Another week with John the Baptist.

I think we can all agree that for us, citizens of the Western world in the 21st century, he is a strange and uncomprehensible figure.

With his wild appearance, strange diet and apocalyptic words he is more than a little off-putting to us and our modern sensibilities.

We know that in today’s world a figure like John the Baptist would either be arrested for disturbing the peace or taken to the emergency room to be evaluated for mental illness.

If we saw him on the street corner, we would assume he was simply mentally ill and homeless and pass him by.

But this was not the case 2000 years ago.

2000 years ago, people took him very seriously, and not just rabble rousers and peasants.

Hundreds of people gathered around him and in the crowd were people just like us, people with solid forms of employment, homes, and families.

People who kept their religious obligations to the Temple.

Why was belief and acceptance of this messenger from God so much easier 2000 years ago than it is today?

Well, most Western citizens of the 21st century would say that this is because 2000 years ago people did not have the knowledge we have today.

It is called the subtraction argument.

It goes like this. 2000 years ago, people looked around and saw phenomena that they could not explain and so they created myths, stories and religion to explain what they saw.

Today though, because of science, we are able to explain what we see and so we no longer need these myths, stories and religion to explain the world around us.

Or to put it another way, once we were stupid and ignorant and needed religion in order to describe a baffling universe, but today we have reason and science, and we can now understand the world as it really is.

The modern world is the way things are once we get rid of religion.

The religious impulse is essentially a delusion.

The sociologist Charles Taylor calls this the immanent frame, and it is the cultural soup that we all live in, religious or not. It is the lens through which we see the world whether we mean to or not.

Now, we, here this morning, obviously believe religion is important and God is real, or we wouldn’t be here.

But let’s be honest, though we claim belief in God and are participants in religion, most of the time we don’t really live like God is real do we?

2000 years ago, heck even 1500 years ago, the transcendent was assumed to pervade every part of life.

Demons and Angels and other supernatural powers were a normal part of existence. John the Baptist was not the only one proclaiming a message from God that drew crowds. God was understood by all to be an active agent in the world.

It was a fact, not something someone chose to believe in, or not.

Action taken was taken with thought to what it meant in the realm of the transcendent.

God was the subject of the world not an object.

God acted on God’s creation.

Today we assume ourselves to be the subject of the world and God is simply another object to be believed in or not.

It is very difficult for us to conceive of a world in which God is an active participant and not either non-existent or the Deist clockmaker in the sky who set creation in motion, but now exists outside of it and simply watches it function according to natural laws that God created at the beginning of it all.

Laws which cannot be contravened.

Theologian and Lutheran Andrew Root argues that even we religious folks act as functional deists.

He calls us to look at our conversations about the future of the church.

We understand that we are declining, and we talk relentlessly about our decline, and we worry and strategize and plan programs and argue about resources, but we never talk about God.

We talk as though we are the main characters of the story and not God.

We work to preserve ourselves and our institutional church and we do this with no sense of a God who is actually active and present in our world.

We behave as very good 21st century western modernists who may profess belief in God but behave as though all that really exists is what we can explain, see, touch and hear right now.

We behave as if the transcendent does not exist.

And we are failing in our pursuit of sustaining a church as functional deists.

The church continues to decline, because using the tools of the immanent frame will never make religion viable because the immanent frame says religion does not need to exist.

No amount of resources, programs, good actions, and intellect will make religion believable to those who choose not to believe.

All we will do is wear ourselves out and our churches will still decline.

Think about it for a moment.

I am sure that you have children who grew up going to church with you but no longer find any need to.

For some, they may have been harmed by the church and that is their reason for no longer participating in organized religion, but my guess is that for most they simply drifted away.

They will tell you that church is irrelevant for them.

And what they likely mean by that is that the transcendent is irrelevant for their lives.

In a secularized world, they can live quite happily without any reference to God or faith or religion.

They can be good people, find community and meaning without the transcendent.

We could create the most brilliant children and youth programs and worship and adult formation, and they still would not come because they just see no need for it all.

The “secular age” the “immanent frame” has curbed our capacity to believe in God at all.

And yet, we also live in a time of great disillusionment and despair.

