The Season of Heralds - Matthew 11: 2-11
Advent is my favorite season of the church year, and I think it’s a travesty that it’s so short. For many reasons. One, we can’t possibly squeeze all the fabulous Advent hymns into only four Sundays. Two, she’s a vision in blue and three to four weeks is not enough time to appreciate it. And three, it is really difficult to recycle sermons in Advent when there are only a handful of readings that repeat year after year.
This week, I rummaged through my sermon archives to see what I’ve preached about on Advent III in years past, as I would hate to bore you with something you’ve already heard. I discovered that I have preached 15 Advent sermons over the years, and only one of them was for the third Sunday. No wonder today’s Gospel passage seemed so strange and new to me!
Last week we heard about John the Baptist’s faithful and impactful ministry of announcing the coming of Christ. Like the Messiah he proclaimed, John led a simple life until his message of hope brought scrutiny from religious and political leaders, and he became an influential public figure who never wavered in speaking truth to power.
He is generally considered a hero in the scriptures, and he will go on to have a hero’s death at the hands of Herod Antipas. But this morning, we see a very different side of John the Baptist. We have jumped ahead in his story and we meet him in prison, in a very vulnerable moment. In spite of a lifetime of heralding the dawn of a new age for his cousin, Jesus, in this twilight of his life, John is doubtful. This is not how he thought the story would go, and he’s looking for hope and reassurance.
We cannot blame him. The violence and persecution he has experienced would test the strength of even the most faithful among us. It says something about who John is that he’s not too proud to reach out to Jesus in his time of need. And it says something about who Jesus is that even those who have gone before him now stand in awe of him. John’s time of proclaiming has passed, now he is the one in need of the Gospel.
This is, in fact, what Advent prepares us for: incarnation flips everything on its head. Just ask anyone who has ever given birth. Pregnant people spend up to forty weeks preparing for the birth: they read books, they buy gear, they stock up on freezer meals, all of which is important. But no matter how prepared they feel, when the baby comes, up is down and down is up and the world is completely reoriented around this tiny being they have brought into the world.
In the Magnificat we prayed earlier, Mary speaks about the extraordinary experience of new life much more eloquently than I ever could. “God has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” It’s a striking image of a world overturned by incarnation.
Mary, John the Baptist, and all the new parents of the world have an important message for us in Advent. We, too, are heralds. We proclaim the coming of new ways of life all the time. But we should take care in choosing which tidings we bear, because whatever we help usher into the world, we will become beholden to. Whatever paths we make in the desert, we will have to travel down.
As most of you know, 2025 has been a difficult year for my family. I am definitely looking forward to flipping over that calendar page and taking a big, deep breath of 2026 air. So this morning, our scripture passages have me wondering. As I look back over the past few months, what have I been a herald of? What have I been working to bring into the world that will capture my attention and my heart in the new year? Is it the Gospel of the Jesus Christ, or something else altogether?
In light of these reflections, I am more grateful for my beloved season of Advent than ever before. Because in these few weeks, we earnestly take up the mantle of proclamation from John. We become the heralds of the Good News of Christ coming into the world. We practice this essential aspect of our faith as a community.
We do it liturgically, by adorning our church in blue, singing hymns about the coming of the Lord, and reading scriptures that help prepare our hearts for incarnation. We do it at home, too. We get out decorations and put clean sheets on the guest bed and perfect our dessert recipes to get ready for Christmas celebrations.
But we also do some public proclamation in Advent. We tend to welcome more guests into our worship in the month of December. We invite friends and family members to services and pageants. We spend time and money making sure the marginalized in our community have shelter and food over the holidays. We hold up a light in the darkness this time of year. It’s a privilege to part of that work here at Christ Church.
It’s been a long year and it’s almost over, but Advent has reminded me that it’s not too late, for me or for anyone, to trust that something magnificent is coming, and to share that news with others. And it not’s too late to remember that as heralds of the Gospel, we can expect the role reversal that we see in the life of John the Baptist. In 2026, just as in every new year, the Incarnation of Christ will manifest in our lives in unexpected ways and flip everything we know on it’s head.
We will need the Gospel down to our very bones, so let us take care in the time we have left to bring that Gospel more fully into the world. Let’s sing our Advent hymns and gaze at our stunning blue furnishings. Let us invite our loved ones to worship and experience the magic of the nativity. Let us be heralds not of doom and destruction, but of Good News and connection. Let us hold up our light faithfully so that everyone we encounter might catch a glimpse of the grace and love of our God. Amen.