Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 24, 2006
Year B
Sermon Title: Waiting For What Is…
Isaiah 35:1-10
The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing.
The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,
the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.
They shall see the glory of the Lord,
the majesty of our God.
Strengthen the weak hands,
and make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
‘Be strong, do not fear!
Here is your God.
He will come with vengeance,
with terrible recompense.
He will come and save you.’
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then the lame shall leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;
the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water;
the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,
the grass shall become reeds and rushes.
A highway shall be there,
and it shall be called the Holy Way;
the unclean shall not travel on it,
but it shall be for God’s people;
no traveller, not even fools, shall go astray.
No lion shall be there,
nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;
they shall not be found there,
but the redeemed shall walk there.
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Matthew 11:1-5
Now when Jesus had finished instructing his twelve disciples, he went on
from there to teach and proclaim his message in their cities. When John
heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his
disciples and said to him, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to
wait for another?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Go and tell John 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.
How is it that he finds himself here, in this prison cell? Here is John the
Baptist, arguably one of the most popular persons of his age, a man
whose legend has sprouted in a desert, and whose fame caused many
to leave the cities to see what the fuss was all about in the countryside.
Despite all of this, here he is, rotting in Herod’s prison, jailed for
speaking a little too loudly against Herod’s affair with his own niece,
Herodias, who was the wife of his half-brother. Whatever collateral John
had as a popular figure got spent with those words denouncing Herod,
and now he is in prison, languishing away, with his own disciples caring
for him the best way they could under the circumstances.
But being imprisoned for speaking what you feel is God’s truth is not as
tough as it sounds—the body can survive the tortures of the flesh if
there is something for the soul to feed on, and knowing that you’ve told
the truth, that you’ve spoken “truth to power” is enough for John, I
suspect. He can handle prison, he can take the uncertainty of knowing
what his future will bring, he can “do” prison—in many ways, I suspect he
never thought that his life would end anywhere else BUT in a place like
this prison cell. This experience, this prison, he could handle, but John
now finds himself tortured by something else, something more painful
than some prison cell. It is a nagging question in his mind and in his
heart, one that he thought he had answered for himself earlier, when he
called his cousin Jesus forth to the river Jordan, and baptized him in
front of the throngs of people that had come out to see John, in his crazy
frenzied state, clothed like prophets should be clothed, stark and strident
in the desert.
While John has been in prison, he has been hearing stories about his
cousin, stories about his healing work, and the crowds that flocked to
him, about his message of peace and love, and his words that kept
challenging the expectations of his listeners about what a Messiah
should like. The expectation amongst John and most of the Jewish
people seems to be that Messiah’s don’t do and say what Jesus does
and says—they don’t preach about spiritual kingdoms, they don’t tell
people to love their neighbors, especially their ROMAN neighbors, and
Messiah don’t keep turning down opportunities to start building armies
who would be willing to get rid of these spiritually dirty Romans who were
polluting their holy land, simply by their very presence on its sacred
ground. Jesus doesn’t seem to be following the script, at least the script
that had been handed to the people by their tradition. “Is he the one?
Was I wrong?” these are the questions that are now torturing John in
prison. The walls around him have no power, but these questions, these
doubts, they haunt him and torture him, in ways that no prison guard
ever could. Is Jesus the Messiah the people have been waiting for?
So, he sends a word to his disciples to go and ask Jesus whether or not
he is the One and the answer to that question which will either bring
John the reassurance he craves or the confirmation of his worse fears—
that the Messiah will not come, that his life’s work was in vain. “Ask him
whether he is the one,” John tells his disciples, and so those who have
been faithful to him go to ask Jesus this very question. And right in the
middle of Matthew’s telling of the story of Jesus, Jesus himself answer’s
John disciples, though he does so indirectly, by quoting the scriptures
that both he and John had grown up with as children of Israel. “Go and
tell him what you see and hear,” Jesus says to John’s disciples, “the
blind now see, those who could not walk are now running for joy, the
outsiders have become insiders, those who could not hear now hear
clearly, those who were dead are now alive, and the poor, the poor, are
having good news shared with them. Tell John what you have seen and
heard, tell him to look around and see what is happening.”
