Transition Time Matthew 11:2-11

So much of what we do each day is based on our expectations, and those expectations give order to our lives. Over the years, we have developed specific tools for keeping our expectations in check. The most common tool is our calendar. As the days go by in our lives we know what to expect by those all too common symbols—year, month, date, hour. With this simple device, we manage our life expectations.

Just a test. What year is this? What month is this? What day is this? Now for the trick question. What season is this?

Because of the answers you gave to these questions, I can know some of the expectations that determine how you live. Now the expectation that you are going to hear a good sermon today may not be realized, but I’m guessing that many of your other expectations will be.

For instance, you probably came expecting to participate in the liturgy, to confess our sins and to hear the words of forgiveness. You probably expect to profess your faith using the creed. You expect to come to the Lord’s table to be nurtured and strengthened in your faith. You also expect these things to happen in a usual and orderly manner. And these expectations will probably be met.

But when our expectations are not met, our emotional, psychological, and spiritual sense of well-being may be upset. We may feel disappointed, tense, off-balance, wronged, even angry. In general, we may just feel out of sorts. That sense of unbalance will continue until the old order is restored, or until we become accustomed to the new way of doing things.

This last week, Sue had eye surgery. Because of her overall eye condition and eye sight and because she is getting to that age when cataracts begin to inhibit sight anyway, the doctor thought that it was probably time for lens replacements. Because of her extreme astigmatism, the doctor recommended a new and improved type of lens called the toric lens.

We were expecting better vision after the surgery, but no one could predict exactly how much better. We were pleasantly surprised Friday afternoon when Sue read the 20/20 line without any trouble. Now she is looking forward to the next surgery to be done on her other eye. By Christmas she may have a whole new outlook on life.

Of course, there are times when our expectations are not met. Some of those unfulfilled expectations are going to be devastating, life-changing events. When we encounter these expectation challenges, we usually describe them with words like: disease, possibly terminal illness, addiction, mental illness, divorce, death, maybe bankruptcy. In those times, other expectation systems may come into play. We may expect to be shunned or shamed, or we may expect our circle of friends to gather around us. Hopefully, in those devastating, life-changing times of failed expectations, we find support, and, in those times of severe loss, we continue to know Christ’s presence in our lives. The knowledge of support and Christ’s presence can make all the difference between being able to make the transition from what our old expectations were to what the new reality is.

Our texts today address this world of expectation and transition. Let me briefly frame the context for these passages.

Isaiah 35 talks about the transition time between leaving the captivity of Babylon and returning home on the Holy Highway to Jerusalem. It anticipates the road God’s people will travel from Persia (modern Iran) through the wilderness of new life in the land God gave them after the first exile in Egypt.

Echoing the joy of this return, we hear the words of praise in Psalm 146. “Happy are those whose help and hope is in the Lord God, the maker of heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever, who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. The Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the strangers and upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked, God brings to ruin. The Lord, our God will reign for all generations, that is forever! Praise the Lord!”

In James, we are cautioned about over-exuberance and to be patient, discerning God’s work in our lives, to wait with expectation for God’s justice to be done.

As-much-as these texts talk about the dreams and expectations of God’s people, they are greater dreams than the reality of their world will admit. The Holy Highway will lead God’s people home, but there will be some who are lost on the way. The desert won’t bloom more gloriously that year, and, as-far-as I know, the leopard and the lamb are still having issues. The justice spoken of in Psalm 146 continues to be a dream of what is possible in God’s kingdom rather than the reality we live in so we hear these words from James with a certain amount of sighing and irritation. Patient? How long, O Lord?

Part of our difficulty in seeing God’s Holy Highway, of seeing God’s creative work among us, is that we want the big picture. We want the great acts of God—those Bible movie special effects acts that make the bad guys shake in their boots, witnessing God’s righteous people being saved from whatever it is that assails them—but God continues to work without considering our expectations.

