III Advent – December 12, 2010 – Year A (RCL)
The ornaments that the church school kids walked back in with last Sunday and hung on the Jesse tree (with some additions made to some of the higher branches shortly thereafter by our own Orcenith Smith) represent significant events in the life of God’s people as they are recorded in the Hebrew scriptures—signs of God’s presence, evidence of God’s power working in the world to bring about good: the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, Noah’s family and the animals of creation kept safe in the ark, God’s covenants with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt, Israel’s exodus from Egyptian bondage—eloquent testimony to God’s never failing love and mercy.
Later on in their history, when they found themselves in exile far from their homeland and prophets like Isaiah insisted that the desert would rejoice and burst into bloom, it was back to these events—these core stories—that people’s memories and imaginations would turn: Their God had been faithful in the past. Why shouldn’t their God be faithful in the future, as well?
But by the time of John the Baptist people were again looking every which way for a sign—for any sign at all—of God’s favor.
“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” is the message that John himself sent to Jesus from the prison into which he had been thrown by King Herod.
John, sent to be a sign that the kingdom of heaven was drawing near, had every reason to wonder if there hadn’t been a mistake.
Maybe Jesus wasn’t the right one after all.
So John did the only thing that someone who couldn’t do it himself would do: asked somebody else—in this case, some friends—to go to Jesus and get some answers.
“After all,” we might imagine John saying, “if the kingdom of heaven is about to break in upon us, what am I doing in this prison?”
I suspect that John the Baptist, who was literally in prison, could speak for many who may not themselves have been in prison, but to whom life itself may have felt like a prison.
Surely that is why so many had flocked to the wilderness to hear John preach in the first place; the coming of God’s messiah meant liberation, political and spiritual; the coming of the kingdom of heaven meant freedom, or so they hoped.
Would their hopes have to be put on hold yet again?
John was not alone in wondering whether his hopes had been false.
Was Jesus the one who was to come or were they to wait for another?
Nothing seemed to be changed; they still felt trapped in their existence, as if they were, like John, in prison.
If they had to wait for another, the question was: How much longer would they have to wait?
The answer that Jesus sent back with John’s friends brought new hope.
“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.”
Things were beginning to change after all.
If the blind were receiving their sight, the lame were walking, lepers being cleansed, the deaf hearing, the dead raised, the poor having good news brought to them, then prison doors were beginning to swing open, so to speak—then John and the others who had waited for the one to come no longer needed to feel hopelessly trapped in their existence.
When Jesus spoke of such miraculous developments, he was not only referring to the shape that his ministry was taking.
He was also purposely pointing to the message of hope that the prophet Isaiah had proclaimed hundreds of years before: “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.”
“Look at the evidence,” Jesus was saying. “These things are happening. Many of you may not yet be released from your prisons, whatever form they may take, but those who are considered the least fortunate among us—the blind, the deaf, the lame, the poor—they are being released from their prisons. These are the signs you have looked for. There is hope after all. All is not accomplished , but a beginning has been made. There is hope after all.”
Sometimes I think that we in the Church find ourselves in the same dilemma as John the Baptist’s.
I know that as one who has been chosen to speak for the Church I have often felt burdened by a responsibility that I imagine is too great.
Called as we are to bear witness in the world to the hope that is in us, how do we withstand the waves of despair which can overtake us when we least expect it?
Like John the Baptist we know what our mission is: to bring the news of God’s reconciling love in Christ to a world that is sorely in need of healing.
But like John the Baptist we can also feel helpless, as if we were imprisoned—helpless and powerless in the face of forces that threaten to undo us.
Look at the Church in Advent.
Barely able to hold out against the onslaughts of commercial materialism, which not only plays on our greed and our desire for instant gratification, but also brazenly co-opts the trappings of the Christmas holiday the better to sell us its wares, we go on resolutely lighting the candles of our Advent wreaths, preparing to celebrate the Savior’s birth in a world that really doesn’t seem to take much notice of it, a world that doesn’t seem a whole lot different from the way it was in John the Baptist’s day.
No wonder we lose heart now and again!
No wonder hope wears thin for us, as it did for John the Baptist!
No wonder we find ourselves assailed by doubt!
We don’t know for sure how John took Jesus’ answer.
The answer was meant to be reassuring, but we have no record of John’s reaction to it.
Earlier in the service we said together the canticle known as “The Magnificat”, the virgin Mary’s outpouring of joy and praise upon learning from the angel that she was to give birth to the heir to David’s throne: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.”
Overwhelmed by the possibilities that the angel’s announcement presents, Mary is moved to ecstasy; her optimism knows no bounds; she speaks of her fondest hopes as if they were already fulfilled: “[The Almighty] has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”
For several reasons it’s hard to imagine John the Baptist reacting with that kind of enthusiasm.
Still, something made him want to find out more about what Jesus was doing, so he did what he could to check things out.
Unable to hear it or to see it firsthand, was John willing to trust in the evidence his friends brought him?
Was he able to see that a light had indeed begun to shine in the darkness, a light that nothing could overcome, a light that would grow brighter and brighter?
Did John understand that he himself had faithfully borne witness to the coming of that light into the world?
No doubt he had expected more.
News of healing was a sign that the Kingdom was on the way, but John might well have longed for news of some good old-fashioned vengeance as well.
“The blind receive their sight, …the deaf hear, …the poor have good news brought to them, …and some really bad people are finally getting what they deserve” is a message that might have been more to John’s liking (and a little closer, perhaps, to Mary’s passionate song).
“Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us;”
The words at the beginning of today’s collect would surely have appealed to John the Baptist.
Power appeals to us human beings; it is, after all, one of our most favored ways of putting things to rights.
But just look most anywhere in the world to see what the stirring up of power usually results in.
Of course, when we think of power, almost the first thing we think of is a show of force.
But God’s power has nothing to do with force; God’s power has everything to do with love.
That is why the light of God’s kingdom did not burst upon the world in a blinding flash; it would have swept everything away.
God rarely comes into our lives in a blinding flash, or we, too, would be swept away.
God comes to us as simply and as naturally as a tiny baby, a helpless child, born in Bethlehem, a helpless child sent for us to love, until the light that that child brought shines in every corner of the universe.
Nothing gets swept away; everything is gathered up; nothing is lost.
That was a hard lesson for John the Baptist to learn, a lesson that we Christians are obliged to learn over and over again, a lesson that the coming of Christmas patiently teaches year after year: God’s love comes not to destroy; God’s love comes to gather up and to preserve and to make things whole so that absolutely nothing is lost.
Thanks be to God!
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