Advent 3a 2025; 14 Dec.
James 5:7-10; Matt. 11:2-11
Jack Hardaway
WAITING
There are some things that just drive me crazy.
Like ticking clocks.
Something about it just drives me nuts, calling attention to every second, or minute by breaking attention from everything else, breaking time into little pieces.
I came by the neurosis honestly, we had a ticking clock in the kitchen when I was a child, and I had to listen to it ticking every second while trying to learn my spelling, and times tables, and reading. It became a kind of torture.
You know that alligator in Peter Pan that ate the ticking clock that drove the pirate to distraction? That is me.
To this day I disable clocks that tic if I have to be in the same room with one for very long. If you wonder what happened to your loud clock, check your security camera, it might be me.
Time loses its flow. Attention becomes fractured. Waiting for it to stop. Every moment is torture.
Time becomes a prison, punctuated with tic, toc, tic, toc.
Prison is a dark place. Crowded and lonely.
Heavy with waiting. Waiting shows up in our readings today. Difficult waiting. Fraught waiting.
John the Baptist, was in prison, he upset the wrong people.
Matthew’s Gospel has the story of John woven through out.
John’s story starts off with the exhilaration of announcing the arrival of the Messiah, baptizing him, the sky opens, John is excited that Jesus is bringing fire and life to the world.
Things change. Excitement fades.
John is now in prison.
The clarity of belief gets foggy with doubt.
Where is the fire and freedom of the messiah now?
It gets dark in there, in prison, dark inside John’s heart.
Words. The words come up from that place, that worn out and beat down place.
“Are you the one?”
“or am I waiting for someone else?”
“Are you the one?”
Where is your fire? Where is your freedom?
Jesus sends word back, he doesn’t answer, he only says to tell John what can be seen happening in the world, sight, healing, life, good news.
Jesus tells John to recognize what is happening.
God’s kingdom is breaking into the world, and rather than everything falling apart, life comes back together. God is near. And where God is life returns.
And John is still in prison, missing out, hearing about what is happening.
And that is all he gets. Like Moses seeing the promised land that he will never reach.
John will not live to see it. John will not survive.
John will keep upsetting the wrong people and they will kill him.
When John says, “Are you the one?” we also hear Jesus last words from the cross, “Why have you forsaken me?”
Gospel faith is faith born out of prison, born out of the cross.
In the darkness, in the abandonment, in the forsakenness, we are bid to trust even more, and to love even more.
We wait for what is not here yet.
We hear about it, others have seen it, but we are those who wait and hope and love knowing that the world is still broken, that life is on the way but not here yet.
Like in the letter of James, we are the farmers waiting for the rain.
Sometimes the ground is so dry and dusty.
The rain is coming.
Hope and love with reckless trust that the rain is coming.
That is Advent.
That is John waiting in prison.
That is Jesus from the cross.
Life is breaking back into this world.
Life is breaking into our prisons.
The bars, the gates, the chains, are all breaking apart.
Sing in the rain, even before the rain falls, dance and sing in the rain.