In 1992, Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida. It destroyed entire communities and killed 26 people, obliterated more than 25,000 homes, and damaged more than 100,000 others.
I remember one news program was going through a residential area where it looked like every single home had been blown to smithereens by bombs. There, in the midst of all that devastation stood three houses. Each of the houses had sustained some damage, shingles off, broken windows, some siding torn loose — but they were still standing while all around them lay in what could only be called traces of what used to be houses.
Upon inquiring about the three homes the reporter learned that they had been built by Habitat for Humanity and he sought out the director of Habitat for that county. Finally, they found the man and had him in front of the camera, standing before the houses that, even then were being repaired.
He was a taciturn individual with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. A retired building contractor, his t-shirt was dirty and sweat stained from the rescue and rehabilitation work he had been doing. His face was permanently creased from years of working in the Florida sun.
The reporter inquired about how it was that these Habitat houses were still standing. How was this possible? What was Habitat for Humanity’s secret? Would he share the obviously miraculous construction standards that Habitat used to build such houses that could withstand a hurricane?
The man allowed that he would, indeed, share the building code he had followed in directing the construction of the three houses. He produced a file from his pick-up truck and showed it to the reporter. As he did he explained, “It’s the regular old Florida State building code. When it said use 2X6 trusses, we used 2X6 trusses. When it said to use sixteen penny nails and a hammer instead of a nail gun, why that’s what we did. I heard that a house built to this code could stand up to a hurricane. Well, sir, we did and it did.”
He looked around at the devastation. “I reckon we’re the only ones.”
When the wind is blowing and the rain is falling horizontally, it’s too late to build the house to code. That has to be done early — while the sun is shining and the ground is dry. Building the house soundly is part of the way we prepare for the hurricane that may never come if we do, but will most certainly come if we don’t.
Preparation is often what keeps us alive.
Preparation is how we get ready.
For many of us, and certainly for children, Advent is a time of waiting and anticipating. For Christian adults, it’s also a time of preparing and getting ready for the arrival of the Messiah.
To help us in our preparation, Saint Matthew tells us a story about John the Baptist.
In this morning’s reading, John had been arrested and was being held in jail at Herod’s desert fortress of Machaerus. John’s disciples had been visiting him in prison and one of the topics they talked with him about was the ministry of Jesus. John sent them back out with a question for Jesus: “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”
This was a curious question for John to ask, given the fact that he was the one who baptized Jesus way back at the beginning of the gospel story but scholars suggest that Matthew was making a point for the readers here. Every Christian, Matthew is telling us, from lowliest to the greatest — even John the Baptist, whose revelation was concrete and specific — experiences doubt. And we probably experience it when we are in times of trouble, even as John did when he was in prison.
So John, at what had to be the lowest time of his life, sent his disciples out to Jesus to ask if he really, really, really was the messiah.
Jesus sent back an answer that may have been something of a shock to the early church as they read Matthew’s gospel. Jesus answered bluntly, concretely, and specifically. Gone, here, are the homely paradoxes and the quaint proverbs of Mark. Gone are the oriental parables and wisdom sayings of Luke. Nowhere here are the long theological treatises to be found as they are found in John. Matthew prefers to be concrete and specific.
How do we know if the messiah is really present and at work? Well, we look for specific, concrete signs of his work.
Those who lived in darkness now live in light. There is no excuse for them stumbling and floundering around anymore. Their eyes have been opened and there is more than physical sight at work here. Seeing, in the gospels, is a theological thing. It has to do with insight as well as vision. To have our eyes opened by Christ is to see the world and each other and ourselves without illusions, “warts and all” as the saying goes.
Illusion and delusion are cast aside and reality is now the real benchmark by which we measure the authenticity of our lives.
It works that way in marriages, doesn’t it? So often we come into our marriages blinded by love, overwhelmed by the heat and sweetness of it. But remember the advice of Friar Laurence to Romeo and Juliet, advice which they ignored: “These violent delights have violent ends and, in their triumph, die, like fire and powder which, when they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness and, in the taste, confounds the appetite. Therefore love moderately. All long love doth so.”
Years ago, a young woman sat in my office in tears, just two years after I had joined her and her husband in marriage. “He’s not the same man I married,” she sniffled. It was my sad duty to explain to her that he was exactly the man she had married two years ago but that, back then, she had been so blinded by her infatuation and love for him that she couldn’t see him accurately.
Romance does not blind us only in our relationships, though, does it? We enter our jobs, our new homes, our new cars, even our hobbies blinded by excitement and joyful anticipation only to be disappointed because they did not live up to our hopes and dreams.
In Jesus, however, we are empowered to live life as it is. We are given the power to see without illusion and the courage to deal with life as it really is.
Obviously, there are examples of physical miracles in the gospels, but we dare not stop there.
People can have legs that are perfectly sound and still be made lame by fear, doubt, narcissism, or prejudice. Leprosy no longer makes us unclean and unacceptable in our communities but the same can’t be said about an arrest record, or a drug conviction, or a mental health problem.
Experts tell us that about 50% of male inmates and 75% of female inmates suffer from some kind of mental illness, and many of them are incarcerated because they have attempted to self-medicate with illegal substances. When they come out we do not hire them for even the most menial jobs. We shun them, push them aside, and then expect them to somehow “make it,” to “pull themselves up by their own boot straps.”
