Where's the Fire?

a Sermon for Advent 3A
Text: Matthew 11:2-11

[Note: the original sermon was preached from sparse notes. What follows is a reinvisioning based on those notes.]

GOD of Hope and Wonder, you invite us into waiting and watching. Help us to see in our expectations true joy and new understanding. Amen.

John
Where’s the fire? Where’s the fire, Jesus? You promised me a fire and a cleansing of the world. You said it! So where’s the fire, Jesus?

John speaks from anger, hurt, anxiety, fear—has he wasted all this time? Has his ministry of preparing the way for this Messiah, this liberator and conqueror been in vain? Because…well…look at this guy. Jesus sure wasn’t matching John’s expectations of a liberator and a conqueror. The very word

Messiah=military leader.

And let’s speak plainly here: John is a man of action. He most certainly would do the work of GOD himself—not send his disciples instead. What kind of Messiah is this Jesus, that lets the disciples do the dirty work?

The Baby
In this season of expectation, we have the opposite expectation. Who are we expecting? A fragile baby. An innocent, innocuous baby that can’t threaten us or frighten us or challenge us or transform us. We expect the innocent pastoral image of a baby welcomed into the world by loving parents.

So John expected a powerful conqueror and received a healer.
We expect a healer and forget about the conqueror.

Jesus
After John’s people leave, Jesus turns to the crowd and asks them about John. He asks three times: “What did you go out [into the wilderness] to see?”
A prophet!
And what did you find?
A prophet!

Jesus isn’t just messing with our expectations, he is inviting us to deal with them. Because, once we see something, we are changed by it. He says that what they found was more than a prophet—a way prepared for them to follow. A road is being paved for us.

Advent is a season of waiting and watching, of expecting and seeing.

The opportunity to watch something is the opportunity to process something. To prepare ourselves for that road. It is the opportunity to be changed—and transformed forever.

Mark Bozzuti-Jones, in his Advent devotional, compares Advent to an expectant mother. That this season of waiting and anticipation is also a season of planning and dreaming and hoping; a season of cleaning and building and gathering. We are changed in the waiting.

For many of us that have had the fortune of being part of a child’s birth, it isn’t in the birth where the real transformation occurs, it is in the expectation.