Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Advent 3: December 16, 2007
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Matthew 11:2-11
When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" Jesus answered them, "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. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me."
As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: "What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written,
`See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way before you.'
Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."
My New Testament Professor, Reginald Fuller, assigned his little book entitled A Critical Introduction to the New Testament to all students taking his New Testament survey course at Virginia Seminary. It was a terse overview of each book of the New Testament with an emphasis on the many sources each author drew in the writing or compiling of his book. As busy as I was as a first-year student, I was relieved to read it, in that though I’d come to seminary with a background in literature, I was confused by the many layers and many voices in Biblical texts.
One day while I was doing my reading, I came to what I thought was an astonishing discovery. There on page 102 in the middle of a chapter on the synoptic gospels was a section entitled “Summary of the Authentic Jesus Tradition.” My heart leapt. “Finally,” I said to myself, “someone is going to tell me the truth about what’s real and what’s not real when it comes to Jesus.”
And this was the first thing that I read there:
Jesus emerged from the circles of John the Baptist. However, instead of preaching the imminence of judgment, as John had, Jesus emphasized “the more positive side of the imminence of salvation.”
I stopped, thought about it for a moment, and then read it again.
Jesus emerged from the circles of John the Baptist. However, instead of preaching the imminence of judgment, as John had, Jesus emphasized “the more positive side of the imminence of salvation.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t know this. It was just that it was said so simply, in such a matter of fact way, that for the first time it dawned on me what an outrageous and disruptive idea this was. Our messiah was all about the imminence salvation, the imminence of heath and wholeness coming to us as a gift.
It makes me feel better this morning to be reminded that this same notion was also outrageous and disruptive for John the Baptist. In our Gospel for today, perplexed at what Jesus is doing, John sends word from prison to confirm that Jesus is indeed “the Coming One,” the Messiah the Jewish people have been waiting and hoping for.
Jesus has not been behaving as John would have expected the Messiah to behave. And perhaps Jesus does not behave as we would expect the Messiah to behave either.
This last week I had more conversations with people about the previous week’s sermon than I’ve had during any other week since coming to St. Paul’s. The sermon was about wilderness in the spiritual life—the fact that our spiritual lives need wilderness experiences in order to have vitality. These wilderness experiences are often like being thrown in what William Bridges calls “the neutral zone” where the past no longer obtains and the future hasn’t appeared yet. It’s an uncomfortable and confusing place to try to live for any length of time. And, I found out last week, it’s where many of you have lived or are living.
And so this morning I’d like to explore the false messiahs some of us tend to look for when we find ourselves in the wilderness, that neutral zone where the past no longer obtains and where the future has not yet arrived. These false messiahs are the same ones that John and his followers wrestled with as they tried to wrap their minds around Jesus as messiah, as the Coming One.
The first false messiah is the uncompromising judge of the past. John the Baptist and his followers expected a messiah who would be the judge of all, coming like apocalyptic fire full of recompense to those who deserved it. In our wilderness experiences, we can get into believing that if we can just sort out the past, separating the bad from the good, assigning the blame to those who deserve it, including ourselves, that this will bring us life. It, of course, does not. .
The second false messiah is the messiah of force. John the Baptist, his followers and others expected that the Messiah would lead a political revolution that would secure a future for the Jewish people. In our wilderness experiences, we too want to marshal our forces, to mount an effort to get to the future we believe we deserve. We want to speed through the wilderness and grab the good we believe belongs to us and to others as soon as we can.
And so while it’s important to move on from the past, we find we are not ultimately helped by determining who or what was right and who or what was wrong. And while it’s important to do things that allow for a future, we find we are not helped by grabbing too much too soon as a way of relieving some of our discomfort.
Where, then, is our soul’s health to be found? How does the “Coming One,” the one who preached and enacted imminent salvation, work? What is the character of this salvation and what timeline is it on?
I think the key here is that our messiah comes to us as a gift, a gift that we neither earn nor deserve, a gift that comes to us at a ripe time or at the right time.
And so the character of our salvation is that of slow or sudden surprise: waking up one day to find that though we were blind, we can see, that though we are lame, we can walk, that though, for all the world, we thought we had died, we are alive again.
And the timeline we are on is either the timeline of things that are waiting for their own ripeness or the moment when out of the blue a gift arrives that we did not expect but that is placed in our hands nonetheless, a gift that changes everything in an instant. And our job, our hard job, I believe in all this, is to wait and to hope—to wait on both the past and the future, and to hope for the Coming One who works so mysteriously, so organically and so unpredictably in lives that wait on him.
Waiting and hoping on both the past and the future.
Poet David Ray captures the importance of having hope about both the past and the future in his poem entitled “Thanks, Robert Frost”. I chose his poem focusing on the idea of hope for the past for this Sunday in that many of us at this time of the year are thinking about and remembering the past.
Thanks, Robert Frost by David Ray
Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
…..Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.
