Are you the one who is to come?

Third Sunday of Advent, Year A 

December 11, 2016

Richard Smith

When John the Baptist had announced the coming of God’s kingdom and proclaimed Jesus as God’s anointed, he expected the world to change.

But nothing seemed to change; in fact, things had gotten worse. Rome continued its oppressive occupation of their lands, and religious leaders continued their policies of appeasement while getting rich off of their own people. Crowds no longer listened to John's powerful call for change at the Jordan River. Now, John was in prison, and, in fact, whether he knew it or not, on death row.

So, from the brink of despair for himself and the people he loved, John sends his disciple to ask Jesus, a question: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

We had desperately hoped you might be, but now we’re not so sure.

Words of anxiety and quiet desperation…

Words echoed in our own hearts and our own world today.

I recall talking to an old woman in a nursing home years ago. She knew her death was not far off. She said, “You know, I’ve been a believer all my life. Always had a deep faith in God. But now my time is getting close, and, well, I just can’t help but wonder…”

Quiet desperation about the very meaning of her own life.

And the other night I was at a meeting in the neighborhood. The mother of Mario Woods was there. Mario was the young man killed by police a year ago in the Bayview. At that meeting, his mother, with tears in her eyes, was pleading with the District Attorney for justice in her son’s case. She told him,

There are days I say, "I had a son. I had a baby son." I have to say his name out loud. He used to be here. And he mattered.
There are so many mothers you have to pray for, so many sleepless nights, so many dragging themselves out of bed.

Quiet desperation.

Just after the long night of the last election, the rapper Macklemore wrote these lyrics:

Mad world, mad world, that's what the TV said
Imagine tryna keep your head
While your daughter sleeps in bed
And when she wakes up, will the world be the same?
Will my girl be afraid in the home of the brave?
See I hope, I hope, that it's gon' be alright
But what a hell of a night.

Quiet desperation.

And when Jesus hears John’s question of quiet desperation--“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”--he does not answer him directly. Instead, he points to what he’s doing, as if to say, "Here's what I do. You can decide for yourself whether I am the one you're waiting for."

What Jesus is doing is restoring things that were missing.

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.

What he’s doing in his own ministry is playing out what the prophet Isaiah had dreamed in today’s first reading. It’s a dream of restoration: That which was missing is found: sight, mobility, hearing, life, the sparkle in one’s eyes.

It’s a longing deep inside our fragile human hearts--this desire to be restored to wholeness.

Because in this world we lose things: sometimes we lose our car keys or cell phones, sometimes it’s a job or a dear friend; aging bodies can lose their looks and their lustiness; mothers can lose their sons.

And sometimes just to get along in the world we can lose parts of ourselves. The poet Robert Bly personally describes these lost parts of ourselves as “a long bag we drag behind us.”

When we were one or two years old we had what we might call a 360-degree personality...but one day we noticed that our parents didn’t like certain parts...They said things like: “Can’t you be still?” Or “It isn’t nice to try and kill your brother.” Behind us we have an invisible bag, and the part of us our parents don’t like, we, to keep our parents’ love, put in the bag. By the time we go to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say: “Good children don’t get angry over such little things.” So we take our anger and put it in the bag. By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Wisconsin, we were known as “the nice Bly boys.” Our bags were already a mile long.

Of course, these lost parts of ourselves do not stay in the bag forever. Eventually they demand to be heard and integrated in a more life-giving way. The longing to be whole again runs very deep in us and must have its say.

This restored wholeness--whether the finding of lost keys or a lost son, or a society restored to its own best values after a divisive and corrupt election, or a self fully alive and at peace with itself--this wholeness, the ancient prophet tells us, is our future; it is our destiny, what God made us for.

This dream of restoration is what we are to hold onto in these Advent days.

And this future we dream of is already on the way. In fact, it already shapes how we are right now.

We know from psychologists how the past shapes our present. Past experiences, pleasures, traumas, even from the time we’re still in our mothers’ wombs, shape who we have become and how we understand and respond to our present moment.

But our present is shaped not only by our past but also by our future. The future we perceive shapes how we stand and what we do right now.

Here’s a metaphor. Pretend I’m about to toss you an orange. Imagine how you stand physically, how you hold your hands in order to catch it. Now imagine I’m tossing you a dish towel. How do you stand, how do you hold your hands to catch it? How about if I throw you a chair?

You get the point. The way we stand, our posture and what we do is shaped by what we see coming toward us.

Similarly, how we live our lives right now, what we do, how we spend our time and energy is shaped by the future we perceive coming toward us.

If, for example, you imagine with George Orwell that “the future is a boot stamping on a human face -- forever”, this will shape how you are in the present--perhaps causing you to cower, or defiantly clench your fist and your jaws, or anxiously hoard what little you have in a universe that you perceive to be brutal and cruel.

But if, with the ancient prophet and with Jesus, you imagine the future to be a world restored, where broken relationships are healed, where our fragmented selves and world are made whole again, then this vision will likewise shape how you are now.

• If in the world to come there will be no more tears, then we wipe the tears from each other’s eyes now.
• If in the world to come, there will be no more wars, no more violence, then we let the weapons fall from our hands now.
• If in the world to come, everyone will be welcomed, with enough to eat, a safe place to sleep, then we resist the building of walls and the violence against people of color and of other religions, and we throw open our doors to welcome the homeless and immigrants, trans people and Muslims.

This prophetic dream of restoration has work for us to do right now. It asks us to resist going numb when the world within or beyond us is falling apart and fragmented.

In the height of despair, in the deepest darkness, this ancient prophetic dream calls us to open our hearts, our eyes, our hands, to engage the world when it breaks our hearts. This dream, passed to us from our spiritual ancestors and now part of our spiritual DNA, this dream goes with us, step by step, providing the sustenance we most need.

This is the dream that can, if we let it, carry us through these harsh, wintry Advent days.

Let me close with a poem by Jan Richardson.

So may we know
the hope
that is not just
for someday
but for this day—
here, now,
in this moment
that opens to us:

hope not made
of wishes
but of substance,

hope made of sinew
and muscle
and bone,

hope that has breath
and a beating heart,

hope that will not
keep quiet
and be polite,

hope that knows
how to holler
when it is called for,

hope that knows
how to sing
when there seems
little cause,

hope that raises us
from the dead—

not someday
but this day,
every day,
again and
again and
again.