Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Advent Message 2016

WHAT WERE YOU EXPECTING?

“Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” Coming from John the Baptist, this is the most startling question of the New Testament. He who had seen and heard God’s affirmation of Jesus when Jesus was baptized, “This is my Son,” now asks this question born out of pain and doubt.
            Advent is a season of expectancy. Hope gives the foundation for expectancy. We are given a promise; the promise gives us hope; we expect to see the fulfillment of this hope. But what happens when hope disappoints us? What happens when you feel that God has let you down?
            God, we can imagine, responds with this question, “What were you expecting?”
            We talked last week about favorite Christmas movies. Some of my favorites are off the beaten track. One I enjoy is called “It happened on 5th Avenue,” released in 1947. The story follows a homeless man who regularly inhabits a mansion in New York while the owners are down south for winter. This homeless man invites other down-and-out characters to live with him, forming a community or family of losers trying to get on their feet. One of the squatters happens to be the real owner who poses as a hobo, but learns to appreciate these interlopers and helps them out. It all works out in the end. A happy ending! Christmas movies always have a happy ending. The majority of movies end well. Depressing movies don’t sell seats as well.
            But life is not a movie. Happy endings are not guaranteed. It doesn’t always “work out in the end.” If we hold on to that cliché we will be sorely disappointed in life. Our hopes, our dreams, our goals will not magically become reality like a Christmas movie.
            When your hopes are dashed, when God has not come through for you, when Jesus seems far away, we need to consider the question: What were you expecting?

Does Jesus leave you wondering?

John the Baptist is in prison. How do you imagine this scene? Is John chained to the wall of a five-by-five basement cell? Does he have room to pace in that dark, dank, grimy cubicle? What is worse for John, the dungeon or the doubts that assail his heart?
            John had boldly spoken out against the sin of Herod Antipas. Herod divorced his own wife and seduced the wife of his brother and married her. John publicly rebuked Herod for this sin and Herod imprisoned the fire and brimstone preacher.
            Now John is battling doubt and fear. A man facing the death penalty cannot afford to have doubts – he must be certain. But to be fair, John’s doubts should not surprise us. What he had predicted and longed for, a new world order, had just not materialized. He expected the world to change when he announced that Jesus, God’s anointed, had come. Months after the baptism of Jesus, John could not see the change.
            John sends two disciples to Jesus with the question: “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (11:3). I wonder if the question stung Jesus.
            There are three ways of looking at this question:
1) Some people think that the question was not for John’s sake, but for his disciples. He had said, “I must decrease so that he can increase.” John was stepping aside for Jesus. So maybe he was sending his disciples to see what Jesus was doing and to witness for themselves that he is the Christ.
2) Others think that John’s question was born out of impatience. John’s message was of divine judgment – the ax is at the tree - the winnowing fork is in his hand - the Christ comes with cleansing fire (3:10-12). So when is Jesus going to act? When will he crush the Romans? When will he condemn the sinners and make all things right?
            A passionate man, a man of action, John wanted Jesus to establish his kingdom. Impatient, John sends Jesus this question: “Are you him or not?” Is Jesus our only hope?
3) A few have ventured to suggest that John’s question was nothing less than the question of a dawning faith and hope. They think that John has indeed seen that Jesus is the One and merely seeks confirmation. But I don’t buy it.
            My own impression is option 2. John had doubts. He was human. He was like us. When Jesus fails to work in just the way we expect him to work, we begin to question him. We doubt. Maybe we doubt the strength of our own faith, or maybe we doubt that God really cares.
            Who of us has not cried out to God in frustration over dashed expectations? We have prayed, we have been faithful, and still we do not see the results we hoped for. Life gets tougher. Innocent people suffer. Some loved ones die. Where is God, the one we hope in? We are left wondering about Jesus…
            Doubt is not a sin. I was once told that to doubt is to begin to seek to understand. Doubt fuels the search for answers. Paul Tillich points out that God does not stand aloof, apart from our questions; rather God is in the struggle of doubt, making himself known through it. Doubt is therefore a vital part and element of the faith which justifies. Our faith is not a faith without doubts, but a faith within doubts. Not the answers we possess but who possesses us. We may doubt God, but God never doubts us. This is the love that never lets us go.

What kind of Messiah do you want?

