On this wonderful Sunday we gather in anticipation of so very much goodness.
As you came into the sanctuary this morning, did you wonder what the Advent Wreath would look like this week? What creativity of plants and color, word and music, would open the biblical story to us anew?
What wonderful expectations energize us! We enter this sanctuary to have hearts and minds, hands and mouths, opened to God’s promised presence. For which we continue to wait and hope.
In the children’s program later this morning the work of dedicated grown-ups and our creative and courageous kids will shine. The ancient story of God’s promise once embodied for us in a child is embodied for us again in our own children and those who love them. It is good.
And we have Isaiah’s picture of the world which God will restore. Exiles return joyfully to their homes, no longer to war-torn lands, but a paradise of plenty and beauty. It’s full-on restoration of community with the earth and each other. And it is good.
As an extra helping of goodness in this overfull season, we get a second visit with the bold and determined John the Baptizer and his story. “The kingdom of God is at hand,” he’s been declaring throughout Galilee. The promised restoration is upon us, among us already. And people had come in droves to hear and look toward a new future. It sounded good.
Only…this morning, things are not looking so good for John. He’s in a jail cell where he’d been imprisoned by the local politicians since the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. They got him out of the way, this rabble-rousing truth teller who revved up the people to look for another kind of realm, a very different authority. And he’s been sitting there. Waiting ever since.
Today, we see John not just waiting, but wondering….wondering. His own followers kept him in the loop about what Jesus had been up to in Galilee. And it wasn’t quite what John had been expecting. Where was the transformation, the empowerment of God’s people
Where the freedom from being over-taxed colonists
What about being be a free people, free to worship?
How much good was Jesus doing, healing folks and feeding them only to send them back into their insecure, threatened lives? Oh, no. no. no. More was needed for John. Good lives and bad ones had to be brought to light, counted. The wicked needed to be cast into unquenchable fire. A winnowing fork was needed.
Instead there John was, in a grimy cell while all the powers of corruption, manipulation, and fear-mongering were still in charge.
And so he asks.
“Are you the one who is to come or should we wait for another?”
Not an idle question or a stupid one.
It was deeply embedded in John’s faith was a caveat: trust only the prophets whose words “come true.” When what they prophesied turned out to be true in real time and real lives. Now, John trusted the words of the prophet Malachi. He was looking for justice. For God’s peace to be established, not the emperor’s. he wanted a winnowing fork and fire to clean things up.
And it wasn’t happening.
Bishop Budde spoke in Minneapolis a week ago. You may remember her. She is the preacher who begged Donald Trump for mercy for the people he had been elected to serve. Here she talked about courage and offered a word of hope and call. “Societies come back,” she said, “when people offer a counter-narrative that becomes compelling. We have to have a constructive narrative, forgive people, and seek to understand. “
This is what Jesus does for John the Baptist. And for us. A different narrative. Jesus calls John to a different image of the Coming one.
Jesus has word for word the same message as John, “Change your roadmap, your orientation. The kingdom of heaven, God’s community, is at hand.” The same words. But then Jesus gives evidence of that kingdom come and still arriving. A place where all God’s own are valued, cared for, included in community. All restored. The promises from Isaiah kept. Its all about God’s faithfulness to the creation that God called good. A grass revolution. For everyone.
The crowds following Jesus called it good.
But its hard, hard, hard to live into a new paradigm that is mostly hidden. Where God with us seems powerless to unseat the powers that be.
We don’t know if John changes his mind about Jesus.
What signs would have convinced him?
Last Sunday as I drove to church, the moon was brilliant in the sky, some pink on the eastern horizon and it was just beautiful. At the very same time, radio news laid out a terrible scenario of civil war in Sudan. If ever there was a world opposite to Isaiah’s words, different from what was happening during Jesus’ ministry in Galilee – it would be in Sudan. Or Providence Rhode island. Or bondi Beach. Or so many other places we could name.
And, friends, I sat, perhaps much as John the baptizer did, wondering, are you the One who is to come, or should we wait for another?
Or give up altogether?
I say this on this joyful morning because I am sure that I am not alone in having doubts about God’s coming again. The pain of the world intrudes and sometimes overwhelms our hope. As perhaps it should.
We hear Isaiah’s dream again,
Peace will pervade more than forest and field;
God will transfigure the Violence concecealed
deep in the heart and in systems of gain,
ripe for the judgement the Lord will ordain.[1]
A dream we have so long waited to see come true.
And still we come. We come to ask in our hearts, our prayers, our hymns, John’s question:
“Are you the one who is to come? “ Thanks be for a Holy scripture that dares to show us doubts and confusion. Even among the faithful. Even among those imprisoned for speaking the truth. We need hope that lives in days of goodness and days of sorry. Scripture puts us in good company. We are NOT alone, not in days of goodness and beauty. Not in times of grief and doubt.
On a blessed day, we may even be reminded, as John was, of the healing work of God’s beloved. Of the hospitals and colleges built through the years. Of the music made in every land and the art from praise, from every land. Of backpacks filled right here. Warm quilts made right here. Products recycled, prisoners tended, right here.
And, it is good.
We humans, and probably most creatures have evolved by paying greater attention to bad news, to threats of danger. We are hard-wired to remember experiences of fear and anxiety.
Yet, here we remember also, that it is good. Right alongside what goes wrong, often from within our grief, the Holy Spirit is moving and calling and opening us to change the narrative with which we are bombarded, the narrative of loneliness that keeps us in prison. To catch the courage that Bishop Budde says is contagious and communal. To trust that Jesus comes among us with a narrative in other words from the prophet Malachi. “With healing in his wings.” Thanks be to God.
[1] From The Dream Isaiah Saw, Glenn L. Rudolph, 2001.