Sermon preached by The Rev'd Nicholas Lang

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

The Third Sunday of Advent, December 16, 2007

In the name of God, the creator and redeemer; Jesus Christ, the long-awaited Messiah; and the Holy Spirit, the giver of life. Amen. .

There is a tradition at the Jewish celebration of Passover to save a seat at the Seder table for Elijah the prophet who is supposed to bring the news that the Messiah has come. At a certain point in the evening, the front door of the house is flung open wide and everyone falls silent with the anticipation of his arrival. For thousands of years that door has been opened and for thousands of years all that has entered those homes is the cool night air.

One Hasidic story tells of a pious Jew who asked his rabbi why, having opened the door year after year, waiting for Elijah to come, he never has. The rabbit answered by telling him that there was a very poor family in the neighborhood with several children. Might he ask this family if his wife and he could celebrate Passover with them and provide everything they would need for the eight days of Passover. “Then on the Seder night,” the rabbi said, “Elijah will certainly come.” The man did exactly as the rabbi suggested, but after Passover he came to the rabbi and told him that, alas, he had once again waited in vain for Elijah to come. The rabbi answered, “I know that Elijah did, indeed, come on the Seder night to the house of your neighbor. But of course you did not see him.” Then the rabbi held a mirror in front of the man’s face and said, “Look, this was how Elijah appeared that night.” He had missed his coming because he just did not have the right kind of eyesight.

We have once again been visited by another prophet this morning—John the Baptist. But unlike last week’s encounter, we don’t find him preaching sternly to the large numbers who came out to hear him. Today we meet him in prison, where it is dark and lonely. How difficult that confinement must have been for a man of the wilderness.

Things were going badly for him. He was in deep trouble with Herod for reading the king the riot act about his adultery and incestuous relationship. Soon, the object of Herod’s affection, the seductress Salome, would be asking for John’s head—literally.

Remember that is was wild-eyed John who lived alone in the desert, hate locusts and honey, and bellowed to the crowds, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” He was once very sure of himself and clear about his calling. Now, however, he has his doubts. The Messiah was supposed to make things better, to fix everything so that the wicked no longer ruled the roost. But Jesus was not showing any evidence that he would live up to John’s expectations. While John warned people to repent, Jesus came along and told them to love one another. John went out of his away to avoid sinners. Jesus invited them to sit at the dinner table with him. And now John was in the pit, locked in a dark and airless cell, and for him it would be all down hill from here on out.

What happens to any of us when we find ourselves in the abyss? When our world caves in on us and we are left in the darkness? What kind of messages do we play in our head when things seem almost hopeless? Our home address may be somewhere on Bettswood Road but, metaphorically speaking, we may think it is the desert. Life may seem dry and dead ended and we may see no way out. That’s about where we find John the Baptist this morning. He is questioning his faith. He has doubts about who Jesus is. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Perhaps he wasn’t really the prophet called to proclaim the coming of the Messiah. Perhaps Jesus wasn’t that Messiah.

Listen to how Jesus answers those who came to him on John’s behalf with the question. “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.” What a radical answer to a radically doubting questioner. “Go and tell John what you see and hear.” In other words, tell John that he needs the right kind of eyesight with which to see how God’s kingdom was unfolding.

A few years ago, the Presbyterian Church made a startling prediction. Influenced by the statistics that indicated that mainline churches like theirs was in a decline, they forecast that, if the trend continued, Presbyterians would be virtually non-existent in the twenty-first century. They even framed this dire prediction in a rather clever way, saying that Presbyterians would become “the Amish of the twenty-first century.” It was their way of saying that their church would be as irrelevant as the horse-and-buggy folks in Lancaster County.

Then last fall, on October 10, a 33-year-old milk truck driver in Pennsylvania shot ten little Amish girls—killing five of them before taking his own life. We all watched in horror as the story unfolded and then, in the midst of their grieving and burying their own children, we saw something utterly remarkable: a delegation of the Amish community, including members of the family directly affected by the massacre, were speaking the language of forgiveness. We watched as a stream of Amish visitors came to the home of the killer’s widow to offer condolences. “We have forgiven your husband…and we share in your sorrow,” they told Amy Roberts. How did they ever summon up the strength to do what for most of us might be humanly impossible? How could they return love for evil and reach out with the arms of reconciliation, healing, and redemption? It was sheer grace and by grace they were able to behold it all with the right kind of eyesight.

The bru-ha-ha continues our Anglican Communion with the difficult folks abroad and here in the United States, who are causing great tension and raising cane because of who we are as Episcopalians—completely oblivious to our tradition of Anglican polity and what this denomination has stood for since its inception.

Last week the Diocese of San Joaquin voted to leave the Episcopal Church. Pittsburgh and Fort Worth are cued up to follow. Will these defections lead us in the footsteps of the Presbyterian prophecy to become, “the Amish of the twenty-first century?” Well, I don’t think the Episcopal Church will ever be irrelevant or nonexistent. We’ll always be larger than life and, by God’s grace, always use our prophetic voice to stand for justice and peace, always be willing to set an extra place at the table for Elijah or for anyone else who wants to break bread with us. Nevertheless, I would be proud to be compared to the kind of faith community we have seen in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania—a people who have learned to see through the darkness and pain in our world with a different kind of eyesight and to shower even those who harmed them with forgiveness and healing.

The darkness of these winter days is an appropriate icon for the darkness in the world. There is a lot to be worried and scared about. There is a lot of reason to doubt, a lot of cause for despair. Maybe we are wondering as well, is Jesus the Messiah? Were we right to believe and trust in him? Are we to wait for another?

But just look around you and see and hear what is happening. Wherever people are reaching out to each other, God is at work. Wherever the most vulnerable are cared for, God is right in the midst of it. Wherever goodwill is shown to enemies, God’s realm is braking in. Most of us have seen it over and over again in this community.

People who were blind to love see it in a way they never did before. People who were paralyzed with fear are unfettered and free to walk in hope. People who were deaf to the good news, or for whom it sounded like bad news, are hearing it with an entirely new perspective. People who felt like they were living in the desert are awakening to new life.

People who thought they had come to a dead end are finding that God makes a way when there is no way. People who felt imprisoned by some aspect of life are seeing their lives transformed. This is not fantasy. This is faith. All we need is a different kind of eyesight. All we need do is to look around us.

Renowned preacher Barbara Brown Taylor ads this: “And best and most miraculous of all is that this is not the work of one lonely Messiah but the work of God, carried out by all who believe, and there is no end in sight. Tell John I am the one, if you must, but tell him also that yes, he should look for another, and another, and another. Tell him to search every face for the face of God and not get tripped up on me, because what is happening here is bigger than any of us. What is coming to pass is as big as the Kingdom of God.”

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the leading Jewish theologians of the twentieth century once said: "This is an age of spiritual blackout, a blackout of God. We have entered not only the dark night of the soul, but also the dark night of society. We must seek out ways of preserving the strong and deep truth—the theology of a living God in the midst of the blackout. For the darkness is neither final nor complete.

Our power is first in waiting for the end of darkness, for the defeat of evil; and our power is also in coming upon single sparks and occasional rays, upon moments full of God's grace and radiance. We are called to preserve those moments of radiance and keep them alive in our lives, to defy absurdity and despair, and to wait for God to say again: Let there be light.

"And there will be Light."