Matthew 11:2-11

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" Jesus answered them, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me." As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: "What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.' Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

Anticipating that the end of his life was near, John the Baptist sat in his prison cell and wondered if he had gotten it all wrong. Had he wasted his life? All those years spent announcing that the Messiah was coming…that the world would be turned on its head…that salvation was at hand; and what did he have to show for it?

John was convinced that in his lifetime he would witness the Messiah come and establish the Kingdom of God on Earth. And it would look something like this: There would be trumpets blazing, the evil occupying government powers would be brought to their knees, the righteous and religious would inherit the earthly blessings, and God would walk on the earth, ruling with justice.

Sitting in the cold, dark prison cell, John’s attention turned to Jesus. He had put so much hope, faith and trust in Jesus of Nazareth. He recalled the day he baptized Jesus in the Jordan River. When Jesus came up out of the water hadn’t he heard the voice of the Lord say, “This is my Son, whom I love.” Maybe he misheard something that day, because as far as he could tell, Jesus was no Messiah.

After all, Jesus spent more time challenging the Hebrew people than the Roman government. Jesus was plain, ordinary, and physically unimpressive. He didn’t throw lightening bolts from his hands, he couldn’t fly, and he never even lifted a finger against anyone. Rather than lead God’s people in a fight against the oppressive, godless forces of oppression, he spent all his time eating and drinking with sinners, adulterers, lepers, tax collectors, and prostitutes.

John was aware of the healings and so-called “miracles” which Jesus performed. But even that was too mundane for John. He expected something more spectacular from God.

As a desperate measure at a desperate time, John sent his followers to ask, once and for all, if Jesus was actually the Messiah. Jesus’ reply was poignant. According to Jesus, John needed to stretch his imagination of what the presence and power of God looks like, because he was missing out on something important.

Here, today, two thousand years later, we too must stretch our imagination of what the presence and power of God looks like. Many of us, like John the Baptist, have a narrow understanding of who God is, what God does, and where we can experience God. In this season of Advent many of us are caught waiting for a God who fits nicely into our preconceived notions – a God who lives confined within a particular church building or a particular set of scripture passages.

In January of 2007, The Washington Post videotaped the reactions of commuters to the music of a violinist at a D.C. Metro (subway) stop. The overwhelming majority of the 1000+ commuters were too busy to stop. A few did, briefly, and some of those threw a couple of bills into the violin case of the street performer. No big deal, just an ordinary day on the Metro. Except it wasn't an ordinary day. The violinist wasn't just another street performer; he was Joshua Bell, one of the world's finest concert violinists, playing his multi-million dollar Stradivarius. Three days earlier he had filled Boston's Symphony Hall with people paying $100 for the cheap seats to hear him play similar pieces.

The question the Post author (Gene Weingarten) asks is: “If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?”*

Just as how many of us have lost our ability to recognize great music anywhere outside of a concert hall; I also fear we have largely lost our ability to recognize God at work outside of the church.

Can we imagine that God is using us in our various roles as employee, parent, spouse, friend, citizen, and volunteer, to extend God's love, blessing, and steadfast care of all creation?

The possibility of missing out on God’s presence and activity might sound dire; but truthfully, it’s more of an invitation to recognize God’s presence so that we can share in the joy that surrounds it. Here’s how the Washington Post journalist captured this joy from in the Joshua Bell subway experiment. He writes,

“As it happens, exactly one person recognized Joshua Bell, and she didn't arrive until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, there was no doubt. She doesn't know much about classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier, at Bell's concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn't about to miss it.

“Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center. She had a huge grin on her face. The grin, and Furukawa, remained planted in that spot until the end.”

John was driven to doubt and despair because he didn’t know what to look for. In order to see God at work within your family, job, friends, and community, you need to know what you’re looking for. On Sunday mornings we gather hopeful to experience Christ in a way that would help you identify God throughout the week. So that when you least expect it, you may see God at work in strange ways and in strange places, and that you would feel compelled drop everything, sit down, and smile until the end.

Jesus tells John that every Christian disciple is greater than John. Why? Because we have perceived in Jesus' "ordinary" actions of restoration the very hand of God at work to heal, redeem, and save –– something John almost missed completely.

I wish to leave you with a quote from poet W.H. Davies:

“What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare. ”

Amen

* Read the original Washington Post article by clicking here.

Matthew 3:1-12

In those days, John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one about whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, and make his paths straight.’ Now, John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist and he ate locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all the people of Judea were going out to him, and all the along the region of the Jordan, to be baptized by John in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

But when John saw the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee the wrath that is to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor;’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees and every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing-fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing-floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

John the Baptist was a strange bird… an odd duck… out there in the wilderness, dressing weirdly, eating differently, baptizing some people, barking at others. A lot can be said about his words, and his ways, and his wardrobe, of course. But I’m always fascinated by how all of it made him standout as unique… as special… as chosen, perhaps… as someone worth listening to… as someone worth heeding, and following, and affording our attention.

Above all else, I think, John the Baptist – Jesus’ crazy cousin – was a Truth-Teller. He was the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, as the prophet predicted. He knew a thing or two about the reign of God and his life was all about preparing for the coming of that kingdom, by way of Jesus. John knew that, in Jesus – through his life and ministry and death and resurrection – God’s reign of love and justice and mercy and grace was about to break into the world and onto the scene in a way that it never had before. And John was on a mission to preach and teach and warn and welcome whoever he could about what that could mean for the world.

