Waiting For What Is

"Waiting For What Is"

Isaiah 35:1-10; Matthew 11:1-5
Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 24, 2006
Year B

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 Herod's 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, John,
clothed like prophets should be clothed, in sack cloth, John, 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 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 John 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 back 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 need 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.