What You Hear and See

When you look around, where do you see God’s Spirit at work? Not just in our congregation, but in your neighborhood, in your workplace, where you hang out for leisure, in school, in your family?   Who helps us see and hear that?  Who helps us recognize Jesus?
This week we said goodbye to a courageous woman, Elizabeth Edwards, estranged wife of  former senator John Edwards..  In a moving interview with Larry King in May 2009, she spoke honestly about the death of her son,  and the religious questions it raised and the recalibrations it forced her to make.
     In the weeks and months after Wade's death, she said, "I had this idea that God was going to find some way to turn back time and he was going to be alive." She continued to ask herself, as many do, whether she had done something wrong -- did she not teach him well enough, not get him a safe enough car? And then when cancer struck, and her husband's affair was revealed, she agonized about the possibility of her own cosmic cooperation in it all.

"And I have to recognize with each of these things, they just happen," she told King. "You didn't have to do something wrong to justify them."
     Edwards said she had to move on from such magical and negative thinking, and she quoted a line from the Bill Moyers, to the effect that "You get the God you have, not the God you want."

    "The God I wanted was going to intervene. He was going to turn time back. The God I wanted was -- I was going to pray for good health and he was going to give it to me," she said. "Why in this complicated world, with so much grief and pain around us throughout the world, I could still believe that, I don't know. But I did. And then I realized that the God that I have was going to promise me salvation if I lived in the right way and he was going to promise me understanding. That's what I'm sort of asking for . . . let me understand why I was tested."
The God she had expected turned out not to fit. . .
Advent began three weeks ago, beckoning us to expectation and hope.  We opened up these ancient texts, telling us that no one knows the day or the hour, but we can't sleep. We must stay awake! After all, there will be a time when the lion and the lamb lie down together, when we beat our swords into plowshares, and we will not learn war any more.
But, we’ve been preaching these texts for years, and it's been over two thousand years since these promises were made, and the violence continues. We have not made our swords into anything but more massive and fatal weapons.   I’m disappointed.  I'm not feeling so alert at this point.  What about you?
Yet, God rarely comes in the way that we predict.
Today’s passage shows us a John the Baptist very different from last week’s.   Last week’s John made vivid forecasts about Jesus chopping down fruitless trees and throwing the chaff into the fire.  John was a fiery preacher, focused on repentance—turning people around.  John baptized Jesus in the Jordan, after saying, “I need to be baptized by you, not you by me!” John certainly recognized Jesus at that earlier point in his life.  John shouted repentance!    But Jesus was forgiving sin, and healing. . . .Now, from prison, near the end of his life, John sent several of his own people, to ask the poignant question, "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we wait for another?" John devoted his entire ministry, even his life, to preparing the way for Jesus Christ.   But now, John had his doubts.  Maybe because Jesus came in a way that John did not expect.
Theologian Helmut Theilicke wrote: “There is a John who lives in all of us: we are disappointed in God.”   Are we?  Disappointed?
At least John had sense enough to ask a good question: "Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?"
Because that is the Advent question: "Are you the one I've been waiting for, or shall I wait for another?" Is this the present I've been waiting for? Is this the job I really wanted? Is this really the house we wanted so desperately three years ago?  Is this really the person I loved four years ago? Is this really the person I love now?  Is this the move I’ve been waiting for?  Is this the pastor we’ve been waiting for?
This Advent, we are busy preparing, each of us in our individual way, for something special to happen.  The sad possibility lies in the back of our mind that our expectation will indeed go unfulfilled - that what we are waiting for will never happen. . .
But Jesus’ answer to John’s disciples:  “Tell John what you hear and see. . .
One of Westminster’s adult education courses over the past few weeks has been focused on “Building the New City”, a curriculum on homelessness for faith communities. One of the stories shared was about a woman named Mary, who had a brain injury, after a bike accident.  She was homeless for two years, and partly because of her injury, was unable to connect to resources to find a place to live.  Her ID was repeatedly stolen, making it difficult to receive services.  With a partner, Jimmy, (who abused her, but also protected her from others), they usually slept in industrial areas, and would ask for the property owners’ written permission to do so, so that they would not be forced to move by police sweeps.  They would set up camp at night, with a makeshift tent.  They needed to move all their belongings by 6am each morning.  Although she worked hard to keep herself clean, often waiting two hours for a shower, Mary felt that when people saw her while she was sleeping outside, all they could see was “dirt, filth.”  When asked what changed for her, Mary says this about her outreach workers at JOIN:  “They seen something in me . . .They just seen a different side of me, and so it was real cool.”  Mary said that the experience of being seen as a valuable person helped her to discover her own worth, to know once again that her life is truly a miracle.  Instead of feeling like a “nobody,” she said, “Once JOIN . . .gave me the opportunity to be somebody, my whole world started changing.  I mean really, it did.”  The JOIN community helped Mary to see something new in herself.
"Go and tell John what you hear and see," said Jesus. "The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk. The dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them." 
This gospel invites us to hear and see beyond our expectations.  If we look around us, if we help one another, we may notice new places where God is working.
In 2000, there was an interesting conference in Corvallis:   “Jesus at 2000 seminar.”    An over-arching message from the whole event was this: "Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you." Jesus did not quite fit all of John's or the people's expectations.  The Divine cannot be squeezed into a manageable-sized box.
Jesus sent the message to John:  tell them what you hear and see:  the blind see, the lame walk, the poor have good news proclaimed to them, the dead—live!  Maybe Jesus was telling John that he should reconsider his sense of who and what the Messiah is. Perhaps John was unable to recognize Jesus because he hadn’t been trained to see healing and forgiveness as indicators of God's presence. John, according to Jesus, needed to stretch his imagination of what the presence and power of God look like.