For what it’s worth, I’m not as scared of John the Baptist’s preaching as I used to be. I think he’s impassioned and he’s frustrated and he’s angry, even, about what he sees in the world around him, and all of that talk about axes and trees, threshing floors, chaff, and unquenchable fire is evidence of that. But, truth be told, each of us has something like the “chaff” of sin in our lives that’s worth repenting, worth changing, worth letting God burn away, if you will, by the refining fires of grace, if we’ll let that be.

So, while it may be tempting to write him off as some kind of crazy, carnival barker out there in the wilderness, John the Baptist is a model… a poster child… an example… for anyone with a Truth to tell; for anyone who prepares a path; for anyone who makes a way; for anyone crying out in the wilderness of injustice and sin and ugliness and despair.

So when I think of John the Baptist, then, I think about the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Mother Theresa - passionate, patient, hope-filled tellers of the Truth and doers of justice. And just this week, in honor of World AIDS Day, on Thursday, I learned about another lone voice in the wilderness I’d never heard of before. Her name is Ruth Coker Burks. (And I owe the meat of this story to an article I read, which was written by David Koon and first published in the Arkansas Times. You can read it in full here.)

Ruth Coker Burks found herself in the wilderness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 90s, in our country. In fact, she was so early on the scene that the then-mysterious affliction was still being called GRID, for “Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.” We’ve come a long way, baby!

The short version of a much longer, beautifully sad story, is that – in 1984 – while visiting a friend with cancer in an Arkansas hospital, she overheard nurses arguing about who would have to care for the patient in a room down the hall – a room with a big red bag covering the door. While the nurses argued and avoided it, Ruth Coker Burks snuck into the wilderness of that patient’s room to find a dying, skeleton of a man, who told her he just wanted to see his mother before he died.

When she told the nurses, they assured her his mother wasn’t coming, that he’d been in the hospital for six weeks, that no one had come – and that no one was coming. This pushed Burks even further into the wilderness of what was about to become her new life’s work – whether she knew it or not – because after getting her hands on the phone number of the dying young man’s mother, she found out the nurses were right. No one was coming.

The dying man’s mother told Burks her son was a sinner, that she didn’t know what was wrong with him, and that she didn’t care. His mother said she wouldn’t come and that her son was already dead to her, as far as she was concerned. And the icing on the cake? This mother didn’t even want to claim her son’s body after he died.

And she wasn’t alone, this mother. Ruth Coker Burks worked with over a 1,000 people dying of AIDS in those days and she says a mere handful of families refused to turn their backs on their loved ones. A mere handful of families cared enough to visit, or comfort, or memorialize or even collect the remains of their loved ones, after they had died.

“You brood of vipers!”

When Ruth Coker Burks returned to that dying man’s bedside, he was sick and deluded enough to mistake her for his mother. And she let him believe that, while she held his hand, bathed and consoled him, until he died 13 hours later.

“… prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”

Because of a strange, rather amusing, family history, Ruth Coker Burks had been promised the inheritance of a cemetery when she was a little girl – a half-acre portion of red dirt on a hill in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where her family had been buried since the late 1800s. There were something like 260 vacant, waiting plots there, and she had always wondered what she was going to do with a cemetery for an inheritance. “Who knew,” she wondered sarcastically, “there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?” “Who knew there’d come a time when people didn’t want to bury their children?”

But, “God is able, from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”

In a chipped cookie jar she got from a friend’s pottery store, then, Ruth buried that first man’s ashes, near her own father’s grave. And over the next few years, she would do the same thing for more than 40 souls, most of them gay men whose families refused to claim them. With a post-hole digger, her daughter’s help, more chipped cookie jars, and some prayers of her own, this lone voice, crying in the wilderness of her very own cemetery (in Hot Springs, Arkansas, for the love of Jesus!), and she prepared the way for some lonely, forgotten, but beloved children of God.

“Then the people of Jerusalem and all the people of Judea were going out … and all the along the region of the Jordan…”

Because after she cared for that first man, people started calling and asking for her help. “They just started coming,” she said. And according to her, “Word got out that there was this kind of wacko woman in Hot Springs who wasn’t afraid. They would tell them, ‘Just go to her. Don’t come to me. Here’s the name and number. Go.’ I was their hospice,” she said. “Their gay friends were their hospice. Their companions were their hospice.”

And that’s how she became the voice of one, crying out in the wilderness, not just in sadness and despair over the LACK of compassion and love and grace she witnessed from parents and families, but crying out in the wilderness WITH compassion and love and grace that too many were unable to muster. With the help of drag queens and gay clubs, she raised money for funeral costs and drug treatments, travel expenses and more. (I wonder if any of those drag queens dressed in camels’ hair, with leather belts around their waists…)

She prepared a way… she created a path… she proclaimed the kingdom…

Which is God’s call for each of us in John the Baptist – and through people like Ruth Coker Burks – these wackos in the wilderness. In these Advent days of waiting – and every day, really – our call is to get about the business of proclaiming and promising and practicing the radical acts of justice and love, mercy and grace we are also waiting on, and expecting from, and hoping for, at Christmas.

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

(If you want to contribute to a memorial some are working to set up at the cemetery, you can add your two cents - or more - here. And/or visit GoFundMe.com and search "Ruth Coker Burks." You'll see there that some of the donated funds will also help Ruth with expenses she's incurred following a stroke.)

"Stop and Hear the Music" – Matthew 11:2-11

"Wackos in the Wilderness" - Matthew 3:1-12