PAST SERMONS
Sermon of December 16, 2007 by The Rev. Rosalee Glass
St. Thomas” Episcopal Church, Camden, Maine
Third Sunday of Advent, December 16, 2007
Scripture references: Isaiah 35:1-10, Matthew 11:2-11
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Sermon by Rosalee T. Glass
“O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Here at St. Thomas’ 9:30 service, we’re singing this hymn, two verses each week during Advent, as we look forward to Christ’s coming at Christmas. Every week the words of the refrain are the same. They resound, “Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel!” Emmanuel means “God is with us.” What does this promise of God’s presence mean to each of us? How do we experience God’s kingdom in the world? When Jesus Christ came to usher in God’s kingdom, there were plenty of questions about who he was and what the kingdom of heaven he spoke of was about.
For instance, think about John the Baptist’s confusion. Last week’s Gospel story had John in the wilderness preaching the coming of the kingdom of heaven. He gave apocalyptic predictions of God’s coming into the world bringing righteousness, with wrath and fiery judgment against evil-doers. He said that the leader that Israel had awaited for centuries, One more powerful than he, would usher in Israel’s this salvation from oppression and the reign of good over evil. He thought that Jesus was to be the One.
To be ready for the imminent coming of the kingdom of heaven, John called for Jews to repent of all transgressions according to the laws in Scripture, God’s Word to God’s people. Then their purification was made complete by their baptism in the Jordan River. The purified would then be ready to receive the kingdom of heaven that was coming near. Unfortunately, John’s condemnation of the corruption of people in high places, especially of King Herod Antipas landed him in prison.
And so, in today’s Gospel we hear of John the Baptist languishing in his prison cell while Jesus’ ministry was underway in Galilee. There is poor John shut up with nothing but second-hand reports about Jesus’ activities. But whatever he heard must have dismayed him. The apocalyptic writings of that time suggest that the arrival of God’s Messiah and reign of justice would be accompanied by cataclysmic events, judgment, and retribution for the Roman overlords and the Jewish collaborators. What John heard about what Jesus was accomplishing wouldn’t have squared with those expectations.
He would probably have heard that Jesus was keeping company with sinners, tax-collectors, Gentiles, and women. Many were disreputable or unclean by Jewish standards. Then how could this man be Israel’s Messiah? Didn’t the words of the prophet Isaiah say that the Holy Way was only for the clean? And though Jesus seemed to have miraculous powers, but he wasn’t exercising them to make the hoped-for sweeping changes. John’s second thoughts about Jesus may have made him question his own judgment and prophetic vocation.
John’s doubt and anguish in this situation is something most of us can identify with. There are times when we, like John, set ourselves on a course that we are sure is the right one. Then things happen that throw everything we have believed about it into doubt. Often this disillusionment happens when we are so wedded to one particular course that we stop looking and listening for anything else. When we begin to suspect that something we have believed in passionately may be limited or flawed, we might be well-advised to do as John the Baptist did and attempt to seek the truth.
So the anxious John the Baptist sends his own disciples to Jesus to ask him face to face whether he is the Messiah. As we see over and over in the Gospels, Jesus answers the questions people have, not the way they expect, but in ways that deflect their thinking in the direction he wants them to go. Jesus knows what is in John’s heart, cares that John be assured of the truth about who he, Jesus, is, and about the nature of the Kingdom of heaven he is bringing into the world. He also understands the kind of verification that would comfort John: that these works of Jesus were the fulfillments of God’s word in Scripture. Without John’s seeing anything for himself, the best way for John to have this assurance would be for John’s disciples to be witnesses to Jesus’ works of salvation and to tell John about them. So Jesus says to John’s disciples
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.
These healing acts of Jesus had been predicted in the oracles of God given to the prophet Isaiah. Some were in our Isaiah reading today:
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.
Reviving the dead and curing leprosy were miracles that had been performed by the prophet, Elisha. Remember in the Old Testament how Elisha brought the widow’s son back to life and how cures the leprosy of Naaman, the Syrian.
Miracles of Jesus similar to those of Elisha that would be reported back to John the Baptist by his disciples would have confirmed Jesus’ legitimacy as the Holy One sent by God to save. John had been right. Jesus was the Holy One, but John missed the full truth about Jesus. He had been focusing on Scripture’s dramatic apocalyptic predictions, not the promises in Scripture to be fulfilled that were about God’s love and mercy.
With Jesus, there was something new. In Hebrew Scripture, God’s compassion was framed most often in terms of comforting and saving a suffering nation, the people of Israel. But with Jesus, the kingdom of God’s love was breaking into the world, not to save a nation, but to save each person according to their need and their faith. This personalized healing through an incarnate divine presence was not what John and the earlier prophets were part of. In that sense, Jesus was right in saying that John, though as great as the greatest man ever born, was less than the least in this new Kingdom of heaven.
How personal and intimate the reality of Emmanuel, was! Jesus’ healing and transforming presence didn’t change the whole world suddenly and violently. The kingdom of heaven, “God with us,” was directly-experienced love and mercy, which was to spread out from Jesus infinitely from person to person, soul to soul, forever uniting us and to one another and to God. It was and is a slow process, but a sure and true one.
And that’s where we are now. Or are we? Let’s hope that we’re not, as John was, locked in prison with our doubts, unable to say not only that Emmanuel shall come to us, but that Emmanuel has come to us, and never will leave. We each have our own sense of God’s presence, and that’s a miracle too, isn’t it? For me “God is with us” is summed up in the words of St. Patrick’s Breastplate:
Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me. Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in hearts of friend and stranger. AMEN