And one of those passages Jesus’ quotes is from the first Scripture we
heard today—the desert will bloom again, hills will sing their dormant
songs, and the feeble will be made strong again, and a highway, a way
home, will be built through the desert, and those who were once lost will
be shown the way home. These words, spoken to a people in exile
hundreds of years before John and Jesus were born, they have been
the sacred texts that strengthened the people of Israel as one empire
after another conquered and occupied their holy land. Both Jesus and
John know these passages, and when he sends John’s disciples with
these words from Scripture, Jesus knows John will understand what is
being said to him, he knows what these passages have meant to both of
them: hope that God would make a way for the people out of the
wilderness of their exile. Jesus doesn’t answer John’s question with a
yes or no, but simply with an invitation to see the world the way it really
is, an invitation to look at the evidence, to see what is being done in the
wake of Jesus’ presence in this world: Jesus seems to be asking: “What
more could I offer to you as reassurance of who I am than what is being
done by God through me? Look and see what is happening all around
me. What you have been waiting for is here, all around you, if only you
will look and see.”
But you know, that’s got to be a hard thing to hear, if you happen to be
John, rotting away in that jail cell. I keep imagining John’s disciples
returning to tell him what Jesus has just said, telling him that what he has
been waiting for all of his life, the coming of the Messiah, the liberation of
his people, is here, it is here, right here and right now. I wonder if this
assurance by Jesus felt disconnected from what was happening to John
in that moment, in that prison cell. Here you are, locked up, and
constantly wondering whether the next thing you would hear is the
footsteps of your executioner coming down the hallway, and then you
hear Christ quoting Scripture to you that speaks of the desert
blossoming, and the world being given hope, of life turning around, and
being transformed. It’s a crazy thing to tell an imprisoned man, on the
verge of being executed by the state, that the hope he has been waiting
for all of his life, looks like this, that the transformation, the liberation of
the world is here, even now, as he is shuttered up in his cell. This, THIS,
is what hope looks likes?!?! This is what Jubilee looks like?!?! It’s got
to feel a little bit crazy to John, being told to look and see through the
prison bars for this eruption of joy within the universe that Jesus speaks
of, to look more carefully and to look more deeply at what is happening
all around him, even that very moment. Hope, the transformation of the
world, looks like what he is living through right now, the hell of that prison
cell, and the uncertain future that still may meet him every time his prison
door opens? Could the transformation of the world look like this, like
what he was living through, maybe even what we are living through right
now?!?!
And yet that is what Jesus seems to be telling John, and to us as well,
that what we have waited for all of our lives is here, right here before us:
the advent of hope, the possibility of meaning, the dominion of God is
here, right now, and indeed, the hills do leap for joy, and the desert you
and I were wandering has now become a road underneath us, a way out,
and a way home. He asks John to look and see, to look and see
underneath the heaviness of the world, with all of its deep pain, and to
see that underneath it all, underneath everything, God is doing what
God has promised to do—transform the world from the inside out,
making all things new. The invitation is to believe what is absurd in this
world to believe, to do what Jesus asks us to do in this passage, to look
for the evidence that even through the prison bars, the world is being
new, that my life and your life is being made new, even through the
deepest shadows, the darkest nights, of our lives. The hard part has
always been the stopping and the looking, from whatever window or
prison wall we’re peering through, and seeing the world as it really is: a
place of immense beauty and wonder, a desert in the midst of being
transformed into a lush forest, a place of fellow wanderers whose
confusing paths have suddenly become transformed into a road out that
very wilderness.
And the boldness and audacity, maybe even the arrogance, of Jesus
inviting poor John, sitting in that jail cell, to see the world this way, to see
the world as a place that shimmers with the very presence and the very
wonder of God, even at that moment, behind those prison walls—it must
seem arrogant to some, this request by Jesus of poor John the Baptist.
