God makes bloom our deserts – Matt 11:2-11, Isa 35:1-6a, 10

Third Sunday of Advent, Year A; Holy Cross Parish.

“Here is your God.”  Behold, your God.  Those are the words we heard from the book of Isaiah.  It goes on: He comes with vindication, with divine recompense, he comes to save you.  It goes on, talking of all the miraculous healing that will happen, all great cause for rejoicing on this Gaudete Sunday, the Sunday of rejoicing.  But, the future, what will happen, can distract us, almost water down, the exultant immanence of the Hebrew acclamation:  Hinneh elohekem!  “Here Is your God.”  Not, here’s the spot where he will be, just hang on; certainly not, there’s where he will be, but he’s distant now, so don’t bother Him.  No.  Here is your God.  The cry might go up… “where?”

Imagine hearing this scripture in Jesus’ time.  Imagine yourself a Palestinian Jew, a lost sheep of the house of Israel, a member of an exploited client kingdom of the Roman Empire, a peasant farmer maybe, constantly in fear of a poor harvest.  You’re faithful, and you trust wholeheartedly that God will come and water this desert so that it will bloom, but right now, not much is blooming.  You’re hungry.  “Here is our God?”  Where?  Certainly not in Herod, the King who was meant to be God’s servant, a king who should show forth God’s providential care in his beneficent reign.  No, Herod Antipas was selfishly opulent at best, and as ruthlessly oppressive as Rome would allow the rest of the time.  But there had been someone, someone who made you feel that God could actually be close to you here and now.

He was odd, decidedly odd.  There was no denying that.  But compelling; strangely compelling.  You didn’t go out into the desert to see someone like Herod, dressed in fine clothing.  You weren’t attracted by money, by the reed that adorned some of Herod’s coins.  This odd man on the outskirts, he was what drew you.  He talked of the coming judgment, that you knew all about, but then he invited: repent, and be baptized, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.  Here, is this God you found here?  In the man who said that these Jordan waters, this rather unimpressive stream, could wash you clean of the sins that bound you?     But he’s in prison now, because your world is one in which everything good gets locked up and then killed.  Where is God?

And now there’s another man, a wandering teacher, homeless it seems.  Funny accent, they say he was born in Bethlehem, but grew up in Egypt of all places and then moved to Nazareth, some Hicksville village you’ve never heard of, and nobody’s quite sure who his real father is!  And you keep asking him who he is, “are you the one we’re waiting for?”  And he won’t give a straight answer. He just keeps on healing people!  Here is our God? 

Yes.  Here is our God.  Not in opulence, not in green pastures.  In the desert.  In the odd one.  In the other.  In those outside the limits of polite conversation.  In those in whom at would be very easy to be offended.  But the route is happiness is to not be offended at him.  Some people live there on those margins.  Those are the people to whom we need to constantly be proclaiming, “Here is your God!”  That proclamation could be in words.  Or it could be in deeds.  Jesus just kept on healing.  It’s only God who can wash away sins.  It’s only God who can make a desert bloom.  But we’re not powerless, not most of us, at least, gathered here.

For those of us who don’t live on the margins, that place where we can say “Here is your God,” we can go there.  Our Holy Cross Constitutions mandate us to “stand with the poor and the afflicted, because only from there can we appeal as Jesus did for the conversion and the deliverance of all.”  Only from there. 

Almost 100 times over the past month, someone from our parish’s St. Vincent de Paul has taken a bag of food like this one to a family in need and has told them, all of this food is a gift from the people of Holy Cross parish.  In handing over this bag, full of items so many of you have given, who might have said, and who might have heard? “Here is your God.”  What about when some of our eighth graders went on Friday to dole out soup at St. Augustine’s soup kitchen?  With them, I think I heard reecho: “Here is your God.”  What about all the acts of simple healing mercy done by so many people sitting here that I know nothing about? 

Here at this table, we are fed.  Here is our God.  The God who feeds.  Over the next week, I will baptize two babies and countless confessions will be heard on Wednesday night at our penance service and on Saturday morning during our regular reconciliation slot.  Here is our God.  The God who heals. 

At your baptism, you were probably blessed on the ears and on the mouth to be a hearer and speaker of good news.  Here is our God.  May that be ever on your ears, on your mouth, in your hands, in your heart.  Rejoice… because here is our God!