He came for testimony, to bear witness to the Light.

John 1:7

This is no small point. Jesus is featured at the beginning of all four gospels of course, but each writer introduces him very differently. As we saw last week, Matthew tends to focus on Joseph, and his is the only gospel that gives us the story of the wise men.

Luke focuses at length on Mary. But he also gives us the shepherds keeping watch by night, along with a bunch more angels than in Matthew, and a whole host of other characters and notable details about them. We learn from Luke, for example, who John the Baptist's parents are, and that, in fact, his mother, Elizabeth, is related to Mary, the mother of Jesus.

For their part, Mark and John give us none of the details of Jesus' birth. No shepherds, no magi, no Virgin birth, no manger, no stars, no angels. For that matter no Mary and no Joseph. Nothing of that sort. In both Mark and John, Jesus just appears on the page, full grown, and we are off to the races.

So the four gospels give us an amazingly rich account of Jesus' appearance on the world's stage. Each one is full of different characters, and is centered around different emphases. In some ways they even present a different Jesus, ranging from Mark's counter-culture revolutionary to the cosmic Christ in John -- the Logos who existed with God before the world began and who becomes incarnate so as to be the Light of the world.

But for all their differences, every one of the gospels gives us John the Baptist. Not surprisingly, their accounts of John are decidedly different - some long, some short; in some he seems a bit more like a crazed desert prophet and in others a little less so.

But the point is this. Unlike Gabriel, unlike the shepherds and the magi, unlike even Mary and Joseph, John the Baptist is in every single gospel, preparing the way for the coming of Jesus. And if we follow the lectionary texts, we can't get to Christmas unless we go through him. He is, in effect, God's gatekeeper.

I think that's no coincidence. Perhaps the reason the lectionary insists that we encounter John prior to meeting the infant Jesus is that he embodies what Advent is about. He is a paradigm of Advent faith. He spends his energy preparing the way for God's arrival. He spends his time waiting for what he doesn't fully understand, for a Christ whose identity is somewhat mysterious to him, or at least surprising.

As we all would do, John expects a great and mighty Messiah -- the hope of the world and the bearer of cosmic Light. But what he gets in the end is a guy he probably grew up with; their mothers are kin, after all. On first blush he gets a carpenter, not a prophet. A man who seems to have no political instincts at all. A bleeding heart who hangs around with the poor and with outcastes, not with priests and politicians, the movers and shakers of ancient Israel.

But he nevertheless waits, does John. And he faithfully prepares the way for the coming of this curious man, this carpenter turned preacher with a new message about what it means to love, to have faith, to be human.

And now we wait along with this wild prophet. I'm glad to say that our waiting, like his, is not nothing. It's not passive and pointless. As Barbara Brown Taylor has noted, people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for (cf. Ms. Taylor's sermon, "Waiting in the Dark", published in Gospel Medicine).

And that's true for us, isn't it? In this Advent season I happen to know that some of you are waiting for literal births. You're waiting for the arrival of new little babies. Not your own, as it turns out, which is good. That would be a miracle of Biblical proportions since none of our members are pregnant, so far as I know. You are waiting instead for the arrival of grandchildren.

Still, you're waiting for a birth. And that waiting shapes you. It alters your schedule. It alters your life. Your days are filled with expectation and hope. Your heart is filled with anticipation and maybe even some anxiety. Will this child arrive safely? And when? And how will her birth change things? How will it change my life?

Our waiting, friends, particularly in this season, is not in vain. How we wait, and who we wait for, shapes us. And it grounds us. We need this time, this waiting. We need it like a bulb needs winter, like a butterfly needs time in a cocoon.

We need to sing Advent hymns and not rush to quickly to Christmas carols. We need all of this. Why? Because nowadays Christmas is all about doing . It's about fighting for parking places at the mall, and shopping for gift wrap that's on sale; and falling off ladders while hanging lights, and getting stuck in airports during really bad snowstorms. And, of course, surviving your extended family.

Advent is about none of those things. Here in this time and this place, we simply wait and we worship. The waiting, and the questions that arise in worship, shape us. Will this child arrive safely? Will he have a place in our hearts? How will his birth change things? How will it change me?

Outside this sanctuary the run up to Christmas has been a little different this year. Some people seem to think there is a war on Christmas in our culture. To my surprise - and I say surprise because I hardly ever agree with the people who are making this claim -- but to my surprise I actually agree with that sentiment, though not in the way Bill O'Reilly understands it.