The future does not look bright for John, not on the face of things
anyway. And yet, the invitation is issued to John from Jesus to look and
look again, and if he can not see it, then to keep looking until the
moment he sees the way the world really is, a place being transformed
by God and full of people, all of us, everyone of us, going through that
same wonderful transformation. Still, I can’t imagine receiving that kind
of message of hope from another in the midst of John’s circumstances—I
think it would probably anger me more than give me any hope! And yet,
both John and Jesus are facing down the worst of futures: lives cut short
by political intrigue, painful and horrific final moments, and for Jesus, a
special horror, the desertion of his friends, his disciples, and an
especially lonely death on the cross, where even God seemed to have
walked away from him. Throughout Matthew’s telling of the story, Jesus
knows his future, he knows what is to come, the future with its particular
horrors, and yet Jesus can tell John to look and see, to look and see that
the world is erupting with joy, and that what they have waited for all of
their lives is here happening among them: the flooding of the deserts
with life-giving water, and the blooming of the desert, and the coming
home of all those that have been exiled.
Even as Jesus offers John a chance to see the world as he sees it,
maybe to see the world the way as it really is, what Jesus offers is not a
Pollyannaish hope, one of those moments when the eyes glaze over,
and the desperation to believe anything but the brutality of a particularly
horrible moment in our lives comes into play. This is not sugar-coated
hope, is not an easy grace, is not a transformation without scars—this is
a hope that never denies the desert, never pretends that the sand
underneath our feet doesn’t burns us when we wander through our own
deserts, and it never argues that suffering is an illusion to be discarded.
It is a hope, a transformation that is grounded in reality of what is—a
world where even the shadows in our lives remind us that we are in the
presence of light, and slow as it may be, the world really is being made
new, being transformed by what God is doing in it
I don’t know about you, but a lot of my life so far has been spent living
towards the future, rather than living in the present, believing that what
comes next will be better than the present, must be better than what is
front of me, than what is being lived through at this moment. Further
along the path, it must get better, right? Surely, surely, it must, and yet,
and yet, that doesn’t seem to be what Jesus is saying, at least not here.
It doesn’t get any better than this moment, because this moment is like
every other moment that we have lived through in the past or will ever
greet us in the future—it is a moment of transformation, a place where
God is doing something new in us, and in the world, to make you and I,
and all the world, new again. The waiting has always been the problem
for many of us, the thinking that the future will hold something better
than this moment, this place, this set of circumstances. But if Jesus is
right, then every difficult and beautiful moment is one of those moments
when God is doing something incredible in us and in this beautiful and
fragile world. But it’s the looking and the seeing that has always messed
me up, choosing not to look too hard underneath some of the more
difficult circumstances of my life to see the transformation going on
underneath even there, even in those moments. But its always been
there, the making of all things new, the truth of these words Jesus spoke
to John in this passage—the transformation of the desert into something
beautiful, over and over again.
You know, Advent is such an odd season, odd because it seems a little
bit crazy that we even celebrate it at all. I mean, the church has asked
itself to wait, to wait for a few moments before the gift arrives on that
night thousands of years of years ago. But its so short, this season—
only 4 Sundays out of 52 are set aside for us to do our spiritual work of
waiting in this world and maybe its because God wants us to have a
taste of desire that is unmet, of life being put on hold, of a hope that has
not yet arrived. And maybe the reason the season of Advent exists at all
is because the church wanted to remind us that at one time we waited,
that the whole world waited to see what God would do to meet the world’s
deep for something new. But in reality, the waiting has been going on
for a long, long time, and yet what we wait for during Advent is already
here, it is already among us; God’s work of wonder is here, even now,
even in this moment. “The desert is blooming even now,” Jesus says to
John in his prison cell, “and God is doing something new in you and in
the world.” I wonder if those words were enough for John, to put him at
peace with his doubts about whether or not Jesus was the One. I
suppose we’ll never really know, but the challenge has always been the
work of doing what Jesus is asking John to do in these words, to look
around us and see what God is doing in this world, and, perhaps hardest
of all, to see how God is working in our imperfect and yet beautiful lives.
Amen.
