Is Jesus "the One"?
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
December 15, 2019—Advent 3A
Isaiah 35:1-10; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11
Is he “the one”? You know … THE ONE! The one you’ve longed for. The one you’re told to search for, wait for, make yourself ready for? Is he the one?
Of course, a respected advice columnist (by which I mean Dan Savage, natch) cautions that no-one is actually the one. What you should look for is a .69 that you round up to one. Most of us think that you might want to wait for a .82 to round up to one, but the point still stands: no-one is perfect, and insisting on perfect will leave you either alone or frustrated and overly demanding all your life. Be ready to round up.
You have to be willing to round up. To live with imperfections and quirks and foibles. Because we ALL have them. Much as we wish we didn’t. Or want to pretend we don’t. And we definitely want to demand that our partners don’t. That’s a hard enough sell. But when it comes to our savior? We really don’t want to have to compromise. We want our savior to be EXACTLY as we ordered!
So, is Jesus the one, or should we wait for another?
This, perhaps, is why so many people ask me why I chose and continue to choose Jesus. In an age when church membership is no longer just an expected social thing, those who deliberately choose Jesus must consider WHY they choose Jesus. Is he, really, The One for you?
Many of the folks who ask me, I think, ask because they look around and see a world that is deeply broken: a world in which children go hungry, in which wars devastate populations, in which cruelty and greed run rampant. How can anyone believe in a God who surely opposes all these things, and yet seems to do nothing?
Why would God do nothing? And if it’s because God can’t fix our mess, then who needs a God who can’t do anything? What use is a savior who doesn’t fix all of our messed up … mess?
On the other hand, some of them ask why I choose Jesus because they don’t see a need for Jesus at all. Not that they can’t see the messed up world. It’s more that they have a deep sense of personal responsibility, and don’t want to cop out. THEY will take up the charge to make things better. They will work with others to try to fix it all. They don’t even want the temptation to foist it off on some other agency, some higher power. We humans broke it. We need to clean it up.
Which is true, of course. We did break most of the things that are broken. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that fixing it all is within our power. And it doesn’t mean that we are actually the only power in the system.
We are mortal, living in this mortal, breakable world. We live and we try and we fail and we try and we do amazing things and we also fail. God created this mortal, breakable world, and mostly, God can’t overturn the strange breakability of this world. Because this is the world God created for us to be and become in. We get the chance to do all these wonderful and terrible things to ourselves, to each other, and to the world.
In such a world, the Savior might just not fix everything. The Savior might just be there to show us a way that is more wonderful, and a lot less terrible. The Savior might just be the power that enables us to do that. To do it a little more often. To see it a little more clearly.
That might be the .82 that we have to round up to “the one.”
Jesus knows this might be a hard compromise to swallow. When John asks “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another,” Jesus doesn’t give some kind of certain assurance. He basically just tells John, and us, to look around. What do you see? Have you seen signs of the kingdom of God? Have you seen the blind receive their sight; have you seen the sick be healed and the outcasts brought back to community? Have you seen people raised from the dead? Has good news been brought to the poor?
If you see that, whenever you see that, the Savior is on the loose. If those things are happening, then that is the Kingdom of God breaking into our mortal world. If you can recognize them, that is the Savior breaking into your own inner world.
It isn’t absolute. It isn’t something that certainty will conjure and make concrete. In those days and in our days, there are signs of doom and signs of the kingdom all around us. Both are there, and the Bible at different times calls our attention to all of it. Make no mistake: signs of doom are at work in the world and in your own soul, and you ignore them at your peril! But signs of the kingdom are also there. Signs and wonders, as described by Isaiah, as described by Jesus. They are there, and it is crucial that you notice them. That you do not despair. That you see they are possible, they are active, and they can live in you.
He's the one. He’s the one who can open your eyes to see. He’s the one who can give you the strength to hope, the power to continue, the faith that will keep your light shining no matter how much frailty and violence and hopelessness threaten to overwhelm you.
That’s why Jesus is the One for me. Not because he fixes everything. Not because I don’t want to have to do anything myself to save the world. But because without him it’s just too overwhelming. Without him, I find it difficult to keep hoping in the midst of so much chaos and death and darkness.
But with him, the signs of the kingdom shine more brightly for me. Small as they may be, they become signs of a much larger power at work. They are glimmers of the dream of God that can never be extinguished.
Singer Carrie Newcomer, whose works I often play in church because she has such a beautiful understanding of God and Grace, tells the story of being in an airport before a flight. An airport, at holiday time, which is a place brimming with stress and anxiety and recirculated air. But there, in the midst of security checks and annoyed business travelers and frazzled families, was a young man behind a coffee counter who was singing his customer service. Clearly a trained singer, he repeated orders and gave change with beautiful flourishes and soaring melodies. Carrie listened for a long time, resting back into the talent and the gift. Then she went up and sang her own order to him, exchanging names and details of their most recent singing gigs as they sang to each other. After she intoned her thanks, he leaned in and whispered, “I needed that today … Thank you!”
She gave him a gift, a gift that was born of the signs and wonders of Jesus within her. Because in the work of that barista, tired as he clearly was, she saw the signs and wonders of God’s kingdom breaking into the world: “There is a lot in this troubled world that feels like a gathering storm. But then something utterly unexpected and truly beautiful happens. There is a goodness down deep....that just keeps singing.”[i]
Is Jesus the one? He doesn’t answer straight out, doesn’t give certainty. Instead, he asks us to look for the signs of the kingdom around us. He reminds us of the power that resides in being able to look for them, recognize them, and allow them to strengthen us. And he asks us to look for those signs within ourselves: signs of healing, signs of the ability and willingness to see, ways in which we are bringing in the lost and the broken-hearted. That’s the savior, at loose in your soul!
It doesn’t always feel like enough. It can feel like a lot to round up! But it is, in fact, what we have been waiting for. Jesus is the One. He is the All. He makes what feels unbearable actually worth bearing. May we know it to be so. Amen.
[i] Carrie Newcomer Facebook post 9/24/2019