Third Sunday of Advent Yr A Dec 15 2019

Audio   Third Sunday of Advent Yr A Dec 15 2019

Isaiah 35:1-10, James 5:7-10, Matthew 11:2-11, Psalm 146:4-9

We come to the place, on this third Sunday of Advent, when God’s revelation is made fully real in Jesus. A new age is dawning. You and I live in the midst of this arc of God’s fulfillment. Remember, Advent is a gift whereby we live into the then, now, and not yet of God’s mercy and justice. We don’t know much really about what the completion of the arc may look like, but we have lots of ideas. We read throughout our sacred scripture what fulfillment, completion, end times, may look like. We see that completion depicted in artwork, and movies. And you know I see it in the world building of novels. We’ll get to that in just a bit, for now, let’s look at John and Jesus.

In Matthew’s gospel, John the baptizer, who is now in prison, sends messengers to Jesus, to determine for himself that this is in fact the Messiah, the one for whom they have been waiting. There is a question about that, because in John’s opinion, Jesus surely did not look or act like the Messiah.

The expectations for Messiah were that this one would come in power, and set up a new kingdom, restore Israel and throw out the Romans, and clean up the temple. And, to be fair, there were varying expectations of what this anointed one, in the line of David, would do or be. Would the Messiah be a warrior? or a man of peace? But you begin to see what is happening here, Jesus did not look like or act like the expected Messiah, and even John, who prepares the way, wonders if Jesus is really the one.

Jesus says about himself, “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.” This is what Jesus is doing, and it doesn’t look anything like what was expected. It becomes clear that Jesus can’t win here. On one side he’s got the temple priests disappointed and even up in arms, that the claims that Jesus is Messiah are not very promising. And, those same people are afraid because everything he does and says incites the Roman officials.

But for those who have been brought low, those who will listen and follow, Jesus is the healer. Throughout Matthew’s story Jesus heals a leper, a paralytic, Jairus’s daughter and the woman hemorrhaging, gives sight to the blind man, casts out demons, returns a withered hand to health, and so much more. This is one who brings God’s healing and wholeness to God’s people, this is one who resists evil in the world.

Jesus, the Messiah, the anointed one, who doesn’t act anything like one in power, but instead, empowers the powerless. The baby, born in a barn, not the towers of power, will model another way. Poor people mattered to Jesus. Jesus is building a world that reverses generally accepted values by opposing evil. Jesus is God’s revelation, in all times and all places. With Jesus’ coming a new age has dawned.

I want to pick up our storytelling conversation and other world building with a story that I think many of you have read or seen. In the Hunger Games, Katniss is our unaware hero. The world that is built in this story exists in the ruins of a place once known as North America. It is the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. The people of District 12 are starving, the rations they get are inadequate and nearly not eatable. Katniss learned early from her father how to breach the fence that keeps them captive, and hunt with a bow and arrow, and collect greens and berries to supplement her family’s food.

Katniss is the tribute from District 12, the furthest outlying district as far as she knows. Katniss’ younger sister was actually the tribute chosen by chance, but Katniss put herself in the place of her sister, surely to die. The other tribute is Peeta, the son of the bread baker. Katniss is sure, that when she was younger, it was bread from his father’s bakery, purposefully burnt and thrown out in the trash that saved her and her family.

Katniss and Peeta are whisked away to the Capitol, to be shaped into the tributes that could garner support when tossed into the arena to battle to the death the tributes from the other districts. But Katniss begins to realize that to save herself, her real self, not just her life and Peeta’s, that she must resist the evilness of those who devise the game, and she must resist the power of the empire of Panem. This is the evil that dehumanizes, evil that is voyeuristic and that revels in the meanness of people. In the resistance, she and Peeta begin to shape a new world, a world in which the powerless are empowered, the hungry get fed. Katniss and Peeta inaugurate a new thing, a beginning that raises up the lowly and gives hope in a very dark world.

Our sacred stories that describe the arc of God’s love all the way from the incarnation, God in the flesh, Jesus, to all of the scenarios that imagine the end of times, apocalypse, always include resistance. The Book of Revelation, that which seems so scary to us, could rightly be called The Book of Resistance. It inspires the people for whom it was written to resist the evil that would oppress, the evil that would dehumanize, the evil that would try to convince us that death is the final word. But, death is not the final word, and we do not live in an ideal world. To be alive in Jesus is to face at every turn the destructive reality of violence, and to resist it, as Jesus does in life and on the cross. And to be alive in Jesus is to side with vulnerable children in defiance of adults who see them as expendable.

Jesus is the Messiah, the anointed one. And the kingdom that God inaugurates in the birth, the life, the death and the resurrection of Jesus is a kingdom in which love is the first cause. It is love that empowers human beings, you and me, to resist darkness. It is love that empowers us to feed one another with the bread of compassion, the bread of mercy, the bread that is broken for us.

We too are called to resistance. We are called to speak the truth of God’s love, God in the flesh, with our voices and our bodies. We are called to stand up on behalf of those who have no voice. It is not death that has the final word, it is new life, it is hope.

Resist during this Advent. Resist the rush, the chaos, the overspending, all that steals our sacredness. Resist being pulled into stress by what is happening around us. Resist the impulse to be overwhelmed by the harsh news we hear, resist turning your eyes down when the one who is hungry, tired, in prison looks you in the eye. Resist the darkness, let the light shine.

Feed the world, or at least your small part of it, with the bread of life. Feed the world with the love that comes to us in the quiet of this new birth. Amen.