KGL+
Sermon
Trinity Church Boston
Year A, Advent 3
December 14, 2025
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts together be always acceptable in your sight, O God our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
As a child, I recall my parents insisting we go to church in the weeks leading up to Christmas. The city was twinkling; the store windows were tinseled; the air, festive. On would go our holiday dresses and the promise of merry and jolly.
And then we would enter into our church, decked in purple and pink; not red and green. And we would sing hymns in minor keys, which were not carols; and we would hear about John the Baptist instead of angels and shepherds, which ensured the full bummer trifecta of what I had felt had been sold as a bill of goods expectation-wise would be complete, expectation-wise. I wanted the pastoral serenity of the ‘First Nowell’ or the incandescent glitter of ‘Angels We Have Heard on High’, and instead I was handed what felt like three hundred and sixteen verses of ‘O Come O Come Emmanuel’.
Perhaps you are familiar with such feelings.
As the rest of the world counts down the days to Christmas with increasingly alarmist emails regarding how few days are left for standard shipping, we who chose to come to church and sit in the pews, keep company (metaphorically, thank you) with John the Baptist in prison. Deep into the eleventh chapter in the Gospel of Matthew this morning, we are decades past the creche and star and wise ones, and the warm and fuzzy conviction of a Christmas Eve faith is looking more like that of whichever day in January the bills fall due, the twinkle lights come down, and each vaunted snowy day turns into a slushy slog.1Blue Monday is a Thing.
Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?
John had been brought up and gifted with the prophetic vision of the one who would come as the Messiah. And the image he had in hand from his scripture, tradition and reason was that in the midst of political turmoil and oppression, the messiah would come to liberate; would usher in a complete inversion of the status quo with regard to Roman rule. The messiah would bring down the establishment, and lift up a people. They might appear with chariots, they might appear with fire, they might appear in glory with winnowing fork in hand separating the wheat from the chaff, but appear in power they would.
And this man—this Jesus, whom John had baptized in the Jordan himself—was not John’s envisioned messiah.
I want you to imagine for a moment the heartache, the wrench, you can feel in this phrase: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”
His life’s work, and his own life on the line, John has a profoundly vested interest in the answer to this question.
As do we.
Advent is when we not only await the birth of Jesus on Christmas, but is also the time when we expect Jesus to return at the end times—when the kingdom of God is enacted and engaged. In this season we wait not simply for a specific day, although that is easiest to explain and to comprehend, but for a God who is coming not only to be with us at the beginning, but at the end as well. The God whom we beseech and invite and, even more, expect to come in power and glory, descending from the clouds becomes dissonant when we name the distance between where we are and what we ultimately hope for. A world in need of healing looks for our God to come. And yet, the God we expect is not the God we are given.
I cannot imagine that much surprised John the Baptist in general. When one wears a tunic of camel’s hair, it seems like you might be a person who doesn’t get easily rattled.
But John’s message through his disciples to Jesus is one which humanizes his stoic demeanor: have I gotten it wrong, he says. Have I made a mistake? Do I need to start over? Is this really what the coming of the messiah looks like?
And Jesus responds not by flexing or going ‘crickety crack’, watch and learn sucker, but tells him to look at what has been restored: healing; hope; reconciliation and humanization. Dignity and delight.
John had been looking toward a solution from on high, a once and for all fix-it plan. John asks for the certainty he has been promised, which he has promised others, in Jesus. And Jesus disappoints him. John is expecting the brass and timpani of ‘O Come all ye faithful’, and Jesus offers him the forty-first verse of O Come O Come Emmanuel.
Whatever messiah we are longing for, seeking out, placing all our hopes and fears, staking our faith and life and livelihood on—that messiah will be different than the one who actually arrives. John asks for an answer, and Jesus doesn’t perform. And in a world which feels untethered, uncertain and wrenching from the intensely personal to the profoundly geopolitical, this is an unsatisfying God to be anticipating and for whom we are preparing.
And the question we can ask for in our own faith, in our own hearts, in our own lives is whether a God who doesn’t ‘fix it all’ or proclaim himself the hero we’ve been holding out for2This song is deep in my bones: https://youtu.be/bWcASV2sey0?si=a21_Ue8SDpXVDqL4; whether Jesus’ question back to John leads to a crisis of faith or a fantastically unbinding and liberative notion of who God is for us?
So: who is the God we have been waiting for? Who is the God you have been expecting to meet here, today?
A God who is predictable is a God who can be commodified. A God who can be bought and sold and returned if it does not immediately satisfy. And Jesus tells John, and his disciples, and their followers, that God is wholly unlike us who wish to claim and control. God is the one who abides with, comes into the fray, stays when the news is bad, ugly cries with us after the terrifying diagnosis, doesn’t tell us that God needs another angel when we hear of yet another shooting, listens more than pontificates, and above all else, refuses to live by our narrow claim of kingship.
Years ago, I volunteered in the women’s unit at the Suffolk County jail, setting up art supplies for the women to write cards, or to simply create. There was little to excite the imagination in that setting, but color and draw and glue we did, every Monday night for two years. And after we would create, we would offer the following prayer before we left:
What we want is power,
What we get is frailty;
What we want is certainty,
What we get is ambiguity;
What we want is answers,
What we get is questions;
What we want is self-sufficiency,
What we get is interdependence;
What we want is permanence,
What we get is transience;
What we want is clarity,
What we get is mystery;
What we want is fantasy,
What we get is God.3This prayer is from “Reflections After Compline”, by Sue Stock from Prisms of the Soul: Writings from a sisterhood of faith
The God we are anticipating may not be the God who comes to us. But the God who comes to us, abides with us, reconciles us, will be the God who loves us, and in whom we are made whole.
O come O come Emmanuel.
Amen.