December 16, 2007
(Third Sunday of Advent)

What a Difference a Week Makes

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Isaiah 35:1-10  •  Psalm 146:4-9 or Canticle 3 or Canticle 15  •  James 5:7-10  •  Matthew 11:2-11
(From The Lectionary Page)

Well, I’ve come to a stunning revelation: Time is a fluid thing. Oh sure, we think it’s linear and discrete, predictable and reliable; we live our lives in one direction only – which is to say, forward. And yet I can tell you that when it comes to Advent, all bets are off. Ask a busy parent how many days before Christmas and they will get a glazed, panicked look and say, “Not nearly enough.” But ask a child the same question and you will get a very different answer. Our lectionary in Advent throws us into temporal disturbances as well – bouncing us forward to the end of time on the first Sunday of Advent and bouncing back again on the fourth Sunday of Advent to the story of an angel’s message to Joseph, son of David. And sandwiched in between the Coming of Christ in glorious majesty and his Coming as the infant of Bethlehem are two accounts of John the Baptist.

And there, too, time shifts. A lot happened between last Sunday’s gospel and this Sunday’s. Last Sunday we had John the Baptist calling the faithful to repentance and comparing the religious establishment to a bunch of snakes. In short, being a prophet – one called by God to speak words not his own to people who want neither to hear nor to heed them. To be a prophet is necessarily to be in harm’s way. So we should not be surprised that John was imprisoned by Herod. John had the impertinence to criticize Herod for his incestuous marriage. But mostly he was imprisoned for doing his job – for stirring up the people and endangering Herod’s hegemony.  Word came to him in prison about Jesus whom he had baptized. There by the banks of the Jordan he had recognized the one who was mightier than he. But that was then. If Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Messiah, why had the kingdom not yet broken through? Where was that winnowing fork? Why was the chaff still on the throne, and not being burned with unquenchable fire? Was Jesus the one who was to come, or could he have been mistaken? After all, the Messiah – as the people of God understood the Messiah – was envisioned as a warrior king like their hero, King David. Not a whole lot of things that John had foretold about the Messiah appeared to be happening, at least as far as John could see from his prison cell.

Time shifts. A lot happened between last Sunday’s gospel and this Sunday’s in the life of Christ as well. By the 11th chapter of Matthew, Jesus underwent temptation in the wilderness, called his disciples, and inaugurated his ministry with what we call the Sermon on the Mount. And then began a ministry of healing and restoration, of lepers cleansed, of sight restored, of a paralyzed man who walked again, of muted tongues loosened, of disciples commissioned and sent out to heal in his name, of a community formed and empowered in Christ’s own authority. The Kingdom of God was being ushered in – not by conquering people but by healing and restoring them; not by exerting power over them, but by empowering them to be agents of healing and wholeness.

Each Advent, our Gospel passages make us feel a bit like time travelers. Our Lord’s first appearing as the child of Bethlehem points toward his second coming at the end of time itself. The past informs the future which, in turn gives shape and form and purpose to the way in which we choose to live in the present. And that’s when John the Baptist comes in – both as the thorny prophet by the shore of the River Jordan and as the imprisoned John, awaiting his own death, who has a serious question for Jesus. God called him to a ministry of prophecy which he undertook with boldness and with no small danger to himself. And at the end of his life he is reflective. Are you the one who is coming or are we to await another, he asks. You don’t act the way I expected you to act. By Jordan’s banks, I thought I was sure, but now I’m not. It hasn’t turned out the way I expected. Have I been wrong?

That John asks this question should get our attention. Seems that faithfully following God’s call does not ensure a life free of re-thinking, of – shall we say – holy doubt.  To engage our lives as Christ followers necessarily places us in positions of questioning, of confusion. And sometimes it’s hard, depending on the times and seasons we live in, to use the eyes of faith – when we find ourselves confined by circumstances as real as four walls, or by the weight of daily anxieties great or small, or by a load of hurt that we carry, or any one of a hundred different kinds of prisons we human soul experience. The easy certainties of yesterday often are replaced with realities which don’t seem to add up. Old ways of seeing the world no longer work. Time indeed does make ancient good uncouth, as the hymn verse [*] puts it.  It's hard to remember that it is for these very times of holy doubt that God gives us the eyes of faith. What do we see when we open them? Struggle and pain, to be sure. But hope and new life alongside. The lost restored, the disconnected touched, abundance shared, love lived out. Christ came into a broken world not to fix it but to redeem it. He was not the Messiah John expected, ultimately not the one people wanted. He was the Messiah we were given, the one whose coming again in glory we await, whose promise and whose love endures.

Tell John what you see, Jesus said to John’s disciples. And then quoting from the passage from Isaiah which we heard this morning, he reminded them that the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the speechless sing for joy. The restoration of God's people, foretold by the prophets, was unfolding in real time. Not with armies. Not with military victory. With healing. With forgiveness. With restoring the least and the last and the lost to fullness of life, one person at a time. In God’s time.

[*] Once to Every Man and Nation, by James Lowell, 1845. From the third verse:
New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.