An Advent Sermon: December 2019
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.”
On Thursday morning when I woke up anticipating some quiet time in my office, preparing my sermon, I heard from dear friends in New York City that an 18-year-old first year student at my alma mater, Barnard College, had been killed in an armed robbery in a park on one side of campus.
Her name was Tessa, and she was from a small town in Virginia. She played the bass in a punk band. She wore combat boots and dyed her blonde hair. And early on Wednesday evening, she was walking to her dorm through an area of Manhattan that I called home for almost seven years. Maybe she had gone to the Whole Foods on 125th street to buy fancy snacks for finals season. Maybe she had taken a yoga class at the studio I used to go to on St. Nicholas Avenue.
And in a senseless act of violence and evil, her life was taken away—before she declared a major, before her band got famous, before her graduation day or her wedding day or her chance to have her dream job.
Every once in a while, something breaks through the noise of social media and one terrible news story after another. Tessa’s story rattled me in a way I haven’t been rattled in a long time. All I can think, even today, is how easily that could have been me—the Barnard student walking in my combat boots on that sidewalk, worrying about all my assignments, sipping from a to-go cup of hot chocolate.
It makes me feel a little guilty though, because I don’t feel so sad and anxious about every person who we lose in such a confusing, heartbreaking way. Every day, violence and fear, addiction and poverty, or just a whole bunch of bad luck cause losses that are never recognized and mourned the way Tessa’s has already been. Some people fear that society today has gone numb, that we just don’t care the way we used to, that violence and indifference and greed have become the norms.
For me, sometimes feeling numb is a defense. Sometimes closing my laptop or disengaging from a pointless argument is a way of ensuring I have the strength to live and fight another day. If every person’s tragedy weighed as heavily on my mind as Tessa’s has, I would be crushed beneath that fear and sadness. I am only human, after all. We each struggle through our own specific pains, and one of the most important reason that we build community and relationships is so that we can help each other carry the weight. We turn to God in search of the one who can bear all these things, carry every weight, weep for every one of God’s children. Tessa’s death shakes me to my core, and I know that as I mourn and my college community mourns with me, there are other families and communities out there weeping for people I will never know anything about.
“What then did you go out to see?” Jesus asks, and it’s easy to believe that we cannot expect a world where terrible things stop happening. “What did you expect?” Did you go out thinking that things would be easy or comfortable or uncomplicated?
There’s part of me that wants to take this gospel passage and go back to bed, because if I went out into the wilderness to see John the Baptist, he wouldn’t have the answers and the evidence I’m waiting for in this broken world. The Advent texts don’t comfort us. As we follow Christ, preparing for him to break into our despairing world, these weeks before Christmas bear a striking opposition between the cheerful songs on the radio and the apocalyptic messages we hear in church.
This week, we meet John the Baptist in prison, alone and afraid and wondering if Jesus was truly the Messiah, or if everything that he’d been preaching, everything he’d staked his career and reputation and life on, was a lie or an illusion or a not-quite-yet situation. John the Baptist saw death so clearly ahead of him, just as we so clearly see pain and tragedy around us. And he expected a certain kind of deliverance from this evil. “Are you the one?” he asked Jesus. “Are you going to put on your armor and march against the Roman emperor? Are you the one that’s going to put a stop to all of this? And more importantly, are you going to do it before I’m put to death?”
In this moment, it seems as if John wants revenge for all the wrong he has endured. He’s waiting for the Messiah he’s been told about, as a faithful Jew, for his whole life. He’s waiting for the wilderness and the dry land to be glad, because it is written in the Isaiah text that when the savior comes, “he will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.” We want this in a God. We want a God that will march with a vast army against the forces that keep us ashamed and afraid and alone. We want a God who will crush the people who killed Tessa. We want a God who will walk willingly into death, and rise again. And John the Baptist has sacrificed everything to follow that God, to experience that vengeance.
Both the old testament and gospel texts we read today speak of a world turned upside down by the saving grace of God. We hear about miraculous healing, about good news for the poor, about death finally defeated in the bright sunrise of grace. Everything we thought we knew about the Messiah and his vengeance will be turned upside-down in a scandal like we could not imagine.
Another way that scholars suggest we can translate Jesus saying, “blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me,” is instead, “blessed is anyone who is not scandalized by me.” In other words, the grace of God, the kingdom of heaven that is to come does not follow the rules we think it ought to. Our God does not crush our enemies and burn away all that we hate, however justified we might be in that desire.
“What then did you go out to see?” Jesus asks, because we should know by now that the savior of the world isn’t going to come wearing soft robes, or in the form of a reed that can be swayed one way or another by our whims and desires. “What did you expect?” Did you expect that the Son of God would not do anything scandalous?
“Joy is the only response to the scandalous coming of Christ that makes sense.
The vengeance of God is not destruction or wrath or the flames of hell. The vengeance of God is joy in the midst of sadness.”
It turns out that dying and rising again, that loving the lepers and the sinners and the outcasts, that speaking truth to power is a scandal that can change the world. The last thing anyone expected was for the Messiah to bring hope, peace, and joy first to the ones who used to be last. When the crowds came to see the king of the Jews, they didn’t expect a man whose love broke through every boundary they could imagine.
In this third week of Advent, we light the candle for joy, and as jarring as that feels to me in the face of so much hurt and confusion in my community, joy is the only response to the scandalous coming of Christ that makes sense. The vengeance of God is not destruction or wrath or the flames of hell. The vengeance of God is joy in the midst of sadness. The recompense we wait for when we have been hurt is joy in the midst of betrayal and violence.
God comes into the world incarnate in the form of a tiny baby, born to a teenage mother in a stable far away from home. This is the unbeatable opponent that God sends to defeat all the forces that defy God—not a fearsome warrior, but a squirmy, soft-headed, sweet smelling little baby that insists on being wholly alive despite all the reasons not to be.
The first thing I did after I heard about Tessa’s death was talk to my sister, a senior at Barnard, who lives just a block away from the first-year dorm where Tessa and her friends live. Later that day, I got a message from a close Barnard friend, who I met during our first week living in that very building. And in defiance of all the reasons I had to feel hopeless and restless and sad, I allowed those moments of connection to make me feel joyful. In defiance of my fear and confusion, I put on my comfiest Barnard sweatshirt and gathered Christmas presents for my baby cousins and kissed my cat on her little fuzzy head.
Following Christ is so often about doing the opposite of what the world expects, and joy as an expression of vengeance is a radical act of resilience that the forces of evil do not foresee. The greatest resource we have in the fight against violence and despair that seek to make us numb is our love for each other, and joy in our connections.
This is how sin does not have the last word—when we live stubbornly in the grace of Christ, believing that his arrival in our midst will bring a vengeance of joy so great, even death will not overcome it.
