Stale Expectations

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. David Williams; 12.15.13

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 11:2-11

It’s that time of year, when the days have grown as short and cold as Napoleon’s corpse, when every day brings the possibility of winter banging down your plans for the day.

Oh, there are times we try to push past our relationship with the reality of Washington area Decembers and Januaries.  We stay late to get that memo done, even though the rest of the office has piled out early.  It’s just gotta get done, we tell ourselves.  I can make it to the daycare on time if I factor in an extra...ten minutes.  Surely that’ll be enough.  We fling ourselves out onto the highway, convinced that maybe, just maybe, every driver in the Washington Metropolitan Region will have remembered everything they were taught about driving in inclement weather.

Hope springs eternal.

Here we have a sprawling urban megaplex designed around the car, a transportation network which barely works in the best of times.  A little rain, a light dusting, wild and crazy things like the sun setting, these events turn the entire overcomplex system into an unworkable mess. We should know better.

We do that a few times, times that involve us sitting in traffic for six and a half hours, increasingly regretting the large bucket of coffee we drank right before leaving.  The snarl of cars inches and slides forward, a dying serpent wriggling through the slush.  Night falls, and we’re still in our cars grows later and later and we become more and more terrified that the daycare center will sell our toddlers to organ harvesters.  Those late fees do pile up after all.

We learn, pretty quickly, that there are times when the patterns of our everyday life just have to change.  We leave early.  We stay home.  We adjust, because we’ve encountered something that demands an adjustment.  We can’t just do what we do, because suddenly right in front of us is something that makes those expectations and patterns of life completely meaningless.

Those huge events, those major moments when reality comes and whups us upside the head, sometimes we have trouble wrapping our minds around them.  We still expect, in our simple human way, that we’ll be able to just stumble onwards with our lives as they always have been, no matter what new things we encounter.

But sometimes, we encounter things that so challenge our expectations that we find ourselves forced to adapt.

And here, defying our expectations for this season, we find ourselves flung far forward into the story of Jesus.  It’s only the third Sunday in Advent, as those candles tell us, and we’ve leapt ahead smack into the middle of Matthew’s story. Jesus isn’t gurgling and cooing cherubically in the stench and smell of the Manger.  Forget wise men and stars in the East.  Forget Bethlehem and the manger.  

We’re thirty years ahead now.  He’s already preached the Sermon on the Mount, and shared his message with thousands. So why here, why now in the story?  

Because, again, this is the Advent season.

These passages from Matthew’s Gospel lay out the details of what is a complex relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus, and are chosen for this season because they speak to two separate things, each of which is essential for grasping the purpose of this season.

First, in talking to the crowds that had gathered to listen to him teach, Jesus affirms again that John the Baptist bore a message that was fundamentally similar to the one that he himself preached.  He does not come to replace or to challenge John, but instead bears a message that honors his teaching.

That Matthew intentionally includes this story here is a testament to the ongoing reputation of John the Baptist in the Jewish community, even during the time of the early church.  He’d been a pretty big deal, with some very passionate and dedicated followers, and for the early church, establishing that John and Jesus were both in communication and on the same page was intensely important.

He goes so far as to equate John the Baptist with Elijah the prophet, who in Jewish tradition had never died, and would return to announce the fulfillment of the messianic age.

Second, Jesus...assuming that many who have come to listen to him also went out to listen to John as he preached and proclaimed in the wilderness...pitches them a couple of pointed rhetorical questions.

Why did you go out into the wilderness?  What did you expect to encounter there?

It seems a simple enough question, but Jesus gives them answers.  Did you expect to see a reed shaken by the wind?  Did you expect to see someone dressed in soft robes?

The first answer may suggest tall grasses growing in the wilderness, but it might also be intended to evoke an image on the coins circulated by Herod, which included a reed.   The second answer was mean to evoke wealth and opulence, the garb worn by the hangers on around the court of Herod and the priests who helped themselves to the riches that poured into the cities.

To which his listeners would undoubtedly say, well, of course we weren’t!  Why would we go out into the desert to see someone dressed up, or to look for coins?  I mean, c’mon.  Why would we do that?

And then Jesus reminded them of just what it was that John came into the world to preach.  Which, of course, pressed his listeners to come to terms with the reality that they claimed to understand about why they’d gone to listen to John in the first place, and why they came to hear Jesus.

“You know,” Jesus says, “that you were going to see a prophet.  But did you really listen to what that prophet was saying?”  Because the implications of what John the Baptist taught from his place out there in the wilderness weren’t just that he paid no attention to his own comfort and his own needs.  

They weren’t just going out there to spectate.  They were there to stand in encounter with the message that John bore...and by extension, the message that Jesus was soon to live out and embody.

It was a message that bore such potency that for all of John the Baptist’s fame, and for all of his sacred reputation, Jesus could say with confidence that even the most incompetent and stumbling member of the Kingdom of God would be “greater” than John.

That’s the experience that Jesus was teaching.  That’s the point and purpose of all of his parables, which draw us as listeners into relationship with the Kingdom that he proclaimed.  That’s the reason underlying these days, and we have to ask ourselves if we really grasp what we’re in encounter with as we gather here to celebrate the season.

What is the nature of the encounter we’re seeking here?  As we gather every Sunday, do we really grasp the depth of what it is we are intentionally stepping into?  Even standing here, with my comfy robe, I find myself struggling with the implications of what it is that Jesus taught, because to truly stand in engaged relationship with it is a tiny bit staggering.

It’s easier, far easier, just to drift along through this Advent season without realizing what it is we are being called into relationship with.  It’s not the expected, not the shine of your Harvest Reed Mastercard, not the remarkable comfort of your Land’s End Goretex Liturgical Garments.

It is the season of Immanuel, of God with us, of a time of justice when what we hear and see changes.

How, in this season, are we being transformed towards that purpose?  Because when you encounter something as radical as what Jesus describes, it has an impact on who we are.  It defines who we are, shaping our responses not just to that event, but to everything.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN