John the Baptist

It is late---we had cabinet in Columbia plus the cabinet Christmas party and I did not get home until well after 11. So I offer tonight the last few paragraphs from a manuscript of a sermon for the second Sunday in Advent--on John the Baptist. I read in a commentary the year I put together this sermon about the scripture where John is in prison and sends some of his disciples to ask Jesus if he indeed was the long awaited Messiah. Jesus tells them to go and tell John what they see, the blind can see, the lame can walk. I would seem from this scripture that John had questions as to whether Jesus was the long awaited One. Does this mean that all of his ministry was a time of waiting? That he really was not sure that Jesus was the one he had fortold would come? In that case, John's life was a testimony to his waiting faith, and his trust in God. Here is the last of the sermon---I think some of this may be from Barbara Brown Taylor:

People tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for. Have you noticed that? When you want something really really badly, your whole life tends to rearrange itself around that goal. For one person that which is wanted might be a baby, for someone else it might be a certain job, or an academic degree. Many of us wait for our vocation to be madeclear to us, others of us wait for a relationship that will last. Most all of us are still waiting for maturity, for enlightenment, for a bridled tongue, and for a contrite heard.

How about you? What are waiting for, and how is it shaping your life? Are you waiting for certainly, for healing, for love? Are you waiting for recognition, for retirement, for enough money to pay the bills? How about peace and justice on earth? How about the dawning of a new age, in which the wolf and the lamb shall feed together and the lion eat straw like an ox?
Whatever it is that our hearts yearn for, chances are that it has something to do with our vision of what it would mean for us to made whole, to be transformed into people who are not afraid anymore, whose basic needs are met and whose wounds are healed and who are more nearly the people God created us to be.

John the Baptist, the odd one who knew the truth, lived a life of waiting, a life that he lived with integrity, for he never turned the spotlight on himself, he always pointed ahead to the one who was coming. John knew the essential truth that all faithful people must know--that although God seems to delay in his coming; God always comes in the time that is right. Not so in haste, my heart, the hymn says, Have faith in God and wait; although he lingers long, he never comes too late. John knew this, even to his earthly death, which came too early for him to see the vindication of God’s love and power over the darkness of death itself.

During this Advent, perhaps God is trying to teach each of us to be people who learn how to be odd in that same way. That we are to be people who know the truth of God, that God is in charge of this universe, and of our lives, and we need not burden ourselves by impatience; we need not make things happen that end up birthing decisions that have not had time to mature; we need not push and push, do and do. Maybe this Advent, we need to learn to be, and in learning to be, we will learn to trust God with our lives, to approach him instead of with grabby fists, but with open hands that allow him the time and space to fill them will all good gifts.

Let us wait on our Lord, with the oddity of Christians who now what it is to trust God with our lives, even, as with John the Baptist. The Advent truth of waiting on God’s time is truth that is real, that can be trusted and that will make us free. Amen