There He is, that's Him.

Show clip from The Cosby Show, Season1, Episode 13 – Rudy’s Sick

“No more partying in there” says little Rudy to the germs she has just discovered.

Our culture seems to think that the presence of Christ is like Rudy’s germs. It ought to be something we can see, experiment with, manage. How Jesus lives in us must be like germs and microbes, DNA, chemical elements and quarks, something we can’t physically see but that has been captured and defined by science.

How do we define the presence of Christ in something outside ourselves? How do we define the presence of Christ in something like Holy Communion? Theologians over the centuries have argued this. There is the Roman Catholic view of transubstantiation, where the bread and juice literally become the physical body and blood of Christ. There is the later Zwinglian view of consubstantiation where the substance changes but we can’t really tell any difference. And then along came the Reformers that simply threw up their theological hands and said, well maybe it’s just all symbolic anyway. But I don’t buy that either. I think Christ is really present but it comes back to the question – how do you explain it? What is the something more?

The Levites and Pharisees knew there was something more and they quizzed John the Baptist about it. John pointed to the Messiah to answer their questions. Here’s something we often miss: John knew Jesus, he knew the Messiah was already there, alive and human. After all, they were cousins and John was just a few months older than Jesus.

Go back to their mothers. Think about Elizabeth and Mary and the time they spent together during their pregnancies. Here’s Elizabeth almost past the age of being able to conceive a child who is pregnant. Her husband is mysteriously mute after taking his turn in the Temple in the Holy of Holies. And yet, when Mary appears the baby leaps in her womb. And Mary, young, pregnant after some overshadowing that had nothing to do with what we understand as human conception is at the beginning of the journey she will make with her son.

With that bond between their mothers, in the way of extended family in those days, John and Jesus surely played together as little boys. They must have shared in common being different because of the circumstances of their births, especially in the company of other, more ‘normal’ Jewish boys.

So when John testified about Jesus, it wasn’t a prophecy for a far-off time. John knew Jesus, knew him as a human person and as Messiah. When John said “there is one coming after me the thong of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie”, he wasn’t talking about some shadowy, ethereal someday sort of person. The face of Jesus was what he could see in his mind’s eye.

That realization, that John actually knew Jesus, gives a rich layer of texture to our understanding of this text. The Pharisees didn’t recognize the face of the Messiah yet but they soon would for he was already among them. How do we bring that into today? What is the Bible telling us through this Scripture on the Third Sunday of Advent?

Go back to Rudy and her ‘partying’ germs. Through science, we know so much about our human bodies that there is no unexplored territory. I have to confess I am fascinated by those films made by tiny cameras deep inside a living human body showing hearts beating, what it looks like when we swallow, how our brain synapses work. We even talk about our human bodies like they are simply a mechanical system. Athletes are fine tuned machines. We talk about our joints being either creaky or well-oiled. But in our love of science and answers, we have left no room for God.

Yes, John knew Jesus the man but he also recognized in him Jesus the Messiah. We can know that our bodies are fearfully and wonderfully made but, in some way that defies and defines our human limitations, God is present in us and with us. God is in us not in a way we can quantify and predict but in a way that is just as real, perhaps more real than what we can see under a microscope or touch with our human hands.

How can we now, how can we see Jesus? How can we see God at work in our world, feel the Holy Spirit and be empowered by it? That’s where faith comes in. Before you turn your brains off at the sound of a ‘church’ word, let me show you what I mean.

Rudy found out about the germs because of her symptoms, because she was sick. We know that our hearts are beating because we are still alive. How can we know that God is real and among us?

Think about where we are physically at this moment. I stand up here in this traditional pulpit because in the days before electricity and microphones, this was the best way for one person to be heard by a lot of people. But the architecture of this sanctuary also reflects what we believe theologically. The one who presumes stand in the pulpit stands in God’s place. They speak for God and don’t think that doesn’t keep me up nights. But just as I can come down from the pulpit and stand among you out here in the pews, in the people’s space, realize that Jesus did the same thing.

Jesus left his father’s house and came down, incarnate in a real human body, just like us. Someone once said, he came down to be like us so we could someday be like Him. John knew him and told other people. Jesus died and was resurrected and came to the disciples and others to show them and us that death had been conquered. And the disciples and Paul empowered by the living Christ and the Holy Spirit told everyone they could. Their lives where changed drastically by the presence of God.

So how do we know? When can we say “There’s Jesus”? When we look into each other’s faces and see him there. When we care for the poor, the stranger, the imprisoned and we see His face in their faces. When we speak God’s name in public, in places where it is not normally heard, that’s Him. When we live lives of repentance and forgiveness, of reconciliation and restoration, that’s Him. When we change our perspective from our short human attention span to God’s eternal view – that’s Jesus at work in us and in the world.

When we walk and talk and love and cry and grieve and live and die in His Spirit and by His truth, we proclaim with our lives the mystery of faith:

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

When all around us we can see the love and joy, the peace and patience, the gentleness and self-control we can look at each other and say: “There’s Jesus, that’s Him.”