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Matthew 11
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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable
to you, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
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Last week, when I was trying to think about the best way to characterize
this holy season of Advent, I came across an intriguing thought from a
pastor in Connecticut. He said,
If Lent is the season to be down on our knees in repentance; then
Advent, it seems to me, is a season to be up on our toes. I love the
New English Version of Luke 3:15 “The people were on tiptoe
of expectation.”¹
So I have been thinking all week about Advent in terms of people up on
their tiptoes in happy anticipation of our Lord’s arrival, of
deserts blooming and lame believers leaping with joy. I love
those positive expectations, not least because they include all of
nature as well as humankind.
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But John the Baptist’s expectations of Messiah weren’t quite
so positive. He does understand that Messiah is coming – and
knows that his coming will affect everyone. But he leaves the
renewal of nature, with its bright blooms and unexpected streams of
water in the desert, out of the picture entirely. And he neglects
to take into account the Lord’s compassion and mercy. So his
warnings to people are all about repentance, and a deep repentance at that.
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“Don’t just go through the motions,” he warns
everyone. “Make real changes. Clean up your act. A
fire is coming—and it’s a fire you won’t be able to
control. If you are ready for it, it will purify you. But if
you are not ready, if you have simply been going through the motions of
repentance, that fire will utterly consume you.”
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Now, John was fearless when it came to speaking truth to power. So
he delivered his fierce message to everyone in earshot, to the powerful
as well as to the lowly. But maybe he should have practiced some
restraint. For one day he preached that message of repentance to
Herod Antipas, who had just taken his brother’s wife and married
her himself. In response, Herod threw John into prison. And
everyone knew this was a sentence of death.
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That’s the context of our Gospel reading this morning from
Matthew, where John, now in prison, sends the plaintive message to
Jesus, “Are you the one we have been expecting, or should we
search for another?” His expectations, you see, for a
vengeful Messiah, had gotten him into trouble. Along with many
others, he expected a Messiah who would bring the wrath of God down on
the nations. He wanted someone who would send the Romans packing
and call down fire on the wicked. What he got instead was a
compassionate and merciful Messiah who healed the sick, restored sight
to the blind and loved the poor. In other words, the prophet
expected a political Messiah. What he got instead was a personal
Savior.
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He missed it, you see, in the same way many of us miss it. God
has arrived in our lives, and he is working, compassionately,
mercifully, all around us – sometimes in the beauty of the
natural world around us, sometimes in people we encounter, and
sometimes even through us. The joyful news this third week of
Advent is that the Kingdom of God has arrived in our
midst – if only we have eyes to
see . . . and will watch to catch it.
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Martha Sterne, who is a priest at Holy Innocents in Sandy Springs,
tells a lovely story about finding the Kingdom of God one frosty
December morning on a walk she was taking with a friend along the
Chattahoochee River.
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Maybe because of the cold, she says, the trails that morning were
nearly deserted. She and her friend enjoyed the sight of a flock
of Canada geese, sticking their heads deep in the water in the middle
of the river and going bottoms up – so all you could see was
their snowy white rear ends. They surprised a great blue heron
staring intently into the water, “as if his life depended on
it – which, of course, it does.”
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And then they came upon a Chinese man with a butterfly net gently
swooshing the frosty grasses along the edge of the trail. They
asked him if he was with the Park Service, and he — still
gently swooshing — said no he was not. His English, she
said, was far better than their Chinese and his smile — grave
and kind – was best of all. So smiles and nods were their
best words.
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In response to their questions, he said he was looking for “teeny
tiny gwasshoppahs.” And Martha, when she heard that,
thought, “Uh oh. December in Georgia is not a good month
for grasshoppers.” So they asked him why he was doing
this. And he said, frowning, he was doing this for his
frog. His son had found a tadpole that summer that had turned
into a teeny tiny frog. Too small to eat the crickets found in
pet stores. Too picky to eat dead bugs. So here he was on
a frosty morning searching for manna in a frozen wilderness, and all
for the sake of his small son and his son’s even smaller pet frog.
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Martha and her friend tried to explain the habits of grasshoppers in
Georgia in December. But after all, she said, what did they
know? Maybe after they left him swooshing in the slanting
afternoon sun he had found a slew of them, exactly what he was looking for.
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And she ends her story saying this: “The sight of him gently
swooshing the grass for the sake of his son and his beloved pet frog
will stay with me. Compassion is so strange and beautiful and
contagious. We live in such a lovely, hungry, grace–filled
world. So watch . . .
watch . . . watch.” ²
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That’s my prayer for us today – that we won’t miss
the joy of Advent this year. That we will think to look in places
we’d never imagined for a merciful God who inhabits even the
smallest aspects of our lives.
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Amen.
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¹ David W. Good “On Tiptoes for a Silent
Night: Reenchantment for the Disenchanted” (The
Living Pulpit: Advent; vol. 6 No. 4; October – December
1997) p. 44.
² The Rev. Martha Sterne “Manna in the Advent
Wilderness” Day One Tuesday, December 7, 2010.
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