A sermon on Isaiah 35:1-10, James 5:7-10 & Matthew 11: 2-11 by Nathan Nettleton

Sometimes when I re-preach an old sermon, it is simply because I stuffed up the planning of my week and failed to make adequate time to prepare. But this week I made a decision early in the week to re-preach a sermon from nine years ago. I made that decision because I think there is an important message in the fact that we were talking about certain issues back then. Nine years ago we were facing such low numbers in our congregation that we wondered whether we had a future at all, and now we are asking those questions again. And the thing is that it is not that nothing has changed, but that everything has changed dramatically, and changed back again, and who knows where they might be going from here? So, with just a couple of little amendments or commentary along the way, here’s what I preached on this day nine years ago.

A time of silence in the presence of God can be a treasured time of spiritual rest and nurture, but it isn’t always. Perhaps just as often it can be confronting and uncomfortable. It can be a time in which we feel more vulnerable to our doubts and anxieties. It can be a time when the questions that we’d rather not have to try to answer begin to plague us and the absence of noise and busyness leaves us unable to drown them out or hold them at bay.

In the gospel reading we heard tonight, John the Baptiser is sitting in jail, perhaps with too much time on his hands and too much silence. Doubts and uncertainties begin to take hold in his mind and grow. If we were to look back at the story of the day he had baptised Jesus, he seemed to be in no doubt then about who Jesus was, but now as he sits in his cell, he’s not so sure. Jesus hasn’t been quite the sort of messiah he’d been expecting. The arrival of this messiah on the scene has not turned the world upside down in quite the way he had imagined. Maybe he’d been wrong about Jesus. Maybe he’d misread the signs. So next time he has visitors, he sends them off to Jesus with a question: “Are you the one we’ve been waiting for or should we be looking out for someone else?”

A fair question. People had asked the same question of John himself when his preaching and baptism ministry was in full swing, and he’d had no trouble answering them: “I am not the one. The one who is coming after me is way out of my league. I’m only immersing you in water, but he will baptise you with Holy Spirit and fire.”

But whatever John thought baptism with Holy Spirit and fire would look like, it doesn’t seem to happening in any convincing manner. Perhaps that should come as no surprise. John was no doubt raised on visions like the one we heard from Isaiah. When the Messiah comes the desert will burst in to flower, the weak will be made strong, the poor will have plenty, peace and harmony will break out to such an extraordinary extent that even the snakes and dingoes will be harmless. And what’s more, the Messiah will see to it that those who have oppressed and abused the people will get back what deserve in full. The Hebrew scriptures contain dozens of visions like that. We even have one attributed to John’s own father, Zechariah, and another, which we sang a few minutes ago attributed to his Aunty Mary:

Tell out, my soul, the greatness of his might!
Powers and dominions lay their glory by;
Proud hearts and stubborn wills are put to flight,
the hungry fed, the humble lifted high.

As John sat in prison facing a possible beheading on the say so of King Herod, you can’t blame him for thinking that the Messiah doesn’t seem to have sent the arrogant and corrupt fleeing quite fast enough. No wonder he’s asking the question: “Are you the one we’ve been waiting for or should we be looking out for someone else?”

I don’t know about you, but despite the fact that I’m not sitting in a detention centre fearing for my life, I can relate to the agonised uncertainty of John’s question. I can relate to it when I see greed, callousness and corruption continuing to hold sway over the lives of ordinary people in this country and around the world. I can relate to it when I wonder why the love of Christ hasn’t so transformed a nation like ours that it would be unthinkable for us to go on imprisoning men, women and children whose only crime is to try to flee even more brutal regimes in other parts of the world. I can relate to it when I read visions of world peace with swords being turned into plowshares and lions lying down with lambs, and then I turn on the news and hear of people who are willing to blow themselves to pieces in order to kill a handful of innocent people. “Jesus, are you the one we’ve been waiting for or should we be looking out for someone who can make a bigger difference?”

Actually, I don’t even have to look beyond the immediate issues of life here in this congregation to begin relating to John’s doubts and questions. The failure of smaller scale expectations can be just as difficult for our faith. A few years ago (3 at the time I first preached this) we made some major changes to our approach to being church. Most notable among them were the changes we made in our style of worship. We were mostly excited and hopeful about those changes. We believed that we were making them in obedience to the leading of the Holy Spirit and that making them would turn the tide on the forces that were threatening our very existence. But at the time, we were a bit like John baptising Jesus — it was comparatively easy to believe in something that hadn’t yet had to prove itself. Now, a few years down the track, the tide has not been turned in anything like the way we anticipated and I know from many discussions that I am not the only one who sometimes wrestles with the question of whether we got it wrong. This Sunday nine years ago, we farewelled Phil and Paula as they moved to Brisbane and that dropped our number of regular attenders to a record low of about twelve people. But what was then and still is even harder for a number of us is that the combination of wide diversity, very low numbers, and very large geographical spread means that many of us feel that we don’t have any close friends in the church. We have brothers and sisters in Christ who we are glad to be worshipping with, but no one who really feels like a kindred spirit sharing the journey. “Is this the track we were called to or should we be looking for something else?”

We don’t know how John received the report of the answer Jesus gave, but I suspect it wasn’t exactly the cast iron guarantee he was looking for. Jesus simply told the messengers to go and tell John what there eyes and ears were telling them: “the blind are given their sight; the paralysed are up and walking; people with hideous diseases are cured; the deaf can hear; the dead are raised; and the poor are hearing news worth celebrating.” Certainly those things were included in the vision we heard from Isaiah, the vision John was expecting to see fulfilled. But was it enough to show that Jesus was the One? Jesus seems to be saying, “See what is happening and make of it what you will.”

We are not told whether or not that set John’s mind at rest; whether or not he went to his execution confident that the Messiah had come and God’s purposes were being brought to fulfilment on the earth. What I do know is that in answer to our questions, we seem to be getting only the same sort of answer. If there are others among you who are sensing God saying something quite different, please let us know, but I am not sensing God saying “wrong way, go back.” All I’m sensing is a reminder to look around me and see what sort of fruit our change of direction has borne. It certainly isn’t as spectacular as I expected, but there are a number of people here who I can see significant healthy growth in who say that these changes have played a big part. If we are to judge the tree by its fruits, which seems to be what Jesus said to John, we might agree that the tree is not the big producer we hoped for, but the quality is pretty good.

Is that enough? I don’t know. I often wish Jesus would be a bit more ‘yes or no’, ‘black or white’ in his answers. I suspect John did too. John seems to have been a fairly black and white sort of character. All I can say is that it is enough to keep me hanging in there. It is enough to keep me from putting my hand up for a move to another church. It is enough to keep me believing, if not quite with my former exuberant confidence, that we are more or less on the track that Christ has called us to follow. And while that may not sound like the bold triumphal confidence that we might long for, it seems to be consistent with both the ambiguous answer that Jesus gave John, and with the exhortation we heard from the Apostle James in our other reading: “My friends, be patient as you wait for the Lord’s promises to be fulfilled. Take as your role models the prophets who brought us God’s message in the past. They really suffered for their stand, but they hung in there, never giving up, and their patience paid off.”

May the Lord speak to us again, in the uncertainties that have come again, with his word of hope and promise.