The One We Are Waiting For

Isaiah 35:1-10

Matthew 11:2-11

People often do like a new thing.

Kim and I have recently noticed the presence of a new fast food franchise in our area, which is drawing a lot of attention: Zaxby’s. I’ve never eaten at one, although I have noticed them while traveling. Apparently, they specialize in “chicken fingerz.” I hear they are really good. Every time we have passed the new one in Cambridge we’ve seen a line of cars stretching out on the road. 

That’s just something humans do. When a new place opens up people have to go there and find out what it’s all about. If there is enough buzz, and if it is really good, the energy might sustain itself, and it becomes like the Rise Up drive-through on Riverside Drive.

When we lived in Dayton, Ohio, food trucks were all the rage. A whole culture of food truck connoisseurs loved to talk about their favorites, and one of these was a certain hot dog truck: Zombie Dogz. At food festivals you might see hundreds of people lined up for this one. People would wait two hours in line for a Zombie Dog. And then they would rave about how good it was. It was “amazing” or “to die for.” Best hot dog ever.

Of course, if you have waited in line two hours for a hot dog, what else are you going to say? “It was okay. Not sure it was worth the two hours of my life. But my time isn’t worth a whole lot. So it was okay.”

Who’s going to say that? When we have invested in something, we want to be able to say it was worth it. 

In the big scheme of things, it really isn’t that big a deal if you spend one Saturday afternoon standing in line for a hot dog. If it makes you happy, okay. But what if you became a Zombie Dogz groupie, and you followed the Zombie Dogz truck around to all the food festivals every weekend, and your whole life started to revolve around Zombie Dogz? That would be a big deal. And you might, at some point, have to ask yourself if you have done the right thing, going all-in on Zombie Dogz. 

Sometimes, we have to face the big question about choices we have made: was it really worth it? Was this the right thing to go all in on?

Is this the one we have been waiting for? Or should I keep looking? Keep waiting?

Last week we met John the Baptist at the Jordan River, baptizing and prophesying. He talked about the one who was to come, who would be more powerful than him. He painted an image of a man with a winnowing fork in one hand and an ax in the other, ready to do some damage.

I said then that, although John was right about many things, he seems to have missed the mark about this one. John’s image of a Messiah coming through like a wrecking crew, judging each and every one, as either worthy or unworthy, and clearing out every person who doesn’t make the cut.

This was something John wanted, and perhaps many of the people who came to him for baptism also wanted. To clear away the unwanted ones – the “bad guys” – might mean that Israel could be free again, and peaceful. Clearly, the goal, the strong desire, was for Israel to be freed from their oppression, and John’s hope was for the Messiah to make that happen.

This was the one John was waiting for.

Time passed. John continued his baptizing and prophesying. He continued to get under the wrong people’s skin, looking very much like a threat to the existing order, and eventually King Herod had him arrested and thrown in jail. And as he languished in his prison cell, John had plenty of time to think. 

He began to have some doubts. He wondered if he had made a mistake of some kind. Was Jesus truly the one they had been waiting for, the Messiah? Was he the one who would restore the glory of Israel? 

John had to wonder, because it wasn’t playing out quite like he thought it would. Obviously, because John was sitting in a prison cell, at the mercy of this tyrannical king. 

And Israel still suffered under the iron fist of the empire. 

This was, of course, much bigger, much more consequential, than a choice of hot dog or chicken fingers. This was about life itself.

And for John, there was some urgency in this. How long must Israel wait to be redeemed? How long must he wait in this cell? Is Jesus the one they have been waiting for, or will they need to still watch and wait?

John sends his disciples with a message for Jesus, a simple question: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” But a simple yes or no answer is not forthcoming. Jesus needs them – needs us – to see for ourselves.

“Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” Do you see this? Jesus is making people whole. He is bringing Shalom.

Jesus points to what he has done, what he is doing, and asks John to make the connection. These are the things Isaiah prophesied. These are the things Mary sang about. Look, he says to John’s disciples. You see it all, don’t you? You know this is good news. Redemption is happening now, in this place and time. 

Everything that Jesus is doing, everything he points John to, each of these sights points beyond itself to the one who made this new wholeness possible.

