Text — Matthew 11:2-11 

When John heard in prison what the Messiah † was doing, he sent word by his † disciples  3 and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”  4 Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see:  5 the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers † are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.  6 And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

7 As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind?  8 What then did you go out to see? Someone † dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces.  9 What then did you go out to see? A prophet? † Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.  10 This is the one about whom it is written,

‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,

who will prepare your way before you.’

11 Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. 

 In our scripture lesson, John the Baptist sent a message to Jesus asking, “Has the time come?  Is the kingdom here?  Or do we have to wait longer?”  To understand this question, you need to know something about the world view of the New Testament that makes the New Testament hard for us to understand. 

Most of us today understand history as a gradual process.  Things change slowly over centuries.  But the writers of the New Testament, and figures like John the Baptist and Jesus himself, apparently didn’t think this way.

You’ve heard of the “apocalypse.”  The apocalypse --  in this New Testament world view I’m describing --  is the dividing line between the old creation and the new creation.  The apocalypse is a very rapid, dramatic, and radical transformation of the world.  There’s no evolutionary process.  The “old creation” passes away and the “new creation” breaks in.

So John the Baptism is asking Jesus, “Is this apocalypse, is this radical change, happening now?  Are you the sign of its arrival? 

And Jesus answers, essentially, yes.  Look around.  These are the signs.  The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor are hearing that they won’t be poor any longer.  These signs are the proof that the new age is here.

There’s one problem with this logic that you may have noticed.  The world didn’t change, at least not as people thought it would.  The world has changed since Jesus came.  Jesus made a huge impact on the world.  The world has even divided history into B.C. (before Christ) and A.D (anno Domini, the year of the Lord, or after Christ.)  The new terms are C.E. (common era) and B.C.E. (before common era) but the numbers of the years on the calendar that virtually the whole world uses are still in relation to Jesus’ birth.

But the world didn’t become that perfect, ideal world that the New Testament — or at least certain passages in the New Testament — seem to say it’s about to become.  There is still blindness, deafness, lameness, and many other illnesses we have to deal with.  The poor are still poor.  Except for Jesus, the dead have not risen from the graves.  The world didn’t change as dramatically as Jesus, in this passage, said it was changing.  Was Jesus wrong?  Or if it did change, the change doesn’t seem to have stuck.

The church has been very creative in dealing with this problem and has found a number of “solutions”: Christ changes our inner reality, not outer reality.  Or Jesus did save the world; the world just doesn’t know it’s been saved.  Or Satan has been let loose for purposes we don’t understand.  Or the big change is still coming, any day now.

Whatever solution you prefer, the situation is: Jesus has “already” come, but the full results of his coming are “not yet” visible, not yet fully realized.  So we live in this in-between situation.  And this is true for all of us, whether we pay attention to the Bible or not.

The world the Bible promises, or the world we would like, isn’t the world we see.  The life we would like to have isn’t exactly the life we have.

Today, we baptized four young children into the Christian church.  I’m sure you parents have wonderful dreams about the relationship you are going to have with your child for the rest of your life.  I’m sure you have many pleasant surprises ahead.  In some ways, being a parent surpasses all your expectations.  But I also suspect that, in fourteen years, or eighteen years, or twenty-five years, you’ll be happy to settle for something less than the most ideal, perfect, parent-child relationship you can imagine.

We have eleven people who joined the church today, who have high expectations of us and we have high hopes for them.  Many of these expectations will be surpassed.  Many surprising, wonderful things will happen in our life together.  But it’s also true that, along the way, we’ll disappoint each other from time to time. 

Our marriages and life partnerships start out with us imagining how wonderful, comforting, even blissful it will be.  It’s also true that most murders are committed by one member of a couple against another.  There’s a relationship between the height of the vision and the depth of despair when reality falls short of expectations.

We all live in this tension between the way we’d like things to be and the way they are.  What do we do with that gap?  That’s the critical challenge.  How do we make peace with it? 

We can make peace with it.  I’ve seen many people, usually older people, who have made peace with it.  That may be because it takes most of a lifetime to do so. It may be because seeing the end come into view is a motivating factor to make that peace.

I haven’t quite found that peace myself, but I’ve made some progress, and I’m working on it. This is the core struggle of all our lives.

There’s a familiar prayer.  “God give me the serenity to accept what I cannot change, the courage to change what I can change, and wisdom to know the difference.”  That’s another one of those prayers for every person, for every day, for just about disappointment or challenge we face.