All Scriptures quoted are from The New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise quoted.

Several weeks ago, something didn’t seem right in worship. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, except that the song that was listed in the bulletin and the one I was thinking I was supposed to be singing weren’t the same. I got to looking around and discovered that some of the people who were supposed to give worship leadership were nowhere to be found. It really concerned me until I looked more closely and realized that I was still using the previous week’s worship guide. It’s very confusing. It really helps if the guide you’re reading and the worship you’re attempting have something in common. Not just in this worship service, but also in all of life.

Sometime this semester, one of our young men was walking across his college campus. He had just left class and couldn’t wait to pull out his cell phone and call his mother and ask her an important question. He wanted to know if it is possible to be a Christian and also believe in evolution. Something his professor said in class had put the faith he’d been given here to the test. He needed to be reassured to know if the worship guide, the faith guide, he’d been given all of his life at Cliff Temple was going to fit the world in which he was going to be asked to live his faith.

It seems, as we read Scripture that John the Baptist was in very much the same situation. He had a very important question to ask Jesus. Except, of course, there were no cell phones and he wouldn’t be going home for Christmas. Something tells me John already knew the fate that was about to be his. He had to send his own disciples back to Jesus to ask him this one question: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

Before we get to that question, let’s back up just a tad. This is the same John, John the Baptist, who not long before had baptized Jesus in the River Jordan after telling everyone, “This is the Messiah your faith has taught you to wait for centuries to see.” This is the same John who had been so loyal to his Lord Jesus and so loyal to his faith that it had landed him in prison on death row. You would think, wouldn’t you, having gone that far with his faith, John would have some fundamental things settled. Yet, maybe it was being in prison that gave rise to his questions and what has become one of the central stories of our Advent season.

Sometimes being trapped in difficult circumstances, especially those that are beyond our control, can cause us to doubt the things that we’ve always just taken for granted. That’s really okay. It’s also in those times that we’re beginning to discover our true faith for what it is. Our faith never really becomes our own until we nearly lose it and have to fight to keep it. The good news is that our faith can be our own if we’re willing to face that struggle.

Sometime, about the time I started high school, we were having one of those family debates one day about the rightness and the wrongness of drinking. I made some comment like, “I don’t believe in drinking because Mom and Dad told me it was wrong.” My older and more tested sister, Darlene, said, “That’s not good enough anymore, Glen. Some day you’re going to be in a place where you’ll have to know for yourself what you believe, because Mom and Dad won’t be there to believe it for you.” She solved her problem, of course, by marrying a Lutheran. A Lutheran pastor’s son, I might add. The worst of the lot!

But she was right about learning to own your own faith as your own. Your faith never becomes your own until it is tested. Until someone or something tries to take it away and offer in its place something else. Until your real life and what you think and your real faith have had a head-on collision and don’t synchronize, you just don’t know which one will survive. So, if you have questions about God during the Advent season, when everyone else is celebrating so much of what we take for granted, welcome to a very good place in your life. Welcome to the league of someone like John the Baptist, of all people, who, in asking his question honestly, may help us answer some of our own.

It may seem strange. Maybe in a time when we should be celebrating the givens of our faith, let me ask, what do you believe about Jesus? Do you believe Jesus was the Son of God? Do you believe that he was God in the flesh? Do you believe that he lived a fully human life and died a fully human death? Do you believe that, when Jesus died, he took away the sins of the world? The whole world. Including yours, past, present, and future sins, forever. Do you believe that? Do you believe that three days after Jesus died he rose again from the grave? Do you believe Jesus is coming again someday? Do you believe that, if you trust him, Jesus can secure your place with Eternal God? If you have not asked those questions and answered them for yourself, then you’re living on borrowed faith that is not your own. And, until those questions become questions you have asked and you have answered for yourself, your faith and your life are going to be in regular conflict with all the options the world will offer you.

Who told you what to believe, by the way? Were they a reliable source of witness to you? The preacher can tell you what to believe, what you should believe. But as one of those people, I’ve never found that kind of preaching to be very effective. Even if I told you what you should believe, and you believed it because I said you should believe it, because that’s the way I interpreted the scripture, your faith is still my faith, borrowed until you ask for yourself of Jesus, “Are you the one?” and wait and see what answer returns.

I can’t tell you what to believe. But, if we will ask our questions together, then together, as a congregation, as a family of faith, at funerals, in times of service, in Bible study classes where we butt heads, even occasionally in times of worship like this, together we can find the truth and have a faith that is more our own, even the truth that Jesus promised would set us free.