Is this a hard thing for John to see? Possibly. Even though John is a prophet, a man gifted with a vision of God’s plan for Israel, he is struggling to understand how this man Jesus fits the vision. He is not bringing down the powers that are oppressing the people. He is not, as far as John can see, redeeming the nation of Israel.

Even John cannot quite see how Jesus is the one. Yet. Because John, like so many of us, has some preconceptions about what this redemption should look like. 

Perhaps Jesus does not look like a Redeemer, one who beats the bad guys and kicks them out of town. Jesus doesn’t look like Superman. Jesus actually looks quite ordinary. Quite human. A human with an unusual gift for bringing healing and wholeness, one person at a time. Shalom.

The word Shalom, which we usually translate as “peace” really means something bigger than that. The Roman Empire prioritized peace, but by this they meant total compliance with the rule of law. They mean that any disobedience would be dealt with harshly, violently. The peace of Rome required the oppression of many people. But the peace of God is entirely different. 

Shalom is universal wholeness and flourishing, wellbeing, reconciliation. Shalom – the peace of God – stands in contrast to what the world calls peace. 

And so, if John is to get the answer to his question, he will have to get his head around this new idea. We too, will need to understand this idea that, somehow, still feels like a radical concept. That Jesus is not going punch out the powerful to bring them down. But what he is doing is attending to the lowly to lift them up. And he is showing us the way, too.

He is the one we have been waiting for, and he will lead us on that highway in the wilderness, the Holy Way.

The One Who Is Coming

Isaiah 11:1-10

Matthew 3:1-12

I recently read a snippet from an interview with one of our most famous living Bible scholars, John Dominic Crossan. The topic of the Left Behind mania came up – you remember those books that were so popular in the nineties? They promoted the rapture concept, the notion that believers will one day, unexpectedly get scooped up into heaven, leaving behind a world on the verge of chaos. According to the theory, there follows a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, ending with the triumphal return of Jesus to earth. This is the kind of stuff that begs to be made into a movie franchise.

We touched on the concept last week, with our first Sunday of Advent texts focusing on the end of the world. 

Crossan had an interesting take on the rapture mania. He said he thought the obsession about Jesus’ second coming was a result of people being disappointed with his first coming. We have always kind of wished that Jesus had eradicated evil the first time.

And that is what many of those in Israel hoped for too, including John the Baptist. Listen to what he says:

“…the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I ... He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Scary words. And John is a scary guy. What kind of person dresses in camel’s hair? Who makes a diet out of locusts and wild honey – wild honey! There is nothing domesticated about this man.

He comes out from the wilderness shouting orders: Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near! Prepare the way, make his paths straight! Get ready or get out!

The people swarm to him – they want in on this baptism. They are rightly afraid and will do whatever is necessary to get on the right side. I can imagine angry John standing in the river, waist-deep, as each new candidate for baptism wades into the water toward him, trembling. He grabs ahold of them roughly, pushing them down under the surface as they utter their confessions. 

He was a powerful presence, this John, and he drew a lot of attention. It swelled from the ground up, but eventually the men in positions of power took notice. They start coming down to the river, too, to check this out for themselves.

I can’t say I know what their motivations were. There might have been some authentic desire for this new life John was proclaiming; they might have felt compelled to repent just as the others did. Maybe they were afraid, too. But maybe they just wanted to check out this situation – this guy who rises up out of nowhere, an overnight sensation who might be a threat to their authority in Israel. Maybe they wanted to assess the danger.

Whatever brought them there, John does not assume they have come ready to repent. 

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” He lets loose with a stream of angry warnings. If the people weren’t afraid before, they definitely are now. Then the big warning:

“His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

John the Baptist is on a mission to prepare the people for some serious housecleaning. And you know what? I imagine that many of them were thinking, “Yeah, it’s about time.”

Things were not great. The people lived in fear of the empire. They suffered poverty as a result of the corruption among the powerful. And the image of a Messiah with a winnowing fork in his hand and fire in his eyes was not unwelcome. Some of them probably wanted someone like John to come along and burn it all down.

Eradicate evil for good. This is what it sounds like John is telling them.

But John, he did have a few things wrong about the one who is coming. 

