Last week we heard about John the Baptizer preaching repentance in the desert and baptizing people in the River Jordan. Today we fast forward: John is in prison. He is in prison because he preached against the Jewish ruler, Herod. Herod had left his own wife and got involved with his half-brother’s wife. In Mark’s gospel  (6:18), John is recorded thundering to Herod, "It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife."  Like any autocratic leader, Herod had no scruples about throwing John into prison for that!

In today’s gospel reading, John sends a couple of his disciples to Jesus to ask, “are you the one who is to come or are we still waiting for someone else?”

Why was John asking?

Some people think that John was depressed in prison and close to losing his faith. Yet another possibility is that he was puzzled, even confused, by Jesus.

Remember how intense John was in his preaching? No gentle persuasion but straight up “You brood of vipers!” and “The axe is lying at the root of the trees.” Talking about Jesus he said, “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” And now he sees Jesus, preaching the Beatitudes – blessed are the poor in spirit and so on - and healing the sick.

Perhaps John was expecting a very different Messiah. Perhaps he was expecting a Messiah who would free the land from Roman rule, a Messiah who would have power over others. But during his time in the desert, Jesus had already said no to the temptation to take short cuts, to use his power in the wrong way.

So in the reply Jesus sends, he claims his Messiahship by referring back to the Old Testament prophecies of redemption and renewal, “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.”

Jesus’ ministry of healing is old hat to us, but at the time it was pretty amazing not just because people got well, but because in 1st century Palestine people who got chronically sick were thought to be being judged by God. In healing them, Jesus was not just providing medical services, he was making it clear that they were not garbage who should be thrown away but were beloved of God. He was extending God’s love to include everyone – especially those thought to have been punished or abandoned by God.

So on the one hand we have John preaching God’s judgment and on the other, Jesus showing God’s love and grace.

You might expect Jesus to tell his followers that John was wrong or at least that John was not understanding the reign of God but he doesn’t do that at all. He says, “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.”

Now there’s a paradox.

“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.”

We can think of John as being at a pivotal point in our salvation narrative – he is the last of the prophets and the greatest of these, but in the new era, the reign of heaven, he is no more important than anyone else.

Every year we spend two Sundays talking about John the Baptizer yet in the new era, the kingdom of heaven proclaimed and demonstrated by Jesus the Christ, he is no more important than you or me.

Isn’t that astonishing? We are equally beloved of God and equally important in the reign of Christ.
The coming of Christ in Jesus opens up an entirely new way of understanding humanity’s relationship with God. We are not condemned, we are not punished, we are beloved. We are called into relationship with God, more than that, we are called into unity with God. We are called to be Christ-like beings.

Jesus brings us the astonishing gift of grace – we are reconciled with God not by anything we do or don’t do but by God’s gift alone.

This was Martin Luther’s great insight. He was an Augustinian friar, and apparently a very timid one who was afraid of God’s judgement. He was afraid of doing it wrong and being punished for his sins. But when he was studying the book of Romans, he had this transformative insight. We are not saved by what we do or by how much we contribute to the Vatican or any other religious authority. We are saved by the grace of God alone. It is God’s action that draws us into reconciliation, not ours.

 We are saved, he declared, by grace through faith.

In other words, God’s gift to us in Jesus is reconciliation but we get to accept the gift and trust in it.
You may remember that when Jesus visited his hometown of Nazareth, he found he could hardly do any miracles there (Mark 6:5). Why was that? Because the people thought ‘that’s just Joseph’s son’ and didn’t trust him as the Messiah. They didn’t trust so they were not healed.

The gift that we celebrate every year at Christmas, the Feast of the Incarnation, is that God loves us so much that she chose to become human, to take on all the limitations of being human, and in so doing showed that all flesh – all matter – is beloved. God’s longing is for the redemption of the world when all her beloved beings will be brought into right relationship and we will no longer be separated from the triune God, in any way.

Jesus did not come to judge us.

Most of us can remember some version of John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  But do you remember the next verse? Verse 17? “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world.

A lot of people still don’t get this. They think that we are flawed, and that we are condemned and we have to grovel to God. Or they think that other people are condemned, that they are the chaff which John the Baptizer said would get thrown into the fire.

But, people of Advent, people of the Coming, this is what gives us joy, this is what gives us hope, this is what gives us peace. This is what set Isaiah’s feet dancing when, in the first reading today, he proclaimed, “the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert…” This is what made Mary sing “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world.  We are beloved, the earth is beloved, the cosmos is beloved. We need do nothing to earn God’s love.
We need do nothing except say thank you, rejoice and live like it’s true.

