Third Sunday of Advent, December 11, 2022 – Isaiah 35:1-6A, 10; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11

A lot of you folks here this morning know who Peggy Lee is.  I guess most people would describe her profession as a chanteuse. But she had a couple big records. One in the late 1940’s, a comedy song called “Mañana.” And then, she wrote the entire musical score for Lady and the Tramp, which included the very pretty Italian love song that takes place as lady and the tramp are having their spaghetti dinner. It’s a very famous scene where the song is. “This is the night, it’s a beautiful night, and they call it bella notte.” And that became a big hit for several Italian-American singers. In the rock and roll era, she surprised everyone with a song called Fever. And, although it was a jazz song, many rock and rollers over the years have actually done a take on it.

But her last big hit was sort of unusual. It was a song called “Is That All There Is,” and part of it was narrated and then she would sing the chorus. The first thing when she talked about when she went to a circus as a child. She was all excited to go, then was disappointed with the circus. Then she talks about how a house in her neighborhood burned down. And she went to the fire and watched the house burn down and she said, “Is that all there is?” The refrain is, “If that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing. Let’s break out the booze and have a ball, if that’s all there is.” It’s a very gloomy song.

But I suspect that many people, especially as they move into the second half of their life, begin to think that way. They have doubts and fears and disappointments. And we don’t like to think that we are thinking that way because when we were kids we were taught that despair was a mortal sin, and if you died with despair on your soul, you go to hell. What we feel and what we think has nothing to do with the Church definition of the sin of despair. That’s an entirely different category that rarely, if ever, affects any ordinary Catholic, in any way. 

We’re talking about emotions. And those emotions can kind of overcome us about our society, about our family life, about our health, about all sorts of different things. And so, when the Church says this is the Sunday of Joy, we have a tendency to say, “I ain’t feeling it.” And so, what do we actually mean by the Sunday of Joy? 

Hope is what creates joy not the other way around.  Hope is what creates joy. 

John the Baptist, in today’s story, finds himself thinking the same way I just described. His career has ended in tragedy. He is in a dungeon in Herod’s palace, awaiting execution. And he had baptized Jesus, thinking that Jesus was the one who would come to cast fire on the Earth with a winnowing fan in his hand to separate the good from the bad. He was talking about revolution. Something that the Israelite people had hoped for from the time of their enslavement by the Persians. Once they came back to their own land, the Persians quickly were conquered by Alexander the Great, and their civilization was threatened again. And then Rome conquered the Greeks, and their civilization was threatened again. And it became a vasal state - paying taxes and providing military and getting nothing back in return. And here, John hears about this nice guy wondering around Galilee, playing with fisherman and stuff like that and he says, “Is this what I baptized you for?” He is disillusioned, angry and filled with doubt. And Jesus sends him back a message that’s simply a quotation from Isaiah. What Jesus says this morning is found in our first reading this morning with one other little line added from another place in Isaiah. 

There’s a technical term in scripture study called proleptic. It means that the author put something in the story that shouldn’t happen yet.  I’ll give you an example. In the story of the Exodus, on the night that Moses is going to lead all the Israelite people out of Egypt, he gives detailed instructions on how to celebrate dinner before they leave. What the writer has done, is take the instructions for the Passover, as it was celebrated in the seventh century BC. in Jerusalem, and put them into a story about an exodus that hasn’t happened yet.

Why would he do that? Several reasons. First of all, to show his people, in his own day, when he is writing, just how important their Passover supper is. The second reason is to give the people sitting at dinner a connection to the past. And the third is to show how things that begin a long time ago have impact in the present day. That’s called, in literature, proleptic.

What we would call it today is a spoiler alert. That’s what that is. It’s a spoiler alert. You put something in the story that tells you the ending almost at the beginning. And that’s why the Church puts this gospel in today’s readings. It doesn’t seem to fit because we’re waiting to celebrate the birth of Jesus and all of sudden, we get a story about Jesus’ ministry and how it fulfills the prophecies. And it is thrown in the face of John the Baptist as though to say to him, “Get over it.” But is it true? Is it true?

I am sure you have all seen the commercials on TV for St. Jude’s Hospital and for the Shriners. They’re annoying as heck. They run on for two or three minutes and what’s really most annoying is the little kid with the teddy bear blanket. You know, you’re really sick and tired of them. But, in those commercials they show you the absolutely astonishing things that have been done in the health field for children with cancer, for children who are born with physical defects.  You watch them running marathons and swimming and playing basketball, and all sorts of things that, only a generation ago, would not have seemed possible. And now they are. And it’s not a miracle that Jesus performed. It’s the work of science and the medical profession. 

What has that got to do with religion? This kind of thing is the product of human ingenuity - human mind, human will, human heart - dedicating itself to doing something good. That is the way God intended human beings to be. But we believe that at the very beginning of the human experience something went wrong. Sin entered the world through our own free will. And everything that God had planned was corrupted.  So that we no longer turn immediately to the good, the beautiful and the useful. And we see that in the very things that I am talking about.  The miracles in medicine and science that we see today, come with a price. Part of that price is an ugly profit gleaning of big pharma and big medicine, big business, big industry and big military. All those things take their cut. Pay people much more than they seem justifiably to deserve. And sometimes things don’t move along as quickly as they should move along because some people are not doing their job, some people are not turning their talents toward the good. That is the effect of sin in the world. And yet even though sin always makes us pay a price, there is still this ongoing miracle of the good. The lame walk, the blind see. 

You know, my mother had macular degeneration. It broke her heart because she used to love to do puzzles. Now they have invented glasses that take the peripheral vision and bring it to the front so that people see normally again. I just bought hearing aids. Now they are an over-the-counter thing. Something that was unheard of, pardon the pun, only a generation ago.

All of this is the way in which Jesus brings about the fulfillment of the prophecy. It’s ongoing. It’s stretched out. It’s overshadowed by some kinds of evil that always takes its toll. But remember what I said. It is hope that brings joy. Sin is the enemy of hope.  But we have reason to hope because we see the salvation that Jesus came to bring, work itself out generation by generation and century by century. Very slowly but steadily. 

No, Peggy, that’s not all there is.