The first reading is Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11.
The holy gospel according to
John 1:6-8, 19-28
6There was a man
sent from God,
whose name was John.
7He came as a witness to testify to the light,
so that all might believe through him.
8He himself was not the light,
but he came to testify to the light.
19This is the
testimony given by John
when the Judeans sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to
ask him,
“Who are you?”
20John confessed
and did not deny it,
but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.”
21And they asked
him,
“What then?
Are you Elijah?”
He said,
“I am not.”
“Are you the prophet?”
He answered,
“No.”
22Then they said
to him,
“Who are you?
Let us have an answer for those who sent us.
What
do you say about yourself?”
23John said,
“I am the voice of one
crying out in the wilderness,
‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’”
as the prophet Isaiah said.
24Now they had
been sent from the Pharisees.
25They asked him,
“Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the
Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?”
26John answered
them,
“I baptize with water.
Among you stands one whom you do not know,
27the one who is coming after me;
I am not worthy to untie the thong of
their sandal.”
28This took place
in Bethany
across the Jordan
where John was baptizing.
The gospel of the Lord.
When I was in college, one of
my majors was Spanish, which required me to spend at least one semester in a
study abroad program in a Spanish-speaking country.
I was really excited about
this—I’d traveled some and part of my interest in a Spanish major was because I
loved getting to know new cultures and new people.
So, as I prepared for my
semester in Argentina, my excitement only grew as more and more of my fellow
students told me that studying abroad would be “the best experience ever!” When I finally dove into my five months in
Buenos Aires, ready for an unequivocally awesome time, I … was disappointed.
My study abroad experience
wasn’t terrible. I made friends in and
outside my program, some of whom are still friends today, and I got to know a
lot about Argentine culture and history.
I learned a lot in my classes and I did a lot of soul-searching, discovering more about who I was and, like
John in today’s gospel, who I was not. I
also, as with many people spending time in big cities, got catcalled. I spent more than a few lonely nights at
home. And I had plenty of
miscommunications to deal with.
All in all, the experiences
that made up my five months in Argentina were probably no better or worse than
anyone else’s study abroad experiences, but I had definitely gotten my hopes up
ahead of time. Everyone had said that it
would be amazing and not once did someone suggest that there would also be
times that were hard or lonely or even just awful.
I wasn’t expecting the hard
times because nobody had mentioned that there would be any. I thought it would be great all the
time. I don’t know if you’ve ever had an
experience like that—planning the perfect party or vacation, or even a holiday
celebration that only ends up with disappointment—but the original hearers of
today’s readings would have been quite familiar with disappointment.
In our first reading, Isaiah
is speaking to a people who are finally back from exile, which they’ve longed
for for what feels like forever, and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Life isn’t all of a sudden perfect like
they’d thought. The devastation of the
exile is still too present in the destruction of cities, the hard memories of
their time in exile, and the changes they’ve experienced.
And yet Isaiah proclaims, “The
spirit of the Sovereign God is
upon me, because the Sovereign has anointed me; God has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind
up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty
to the captives, and release to the
prisoners. ” Isaiah’s message,
which Jesus will reiterate in his ministry, is good news for those disappointed
people.
This liberty, this release,
this good news doesn’t have the delivery time that every online retailer
currently seems to be offering—“oaks of righteousness” do not grow over night,
after all.
Isaiah states that “as the
earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to
spring up, so the Sovereign God will cause righteousness and
praise to spring up before all the nations,” but he never says it’ll be
quick. The seeds are planted and will grow into oaks … eventually, but
not on the timeline of these people who have finally returned from their exile
and just want everything back to the way it “should be” now. Patiently or
impatiently, joy will come, but now it’s time for them to wait.
Like those early Israelites
returned from exile, the Judeans in the gospel reading are also waiting. They’re anticipating this coming messiah, and
John seems like a pretty good candidate, so the religious leaders send some
priests and Levites to investigate.
Filled with hope and expectation for the one who will deliver them from the
oppressive rule of the Roman Empire, they ask, “Who are you?”
John’s reply, however, is
another disappointment.
John. Is. Not.
“I am not the Messiah.” Not
Elijah, not the prophet. Not any of the
really important titles they want to give him.
Instead, John is the
voice. The voice crying out not of
despair, but of hope—in preparation. The
voice who is a witness to the one who is coming.
John’s call in this moment is
to hope and prepare for the one who is to come.
John’s work—crying out in the wilderness—may seem a bit fruitless. But those seeds, scattered with his words on
the wind and splattered with the drops of baptismal water, will find a landing
place. John’s witness will take root in
the one to come—the one who shall be called Jesus.
In this time of Advent, we
wait and hope. We wait for Jesus to come
again. We hope for God’s reign to be
made manifest all around us. We wait and
hope for peace. We wait and hope for
Good News in the midst of disappointment.
Even as we sit in this Advent
time of knowing that God wins—that Jesus conquers death and evil—we are also
sitting in this disappointing time of God’s reign not yet fully on earth as it
is in heaven.
This Advent time when the
seeds are planted and may even be sprouting, we are still far off from the sturdy
“oaks of righteousness” to come. And
yet, this is the time that we make for ourselves. To join with John in preparing for God to
come—bearing witness to Jesus and sharing the hope of a God who will come to us
as the baby of homeless peasants who will soon flee to Egypt as refugees.
This time of waiting
anticipates joy to come—it knows the ending.
And we can look back to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, we can look
back at the ways that God has been at work, not only 500 years ago during the
beginning of the Protestant Reformation, but every day before and since. As I
look back on my study abroad experience in Argentina, I am grateful. While it was an experience filled with both
disappointment and joy, I recognize God’s presence and work in me through that
time. Without it, I wouldn’t be the pastor
I am today.
The holidays to come will
also be joyful and disappointing. They
will be filled with memories both good and bad, which will bring any number of
feelings up for us. And yet, in all of
those memories, God is with us. In
recognizing God at work in the past, working for good even in the midst of
disappointing situations, we gain hope for the future that God is bringing
about—a future of hope, a future of joy, and a future of Good News for us
all. Our hope rests in the oaks
springing up, in the One who comes to us as Jesus, the Word of God,
God-With-Us, Immanuel, our Hope and Joy.
Thanks be to God.
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