I mean it in this way...

When the story broke that the CIA was operating clandestine prisons - so called "black sites" - there was outrage in the press and in official Washington that someone had leaked the truth about these sites to the public. It seems to me that if there is cause for outrage it is not that clandestine prisons run by the CIA have been made known. The cause for outrage is the fact of the prisons themselves, and that they are likely being used as torture sites. And that government officials have the audacity to look us in the eye and deny the use of torture. That's the outrage.

The folks in Washington and in the press -- they've got the wrong story. Just so with Christmas, in a way. That stores are now wishing people "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" is not the real story; it's not the front line in the war on Christmas.

The front line in the war on Christmas, rather, is the fact that you have to go to a store in the first place, and spend hundreds of dollars in order for this holy season to be meaningful. It's the fact that when the stores fling open their doors at 5:00 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving, literal stampedes ensue, and God help you should you stumble and fall on your way into Wal-mart. It's the fact that frenzied people are still shopping on Christmas Eve, loading their carts up with expensive tchotchkes that have absolutely no value and even less meaning.

The parking lot of Wal-mart at 8:00 p.m. on December 24 ^th . That's the front line of the war on Christmas. But there is another sense in which Christmas is threatened. It has to do not with what goes on in Wal-mart but with what goes on in the world at large. And what goes on in our minds and hearts as a result.

At some point relatively early in our lives we all gave up believing in a rotund fellow who lives just above Canada. We started to do the math with regard to how much time it would take for him to actually fly from house to house and town to town. Finally we realized that even with a jet it just couldn't be done, and so we gave up believing in one of the best myths ever.

I wonder if the same thing isn't true for some of us with regard to Christmas itself. We open the morning paper, we read the headlines and we do the math. And we make an adjustment in our heads and in our hearts. It just can't be possible that the Messiah has in fact come. There's too much darkness, too much pain; too much hunger, at times even too much rain. As so Advent and Christmas become for us little more than a way to revisit happy childhood memories.

And who can blame you if that's true? It's a hard world in which we live. We need the beauty of the season as much as we need the truth of it. We need the beauty of the green wreaths and the red poinsettias. We need the minor keyed Advent hymns to express our sorrows and the major keyed Christmas carols to give voice to our joy and our hope. We need the laughter of children, and the pleasure of giving and receiving gifts. These Christmas traditions shine light in our darkness, and we need them.

But I believe we also need John the Baptist for much the same reason -- because he shines light in our darkness and because he helps us reclaim the meaning of this season.

Some years ago a friend of mine -- I'll call him Jeff -- told me about an epiphany he had in therapy. Jeff happens to be prone to . . . what's the word . . . overfunctioning. Bit of a perfectionist, is he. And while that means his personal and professional standards are high, it comes at the price of inner peace.

Jeff sought help for this problem and was lucky to find a therapist who'd had some theological training. One day, after hearing of Jeff's struggles to be the Christian he thought God was calling him to be, his therapist offered him a gift. He pointed out to him that he wasn't called to be Jesus. He was called to be a disciple. He was called to be himself, to be Jeff. This simple truth changed his life.

John the Baptists understood that calling from the beginning. He somehow grasped from the start that his job was not to be the messiah but to be, simply, John.

He knew he was not Jesus, but he also knew he had a job to do -- to testify, as the text tells us, an old word that means to serve as evidence or proof, and to bear witness to the light.

A desert dwelling prophet who wore clothing 800 years out of date, this man was a living call to worship. A man who ate locusts for breakfast holds up Jesus like a prism to the sun, and the world has been dazzled by that light ever since.

You can't get to Christmas without John. He knew you had to wait. He knew that whatever this new Light was about, you can't own it, you can't possess it, and you can't buy it. He knew, instead, that it possess you. He knew that we are not the light ourselves, but that we are lit up by that light like beacons in the night. And that our job is to bear witness to that light.

He knew that we are changed by that for which we wait. He knew that we are made whole, and made holy, by mysteries we do not fully understand; that we are grasped by truths we ourselves cannot completely grasp . . . and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

He knew his own identity, and the identity of the one who came after him. He knew the meaning of Advent. In the end, he knew the meaning of Christmas.

Thanks be to God.