A Sermon for Advent 3
December 15, 2024 at Holy Communion
1 Corinthians 4:1–5, Matthew 11:2–10
“Blessed is the one who is not offended by me” (Matthew 11:6). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.
Some years ago I met an elderly priest at a summer picnic. I had heard his name many times, so that I had a sense that he was “a man to know”—but on the other hand no one ever told me about his particular accomplishments or distinctions. When I met him it became clear why.
He sat in his Muskoka chair quietly. He spoke rarely, but when he did his words were gentle. When he was listening, he gave two impressions at the same time. On one hand, you always knew that you had his full attention and that he was really considering what you were saying. On the other hand—and without diminishing any of the warmth of his presence—he communicated a sense of stillness that your words could not possibly touch. His quiet attention was a kind of immensity, next to which the silly chatter you flung at him seemed rather quaint and unserious.
I felt seen meeting him. He didn’t have to say anything at all to me for me to realize that I am a light talker, loving my own voice more than I love listening to the voice of another, someone who is willing to say things I haven’t really considered in order to fill the dead air. So of course I start asking myself, “Why?” And the answer is also immediately there—because I am not spiritually grounded like this man is. Even in this life he drinks from the wells of eternity, and he is so satisfied that he doesn’t need to feed his ego with idle chatter.
This elderly priest is not the only person I’ve met who makes you feel seen this way, but there have only been a few. They God’s holy ones, the saints quietly loving their God and thinking nothing of themselves. What we experience when we meet these people is a sip from the same cup that the Prophet Isaiah drank when he “saw the Lord sitting upon his throne, high and lifted up” (Isaiah 6:1). “Woe is me!” he says, “for I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips; … and my eyes have seen the King!” (v 5).
In our Collect, the prayer for this Sunday, we have prayed for the “stewards of God’s mysteries [who] prepare and make ready his way.” This is language from our Epistle: Paul says that we should think of him and his colleagues in the gospel as “servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Corinthians 4:1). But then he pivots to the theme of judgement. Servants need to live up to the dignity of their calling (v 2), but on the other hand only God is able to judge the worthiness of his own servants, so Paul doesn’t worry too much about it (v 3–4). “Therefore,” he says, “do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart” (v 5).
But why does he start talking about judgement and worthiness at all? It can only be what Isaiah experienced in the temple of heaven, what I experienced in my own small way with that priest: when you make contact with genuine holiness, your own superficiality comes immediately into view. He feels how great the gap is between God and his frail little servant named Paul; and the only reason he can keep going as a minister is that he trusts the faithfulness and wisdom of the one who commissioned him to serve.
The essential point, though, is what he says about God: when the Lord comes, “he brings to light the things hidden in darkness and discloses the purposes of the heart.” This is what God does—this is what God is, because “God is light” (1 John 1:5).
Our Old Testament says much the same thing in its own way. It imagines the glory of the Lord, the luminous darkness that followed the Israelites in the wilderness, making its way over the desert to return to Jerusalem. As it approaches, the desert blossoms like a jungle. Crocuses come up between the rocks, sandy fits fill with water and overflow, the sunburnt stubble becomes a wetland, and the impassable wilderness becomes a road beckoning the Glory back to Zion. Good-for-nothings who made their hideouts in desert caves won’t be able to walk on that path, nor any dangerous animals. Why? Because before the glory of the Lord “sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (Isaiah 35:10).
In this case the tone and imagery are quite positive, but the message is the same: God is light, and like a light he banishes darkness as he approaches.
In our Gospel reading we meet John the Baptist: John who “prepared the way” before the Lord, turning “the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just” (Luke 1:17). Conscious of his own unworthiness compared to the Lord whose coming he announced (John 1:27), John’s preached repentance. And you had better believe that John made people feel seen. They came out in droves and his preaching touched their hearts with an awareness of their own unreadiness to meet their King.
The scene in which we meet him today, takes place after he has unashamedly called out King Herod for his immorality. Now John is in prison, and perhaps he’s feeling down, because now he doesn’t seem quite so certain that Jesus is the Messiah. He sends his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Matthew 11:3). Jesus tells him, in effect, that all he needs to know is that the wilderness is blooming as he approaches Jerusalem. “The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them” (v 5). In short, yes, he is the Coming One, and the proof is the darkness is on the retreat.
But then what he says is this: “blessed is the one who is not offended by me” (v 6). When Jesus comes, the blind are blessed because they are made to see. The lame are blessed because they are enabled to walk. But that’s not the only reaction people had to the holiness of Jesus. Some people reacted with jealousy. Some reacted with hard-hearted disbelief in spite of what their eyes told them. In short, some people were offended.
This should hardly surprise us. “Feeling seen,” feeling confronted by a goodness that you lack, can also mean feeling embarrassed, perhaps even ashamed. There is no blessedness is embarrassment and shame, at least not in that first moment. So we draw back. We vilify holy people as if they were self-righteously smug, even though they probably said nothing of the sort, when the true problem is our own embarrassment. We are offended, and so we are not blessed.
The good news this morning is that drawing back and taking offense at the holiness of God is not a foregone conclusion. In fact, the Bible addresses us as a community of faith and says boldly, “we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls” (Hebrews 10:39). To be seen by God, to have your darkness banished, to feel the crocuses breaking up the stony ground of your heart—all of that is possible for you. When someone says a holy word and you hear it in the echo from one of heaven’s belltowers—that is, when God draws near—let it sink into you. Don’t turn away and callous your own soul. Let the quiet goodness of God’s holiness embarrass you, and then let it transform you.
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