O come, O come, Emmanuel. Amen.
What
are you waiting for? That’s not a call to get busy, but rather a sincere
question. What are you waiting for? Advent is a season of hoping and waiting. So
what are you waiting for?
The
contrast of John the Baptist between last Sunday and today is stark. Last
Sunday, John boldly proclaimed “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near…
one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry
his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. He will gather the wheat
into the granary, but the chaff he will burn.” John was so confident that Jesus
would be the messiah that he shouted “prepare the way of the Lord.” He was so
excited. He saw salvation on the horizon. His heart was giddy with joy and
anticipation. And all of this happened in chapter 3 of Matthew.
Today
we’ve fast-forwarded to chapter 11, and the tone has changed. John is now in
prison. Being in prison in those days wasn’t as it is today, where prisons are
often places where you can move in and out of depending on your sentence. In
John’s day, prison was a final destination. He knew he days were numbered as he
sat in his cold jail cell. But he was still able to have some contact with the outside
world through his faithful disciples who could pass him messages. So one day,
when he was feeling particularly defeated and dejected, he said “go to Jesus,
and ask him ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’”
In other words, he told them to go to Jesus and ask “What gives? I thought you
were supposed to be the Messiah. Why then am I still in prison? Why isn’t Rome
defeated? Why aren’t you yet baptizing with fire? What’s going on Jesus? Are
the Messiah, or did I get my hopes up for nothing? Should I be waiting for someone
else to come along?”
John
the Baptist is such a critical figure in the story of Jesus because he asks the
questions that we all ponder in our hearts, but often don’t have the courage to
put into words. Is Jesus the real deal? There are so many faith systems around
the world, is Christianity somehow different from the rest? Does having faith
even matter? Can I really trust the Bible? Is God real? Have I put my hope in
the wrong thing? Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?
It’s interesting that John asks his question in the plural, asking if “we” are
to wait. He knows that it’s the question on everyone’s mind, but he has the
boldness to ask it. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve all probably asked some
version of that question at some point in our lives.
Jesus,
being the masterful and wise teacher that he was, knew how to answer a question
with a question. He responds by saying “what do 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. What more do you
need to know?” Jesus, of course, knows his Scripture, and is drawing on today’s
reading from Isaiah 35, which spoke to the hope of Israel, saying “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.”
In
answering the question in such a rhetorical fashion, Jesus calls the question
itself into question. He resists the simple answer and instead poses the
question back to John- “what do you think?” And it’s a question that each of us
needs to consider this Advent. Is Jesus the one who is to come, or are we
waiting for another? Jesus is restating the declaration posed in Joshua 24:15- “choose
this day whom you will serve.”
And so
I’ll again ask the question that I began with- what are you waiting for? What
is it that that you expect out of Jesus, of God, of the Messiah? What is that
you expect attending church to do? What is prayer all about? When you give your
money to charity, what do you expect to happen? What do you hope for? What do
you yearn for? What do you want more than anything in the world? And is Jesus
the answer to those questions?
Jesus
then starts asking the questions. People have come out to the middle of the
desert to find John the Baptist. And Jesus asks them “what are you waiting for?”
“Why in God’s name did you walk for 25 miles from Jerusalem out to the Jordan
River to be baptized by John? What were you hoping to find? Was it a reed
shaken by the wind?” Reeds could be found on the coins minted by Herod Antipas.
By suggesting that the reeds were being blown to and fro in the wind is to
suggest that Herod was simply a puppet being controlled by Rome. Did they walk
all that way to see some sort of government power? Do you think those in power
are going to worry about anything other than their own interests? Of course
not.
“Did
you come out here to find someone dressed in soft robes? Of course you didn’t,
those people are found in the palaces where you came from. You know John wears
camel hair and eats locusts and honey. Did you think you’d come out here and
find riches? Of course not.”
Jesus
says they came all that way to find a prophet, and they not only found one, but
more than that, they found a messenger of the kingdom. And how did they know
that God’s reign was coming? Well, as Jesus says, the blind received sight, the
poor received good news, and the dead are raised.
But
you and I can look around and are left to wonder, “is this really what we are
waiting for?” We have politicians that seem to have misheard Jesus to say “blessed
are the deserving poor” or “blessed are the legally documented poor.” We live
in a society in which the rich receive far more than the poor. Of the gains in
wealth in America since 2009, 95% have gone to the top 1% and in 2012, the top
10% of earners took home over 50% of the income, which is highest rate ever.