To be clear, John was right about a lot of things. He was right about the need to repent, which is simply turning toward God. To repent is to turn away from the ways that keep us estranged from God and toward the way that has been prepared for us – out of the wilderness – to reconnect with God. John was right to say that the kingdom of heaven has come near. Jesus was there in their midst, ready to begin his ministry on earth. God came down, love came down, ready to reconnect with all of us. The kingdom was near and is near.

John was right about the urgency. It is always urgent for us to turn away from our crooked, broken ways and find our way back on the path that has been made ready. It is urgent that we all acknowledge that it will not do to rest on the accomplishments of past generations. Just as the Israelites could not simply say, “We have Abraham as our ancestor,” it will not suffice for us to say, “We have this church that some good people before us built.” Complacency will not be enough. 

John was right. And Mary was right. In her song we find in the first chapter of Luke, the Magnificat, she proclaimed how the world was about to turn – filling the hungry with good things, turning the rich away empty. Scattering the proud in their conceit, casting down the mighty from their thrones, lifting up the lowly. 

Just as Isaiah was right. The wolf shall lie down with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion shall feed together, and a little child shall lead them.

I know what you are probably thinking. It is hard to believe that these words are true. We look around us and find them unimaginable. How could it be right?

In the language of the church, we are living in the age of “now” and “not yet.” Jesus came to usher in the realm of God’s love and grace. We live with one foot in this world and one foot in that realm. 

And so, it is right for us to heed John’s call to repent. Even though John, himself did not really know what kind of Messiah Jesus would be; even though his images of unquenchable fire miss the mark; even though John is terrifying, he is serving the important purpose of getting our attention. He is getting us ready for the world to change.

And the change he envisions, the change Mary and Isaiah proclaim, is a change that demands our participation. Not to answer violence with violence, but to be a part of changing the world, for good. 

Repent and see that the kingdom of heaven is so very near.

About Time

Romans 13:11-14

Matthew 24:36-44

It’s a bit quirky that the liturgical calendar which starts today with the first Sunday of Advent, usually begins with some thoughts about the end of things. The end of time, specifically. The end of the world as we know it.

There is a human desire to know in advance when that end will come. I think it must be because of some completely irrational idea that we might avoid it. If you know it’s coming maybe you can duck? But, as Jesus says, no one knows.

Still, people try to figure it out, as if it were nothing more than a tough riddle. And so it seems like there is always somebody somewhere offering up a prediction about exactly when the world will end. In fact, just this fall there was a prediction that caught a lot of traction.

A man from South Africa announced that he had been given a dream that told him the rapture would come September 23 and 24 of 2025. For anyone who is unaware, the idea of the rapture is that suddenly, in an unexpected and unannounced moment, the faithful will be scooped up out of this world. This notion, by the way, is a distortion of biblical beliefs. There is a brief passage in one of Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians that describes how Paul thinks the end times will affect both the living and the dead. And there is this passage from Matthew, although in this case, Jesus might actually be saying that it is the unfaithful ones who could be swept up. 

This South African man explained that the rapture was all about the 2026 Soccer World Cup, the connection being that with all the chaos that results from the rapture, the World Cup would end up being cancelled. I don’t know why that’s important. Perhaps Jesus doesn’t like soccer, but I find that hard to believe.

So, in preparation for this rapture, lots of people offered free advice. Don’t make any plans for the weekend, they said. Leave your phone unlocked, and maybe your house too, just in case someone you actually care about is left behind.

Just recently I saw a list of things to do while waiting for the world to end – compiled by someone who was thinking it might be coming soon. It included things like 1) forget about that plan to refinish your floors; 2) scratch War and Peace off your list of books to read; 3) don’t worry about your Christmas card list; and 4) do you really need to make your insurance payment? Just relax. What’s the point of doing anything?

Not exactly a faith-based perspective, though. I think of the story about Martin Luther being asked the question of what he would do if he knew the world were to end tomorrow. His answer was, “I would plant an apple tree.” 