  Are we any different? What limitations have been placed on our imagination and expectations?
Writer Annie Dillard, remarked on the book, Space and Sight by Marius von Senden.  When surgeons discovered how to do safe cataract surgeries, they operated on dozens of people of all ages who had been blinded by cataracts from birth.  Many of the patients had been tested before the surgery, and had no sense of space whatsoever.  Form, distance, and size were just meaningless syllables.  A patient had no idea of depth, confusing it with roundness.  Before the operation a doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a sphere; the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and name it correctly.  After the operation the doctor would show the same objects to the patient without letting him touch them:  now he had no clue what he was seeing.
In general the newly sighted saw the world as a dazzle of color-patches.  They were pleased by the sensation of color and learned quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing was very difficult.   . .
The mental effort involved proved overwhelming for many patients.  It oppressed them to realize the tremendous size of the world, which before had seemed manageable.  A number of them refused to use their new vision, continuing to go over object with their tongues and lapsing into apathy and despair.
The father of a twenty-one year old girl wrote:  “She carefully shuts her eyes whenever she wishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase, and that she is never happier or more at ease than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness. .”
Mary Hinkle Shore, commenting on this passage said “. . . the crowd I usually hang out with is way too polite and politically correct to sound much like John the Baptist when they see human sin. My crowd's problem is not that we think the Messiah will burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. Our problem is that we do not expect much of anything to change with the Messiah's advent.   Instead, our problem is that we think the best the Messiah can do is take the edge off. 
"Go and tell 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 poor have good news brought to them."  Instead of hoping for, watching, expecting such things as these, we look for a little analgesic.
Jesus, could we just have something for the pain?
Emmanuel—Christ with us—is so much bigger than that!    I heard a woman say to a psychotherapist recently, that a mutual friend was unlikely to change some particular habit: "After all, he is over 50 years old.  How much change can there really be at that age?" The therapist disagreed. "Of course people can change after 50!” He said.
Can we change?  What a cramped vision of the future—if not!
Can the lame walk?  The blind see?  Can even a middle-aged person’s mind, heart or habits change?  John's expectation of the Messiah may have been too vengeful; ours is likely too small.
Our call is to go and tell what you hear and see: One of us is walking again after being laid low by grief and depression for years on end. Another is liberated from the prison of addiction.  Another can actually hear it and believe it now when someone says to her, "I love you."   Another was able to make through a dark time because friend sat with her, cried with her, held her, when her baby died.
"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." Could this one be the Messiah?
A reading from the Hebrew scripture, also appointed for today is from Isa. 35: 1-6a:
The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
The desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
And rejoice with joy and singing.  The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,
The majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.
Strengthen the weak hands,  And make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear!  Here is your God.
He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense.  He will come and save you.”
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped,
Then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
In his writings, Letters from a Birmingham Jail, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King wrote: "Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart."
The star, the manger, the vulnerable baby, the singing of angels. . . .This is the language of the heart.  We will recognize the gift of love and peace when we recognize that people have changed. We will recognize the gift of love and peace when we recognize that we must change, too.

No matter how young or old we are, whether we are waiting to receive that perfect bicycle, waiting to receive that special answer from our loved one, waiting for that special moment of reconciliation with our children or with our parent, we are also waiting ultimately for the Christ. 
So, I ask you, where is God kicking about in and among us?   We have seen and heard. We have waited. And we are the body of Christ, waiting to live into what God has already opened up all around us.  
Where have you seen these great promises taking place in your life and work?  What would your life be like if your ears were tuned to hearing where God is at work?  What if each of us was able to see Jesus among our co-workers?  In our families? With our friends?  What expectations of ours would be shattered?  What would our church be like, then?