O come, O come Emmanuel. Amen.
“Are
you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” That’s the
question, isn’t it? Is Jesus the one in whom the hopes and dreams of all the
years find their fulfillment? Is Jesus the Messiah, God Incarnate? Or is Jesus
only a prophet and wise teacher? Because if Jesus is the one whom history has
been waiting for, then there are huge implications for our lives and our faith.
But if we’re supposed to be waiting for another, well, I’m probably out of a
job.
This
Advent, I’ve been preaching a sermon series on the concept of “preparation.” On
the first Sunday of Advent, we considered the question “how do we prepare.” I
offered for your consideration that we prepare by having meaningful and
dignifying relationships with God and our neighbors. Last Sunday, we wrestled
with the question “what are we preparing for.” I said that what we prepare for
is the fullness of the Kingdom of Heaven, which has already come near to us.
Today, we’ll consider the obstacles to being prepared.
John
the Baptist tells his disciples to go to Jesus and ask “Are you the one who is
to come, or are we to wait for another?” You’ll recall that last Sunday’s
gospel text ended with John saying about Jesus “His winnowing fork is in his
hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the
granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” That was back in
chapter 3; today we’re in chapter 11. Between these two passages, Jesus has
delivered the Sermon on the Mount, healed a paralytic and a hemorrhaging woman,
ate dinner with tax collectors, and sent out the disciples two by two to heal
the sick.
I
know that today we don’t like to mix religion and politics, but John’s question
really is rooted in that relationship between faith and politics. John, like
many others, was expecting a Messiah, not a faith healer. Israel was under the
thumb of Rome and the Emperor. The Messiah was supposed to be a savior who
would liberate Israel from Rome, just as Israel had been liberated from
captivity in Babylon, and from slavery in Egypt. People perhaps thought it was
nice for the sick to be healed, and that the lessons from the Sermon on the
Mount were good, but it was reasonable for people to start wondering “So, when
does the overthrowing of Rome start? When does this get more political?” In
short, patience was waning.
Patience
is hard, isn’t it? We talked about this last Sunday in the adult Sunday School
class. Patience is the heart of wisdom. Think about it, every person that we’d
describe as “wise” is deliberate and unrushed. We all instinctively respect
someone who, when asked a difficult question, says “Let me think about that”
instead of spouting off a quick response. But when we expect results, when we
have deadlines, when we are stressed, we like to get things done. Ours is an
over-scheduled, results-driven, and over-stressed culture. So there isn’t much
room for patience. And so we might find ourselves asking a similar question –
“Uh, Jesus, I thought the wolves are supposed to be lying down the lambs? When
are you going to get on that?”
It’s
easy to misunderstand what patience is really all about. Patience is not
passivity or inaction. Rather, think of patience in the way that a farmer
might. Each spring, they plant seeds and they have no choice but to be patient
in order to harvest their crops. You can’t pick a tomato until it’s ready. But
that doesn’t mean that you are powerless or passive as you patiently wait for
the crops to arrive. You weed, you water, you prune. If it seems to you that things
aren’t moving along at the pace you’d like, you might try doing the holy work
of active patience.
Perhaps
another challenge to our preparation is that a little reassurance is needed. We
like to know that we’re making the right choice. Is this the right person to
marry? Is this the right school for me to attend? Is this the right job to
take? Is this the right medicine to try? Is this the right time to retire? Is
this the right house to buy? Don’t we all pray from time to time “God, please
give me a sign”? If you’re going to follow Christ, which isn’t an easy thing to
do, it’s nice to have some reassurance that it’s a good decision. If you’re
going to give money that you could spend on a vacation to the church, if you’re
going to spend Sunday mornings here instead of doing something else, if you’re
going to hold yourself to the higher bar of Christian morals instead of being
inwardly-focused, well, it’s nice to know that you’ve made the right choice. For
John, as he sits in prison, a little reassurance would go a long way. So we
might read that question as a form of “give me a sign.”
Or
maybe that question, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for
another?,” is rooted in the fact that Jesus isn’t at all what we expected. No
one expected the Messiah to grow up in Nazareth, no one expected him to put so
much emphasis on the poor and the outcast, no one expected him to die on the
Cross, no one expected that Rome would sack Jerusalem and destroy the Temple.
In today’s reading from Isaiah, the prophet writes “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 traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.” But
it seems that we do go astray. God’s highway to peace and righteousness isn’t
one that is always traveled.
Most of us would rather
like a Messiah that fixes things that are “out there.” We’d love cancer to be
cured, for wildfires to be put out, for wars to cease. That’s the Messiah we
hope for. Jesus though doesn’t seem to be as interested in those changes as he is
in changing us. He’s a Messiah who wants the poor to be lifted out of poverty,
the sick to be nurtured, those who live in fear and the shadow of death to find
hope. That means that you and I need to be changed, and we don’t like to be
changed. We’d prefer to be left alone to live our lives happily ever after. So
maybe we ask “Is this the version of Jesus that I’ll follow, or can I find a
church that focuses more on prosperity and blessings instead of one that pays
attention to Jesus?”
To be clear, we don’t
know why John asked the question. Was it impatience, the need for reassurance,
the desire for someone to fix our problems? We don’t know, but what we do know
is that those are all aspects of our faith that we struggle with as we seek to
prepare ourselves in Advent for Christ’s coming.
