Another
Matthew 11:2-11
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I hope you’ll forgive me if I have Star Wars on the brain. The movie that got it all started back in 1977 came out when I was a kid and was very much a part of my growing up. I had the action figures. I had a Millennium Falcon and a Death Star. I had arguments with my friends on the school bus about whether Darth Vader was really Luke’s father, or whether he was just trying to trick him. We were invested. And now the final movie in the 9-chapter cycle is set to release this week. So, when I looked at this morning’s gospel reading and it opened with the line, “When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing,” I thought, “this is not the Baptist you’re looking for.” That’s because if Advent can be counted on for anything it’s two things: conversations about Christmas carols, and John the Baptist. I’m not touching that first one, but John. Well, John is like the antidote to an overdose of Christmas spirit. John is the fiery prophet living on bugs and honey out in the desert, preparing the way of the Lord. Not the Lord who arrives as an eight-pound, six-ounce tiny baby in his golden fleece diaper, but the fully grown man from Nazareth who shows up at the river Jordan to receive John’s baptism.
That’s the scene that we’re most often treated to sometime in the season of Advent. John, the firebrand standing waist deep in the water offering a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. John, the prophet who represents the fulfillment of Isaiah’s words regarding the voice crying out in the wilderness, to make straight the way of the Lord. In so doing, John casts a vision of the one to come as having a winnowing fork in his hand to separate the wheat from the chaff; burning the chaff in a baptism of unquenchable fire. John had all the theatrics and rhetoric to attract a crowd, and he did. All manner of people came out to the wilderness to see him, to hear him, and to walk down into the river to be baptized.
But it’s one thing to call tax collectors and prostitutes, and all kinds of common people to repentance. It something else altogether to aim those words at a person with authority, a person with power, a person who can have you thrown in prison to shut you up so that won’t keep bringing up the fact he shouldn’t be openly carrying on with his own brother’s wife. One moment John is out in the open, standing before crowds of people pointing the way to the one who is to come, and the next he finds himself in prison. It’s quite a twist of fate for someone who thought he was inaugurating more than a ministry, but a movement; the beginning of God’s great reordering of the world in which the powers were put on notice. John finds himself where a lot of us find ourselves this time of year. John isn’t just in prison. John finds himself in the dark. Locked away, where he can’t see what is going on.
That’s the irony of this season that we work hard to make so festive. As our half of the planet tilts away from the sun, the amount of daylight continues to diminish. So, we put up lights. Not bright enough stave off the night, but enough to lighten the darkness. Not bright enough to see by, usually; just enough that we won’t worry so much about what we cannot see.
All John has in the dark is what he has heard about Jesus. And what he’s heard doesn’t really sound like the righteous judgment that he’d announced at the Jordan. It doesn’t sound like unquenchable fire, or the axe laid at the root of the tree that bears no fruit. No, instead Jesus has been saying things like, I am sending you out like sheep in the midst of wolves,” and, “Do not fear those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.” John is in jail, put there by a no-good king who is in serious need of winnowing and Jesus is telling people not to fear someone who can kill you. That’s easy to say when you aren’t the one in a prison cell facing your own death. John is running out of time. For the life of him, John cannot see what Jesus is doing. What are you waiting for already, Jesus? Get to the threshing!
I wonder if it didn’t all start to feel like a mistake. Maybe not the bugs and honey, or even the call to repentance. But maybe he began to think that he’d gone too far, calling Jesus, “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” Maybe he had oversold him. Maybe he had been wrong about the whole thing. Are you the one to come, he asks, or are we to wait for another?
This, of course, calls to mind the other scene, much debated on the school bus. If you’ve seen it, you might remember in the Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back, that the hero, Luke Skywalker travels to the remote planet Degoba to train with the Jedi master, Yoda. But in the middle of his training, Luke sees a vision of his friends in peril. He decides he has to go, cut his training short, and help his friends. Master Yoda cautions him against it, telling him that if he leaves now, he’ll never complete his training to become a Jedi knight. As the rockets of Luke’s departing space craft light up the night, Yoda converses with the ghostly apparition of the slain Jedi, Obi Wan Kenobi. “That boy is our last hope,” says Obi Wan. “No,” replies Yoda, “there is another.”
