December 14, 2025
Advent 3/ Year A
The Rev. Dr. Elaine Ellis Thomas
St. John’s Episcopal Church, Essex, CT
Isaiah 35:1-10; Psalm 146:4-9/Canticle 15; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11
Before we took a break for our current Advent bible study book, the Tuesday morning bible study group was making our way through Amy-Jill Levine’s “The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently.” (We will return to the final chapters of this in the new year.) Levine is a Jewish scholar of the New Testament and so has a unique ability to read our story – the Christan story – through a Jewish lens. How did Jesus come up with the things he said? What ancient traditions is he incorporating into what he says in the 1st century? In reading and discussing this book, we also see the ways we use Hebrew scripture to point toward the coming of Jesus when, to a Jewish reader, that is not what the texts are saying at all. Just because we think the text means something doesn’t mean it’s the only way to read it.
This morning, we heard the beautiful prophecy of Isaiah pointing toward the day when the desert would spring into bloom and the ransomed of the Lord would return. It is well established among biblical scholars that the first 39 chapters of what we know as First Isaiah deal with Isaiah’s call to serve as a prophet of God and the run-up to the Assyrian invasion of the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE. The second part, chapters 40-55, shifts to the time of the Babylonian exile more than a century later, and Third Isaiah, the final ten chapters, is a collection of writings pointing toward the restoration of the people.
It is from the first section, before the invasion, that our reading this morning comes. Even in the face of impending disaster, the prophet tells the people that God has not abandoned them.
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then the lame shall leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert… (35:5-6)
Prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos point toward a time when God’s will for humankind will be fulfilled, and we believe that fulfillment came in the person of Jesus. Mary the Prophet, the mother of Jesus, is claiming it. It is here. The time has come.
And yet. And yet. If we look around us, the world is not as God would have it. The poor are still poor, the hungry are not filled with good things, the rich are not sent away empty but only get richer, people are still dying in a hail of gunfire while going to class or enjoying a holiday celerbation at the beach. What are we to make of this?
The epistle from James this morning might provide a clue.
Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near… As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. (James 5:7-8, 10)
The prophets did not live to see salvation. John the Baptizer who sent his followers to question Jesus did not live to see it. The disciples and martyrs did not. Will we?
Last week’s John was in fine form, booming to all those within earshot to repent. This week’s John – 8 chapters and months later – is in an entirely more subdued frame of mind. He is under arrest, sitting in Herod’s jail, uncertain about his future, and his question is far more uncertain. Are you the one? Are you the one whose way I was supposed to make ready or was I just confused, misguided? Jesus’s response is taken straight from Isaiah: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: 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” (Matthew 11:5). Just as his mother Mary had prophesied:
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, *
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things, *
and the rich he has sent away empty. (Luke 1:52-53)
Often at this time of year, when the world is swirling with joy and good cheer, many of us find ourselves asking the same question John asked, “Are you the one? Are you the one, because I gotta be honest, it doesn’t feel like it. Things are hard. We haven’t really been reconciled with God and each other as was promised, so what was it all about?”
Advent is an odd in-between time. We are supposed to live in the joy of resurrection and the expectation of Christ’s coming again, and we look around and see a deeply troubled world. Yet, rather than giving up, losing hope, deciding that’s it’s all a big fairy tale, look around you.
The hungry are being fed. The poor are being cared for. People are being cured from once-incurable diseases. Perhaps when the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night, it will only be because we didn’t look around to see the signs of the inbreaking of God’s reign all around us. Amidst the tragedies unfolding in the world, there is hope. Goodness springs from the hard winter ground like a crocus peeking through the snow. Our job is to tend those tender shoots, those fragile beginnings of something new, to breathe on embers of faith until they burst into flame.
This is what we do in the in-between time. We live as if God’s reign has come, and we do our part in making that real, until Christ comes again.