Not What You're Waiting For

Matthew 11:2-11

I’m not the one you have been waiting for.

Well, I am the New Rector you planned and discerned for, the one announced a couple months ago, now here, in your pulpit. And I’ve been waiting for you, too.

But I’m not.

I’m not the one you’ve been waiting for.

Wait  -- what??

If that’s what you’re thinking, you may have some sympathy for John in today’s gospel story.

John the Baptizer has preached the coming of God’s Anointed, the Messiah who will cleanse evil and corruption from the faith, and bring peace through the power of his judgement, who will change the world. John has recognized that Anointed in Jesus, when they met for baptism in the wilderness. Now he’s imprisoned for the courage of his convictions, for acting on his trust in that cleansing Messiah, but he has seen none of this fierce and fiery transformation he’s been counting on.

So he sends his disciples to ask Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

Are you the one we’ve been waiting for?

And Jesus, apparently constitutionally incapable of giving a yes or no answer to a yes or no question, says: “Go and tell John what you see and hear. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the marginalized have good news brought to them.”

The one you’ve been waiting for? Yes or no?

Whatever, doesn’t matter, the Kingdom of God is here.

Jesus is teaching them to see healing, reversal, transformation. This is what God has been doing all along, while you were waiting for the Messiah, whoever that is.

The blind see, the lame walk, the hopeless receive hope…This is what you’ve been waiting for, whether you were waiting for it or not.

So tell John.

Tell John to stop waiting. To see, to hear, to walk, to live, to receive good news himself. To experience God’s Kingdom now – whether or not it’s the right way for God to come.

It’s impossible for us – thousands of years of storytelling and interpretation and cultural change later – to understand how wrong it was that the Messiah was not judging and cleansing and getting rid of all the bad guys and fixing the government so we could all live in righteousness and peace.

Here and now, we’ve managed to create ourselves a world where we elect people to do that every couple of years, and we’ve gotten used to the idea that God is supposed to heal the sick, cheer up the poor, and stay out of government.

So it really is impossible for us to understand how thoroughly Jesus was disappointing and disrupting the Messianic expectations of the faithful in his day.
Well, unless, perhaps, Donald Trump dropped off of Twitter, nominated a slew of pro-choice left leaning justices to the federal bench,  went around comforting the lonely and grieving and doing dishes for welfare recipients when it was all just too much, initiated national single-payer health plan, and spent four years facilitating Bible studies about race, privilege, hospitality and diversity with both Black Lives Matter activists and white supremacist groups. 

Are any of you – honestly – expecting that from Mr. Trump? Did anyone vote for him to do that?
Are any of you – honestly – expecting that presidential transformation from God?

Right. All the healing, transformative, stuff that Jesus was doing in his day didn’t fulfill anyone’s expectations at all, either.

Jesus went around doing God’s work in the ways that no one was looking for – often in the opposite way from what anyone was looking for! So seeing and hearing that healing transformation they were supposed to tell John about might have required a wrenching change of focus and lenses for those disciples.

That’s true for us, too.
While does God meet some of our expectations, I suspect that most of the transformative work God is doing now is in the opposite places to the ones we’ve come to expect.

That – now that we’ve gotten used to the idea of Jesus being gentle, cheerful, and nice, God may be bringing about healing through fierce, disagreeable, even rude disruptions in our relationships and communities and even bodies.

Or – if we’re used to the idea of Jesus being righteous – God may be out there saving the world by actions and attitudes that feel “unchristian” to us.

Or, well, we’re expecting a baby this Christmas, wrapped in the heartwarming wonder of birth – what if God is – in those very moments – pouring out loving joy in some sort of brutal death?

I’m shuddering. It feels wrong to say it, even. But I think that’s what Jesus is talking about, today. About the raw reality that the Messiah, the bringer of God’s will and reign to everyday earth, is not going to do it the way we want or expect, and that we need to tune our eyes and ears and hearts to see and hear what God is doing in the things it would be wrong or silly or simply out of place for God to do.

And that might be good news.

VERY good news, in fact.

Because the world is full of things that are just plain wrong these days, isn’t it?

Politics, culture, economics, media…

So what if -

What if God is bringing salvation through ISIS, or in Russian email hacking or reality TV or climate change or the rising cost of health care or the really, really, annoying person in your office or neighborhood?

It may be comforting to think of God bringing salvation in the things that are otherwise just awful for us, but it’s also challenging.

Because, well, would we notice?

Would we hear and see the Kingdom of God in those events and places and things that are so opposite of where we expect the holy?

And if we did – what would happen if we told the story of what we see and hear – of healing and transformation in those things that feel wrong, healing and transformation that would be otherwise easy to overlook, to miss…

I don’t know what would happen.

But I do know that Jesus would like to find out.

Because one thing I know about Jesus, the thing he’s reminding John and you and me about today,

is that he’s never the one we were expecting,

but he’s always the one God has sent.

That’s true for us, too, here at Trinity.

You are not going to be exactly what I was expecting. I will not be exactly what you were expecting.

Instead, we are the ones God has sent.

And Jesus is commanding us to tell the story of what we see and hear – of healing and transformation, glory and grace, happening in the places we weren’t expecting,

and reminding us to look for that, in the places and ways we’ve never looked for God before.

It’s a good thing to do – individually and together – as we make this new start in the life of Trinity: to look with new lenses and new focus. To see, despite any blindness imposed by our expectations, hear despite any deafness conferred by our customs, walk despite the binding limits of our comfort zones: to stop waiting for what we expect from God, and become what God has been doing all along.

Because in the end, and in the moment, at Trinity, for the world, in our own hearts, it doesn’t matter what we have been waiting for.

The only thing that matters is that God is here.

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Trinity Episcopal Church, Moorestown NJ