RELY ON THE EYES OF OTHERS

I’m not much of a novel reader. I like to stick to reality. But every once in a while, a novel captures my attention and affection. And usually it comes from remembering a suggestion from my wife that I initially always dismiss. I am working on that. So in the last few months, I picked up a book called All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doer. It won a pulitzer prize in 2015 and just this past weekend was released as a multi-part netflix series. Apart from the Christopher Nolan like pace of the book, what captured my attention is the relationship between the two main characters of the book: a father and daughter. But this wasn’t a typical relationship to say the least. In the story, the daughter is blind. And the father knowing the state of the world as the book is set in Europe at the precipice of World War II, creates intricate models of the city him and his daughter are living in. As they walk the city together, the father helps his daughter memorize particular streets, monuments, and markers that will find their way into the model. And each day, the daughter runs her fingers over each part of the model making sense of the city she cannot see.

This relationship between father and daughter is a picture for us in our dissonance. The insight is simple, we need the eyes of others. Our present circumstances have the ability to blind us and we need others from a different perspective to shed light on what is happening around us. 

In your dissonance, lean on brothers and sisters to not only be with you in your wrestling but also give you eyes to see what Jesus might be up to. This is also why we need the global church. We got a small taste of this during soma school and in the room last sunday were numerous nations. For those in the West who believe Christianity is dying and watch friend after friend in their own dissonance, deconstruct and leave Jesus all together. For every one white christian leaving Jesus in the West, there are four majority world Christians encountering Jesus and following him. 

Like the disciples of John, we need sisters and brothers to be with us in our dissonance and give us eyes to see. 

We will be tempted to meet our dissonance with a host of distractions, but if we choose to continue to stand in the gap between our belief and circumstances, we might discover the presence of Jesus in fresh places.