The answer John receives may not have satisfied his doubts. Jesus replied to John through the disciples, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (11:4-5).
            Is this what you wanted to hear, John? I think what John wanted was something we also want – we want a Messiah who answers our questions, fulfills our longings, and is powerful to solve all our troubles. What kind of Messiah do you want?
            Jesus’ answer is completely biblical. The Psalmist wrote that the God of Jacob “…upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets the prisoners free, the LORD gives sight to the blind, the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down, the LORD loves the righteous” (Ps. 146:7-8).
            The prophet Isaiah echoed these signs when he said, “Behold, your God will come…Then the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy” (35:5-6).
            Then when Jesus began his ministry in Nazareth, he read from Isaiah 61:1-3. This was a Messianic prophecy foretelling what the anointed One would do when he came. Jesus told the audience in the synagogue at Nazareth, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk 4:21). He might as well have set off a bomb, it so shocked the people.
            These are the signs that accompany the Messiah. What do you notice about these people who benefit from the advent of the Christ? They are outcasts, social misfits, cripples… Jesus comes to the blind, the deaf, the lame, the poor, the prisoner…Jesus is preoccupied with freaks and geeks. These are not the people John would have chosen to bring revolution. These are not the movers and shakers of the world. These people aren’t going to change anything.
            Wait a minute John, what do these people remind you of? They are all in need. That’s something that John has in common with them now that he is in prison.
            John, the popular desert preacher, full of charisma, commanded a large following. Yet despite his incredible faith and service to God, he finds himself in a position of absolute need. He can relate completely with the needy, the poor, the outcast, the prisoner, who can boast of nothing except their dependence on God’s grace and mercy. If I were John though, I would find it painfully ironic that Jesus came to set the prisoners free, but I’m still in prison. Something’s off here.
            While John often fasted, Jesus feasted – and he ate with sinners, tax collectors and prostitutes. While John preached hellfire for sin, Jesus preached love and forgiveness. John was flummoxed. And you will be flummoxed too if you long for a Messiah of your own making.

Are you offended by Jesus?

The final thing Jesus wants to tell John speaks to the heart of John’s expectations. “Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me” (11:6).
            The word “stumble” can also be translated “offense.” It comes from the Greek word scandalon, from which we get our word “scandalous.” Scandals can take down Presidents, ruin marriages, and destroy careers. Scandals are offensive to the general public. Those who have been scandalized will find it very hard to come back to a position of respectability.
            What Jesus tells John then, is that the person who does not find Jesus scandalous or offensive will accept him as the Christ.
            Was John offended? Perhaps. John may have only grasped half of the truth concerning his cousin. John preached the gospel of divine holiness and destruction; Jesus preached the gospel of divine holiness and love. So Jesus says to John, “Maybe I am not doing the things you expected me to do. But the powers of evil are being defeated, not by irresistible power, but by unanswerable love.” If a person is offended at Jesus it might be because Jesus cuts across one’s ideas of what religion should be.[i]
            But think of the scandal that is Jesus Christ. He was conceived of by an unmarried teenage girl. Her husband wanted a divorce (an annulment of their betrothal). When Jesus was born, this “king” was born in a stable and slept in a feeding trough. Jesus was raised as a common carpenter – a laborer. Finally he was killed like a criminal, executed on a cursed tree.
            And the things he said…well! Jesus told crowds to eat his flesh and drink his blood. When great crowds followed him, he turned on them and said they should take up their crosses (those hated instruments of death) and follow him. He criticized the religious; he rebuked the rich; he ran from the crown.
            Are you not offended? Do you not find this Jesus to be utterly scandalous? And yet, isn’t this exactly what you need in a Messiah? When your life is rocked with scandal, when you realize that you find yourself among the needy and identify with those who depend on God and throw themselves on his mercy, in this moment we find in Jesus a God who is, once and for all, for us.
            Paul quoted Isaiah when he summed up the two choices concerning Jesus, “See, I lay in Zion a stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame” (Rom. 9:33). You can fall over Jesus and be crushed by your failure to confess your sin and need, or you can fall on Jesus’ and find the mercy you are looking for.
            How is this a Christmas message? In this advent season we remember the hope and expectancy of a God who would draw near. He came near in the flesh and blood of a helpless baby to experience our existence, our plight. He is Immanuel, “God with us.”
            Matthew’s account of John’s doubts fits with our Christmas experience quite well. At this time of year we are filled with hope. But we are also filled with a feeling of being stuck between God’s promises made and God’s promises kept, between Christ’s first coming at Bethlehem and his second coming with Glory.
           
When it comes to Jesus Christ, what were you expecting?
            What would Jesus say to us in our doubts, our disappointment with God, and our disillusionment with the so-called “happy endings” that elude us?
            He might say to you and I “Hang on to your faith in me. I know you are suffering; I know you are hurting. I know I haven’t been what you expected Me to be. You think I have let you down somehow. But the problem is not me. The problem is the expectation you have laid upon me. You need to understand that I am much greater than the box you have put me into. Remember that I am not yours to command. Repent of your expectations. Believe what the Scriptures say about Me. Trust me to do, not to do what you have expected me to do, but what I have promised to do in my Word for you. And if you trust in My Word, the promises of Scripture, I will never disappoint you. No, you will find that I have done everything I said I would do and more than you can imagine. You will find that you will be eternally satisfied in Me.”[ii]
            Jesus might say something like that, if we are allowed to put words in his mouth. Or he might simply say, “You say I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see…Behold I stand at the door and knock, if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:17-18, 20).


                                                            AMEN



[i] William Barclay, Gospel of Matthew, chapter 11.
[ii] Adapted from Greg Allen sermon on the same passage.

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