Most people have come to understand that science and reason have not saved us from the worst of human nature—wars continue, all the “isms”—racisms and the like continue, poverty continues, environmental degradation continues.

We no longer believe that God will destroy us, but we know that we can and may well destroy ourselves.

And people have lost a sense of meaning and purpose.

Modernity promised us that focusing on human flourishing, our own and others, would be enough to provide us with meaning, and we are discovering that this is just not true.

So people try to make meaning through material things, wealth, status, accomplishments, social justice, power, nationalism, fundamentalism, politics and the like, and when they get what they were working for find themselves saying, “Is this all there is?”

And they feel despair.

They ask, “Why are we here?” “What is the point?” “If it all ends in death, why bother?”

Some are paralyzed by these questions and others simply live a life of quiet despair.

In spite of all our efforts, we simply can’t shake the feeling that the transcendent actually exists and we need it.

I think this is actually why we are gathered here this morning.

I think it is because deep down we know that the what we have been given as the truth in this secular age, that what we can explain and know through our senses is all there is, is not true reality.

Deep down in our guts we know that there is more to this world than what we humans can explain and understand through our senses.

And we know that we need to be in touch with the unexplainable, the other, the transcendent, God, in order to be truly at peace, in order to leave behind despondency and despair, in order to be saved from ourselves.

We crave an encounter with the living God, the God who acts in the here and now, the God who is with us every second of the day.

The God who loves us and knows us better than we know ourselves.

We know deep down that this is why we exist and live and move and have our being.

We don’t exist for ourselves we exist for God.

We are not the main characters in our own story.

God is the main character, and we are the objects who God acts upon.

We have simply become blind to God’s action.

The immanent frame has blinded us to seeing what God is doing in and all around us all the time.

Now I am not arguing here that we try to go back to a pre-modern time, for we can’t.

I suspect that there are no more John the Baptists being sent to us because we are incapable of hearing them.

You and I are not capable of shedding the science and reason that are the way we now see the world.

But this does not mean that God is not continuing to act in our world.

God is still the subject of our world.

God continues to act even if we have lost our ability to see this action.

Our task as a community that follows Christ, God’s very act of entering our world and taking on our humanity, is to first and foremost make God the subject of our speech.

We need to work tirelessly to remind ourselves that we are not the main characters of the story we are telling here, God is.

We cannot save ourselves, only God can save us, and will if we choose to step out of the way and let God be God.

Nothing we do here should be first and foremost about us, it should be about God.

Secondly, we need to take on practices that will help us regain our vision, that will help us to shake off our blindness to transcendence and God’s action in the world.

There is no formal program that will help us to do this.

This is about gathering together in whatever way works for us to pray, study scripture, share our stories and to be vulnerable with one another that we might begin see that God is acting in our lives, our church, and the world around us right here and now.

You have probably heard about the gorilla experiment.

The participants in this experiment were asked to watch a video of a basketball game and to keep track of how many times the basketball was passed.

In the midst of the game a man in a gorilla suit walked across the court.

Only half of the participants noticed the gorilla.

What we give our attention to often prevents us from seeing what is right in front of us.

We need to be quiet long enough, pay attention long enough, sit still long enough to see God all around us, to notice that God is here, and we need to help each other develop these muscles, for our spiritual muscles have grown very weak.

Thirdly, we need to go out into the world and love the world as God loves the world.

We need to protect the vulnerable, bring laughter to the despairing and love to the lonely, and meaning to those awash in meaninglessness.

We need to be witnesses to God’s agency and help others see again as we are helping each other to see.

And finally, we need to stop trying to explain the strange.

John the Baptist is strange to us, and we need him.

We may not understand his words with our 21st century minds.

We may not be able to embrace in a literal sense his message, but we can embrace the strange God that he shows us, a God that is other than us.

A God that exists outside of the rules of the immanent frame, the natural world, the explainable world.

A God we will never be able to tame and explain.

A God who exists wholly and totally outside of us and yet comes to us with peace, healing, and life.

A God that we need even when we think we don’t.

And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?”

And John replied, “Know that God is God, and you are not.

And God is with us.”

That is Good News.

Amen.