And what is Jesus’
response to the question? “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.” As he often
does, Jesus frustrates our desire for simple and clear answers. The response is
essentially, “what do you think?” And so, “what do you think?” What do you hear
and see? If someone asks you why you come to church or why you believe in God,
what would you say?
As we’re approaching the
end of the calendar year, lots of lists and summaries of 2016 are coming out.
One that has gotten lot of attention is the Oxford Dictionary’s “Word of the
Year” – “post-truth,” which is defined as “circumstances in which objective facts
are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotional and
personal belief.”
Columnist David Ignatius
has said that facts have been overwhelmed by propaganda, and you may have heard
some people say “You have your facts and I have mine.” A recent study from
Stanford University found that 82% of middle school, high school, and college
students had difficulty distinguishing between a legitimate news story and an
advertisement or between a reliable source and an unreliable source. And if
students struggle with this, then it’s likely that parents and teachers who
instruct students have the same struggle. Now, of course, this is nothing new.
George Orwell’s novel 1984, which was
published in 1949, spoke about this. Our recent election was only out of the
ordinary in that “post-truth” ideas spread faster thanks to social media, but
the concept of “post-truth” has been around for a while.
There are two things that
need to be said about this. The first is that it is something that we, as
people of faith, have to struggle with. I know that you’re tired of politics
invading every aspect of our lives. You can hardly talk to a neighbor, listen
to the radio, watch television, or open your mailbox without running into
partisan politics. I get it, I’m with you in that exhaustion. And as tempting
as it might be to say that our faith is a “politics-free zone,” that simply
isn’t a luxury that we get as followers of Jesus.
As I mentioned, people
wanted Jesus to be political, and he was, just not in the way that people
expected. There is hardly a chapter in the Bible that isn’t speaking to a
political reality. Jesus was tried and convicted as an enemy of the state. The
Gospel has always been political in nature. A faith that cannot speak hope and
reconciliation into even the most partisan of situations is a faith that will
melt away faster the Frosty the Snowman. Furthermore, silence sometimes speaks
louder than words. Retreat is not an option.
As a preacher, if I’m
going to be faithful to the Gospel, there will always be a political dimension
to preaching. “Politics” is simply a word that means “affairs of the city.”
Politics is about our communal life, and so politics is about how we live together,
which really is at the heart of the Gospel. That being said, we’re still tired
of politics, aren’t we? Politics is a bit like garlic when it comes to
preaching – it should be there in any good meal, but too much is bitter and
off-putting. The problem isn’t with how much politics comes up in church, the
problem is that we’re inundated with politics everywhere else. It’d be like
eating a garlic roll with a roasted garlic spread and then being served garlic
chicken for the entrée. By the time the main course rolls around, you’re tired
of garlic and might even blame the chef for using too much garlic. It could be
that the chicken has the right amount of garlic, but there’s just too much
garlic everywhere else. That’s the analogy of what’s going on with politics. It’s
not that there shouldn’t be politics in the church, it’s that there’s too much
politics everywhere else. And the Church needs to have a voice in our
understanding of politics – a reconciling and unifying voice of hope. That’s
what I seek to offer in my preaching.
That being said, I know
that “post-truth” has become a political topic over the past few weeks. But as
people of faith, we absolutely need to be worried about the idea of
“post-truth.” This is the second point to make. You’ve probably noticed that
here at St. Luke’s we don’t have a product to offer you. There’s no new version
coming out this year, no software upgrades to download and install. What we
have is Jesus, who once said “I am the truth.” The philosophical acceptance
that there is no such thing as objective Truth is one that undermines our
faith.
If it is acceptable to
say that there is no such thing as Truth then we are in serious trouble, both
as a Church and as individuals. If we accept the “post-truth” position, then
the concept of God coming to us in Jesus goes out the window, as does the
Nicene Creed and the Resurrection and God’s call to love, justice, and mercy.
Now, this isn’t a claim that Christianity is the only valid religion out there,
but without a concept of truth then Christianity loses any validity that we
might think that it has. And so fake news is not an innocuous and insignificant
thing, as it threatens the very things that we hold dear.
If our children cannot
tell the difference between real news and fake news, if facts turn into
opinions, how will they ever respond to Jesus? Jesus asks what we hear and see.
God’s love is not an opinion. The God-given dignity of every human being is not
up for debate. Our Christian hope is not subject to vote. One of my favorite
prayers to use before starting a sermon comes from Phillips Brooks – “Almighty
God, guide us to seek the Truth: come whence it may, cost what it will, lead
where it might.” That is a bold prayer, as it might show us things that we had
hoped not to see, it might take us places that we’d rather not go, it might
make us ask the question “Is Jesus the one we’ve been waiting for, or are we to
wait for another?” And yet, it is a prayer that takes us into the very heart of
God.
There are certainly
challenges to being prepared – we suffer from impatience, from presumptions
that distract us, from fears and doubts that need to be reassured. The whole
point of Advent is to prepare us for the great claim of our faith, in the words
from the beginning of John: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and
we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and
truth.”
Is Jesus the one who is
to come, or are we to wait for another? What Truth do you hear? What Truth do
you see? What Truth do you live your life by?