In Jesus Christ, these “unclean” members of our culture are made clean. Fear is cast aside, prejudice is overruled, doubt is reassured, and narcissism is called out and identified for what it is. In God’s kingdom, those who have been shunned aside are reconciled and made part of the community again.
Of course, where Jesus went, often some people suffering from physical deafness had their hearing restored — but not all. Every deaf person didn’t get healed.
Scholars tell us the healing stories are meant not simply to show Jesus working miracles so we would believe he is the messiah. They are to serve as teaching metaphors as well.
When both of my parents were in their sixties my mother insisted that my father get his hearing checked. He did and the test came back with good news. His hearing was fine.
My mother, incensed, asked the doctor why, then, could my father not hear her when she called to him from the other end of the house? He suggested that maybe she just wasn’t talking loudly enough. She countered that everyone else in the house could hear her. The ENT specialist tried to stifle his laugh but he just couldn’t. Maybe, he said, what my father had was not a hearing problem at all but, rather, a listening problem.
He heard what he wanted to hear just fine. But when he was afraid my mother was going to give him some task to perform or some problem to worry about he suddenly became profoundly deaf. He could not hear that which he didn’t want to hear.
Jesus, Matthew tells us, can remove the fear and anxiety that makes us deaf to the things we don’t like to hear.
There are only three accounts in the gospels of Jesus raising someone from the dead. (The story of Lazarus appears only in John’s gospel, not in the synoptics.)
The other story is that of Jairus’s daughter whom Jesus says is not dead, but “just sleeping.”
So it’s not unreasonable to assume that when Jesus says, “the dead are raised” he may be talking not literally but spiritually. Those who live as though they are dead are being given new life, in other words.
Back when I was a teenager there was a popular commercial on television where a man was working late one night in his office and the cleaning lady came in. She was one of those whiny, complaining people you try to be nice to and who make you immediately sorry you tried.
He asked her how her recent vacation went and was immediately sorry as she launched into a long story about how she went on a safari in Africa and how everything went wrong. The food, the accommodations, the guide, the weather — it was all terrible — right up to the point where she was taking a picture of a rhinoceros when it turned, stampeded, and charged right at her.
There’s a long pause and, finally, the man breaks the silence, “Well, what happened?”
“Oh,” answered the cleaning lady, “he killed me.”
The man is taken aback for a few moments and then he chuckled, “Well, yes, but that can’t be. You’re here. You’re dusting and emptying the transh cans and doing your job.”
She looked over her shoulder and smirked, “Ha. You call this livin’?”
Real living, authentic living has nothing to do with the job you have or the company you keep or the things you own. It has to do with living life in the kingdom of God by the grace that comes to us in Jesus Christ.
The poor, in those days, were considered deserving of their poverty. Oh, maybe they hadn’t done anything themselves to earn their misery but, probably, someone in their ancestry had done something horrible and they were having to pay for the bad done by other, previous generations.
The prophets worked for centuries to convince the Hebrew people that this was not the case and that the poor should be treated with compassion and respect and given the opportunity to lift themselves up and out of their poverty. In fact, laws were created in Israel that were designed to give the poor a break and help them live better lives — but those laws were often ignored and most often not enforced.
The good news Matthew speaks of here is the news that your poverty is not caused by sin. It doesn’t mean that God doesn’t love you or that his grace doesn’t apply to you. It simply means that you were unlucky enough be born into a poor family and that there is no reason why you should not be allowed to work your way out of poverty if you so choose.
Of course, people didn’t like what Jesus was saying.
It upset the apple cart. It caused ripples in a social fabric that had allowed the rich and powerful people of their time to live lives of comfort and ease, lives shored up and held aloft by the sweat and toil of the poor. It made waves. It caused people to question the way they were living.
It is not always a “good” thing for people to begin seeing, hearing, and walking and learning that their lives are in their own hands. It can cause all kinds of uncomfortable things to happen. It makes people uncomfortable. People take offense.
So Jesus assures his disciples that people don’t have to be actively on his side. They just need to stand back and let it happen. “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” You don’t have to help, in other words, but don’t get in the way either.
How, then, do we allow all of this seeing, hearing, walking, and so on to prepare us for Christmas? For the advent of the Christ? How do we get ready for all this to begin happening?
Matthew says there are three ways people usually go about it — two of which are inappropriate.
The first, and most inappropriate way is as a reed.
The reed bows to the prevailing wind. We do not adequately prepare for the advent of Christ in our lives by telling ourselves and others simply what we want to hear. Neither do we do so by going the way everyone else is going, bowing to the direction of popular culture and peer pressure.
The second (and equally inappropriate) way to prepare is in soft robes — thinking only of our own comfort. We do not adequately prepare for the Christ in our lives by simply seeing after our own physical comforts and ease.
Finally, the only way to prepare adequately for the kingdom of God is as a prophet. We stand firm. We speak the word of God as it has been proclaimed and revealed to us. We stand for what is good, right, and moral — even when it is unpopular and dangerous to do so.
Then and only then will we be prepared for the kingdom which is to come.
The kingdom of God.
Amen.