12/28/25 – Sermon written and preached by Leigh Rachal @ FPC Abbeville, LA

They keep asking John the Baptist to explain himself.

Who are you?
What authority do you have?
Why are you doing this?

These are not just friendly questions.

They are locating questions - A way of placing someone on the map.

Of deciding where they belong

and what weight their words should carry.

In Cajun culture, we have our own version of this question.

It sounds gentler, but it is asking the same thing:

“Who’s your momma?”

It is not just curiosity.

We aren’t just trying to figure out what your mother’s name is.

It is a way of understanding who shaped you,

where you come from,

what stories formed you.

If we know your people, we know something about you. We know how you belong.

When the religious leaders question John, they are asking their version of that.

Who are your people?

What line do you come from?

What role are you claiming in God’s story?

To understand John’s answer, we have to remember how this gospel begins.

John does not open with a birth story.

There is no manger or angel song.

John opens with poetry.

“In the beginning was the Word.”

Before anyone speaks in this gospel, before anything is explained,

we are told that Jesus is the Word that existed before creation itself.

The Word through whom everything came into being.

Then John immediately introduces another figure.

“There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.”

Not the Word.
Not the light.
But the witness.

John’s gospel is careful here.

The Word comes first.

The light shines first.

John’s role is secondary, but essential.

He is the one who points.

The one who says, Look. Pay attention. Do not miss this.

So when the questions start coming in today’s passage, they make sense.

Are you the Messiah?
Are you Elijah?
Are you the prophet?

In other words, are you the Word? Are you the light? Are you the one?

John answers by letting go. By clearing understanding who he is NOT.

“I am not the Messiah.”
“I am not Elijah.”
“I am not the prophet.”

There is something deeply faithful about that acknowledgement.

John does not grab at power.

He does not inflate his importance.

He does not let himself be defined by what others want him to be.

Only after naming what he is NOT does he say who he IS:

“I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.”

Not the Word.
Just a voice.

Not the light.
Just someone pointing toward it.

In response to the questions asking John who he belongs to, he answers:

I belong to the work God is doing.

I belong to the truth.

I belong to the task of making room.

And then Jesus appears.

John sees him and everything sharpens into focus.

“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

What does it mean for John to call Jesus the Lamb of God?

John does not explain the metaphor.

He assumes his hearers already feel its weight.

The lamb is a reference to Passover.
The lamb is about deliverance.
The lamb is a reminder of the blood on the doorposts and freedom on the other side the wilderness.
The lamb is how God moves people from bondage into life.

Calling Jesus the Lamb of God is not about calling him meek and mild.

It is calling him the one who rescues his people.

And notice what John says next.

Jesus is the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world.

Not just individual guilt.

Not just private failure.

But the brokenness that runs through systems, relationships, bodies, and communities….

This is not about an individual transaction.

It is about communal liberation.

Which brings us back to light.

Earlier, John’s gospel tells us that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

Light in this gospel reveals what is real.

It tells the truth.

That is why Psalm 32 belongs so beautifully with this story.

“Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven.”
“Happy are those in whose spirit there is no deceit.”

This psalmist knows what hiding does to us.

The psalmist describes how silence dried them up.

How their body ached under the weight of what was unspoken.

But when the truth was named,

forgiveness did not arrive as some kind of punishment avoided.

It arrived as relief. As breath. As freedom.

That is what is happening at the river.

People are not lining up to be shamed.

They are coming to tell the truth.

They are stepping into the water because they are tired of carrying everything alone.

Tired of pretending.

Tired of being defined by what they cannot say out loud.

And then Jesus steps into that water.

Not to stand above them.
Not to separate himself.
But to join them.

If we were asking the Cajun question of Jesus, “Who’s your momma?”,

the answer would not stop with Mary.

It would include the people around him.

The ones he stands with.

The ones he refuses to leave behind.

Jesus belongs with those telling the truth.
Jesus belongs with those longing for release.
Jesus belongs with those who have been carrying too much for too long.

And he takes away sin not by ignoring it,

but by removing its power to define us.

By carrying it out of hiding.

By refusing to let shame have the final word.

We live in a world that keeps asking us to explain ourselves.

To justify our worth.

To prove our belonging.

Even faith can become another performance, another way of hiding.

John offers another way:

Let go of what you are not.
Tell the truth about who you are.
And point to the One who has already come close.

Psalm 32 promises what waits on the other side of that honesty:

Happiness, not the shallow kind, but the deep relief of being known.

Freedom that settles into the body.

Joy that comes from discovering you were never alone.

John’s witness is simple:

This is the Word made flesh.
This is the light that tells the truth without destroying us.
This is the Lamb who takes away what no longer needs to be carried.

And we are invited into that same vocation.

Not to be the Word.
Not to be the light.
But to be witnesses.

Witnesses to grace that frees.
Witnesses to truth that heals.
Witnesses to a God who enters the water with us and calls us beloved.

May God grant us the faith and the courage to be a worthy witness to his Amazing Grace. Amen.