Because that’s what we do when the hopes we had are dashed. We started looking to see if there isn’t a door number two, if we won’t find what we’re looking for somewhere else. As I’ve quoted before, the writer Anne Lamott has observed that, “expectations are resentments under construction.” What John hears about Jesus is nothing like what he expected. This wasn’t the Messiah he was looking for.
This time of year, expectation can fill us with hope, or it can lead to despair. We can spend the darkening days of December with an active expectancy of something undefined yet somehow imbued with the promise of God’s goodness, or we can wait for the kind of Christmas that we wish for. You know the one. It looks like something out of Norman Rockwell, and it is just so. It is the way things are supposed to be, the perfect Christmas, where everyone you send a Christmas card to sends one to you, the eggnog tastes just right as you sit next to the fire contentedly admiring the tree adorned with lights and ornaments and a full spread of presents. Everyone gets what they wanted, and there isn’t a word of contention, or politics to be heard. But what happens when that picture doesn’t materialize, when you can’t get the cards out for all the other things going on, and no matter how long you shop none of the stores seem to have what it is that you’re looking for. What happens when there is one less place setting this year and the hole that you feel inside is so much bigger than the empty chair at the table? What do you do when faced with the uncomfortable notion that Christmas may not turn out to be all that you’ve wished for. We put an awful lot of pressure on this time of year to deliver the goods. Retailers rely on those end-of-the-year receipts to keep their business afloat. Families rely on the old traditions to keep everyone from drifting too far apart, or fragmenting any further. Charities rely on the sense of good will that will fund their efforts to meet the needs that exist the remaining eleven months of the year. And everyday people seem to rely on the value of gifts to quantify relationships and say things that they may have forgotten how to say any other way, rely on holiday cheer to revive their weary souls, rely on a story they’re not even sure that they completely believe in order to make the whole production possible. That’s a lot of freight for one holiday to carry. No wonder it seems harder every year to get things moving, to crank up the holiday express. And when the whole thing bogs down, when the expectations stop us dead on the tracks, the darkness that descends can feel like a prison, and we might find ourselves asking, “Is this all there is?” “Are you the one who is to come?” Or is there another?
Jesus’ answer to John’s question redefines his expectations, and it can redefine ours as well. John is looking for the promised day of judgment, and to him that means the axe, the threshing floor, the unquenchable fire. For John the promised judgment of God is one that cleans house with words of destruction and separation. By contrast, Jesus’ answer speaks of the blind receiving sight, the lame walking, lepers cleansed, the deaf regaining their hearing, the dead being raised, and the poor brought good news. It is a word of judgment that restores all that has been lost in order to make the world and all that is in it whole once more. In a holiday season in which we’re unlikely to get what we want; the good news is that what Advent offers instead is what we’ve got coming to us; the one who is coming to us.
Maybe the reason for the holiday blues that seem so prevalent isn’t that we expect too much, but that we don’t expect nearly enough. We’re waiting for Christmas carols and greeting cards meanwhile God is offering God’s own self, God’s own son, a vision of God’s future, the sound of good news, and a life made whole and new and eternal.
Listen, there are people out there (and there might be a few in here), people who are living in prisons of despair, people for whom the richness of the season only serves to highlight the poverty of their own spirit, people whose own memories betray them and call to mind all that has been lost. There are people out there who are desperate to know, “Is this all there is? Or is there something else?” Jesus’ directive for answering that question is, “Go and tell what you hear and see.” Go and tell the story, not just of shepherds and wise men and mangers and angels. That’s a good story.
But tell them what you have heard and seen in your own life. Tell them how your own eyes have been opened to new possibilities, tell of how you are learning to walk in a new way, tell of how something you thought you’d heard a thousand times suddenly made sense in a way it never had before. Go and tell the good news of being awakened to the new life in Jesus Christ, like one being raised from the dead. Go and share the joy, the happiness, the blessing to be found not in the weight of holiday expectation but in none other than the one who is to come.