Back when I was a campus minister there were a couple of these end-of-the-world predictions that people grew obsessed with. There was Harold Camping, the man who used some kind of creative math to calculate when the end would come. And when the end failed to come, he checked his work and realized he had made a mistake. Then there was this notion about the ancient Mayan calendar that caught on like wildfire. It seems that someone suddenly noticed that this calendar which had been around for thousands of years, ended in 2012. And they concluded that the Mayans must have known something. There were college students I worked with who were pretty disturbed by that. Afraid that it might be true. 

When I talked with these young adults about the end, I could see they were afraid. And it was not because they lacked faith. It was more about a kind of disorientation of their lives. They said to me that everything they were doing was focused on the future. Whether it was the term papers they were scrambling to get finished or the career they were hoping to find at the end of their college years. The student debt they would begin paying off when they got that good job. It was all somewhere out there.

But when I asked them what they would do if they knew the end was near, they struggled to reorient themselves to this present-moment focus. 

What would you do if the end of the world was coming tomorrow? Eat more pie? Binge-watch all the TV shows on your list? Sleep late? What would you do?

There are lots of things we do that are unimportant – maybe because we have too much time or too little focus. Looking at the end, however, does have the effect of helping us to see what is most important. It gives us a sense of urgency. And it is not a bad idea to give it some thought: what would you do differently if you approached life this way? What would you change if you had that kind of focus?

If you suddenly realize that this moment counts, that every moment you are living counts, this might be the best thing that could happen to you – what would change?

It seems like when you are facing the possibility of the end, there are two roads you can take: despair or hope. Despair if you feel that there are too many things you haven’t yet done and too little knowledge about whatever comes next. Despair if you feel unprepared, like you forgot to study for the test. Despair if you believe that your life has been a failure and only judgment awaits you. Despair is deadly.

But the way of faith is different: it is about hope, and this hope is available to anybody.

Because Christian hope is not based on the foundation of whatever our life circumstances are. Our hope is based on the possibilities of God even in the worst imaginable life circumstances. And, while these are not the worst of times, there are some things that give me pause.

It is apparent to me that, even though most of our lives are pleasant enough, we are living in very anxious times. It is in the news and media we consume every day. It is in a certain uneasy feeling we have about the economy we are living in. It is seemingly in the water we drink and the air we breathe. We are living in anxious times, and it is hard for us to navigate through the murk of anxiety to locate hope. 

Yet there is a way. And it is urgent that we find our way to hope.

The German theologian Jurgen Moltmann, who died last year, wrote frequently about Christian hope throughout his career. But in the last few years, he wrote of his concern about nurturing “a culture of life that is stronger than the terror of death, a love for life that overcomes the destructive forces in our world today, and a confidence in the future that overcomes doubt and fatalism.”  

The way to nurture that culture of life is the way of hope. And the way to hope is through community.

Community is something we make, of course. We find our clusters of like-minded people, kindred spirits, we might say, with whom we enjoy conversation and meals and other things. But community is also bigger than these circles we select. Community is where God places us and includes all the other people God places there.

In our community, like all communities, there are many people who lack some of the basic essentials for life. We are aware of this. This congregation is pretty conscious of the needs surrounding us, and responsive to them. We understand and embrace the ancient Christian values of mercy and compassion that Jesus taught us. 

But something that is a little harder, a bit more of a stretch, is to embrace the value of community. The belief that whatever our circumstances we are all in it together. 

The notion that the rich and the poor live in the same world. 

When we lose sight of that, there is a deathly loss of connection, of community, and no matter how much money you have, a poverty of community will bring despair. I think this is the deep cause of our prevailing anxiety. 

Quite simply, every human being needs to feel that someone cares. This goes deeper than material needs. It is beyond providing food, paying utility bills, or having a bed to sleep in. The human connection is the most essential of basic needs.

If you knew that the world would end tomorrow, I think the thing to do would be to make human connection – with anyone. Everyone. To look at a stranger and see another human being. To speak to someone with kindness, even if that person is wasting your time. Even to see someone who has committed a dreadful crime, like the man who shot two National Guard members last week, but still know that this person is not an animal, or whatever word you might say in anger, but a person made in the image of God – just like us.

This is something that would be worth doing if you knew that the world would end tomorrow. And, since we don’t know when the world will end, but it could end at any time, then this is something worth doing every day.