A sermon preached on Matthew 3:1-12 and Isaiah 11: 1-10 at the Wesley Foundation at UVA.  (Due to icy weather last week we revisited the texts from the second week in Advent last night, for Advent 3.)  

John the Baptist is attractive and repellant.  The Duck Dynasty guys wish they had beards as long and unruly as his!  He wears camel’s hair and eats locusts and warns everyone to repent – turn around, now!  He’s a wild visionary who’s made camp in the desert.  I find those images attractive.  I can picture him with a kind of charisma, speaking the hard truth people crave hearing, baptizing people and saying Wait it out.  He’s coming.

But he repels us, too, doesn’t he?  He’s way out past the edge of civilization, and hanging out with him seems a little risky.  Who’s coming after him, exactly?  And will it be someone as edgy and scary as John?  He seems especially angry with the Pharisees and Sadducees – how do we know he won’t turn on us next?

Then there’s the passage from Isaiah, which makes me scratch my head and ask where the parents are.  A child young enough to still be nursing is playing right over the hole of an asp?  Really?  Who thinks that’s a good idea?  And are we really supposed to believe wolves and lambs are going to get all snuggly with one another?  Cows and bears will go out into the field together to graze – on grass?  Lions will be satisfied feasting on straw?

Artists have depicted these mixed up unlikely scenes in religious art for thousands of years but they are still hard to imagine, aren’t they?  Are we meant to use these as guides to life in the future?  Or is this “just” poetry? 

We read about strange desert prophets and unimaginable peace between creatures we know to be natural born enemies – and we read this in Advent as we prepare for Christmas and as we remember and anticipate Christ’s promise to come again.  What does it mean to spend this season waiting?  To hear the prophet’s words and see the artists’ renditions and wonder if we are any closer to these promises being fulfilled than we were last year?

It’s easy to get confused about exactly what and who we are waiting on.  Lately Twitter and Facebook and the rest have been abuzz with tales of Pope Francis and his critics.  People who’ve given up on the church or been hurt by its scandals see in the Pope’s passion for the poor another way of being Christian.  It’s actually the original, Jesus-like way, but so many of us have done such a poor job of imitating him that many people no longer recognize this as “normal” Christian behavior.  In fact, some folks are so unfamiliar with the Jesus who was born to unwed, poor parents and spent his life overturning tables and expectations, that they fear maybe the Pope has gone astray somehow.

What are we waiting for?  Who is coming to be with us?

Here’s what I know:  it is never what we expect.  We, who like to put our faith in conservative or liberal, will be confounded.  We, who like to think we are getting pretty good at pulling up on our own bootstraps, will be surprised when we are lifted up.  We, who feel like failures, will find failure is one of God’s favorite materials to work with and transform.

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid… (Isa. 11: 6)

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…(Mat. 3: 8-9)

It might be “just” poetry, but it’s interesting to me how specific and physical Isaiah’s images are.  We don’t hear about unicorns or ewoks – it’s known enemies like lions and lambs, cows and bears.  Real creatures we have seen with our own eyes – behaving in strange, “unnatural” ways.  Scary-attractive John does this too, out in the desert.  He doesn’t sit around looking “spiritual” and talking in vague unachievable non-physical ways.  He says prepare.  Turn around.  Bear fruit.  Don’t think you know where you come from so you’ll be fine.  See these stones?  Feel this water, be baptized.  Wait and watch for the one coming next.

Isaiah promises “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.  On that day …his dwelling shall be glorious” (vv. 9-10).   God’s dwelling shall be glorious.  To dwell…to remain for a time; to live as a resident; to live in a particular place.  Not generally, euphemistically alive – living in real time in a particular place.  Like a stable in Bethlehem in the middle of a census.  Like Nazareth, amidst the sweet-smelling curlicues of wood in your father’s carpentry shop.  Like Galilee, hanging out with fishermen, feeding throngs of people with a few measly scraps of bread and fish.  His dwelling shall be glorious.  His dwelling.  His living in a particular place, in a particular body.  Jesus of Nazareth.  Fully human, fully divine.

We weren’t expecting that. 

Sometimes we still aren’t.  It’s a little too mysterious and unnatural for our imaginings.  How could God confine what’s God to a body like this?  Why would God want to get that particular?  This whole incarnation thing puts a real cramp in our tendency to want to separate body and spirit.  If God – the ultimate in Spirit – finds a human body worthy of dwelling in, who are we to question it?  Who are we to find human bodies less worthy?

Who are we to ask God to be a little less particular?  When Jesus said visiting the sick and imprisoned is the same as visiting him, he meant that in a spiritual way, right – we can pray for prisoners without visiting the prison and shaking their criminal hands, right?  We can love the poor from a distance, can’t we?  Isn’t it enough to give to the Food Bank without actually sitting down for a meal with our hungry neighbors?

We don’t get to have a “spiritual,” disembodied Advent or Christmas – or life.  Our job is to dwell in this uncertain, mysterious promise, to inhabit our imperfect maddening bodies more fully as places of divine presence and revelation.  Our calling is to look for Jesus in each face we see  — Pope, Palin, pauper, prince, people right next door…

The One we call Emmanuel – God with us – is always ready to be born and revealed in new ways in the midst of our lives and established routines.  And it’s never what we expect.  So we read strange poetry and listen to strange prophets and try to prepare.   

It’s an attractive and a repellant message.  It’s a promise that means no escape from here and now.  These bodies and this world were good enough for Jesus to dwell in and they are the things through which the Kingdom of God comes near.   

Thanks be to God!

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photo credit:  © 2008 Rob Shenk,  CC BY-SA 2.0