3rd Sunday Advent 2007
	Matthew 11:2-11		December 16, 2007

Perhaps you already knew what I only recently learned – that the last painting painted by Leonardo de Vinci was of St. John the Baptist.  If you’ve been to the Louvre Museum in Paris , perhaps you’ve seen it.  I’ve only seen it on the internet.  If I was a walnut grower I would be tickled to know it’s an oil painting on walnut wood.  But what also stood out to me is that there’s a controversy around the painting. 

Some people place de Vinci’s St. John the Baptist along with his Mona Lisa and the Virgin and Child with St. Anne.  They say these three pieces got him the reputation of Italy ’s greatest living painter at the time.

Others, however, were outraged by his painting of St. John .  They saw it as a “mistake” – and even more than a mistake, “a crime” because it showed John mysteriously peering out of darkness with the light only catching the long curls of hair falling down on his bare shoulders and his right hand pointing up to heaven.  These didn’t like the painting’s depiction of a saint.  They probably wouldn’t like the similar painting on our bulletin cover – not by de Vinci, but by an artist nearly 300 years after him.     

Imagine a man like John the Baptist surrounded by dark, except for a light that catches part of his face, his hair and his hand pointing outward.  When you have that picture in your mind – of darkness all around with light reflecting on a hand pointing outward, you have a visual picture of Advent.  

John’s witness to Christ fascinated painters from the Renaissance on, as you can see in Dieric Bouts' Ecce Agnus Dei (c1463), Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheimer Altar (c1515), Pier Francesco Mola's St John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness (c1640), and many other treatments of the subject, including the one on this Sunday's bulletin!

Similarly, the Isaiah readings before us were written while the poet was still in exile, in bondage, in darkness, amid suffering people, and yet the readings imagine the coming of beauty and light. The poet says crocuses will blossom in the desert.  Streams will flow where before there was only drought. 

These are visionary words written by one like John, who saw beyond the darkness of the present moment.   

John, our Gospel tells us, was in prison.  And he dies there, and his death is not a pretty death.  Perhaps some of the most awful paintings from Bible stories are those of John’s head on a platter. But even so he is a focus of Advent.  One might say it’d be nice to have a luckier saint on the cover of our Advent bulletin.  One might hope for a better outcome for his life.  But there’s power in John being John.  Jesus alludes to that power when he tells John’s disciples, “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” 

Why would offense be a part of the stories leading up to something as beautiful as Christmas, except that Christmas is breaking into a world that wants to tame Christmas into a soft and safe jingle bell.  But that’s not Christmas.  Christmas is the coming of Christ who lived, suffered violence, died and rose again to announce a new day has come.

John is important – and the artist’s paintings of John help us see it – because they point to the One whose coming turns darkness into light, sadness into joy, despair into hope.  Christmas is the beginning of a whole new world, for “those who have ears to hear.” 

But there is tension between faith, on the one hand, in God breaking into the world and offense, on the other, at that very in-breaking.  I know there’s tension because I experience it myself.  I believe Jesus came and died and was raised from the dead and if the crucified can be raised, then new life can come out of the least expected places. 

I believe this, but I don’t always trust it.  On the days I do, I wake up in the morning happy and peaceful, knowing God’s resurrecting power that will go ahead of me into the day.  But that power isn’t always easy to see.  John saw that Jesus was the one he was waiting for, but then why was John in prison?  If Jesus ushered in God’s reign, why was John caged like one on death row?  

The reason is that there were other systems at play that were at odds with what Jesus came to model.  The new world Jesus ushers in collides with the world we envision as possible.  Human expectations are limited by human vision.  In other words, if vision is based on what we think is possible then our vision is too limited for the ways of God.  What we have in Christmas is a God whose vision is larger than ours, more loving, merciful and joyful. 

And that is what we have in Christmas.  God comes among us to show us something we hardly have the imagination for – that the world is worth investing in, risking for, being a part of deeply and fully, not because it’s perfect, but because it is beloved. 

The focus of Christmas is the world God loves and comes to find a home in among us, in the mangers of our hearts; in the communities of our gatherings where there is human suffering and need, but also real joy and beauty.  John the Baptist glimpsed this.  He saw the hungry were fed.  The poor had good news preached to them.  And because John recognized these good things as signs of God’s coming, Jesus announced that of those born of women there was no one greater than John.  But Jesus then said, “Yet, the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”  

Late Professor Robert Smith who taught at PLTS in Berkeley explains this as well as I’ve heard it explained.  Smith says that “John was great because he had looked at the face of Jesus and knew he was seeing the drawing near of the kingdom of God .  Yet John stood only on the threshold.  The new world is now beginning to crack open and the least who steps across the threshold and dwells in the kingdom of God [with the crucified and risen] Jesus is greater than John, who [announced] the kingdom, but did not know the resurrection and presence of Jesus.” (p. 155)

In other words, unlike John, you and I live on the other side of the death and resurrection of Jesus.  As a modern song puts it, “when you are filled with fright, remember God once raised the crucified.” 

Christmas invites us to not only join John in glimpsing God’s in-breaking in Jesus, but to go beyond John.  “The least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John.”  If we will not take offense at God’s far-reaching vision – that surpasses what we can imagine, then we will be blessed.  We will be blessed to see what God is up to that we couldn’t have even imagined on our own through our own limited vision. 

God comes among us as a baby – I believe – because we needed help not being afraid of the loving, outlandishly expansive possibilities of God.  Madeleine L’Engle calls them “the glorious impossibles.  Who would have thought that God could or would come and take on human flesh and be with us?  It is a glorious impossible that stretches our imaginations and vision. 

And if God would choose to do that, what other unexpectedness might God be about among us?  What are you imagining as impossible?  World peace?  Trust where trust has been broken?  New beginnings?  Second chances?  Wholesome relationships?  The hungry fed?  No more war?  No more drugs or abuses?  No more gumption traps keeping you from being who God calls you to be? 

God is up to gloriously impossible things – beginning with choosing to be born into an imperfect struggling world.  And Jesus said, “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”  Luther wrote in one of his Christmas sermons, “Do not fear, but come to this gurgling babe who is come not to judge you, but to save.”  Fear and judgment won’t draw us to God.  Only love will.  Love and joy and peace! 

If we will not be offended, or put off, or frightened by such love for us and for others, then we will be blessed this Christmas and always.  In our preparations for Christmas may we spend time – not just with shopping or fretting over what needs doing – but with intentionally practicing ways of letting go of fear so God’s love might find room in our hearts. 

“Blessed is anyone who takes no offense, or puts up no defense against my love,” says Jesus.  May that be our prayer this week, for “love, the gift, is on its way!”  “The Savior comes at last.”   

Amen.

+Pastor Peg Schultz-Akerson, to the glory of God
Faith Lutheran Church, Chico, California