Minorities are incarcerated at rates higher than whites. Our culture is
obsessed with movies about zombies, vampires, and other stories about the “undead”
as a way of suppressing our fears of our own impending deaths. If you look
around, it’s easy to wonder, like John, if perhaps we’re waiting for someone
else to come along and solve these problems. John was captive in jail, with
little hope for escape. It seems that we, too, are stuck in a self-made jail of
materialism, selfishness, prejudice, economic inequality, never ending military
occupations, political ineffectiveness, global warming, and despair. Is this
really what we’re waiting for? Surely there has to be another to save us from
ourselves, from this mess that we’ve created.
Let’s
turn to today’s epistle reading from James. He delivers a good message to us
for Advent saying, “Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the
Lord.” Have you ever wondered why we say that “patience is a virtue?” What is
so virtuous about waiting? And why is it so hard to do? It’s especially
difficult for us moderns who are used to things being instant. We have meals
that can go from freezer to table in 5 minutes via the microwave. Through
smartphones we can get our emails and phone calls instantly, regardless of
where we are. Twitter gives us news as it is happening. We really don’t like to
wait for anything.
The
importance of patient waiting is found in the example that James gives us, that
of a farmer waiting for the crop. Even if you’re not quite a farmer, but
perhaps just a gardener, you can understand the point. Do you put the seed in the
ground and then get impatient a week later when there aren’t tomatoes growing
on the vine? The reason why this is such a good metaphor is that the farmer doesn’t
simply put the seed in the ground and wait for it to grow. Instead, there is a
lot of work that goes into it. Farmers don’t know what the meaning of a “day
off” is. The herd needs to be fed and tended, the vegetables need to be weeded
and watered. And the same is true for those of us who are waiting for justice,
who are waiting for the coming of the Lord; there is work to do.
Just
as Christmas morning doesn’t happen all by itself, it takes work to get there.
Presents don’t just magically appear; someone has to wrap them and put them
there. And in the same way, peace and reconciliation aren’t going to just show
up on our doorstep on Christmas morning because we have hoped and waited for them.
As I suggested in the my sermon in the first week of Advent, perhaps we are
already in the midst of what we are waiting for. What if we’re waiting for something
that’s already here, but we just haven’t noticed it?
There
is a great word play with the word “wait” in Spanish. It might exist in other
Romance languages, but I know Spanish, so we’ll go with that one. The word “wait”
in Spanish is “esperar,” which also means “to hope.” There is no linguistic
difference between waiting for something and hoping for something. What you
wait for is what you yearn for. And it is very closely related to the word “espirar,”
which means “to breathe.” Living and breathing is almost the same as hoping and
waiting.
So
perhaps instead of asking the question “what are you waiting for?” we should
ask ourselves “what are you breathing for?” Why do you get out of bed in the morning?
What seeds are you planting and tending?
I’d
also like to point out that Jesus doesn’t chastise John for his seemingly despairing
and doubting question. He says “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no
one has arisen greater than John the Baptist.” There is nothing wrong with not
being sure of what you’re waiting for, nothing wrong with having doubt from
time to time. There’s a lot of heresy that you’re hear in mainstream culture
that will tell you that blessings come from strong faith and bad things come
from doubt. Jesus’ statement about John the Baptist should put that to rest. Doubt
happens. And the way out of doubt is to keep working, keep tending to your
hopes.
As we
inch closer and closer to Christmas, John the Baptist invites us to consider
what is that we’re waiting for. Instead of simply gazing into the future,
waiting for things to change, James urges us to live by working toward that
which we hope for. As our Collect today prays, “Stir up your power, O Lord, and
with great might come among us.” Stir us up to do the work of your kingdom.
Help us to wait and work with you. But sometimes it just gets hard to wait. It
happened to John the Baptist who went from enthusiastically proclaiming Jesus to
doubting him, and it’s okay when it happens to us. The great preacher Thomas
Long has remarked that “it’s impossible to prove the promises of God ahead of
time; but if we live them, they’ll be true every one of them.”
This
Advent, may we spend some time reflecting on what it is that we’re hoping and
waiting for. May God stir us up to work towards what we hope for with each
breath that we take. And may we find grace and salvation in God’s promises,
which are unfolding in our very midst. Amen.