Because it is.

the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall

I struggled with this morning’s sermon. I did all the things I normally do – read the readings, consulted a commentary, looked at a close reading of the gospel in Greek and read several other excellent sermons, and still nothing. Nothing to share with you.

I think it’s because rather than filling me with hope and joy, today’s readings left me grieving.  Grieving, because the reality of the world we are living in seems further than ever away from the world that Isaiah and Paul and John were seeing. It’s Advent again and we are still waiting. We are still waiting for the little shoot to grow tall and strong out of Jesse’s stump. We are still waiting for the end of racism that Paul proclaimed in Romans. We are still waiting for the wilderness of our culture to make clear the road for our God. Still waiting.

We avoid grief because it is uncomfortable. I would rather be rejoicing in the generosity of God. But grief is part of our life, and it is part of God’s life in Jesus. We grieve for what we had that is gone, we grieve for what we long for but do not have. There are mystics who say that our very longing for God is a kind of grief because in this life we never experience more than a momentary oneness with the divine. So our longing is always unfulfilled.

When we avoid grief, it can turn sour inside us. Looking around the church this morning, we are deeply grateful for one another and for God’s generosity in providing this building, this liturgy, this music, this faith community. And yet we grieve that there are no children here. We grieve for our children and grandchildren who are not finding God in the way we do, or not apparently even noticing that God is missing in their lives. And if we avoid our grief it can turn to anger and blame.

It must be someone’s fault that the church isn’t what it was in our youth. It must be someone’s fault that our economy has changed and there are fewer well-paying blue-collar jobs. It must be someone’s fault that social security costs the country so much and medical expenses keep rising. Someone must be cheating the system. Someone must be blamed.

We are living in a culture of blame and a culture of racism. A culture where some at the highest levels can describe people who have immigrated legally into this country as ‘garbage’. Can describe people who God has created and who are God’s beloved as garbage. My friends, you don’t need me to tell you that there is no part of Creation which we may see as garbage when God sees it as good.
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This prejudice and hatred grieve me deeply.

The religious folk who went out to the desert to hear John preach were confident that they were the descendants of Abraham, and they were ok. They were proud of their religious and racial heritage. But John said it was not enough – God could make good Jews out of stones. God can make good Christian Americans out of rocks too. If God wants to. But that is not what God wants.

God wants us to repent and to show the fruits of repentance. We often think of repentance as having a change of heart, yet it also has a connotation of return from exile. Like the Hebrews exiled in Babylon, we are away from our true home which is the presence of God. We have glimpses of it. We get postcards from home. But it is up to us to take the journey through the desert. The journey of repentance which is also a journey of grief.

Yet not just of grief. It is a journey of hope as we return to the God who loves and welcomes all beings, who is creating a new kin-dom where violence is unknown. Where anger and blame are replaced by love because in God’s generosity there is plenty for everyone, lion and lamb alike. This is Isaiah’s vision, the Great Shalom, where all are reconciled with one another and with God. It is this new Creation that God calls us to co-create with her. Not the old one based on hate but a new one based in love, compassion, justice and peace.

A few minutes ago, we sang, “O come O come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, That mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear.” We grieve because we are still living in exile when we long to be reconciled with God and not just as individuals but as a society, as the whole of humanity, indeed the whole of the cosmos. And we seem so far from that reconciliation.
 
Yet John the Baptizer tells us that the coming of the Christ changes everything.
 
“Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees”, he says, “every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” A fearful image, but Isaiah takes the picture of a tree stump – a tree that has been cut down - and turns it into a healing one. From that stump, that tree that seemed dead, a shoot is growing. A shoot which will become a branch and a branch in which the Spirit dwells.
 
And therein is our hope. That the tree which fails to fruit or whose fruit is bitter and sour will be cut down. Things will change. Yet even that diseased tree may grow again in newness of life. Even that tree may return from exile and be reconciled with God in the coming Great Shalom.
 
There is hope for us. And we are called to grow that hope. Listen to the words of John the Baptizer again, “Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
 
Being good Christians isn’t enough, even being good Episcopalians isn’t enough. We are to bear fruit worthy of repentance. In Galatians, Paul says “the fruit of the Spirit” is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal. 5:22-23 NASB). This is the fruit worthy of repentance, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  This is what we are working towards, with God’s help. These are the qualities of the coming reign of Christ, the reign of righteousness, peace and justice. These are the qualities that we are to develop in ourselves and in one another and in our society.
 
This is hard and deeply counter-cultural work. And it is ours to do.
 
Instead of allowing our grief to turn us sour and critical, let us turn instead to Jesus, the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and allow him to work in us and with us the coming shalom, the day of peace, the great turning and return home from exile. Amen.

the Rev, Dr. Caroline Hall