Brief synopsis of the readings: Once again, in the book of Isaiah, we see a prophesy of hope. Parched land will be quenched, flowers will bloom, and all will rejoice. The blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will leap and all will return to Zion praising God. Matthew’s Gospel speaks of an imprisoned John the Baptist. On hearing of the works of Jesus he asked if Jesus was really the Messiah or is there another. When Jesus hears of this he responds by telling his disciples that the blind can now see, the lame can now walk and the dead are raised. He then tells his disciples: “among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

Several years ago I had the pleasure of participating in our local public radio station’s Radio Reading Service. If you were blind or sight impaired they would give you a special radio and volunteers like myself would read the newspaper over it. Even though I never saw (no pun intended) the people I read to, I enjoyed it because I knew they were out there benefiting from it. In a sense we had, for a few hours, conquered their blindness.

We have other tools: braille, audio books, etc. For the deaf we have cochlear implants. Artificial limbs take the place of missing arms and legs. If your kidneys are failing we have dialysis as well as insulin pumps for people with bad pancreases. Granted this stems from God given intelligence but we’ve done well in healing those with physical ailments. But these are workarounds, not healings and we brag at our own peril.

I write this because sometimes our hubris can cause us to see the totality of what we’ve done and say to God: “Thanks but I’ve got this.” We don’t and the suffering we do and will experience from climate change will only make this clearer to us. We already see that land that is now parched was once flowing with an abundance of water. We already see that coastlines can be in flux. We already see that food supply chains can change dramatically by seemingly small changes.

Our first reading from Isaiah speaks of a hope to come, that God will make all things new again. And Matthew’s Gospel reminds us that God doesn’t necessarily follow our plan of salvation. I feel a certain empathy for John the Baptist here. As we know, a few chapters later in Matthew, John is executed by Herod. Today’s reading describes him in prison asking if Jesus is truly the Messiah or if he should wait for another. This must have been painful for him as John was “all in” for proclaiming the Messiah. If it wasn’t his cousin Jesus, was all his ministry for naught? Was his life a colossal waste? We can only imagine the despair.

But Jesus didn’t rebuke him or tell his disciples that John was off base. Instead Jesus did the enlightening thing. He reminded his disciples that the blind see, the lame walk, and the dead are raised to life. This appears to be an ongoing theme for me this Advent but again and again I think we find ourselves wanting the right things but putting too much stock in deciding we know how God is going to achieve this. Matthew doesn’t tell us what frustrated the imprisoned John but I suspect with a little imagination we can fill in the blanks.

Last week we read about John’s ministry and his calling the pharisees a “brood of vipers.” That was a pretty harsh throwdown and it’s not hard to figure out why he is in prison. But for much of his ministry Jesus had a more complicated and nuanced relationship with them. Obviously we can look forward to when Jesus overturned the tables in the Temple and see that as his own throwdown but that’s in the future. Perhaps John didn’t feel that Jesus was being aggressive enough. Or perhaps John feared that Jesus was just another pretender. Prison can do these things to a person.

We live in a world in as much need for God’s healing today and our prayers have never been so fervent. We hear about the upcoming winter in Ukraine and hear about low morale among Russian troops. But it’s tempting to decide we know how the peace talks should happen and what events need to fall into place to achieve the peace we’ve planned. I have a running joke with a family member about the phrase: “Well, all you need to do is….”

When we put our energy into that we’re not praying to God, we’re giving dictation. As pure as our motivations are, we’re telling God how he should do things. I often say that there are three stages to the Lord’s Prayer. In stage one we say: “My will be done.” We all know that doesn’t work. But we get into trouble when we pray: “Thy will be done. But I have a plan as to exactly how thy will should be done and it will save you time to recognize that.” And of course stage three is (finally) “Thy will be done.”

Again, and I can’t say this enough, it’s not bad to hope and it’s not even bad to imagine how our hope will be fulfilled. But we get in our own way when we decide that our plan is the only plan or the best plan. We blind ourselves to God’s creativity and stray from our path of faith.

We are now nearly at the halfway point of Advent 2022 and, alas, our schedule will get nothing but busier and more hectic from here. But let us give ourselves a break and be open to surprise.