As we continue to experience the Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. Lord, open our hearts and minds by the power of Your Holy Spirit, that, as the Scriptures are read and Your Word proclaimed, We may hear with joy what You would say to us today. Speak Lord, your servants are listening. If these words are not Your Word, may they be forgotten and come to naught. But if they be Thy Word, may they adhere to our hearts, forever transforming us from glory into glory, into the creatures you would have us be, Thou who art our Rock and Redeemer, Amen.

Hear now The Word of the Lord as it comes to us in the Gospel of Matthew. Listen. Matthew 11.2-11. The Grass withers, the Flower falls, but the Word of the Lord endures forever…Thanks be to God.

I was a teenager when the magic of Christmas disappeared for me. We were in Florida…

Though it is perhaps a silly comparison, I wonder if that is what John was thinking in today’s passage. What has John been doing? Preaching and proclaiming and preparing the way for the Messiah with fire and fervent warnings to repent. Did that get him a seat of honor in the court of the King? No, it got him in prison. We can understand his frustration. John asks a poignant question of Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Maybe John was questioning his calling and life’s work. Had his intentions been misplaced? Is God’s Messiah really John’s own cousin? Maybe John was underwhelmed. “Is that all?”

John desired a Messiah who would turn the political world over. He wanted a judge to vindicate the righteous and damn the wicked. With good reason did John want this. He had Biblical support. He had preached his heart out to get people ready to face the new order. He put his life on the line, and now sat in jail for his efforts. What John saw was this Jesus eating with tax collectors and sinners and telling people to love their enemies. This wasn’t the winning team that John had envisioned. Sitting in a prison cell facing death underscored the point.

Don’t we all want Jesus to be the ultimate winner, and to make us part of the ultimate dominant winning team? Evil and all evil doers would just get vanquished. Our way of living is validated, and everyone can see what good people we are, and how we were right all along. Yes, the Messiah is supposed to show the world the difference between right and wrong, and which is which. O how we pray for it. How we work for it. How we want it. We can taste it, and it surely will be sweet. We think we can, anyway. The only reason to want it is because we are sure we are on the ins with God. We are sure we are good enough. We are sure we are better than others. We’ve worked tirelessly, to make sure our children are raised rightly in the church, to make sure that this church strives for what is right, that pumpkins get sold so we can go to Montreat or on a Mission trip. We’ve done so much, and its about time God gave us what is coming to us. And Jesus eats with sinners, and invites them to full participation, to the full participation that we have so tirelessly worked for. Haven’t we earned some special consideration? Shouldn’t our hard work be paying off? So, we can understand where John is coming from, can’t we?

Jesus doesn’t give a yes or a no to John’s question, but tells John’s disciples to go and give their own testimony about what they see and hear around them: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news preached to them. It is as clear a reference to Isaiah 35, as read earlier, as you are likely to find. Jesus knew that John would recognize the origination of these words, even if he didn’t recognize Jesus as the fulfillment of prophecy. Ironically, Jesus is who John expected, but not in the way John expected him. Jesus did not come to destroy the wicked, or to separate those who thought they were good from those that they looked down their noses at. Jesus came instead to restore us all.

Jesus references Isaiah, which offers a glorious vision where landscape and people alike are folded into God’s promised healing and restoration. Wilderness, dry land, desert…, waters, streams, blossoms. Blind eyes opened, deaf ears unstopped, the lame leap, the speechless tongue sings for you. The redeemed, the ransomed, and the foolish all returned to the kingdom. Jesus came to restore us all.

Some people took offense at the kind of Messiah Jesus turned out to be. He hopes John will not be one of them. There are plenty in Jesus’ day who did wish for more. They expected something, someone, else. Some people take offense today at the kind of Messiah Jesus truly turned out to be. Not the Messiah we have made him into, the winner God who validates all of our ideologies, theologies, and political policies. But people take offense at the real Biblical Jesus. You know the one, the one who blesses the poor, and grants grace to the worst sinner. The Jesus who doesn’t give us special privilege, and asks us to throw away all of our false self righteousness. People take offense at the Jesus who came to restore all.

Jesus came to restore all. All, isn’t that much more like the God of grace we need. God is not about to pick a certain click of people and bestow love on just those who fit that mold. That is the God we need, we crave, and thank God, the God we have.

In this season of expectation, as we make lists of our wishes and wants, this text invites us to re-examine all of those. Given the kind of Messiah Jesus turned out to be, we have much to learn about the kind of disciples we are meant to be. Amen.

1. This sermon is informed by an article by Kimberly Clayton Richter, “The Advent Texts: Glorious Visions, Dogged Discipleship”, as found on pages 3-10 of Journal for Preachers Volume XXVIII Number 1 Advent 2004, T. Erskine Clarke, Editor and Publisher. Decatur, GA.