Sermon Advent 3 A 2025
Advent 3, Year A
Text: Matthew 11:2–11
People sometimes ask me, “What’s a typical day for a priest?”
And I usually say, “As soon as I have one, I’ll tell you.”
It gets a laugh—but underneath it is something more honest than funny. Most of us assume that if we plan carefully enough, if we follow the right steps, life will eventually settle into something predictable that we can wrap our minds around.
And then it doesn’t.
Occasionally, things fall apart all at once, but more often they just stop lining up the way we thought they would. The plan works—until it doesn’t. The explanation helps—until it doesn’t.
It seems that by now things should be clearer, that faith would feel steadier, that doing the right things would eventually lead to a sense of arrival.
Instead, it feels slower. More complicated. Less certain. And sometimes the hardest part isn’t the pain itself. It’s the disorientation—the sense that the maps we were given no longer match the terrain beneath our feet.
That’s not a failure of faith. That’s simply what happens when life refuses to fit our expectations.
Which is exactly where today’s Gospel begins.
John the Baptist sends word to Jesus from prison. And that detail matters. John is not asking this question from a place of comfort or curiosity. He is asking it from confinement, from danger, from a situation that has already gone very wrong.
“Are you the one who is to come,” he asks, “or are we to wait for another?”
This is not the question of a weak believer. This is the question of a faithful prophet whose expectations have been stretched to their breaking point. John has done everything right. He has prepared the way. He has spoken truth to power. He has named injustice. And now he is sitting in a cell, waiting.
John expected the Messiah to bring urgency. Fire. Judgment. A turning of the tables. What he gets instead is something much gentler.
Jesus doesn’t say yes. He doesn’t say no. He doesn’t explain why John is still in prison. He simply says, “Go and tell John what you hear and see.”
Look.
Pay attention.
Notice what is happening.
And then Jesus adds a blessing:
“Blessed is anyone who does not stumble because of me.”
The word translated stumble means to be tripped up—to lose your footing. And in this story, what trips people up is that Jesus does not match what they were expecting.
That’s not an explanation.
It’s not a justification.
It’s not a promise that things will turn out differently.
It’s simply an acknowledgment that what Jesus is doing will unsettle people—that his way of being Messiah will not line up with their categories—and that some will walk away because of it.
And yet, Jesus names blessing here—not for those who understand, not for those who can make sense of it all, but for those who do not turn away.
Notice what Jesus does not do. He does not rescue John. He does not clarify the timeline. He does not explain the suffering. John remains in prison. The empire does not fall. The story does not resolve.
What Jesus offers instead is a larger horizon. A deeper reality. A God who is present—but not in the ways John expected.
That’s the promise buried inside this strange exchange. The mismatch is not a failure. It’s a revelation. It reveals that reality is larger than the boxes we build for it. That God is larger than the categories we carry. That faith sometimes matures not through clarity, but through disorientation.
And if I’m honest, this is where the text presses closest to home.
I’m learning—slowly, and not without resistance—that some of the most important moments of faith are the ones where the old frameworks stop working. Where the explanations that once brought comfort start to feel thin. Where the answers I memorized don’t quite reach the questions I’m living now.
My faith hasn’t gone away,
but it no longer fits into the box where I used to keep it.
What I’m losing is the version of faith that promises things will go right if I get things right. And that loss matters.
I’ve realized over time that I’m much more familiar with Advent than with Christmas—with waiting in the cold and the dark, trusting that God is present, even though that presence doesn’t look the way I expect.
That’s been unsettling.
But it’s also been honest.
And I suspect I’m not alone in that.
So this is the courage Advent asks of us.
Advent becomes the courage to let our boxes break open, to let our faith deepen, mature, awaken—not toward easy answers, but toward deeper participation in reality, even when that reality unsettles us.
Staying awake looks like resisting the urge to label uncertainty as failure.
It looks like refusing to rush past questions that don’t yet have answers. Like remaining present to lives and stories that are still unfinished.
Advent doesn’t ask us to stop hoping. It asks us to hope without insisting that reality conform to our expectations.
John never gets an answer that explains his suffering. He gets a blessing—and a larger horizon.
He remains in prison.
The empire does not fall.
The story does not resolve.
And still, Jesus says,
“Blessed are those who do not stumble because of me.”
Not blessed are those who understand.
Not blessed are those who are certain.
But blessed are those who stay awake to a reality larger than their expectations.
That may be all the blessing Advent gives us.
And it may be enough.
Amen.
Hopping Hadrian's Wall 