Advent 3 Yr A

John the Baptist was antsy. Sitting in prison and waiting, waiting for the messiah whose coming he had prophesied, waiting for his cousin Jesus to get on with the fire and brimstone of judgment, to get on with separating the chaff and the wheat, waiting for Jesus to clear the threshing room floor, waiting, no doubt, for Jesus to get him out of jail!! John asks, if you’re the one, then where’s the action? Where’s the wrath?

In response, Jesus lists his acts of love—no recompense here, just healing.

Jesus wasn’t the messiah a first century Jew expected. From John the Baptist of Jesus’ early ministry, to the apostles of his life and the early Christians of Paul and James, Jesus’ followers assumed that the second coming was going to happen soon--so they waited, getting everyone riled up to “be ready.”

Of course we’re still waiting…but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get ready.

But, just what constitutes “getting ready?” Repenting of our sins, turning our lives around? Absolutely, these are important steps, but they’re reactive—reactions to choices we now regret. Besides being reactive, we must also be pro-active. We have a part in this second coming, but we need to pay attention, because God? God tends to show up where we least expect it…in the downtrodden, the lost and the unnoticed.

If the first Advent was ushered in via a scared young woman and her poor yet faithful fiancé, why should we expect the Second Advent to be some type of surround sound High definition blockbuster event?

My guess is that God will come in the most astonishing and unimaginable way possible, simply and quietly, because that’s what God does….God hides in plain sight.

No one expected anything good to come out of Nazareth and certainly no one gave that poor couple searching for lodging in Bethlehem a second thought. Just like so many in our world don’t give a second thought to the homeless, the hungry, the captive or the destitute among us. But we must because that’s how God comes to us. In the unnoticed, unrecognized “other.”

When God came the first time, in the person of Jesus, the Romans weren’t toppled, the Pharisees weren’t thrown out of the temple. The lame walked, the blind saw and the deaf heard.

The Kingdom of Heaven on earth isn’t going to be an event, God’s reign on earth is a process. A process which began to unfold through the First Advent, and which will culminate in the Second Advent. The first Advent and the second are all God’s doing, but the in between time? That’s ours. The in between time is the time for us to bring the love of God into action.

Jesus’ first coming did cast the mighty from their thrones—but not because of military action or legislation, but because he put compassion into action and that is what will bring Christ again. Compassion in action—the Second Advent will begin when we ----God’s beloved-----put the compassion of Christ into action.

And we can do it---we can bring compassionate justice into our world because we have God on our side [it’s right there in this morning’s collect]. God’s bountiful grace and mercy helps and delivers us--- from hardness of heart and wanderings of mind, from looking out for ourselves on the backs of our neighbors, from walking past the homeless and the outcast, the downtrodden and the lost. God’s bountiful grace and mercy is given to us as fuel…fuel to do all the work we’ve been given to do, work in redeeming this world from the power of selfishness and hatred, from war and violence, from cheating and deceit.

The second coming, the Second Advent, the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth is guaranteed—it’s guaranteed because God is patient---God will wait until we get it right, God will wait until we realize that our part in the second Advent is neither passive nor impossible.

Our part in the Second Advent is active and possible, it is energetic and do-able, and it is necessary and needed. And it is up to you and to me.

John the Baptist wanted to know if Jesus was the one because Jesus wasn’t acting like he expected the Messiah to act. Today, the leaders of faith who get the most attention beg a similar question---they don’t act like people of faith—they seem to ignore the teachings of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, begging the question, “where is the loving God of faith? Where is the tolerance of the Almighty, of Yahweh, of Allah? Where is the peace of Abraham, of Isaac of Ishmael, of Jesus? How can you, [how can we], preach a message of redemption, of repentance, of renewal when what comes out of your mouths is hate and intolerance?”

The questions of John the Baptist, “are you the one?” came because the peace of a humble carpenter’s kid from the backwater area of Nazareth was not how he envisioned God in the Flesh. The questions were legitimate and Jesus answered them---not by proclamation, but by action.

The public view of religion today has been usurped by fanatics who have high-jacked the message of God, as expressed in the three great Abrahamic faiths, to suit their own needs of power and elitism. No wonder people today ask us, how can your faith be the answer…look at what’s being done in the name of God!

John the Baptist was antsy, antsy for some action from the Messiah. And now the Messiah is antsy, anxious for some action from us.

Our Advent task, our Christmas task, our Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost task is to reclaim the message of the incarnation—the message of peace on earth—and make sure that in all our doings we live into the message of hope which is Christ, that the lame and the blind and the deaf of our lives—those people who are deaf to the pleas of the homeless, the people who are lame to the plight of the destitute, the people who are blind to the needs of the outcast—are healed.