There’s been a little consternation of late among some in our church about the coming of Brian McLaren this February. Some of our folks are concerned about what he believes about Jesus. Many of us have found his writings to be particularly helpful. May I please encourage you to remember that it’s always better to read what someone actually writes than to read what someone writes about what they write?

This much is for sure. Brian McLaren, first of all, is not just coming here for us. He’s coming for thousands of people, and we are fortunate to host the meeting. I also assure you he is not coming here to make you doubt your faith. The doubts that are yours are yours already. What he will certainly do is help us ask some really good questions that might, for the first time, put us in the same league as John the Baptist, help us find our faith for ourselves and what we really believe about Jesus. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

If all of our faith questions are answered, and we are fully satisfied that we know all that we need to know, then we should not attend the McLaren event. If, however, we have found that, like the college student calling his mom, the faith we were given and the life we’ve discovered don’t always get along with each other, this could be a life-changing event for you and for all of us.

I’m not afraid of questions about my faith; I’m only afraid of being too afraid to face them. Think of the courage, the unbelievable raw courage, it took for John to ask his disciples to go ask Jesus, of all people, “‘Are you the one?’” What would Jesus think of John after this? Do we have the courage to ask of Jesus, the Jesus we’ve always claimed to believe, do we -- students, do you -- parents, grandparents -- do you, do we have the courage to ask Jesus, maybe for the first time in our lives, a very personal question -- “Are you the one to whom I can trust my eternal soul?”

By the way, if you choose to ask, be careful what you expect in return. When John’s disciples found Jesus and asked him the question, Jesus didn’t just give them some simple facts and information, like, “Yes, I’m the one. Tell John to worry about something else.” Instead, he sent them back for more information for John to ponder for himself. “‘Go and tell John,’” Jesus said, “‘what you hear and see. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. Make your own conclusion of all of that.”

In the life you really live, when all of us other Baptists and Lutherans are not around, what is it you make of all the conclusions you’ve drawn about Jesus? Jesus didn’t solve John’s doubts by giving him simple answers. He simply invited John to continue the conversation and see where it led him.

If I get this right, Jesus was trusting John with more information, so it appears that trust with God works both ways. With what information has God entrusted you to draw your own conclusions? We are commanded to love God with our heart, our soul, and our mind. There is no difference between a mind that is enslaved and a mind that is not free to ask questions beyond what it knows to be certain, whether that mind is sitting in a worship service at church or in a secular college classroom with an atheist as a professor. There’s no difference. How can we love God with a mind that is not free to ask and discover for itself the truth God has given us?

Advent is a time for celebrating the coming of Jesus and one of the main biblical characters who helps understand Advent is John the Baptist. A man who, at the time of the greatest test in his life, found his faith quivering like Jell-O and asking more than he was celebrating. He was not embarrassed to admit that.

So, how about you? Are your faith and the life you’re really living in conflict with each other? If so, what are you willing to ask about that? Would you be willing to ask in this conflict between your faith and the life at which your faith keeps tearing, “Jesus, are you the one?”

Speaking of synchronized, something very terrible happened last Sunday during worship. Brad walked over to me and tells me that we had inadvertently printed the wrong text from Isaiah. It was one from the first chapter of Isaiah instead of the eleventh, as we had planned. The one we were holding and reading was totally out of sync with the worship we had planned. Brad comes over to me and says, “We’ve got a real problem here. We’ve got too much Sodom and Gomorrah.”

The second thing that happened was, when I was supposed to wait, I got up instead and preached, completely forgetting the choir’s well-rehearsed anthem. Just as the invitation was beginning, Brad brought me a note (a very gracious note, I might add, which you can own for $200 for the original!) to tell me that I had skipped the choir and wanted to know what we should do about it. On the spot, we agreed to cut and paste the anthem to the end of service.

By then, everything was a mess. Everything we had planned seemed all jumbled up. I was standing here, preoccupied with all of that at the end of the service, worried about the mess. But, oddly enough, something in the text from Isaiah that we weren’t supposed to read actually did fit the sermon. Then several people commented afterwards that the anthem seemed to actually fit better at the end than when we had originally planned it. Like God met us in the middle of the mess and taught us that that’s where faith happens. Not where everything works well, but when our original script and the one life ends up handing us are out of sync. We were willing, nonetheless, to give ourselves and all of our missteps to God; somehow, he made it fit and we worshiped.

Whatever your life’s script, the one you’re reading from, and the life that is actually at hand are tearing each other apart. If so, would you be willing this morning to ask Jesus, maybe for the very first time in your life, “Are you the one? Can I trust you, Jesus?” Just ask him.

Ask him. See what happens.