I know I have said this before, but how we think of God determines what we think about God. If we think that God created the world and everything in it and then stepped aside to watch the world from a distance, or maybe God went off to create something else and left the world to be on its own because God was bored with the last project, then what we think about God is going to be limited to God’s initial work and fascination of the new world things but not the maintenance of the world. If we think that God is involved with planning every detail of creation and the lives of all the creatures including humanity, then God is not only responsible for all the good things that happen to us, but all the bad things too. God caused those bad relationships and our suffering. God wanted the car accident to happen so that people would die or be crippled for life.  If we think that God is always going to take care of us and keep us safe, then, when things don’t go the way we think they should, or when we find ourselves in dangerous places, we wonder whether God cares about us or whether we are being punished for something we did wrong. So, you see, our expectations of God determine whether we can even know God’s work and presence in our world today.

This is the situation John is in when he sends his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one? Or, are we to wait for another?” John’s problem in today’s reading is that his expectations of God and how God will act do not match up with what Jesus is doing. John is living in a world that is thinking, “If God is going to come and be one of us, and God is all powerful, and God’s preference is towards God’s chosen people, and God’s chosen people are being oppressed by the nasty Romans, then God should have a certain amount of power and authority to defeat the Romans and establish God’s chosen people as the rulers of the world.” Right?

Instead of that powerful, vengeful God, Jesus tells John’s disciples that they are going to need to rethink how they think about God. That the God who created the world is also the one who continues to be in relationship with all of creation and continues to create new things in new ways, with new relationships. Jesus demonstrates another way of knowing how God is present in the world, not as conqueror or oppressor, but as healer and worker of justice, of lifting-up the forgotten into new ways of living. And beyond that, Jesus challenges us all to rethink the roll of prophet. Yes, John is a prophet, but he is more than that. A prophet is called up from the midst of God’s people to speak as an advocate for the poor and the afflicted, to claim justice for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. John does this, but John also announces God’s presence among us—God’s Word revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus tells John’s disciples to tell, that is, bear witness, to what you hear and see: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers (unclean) are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them.

This is not a world of power to kill and vengefully overthrow. This is the power of healing presence. It is that other Psalm 146 expectation image of God. It is the vulnerable image of God that walks with us knowing our weaknesses, our disappointments, and hurts. It is the God who gives vision to the blind even if they can’t physically see. It is the God who makes sure the lame travel with the rest of God’s people even if they can’t walk. It is the God who cleanses the unclean in his own blood. It is the God who speaks in the silence that only the deaf can hear. It is the God who forgives us when we were dead in sin and raises us up into new ways of living. It is the God who says that poverty is not divine punishment, but an opportunity for the wealthy to share, for the world to recognize that life is not about us individually, but about the relationship of God and one another as we were first created: in God’s image.

This God of healing also works through the lives of others. The gift of sight that Sue is receiving comes through the gifted hands of a surgeon who is God’s child also. With artificial joints and limbs, the lame can walk and the maimed are given restored abilities. Through medicine and therapy those with diseases are treated and healed. Through our caring, the forgotten and the poor are given value. Do these things happen because Jesus is touching and speaking them whole? Well…?

With John, we are asked, “What are our expectations of God? Are those expectations realistic, or do we need to look for, to recognize, God’s presence and activity in our lives differently? Who is this Jesus? What difference does he make in the way we live our lives together?

In times of transition, we all come with certain expectations. When we are growing up, the times of transition are regular and often. There will be some disappointments along the way, but in general, life continues as it should unless something really big comes along to change everything. That change may be physical or psychological. It could be something that completely changes the way you think of and interact with creation—like finding out that the earth is round; or finding out that the sun is the center of the universe; or that we do not live in a universe at all, but a cosmological multiverse. Or maybe, that God has come to live among us as one of us.

During this transition time of Advent, we come with John in the prisons of our own limited thinking, asking with him, “Are you the one we are expecting?” For the question of who this Jesus is is a question that every generation needs to ask and answer. We have to keep asking the question because our world keeps changing. It is this issue of change that demands us to continue to rethink and proclaim who God is and what our relationship with God is going to look like in the coming years.

As the first week of Advent considered the time of when the Son of Man will come and the second week considered our wilderness time together, so it is that this week we consider the transition time of where we have been and where we are going. Of what in God’s name are we doing here? It is a time to consider what our expectations of God are, and then what are God’s expectations of us?

So, tell what you hear and see. If you aren’t hearing anything, make some noise that proclaims Christ’s presence among us! If you aren’t seeing anything, point out God’s activity to those who are also looking and walk in God’s healing justice ways.