Where's Jesus?

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Advent II, Year B
December 5, 2021
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
If you have been a child, or been around child, grandchild, of young person left in your charge, it is likely that you have encountered the Where’s Waldo books.  For the uninitiated, the Waldo empire is a vast library of 27 books that began as Where’s Wally in the U.K., and went international with Where’s Waldo about 20 titles ago.  There is no complex plot or character development.  There are not many words.  Each page is a wildly ornate and animated scene.  A jungle, a circus, Sydney, London, Paris… and somewhere in the cornucopia of busyness, Waldo is hiding in plain sight.  The task is to find Waldo and move on to the next scene.  I lost the find Waldo race with my children several times, but I think they studied ahead of time.  Apples do not fall far from the tree.
 
Waldo does have a particular look, with his trademark red and white sweater and matching toboggin hat, and he should be easy to find, but alas the pictures are so busy and detailed. Waldo can be obscured in a field of red tulips or among the bright lights of a Hollywood movie set.  You get the picture, or maybe not.  It depends on how long and how closely you look.
 
The book series is delightful and teaches children how to be observant, to pay attention to detail, and differentiate between patterns and shapes.  The scenes from everyday places as well as iconic or historic places reminds us that not all we see at first is all there is to see.  And as I have quoted the British rocker, Rod Stewart, before: “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?”
 
As we embark on a new year in the Church, we move from last year’s following of Mark’s picture of Jesus, to following Luke’s illustration.  Whereas Mark is a just the facts kind of writer, Luke is a more flowery story teller.  No matter the year, we defer to Luke’s Christmas story with angels, shepherds, and all that.  Every year, I cannot help but hear Linus’s recitation of Luke’s narrative in A Charlie Brown Christmas.  It is hard to forget that image where he explains the real heart of the celebration, among the confusion of Snoopy’s high wattage dog house, and Charlie Brown’s despairingly sparse Christmas tree.  
 
This week’s reading may be familiar, especially if you are a Handel’s Messiah fan, but it is also an unusual outlier among the lexicon of Gospel stories.  Normally, a Gospel reading tells about and illustrates a particular picture of Jesus as he helps, heals, speaks in parables, and challenges the way things appear to be, over against the picture of God’s presence and action in real time.  But in this passage, where’s Jesus?  Today’s narrative does not include Jesus at all, or does it? 
 
Right of the bat, Luke provides a time stamp: a particularly and agonizingly difficult to pronounce set of names of those in notable power positions in a particular moment of history.  Luke’s audience knows that time well.  It was a time of great tribulation and oppression for their people.  And for Luke’s people, the times are even worse.  They are wondering “where is our God?”  Psalms 42, 79, and 115, bring that question to their regular worship.
 
Luke’s narrative cuts through the busyness of human machination and points to John the Baptist, saying that even in this present mess: “the Word of God comes to John.”  And here’s the tricky part: the Word does not come from John.  The Word is already there.  The Word comes through John, as he brings their well-known Isaiah prophecy right into the present.  John points to Jesus as being in the picture already and not yet.  Though Jesus is not there, Jesus is there as the Word.  Get the picture?  Yeah, sometimes I don’t get it either.  We do not sit easy with mystery.
 
This John the Baptist character as a wild man who gets it, but doesn’t get it.  John speaks the truth, but he is so odd and off putting with his rage, his hairy poncho, and fire and brimstone vocabulary.  His vision of Savior is not gentle.  It is one of retribution and fiery redemption.  At least he talks a good forgiveness game.  At least he gets that right.  Signs are not reality.  Signs point to reality.
 
On the surface, John’s drama makes for the ideal Hollywood prequel to the Jesus story, but Luke doesn’t set him in the beginning of the story.  Luke puts John the Baptist in his picture after the author’s trademark nativity story, after Jesus and his folks moved back to Nazareth, after the child Jesus appears in the Temple and astounds them with his precocious teaching.  Then, Luke looks back to the Baptizer in the Wilderness, as if to say: See! See, Jesus was there all the time.  This is not the new plan, this is THE plan, that has been here from the very beginning.  Get the picture?  With a little context, it makes more sense.
 
We are still gazing at this picture not because in falls into an interesting historical moment, but because we are part of Luke’s audience.  Through time and space, we are part of Luke’s curious community, and we wonder, along with them, “Where is our God?”
 
Now is a moment in our history, where Ralph Northam is governor of the Commonwealth, with Glenn Youngkin about to succeed him; where Michael is the Presiding Bishop, and Susan and Jennifer and Porter are our Bishops.  Perhaps, even in our convoluted wrestling with ideas, issues, and theology, we might look past the clutter and ask: “Where is Jesus?”  Are there signs pointing us toward him that we have breezed by without notice?  Where is Jesus in Greenhouse, Mudhouse, or the Harris Teeter?  Jesus is there, just like Waldo in those books.  Where is he?  Maybe Jesus is obscured in the aching bones of a package deliverer, in the tenacity of a young mom with kids in a racecar shopping cart, or even in the invisible frailties of the person sitting next to you right now.  When we look for Jesus, we are more likely to see Jesus.  We we love, we are more able to love more. 
 
The Gospel is not a quaint bedtime story or a game of hide and seek.  The Gospel is a picture of God, with a picture of us laid right over it, like one of those old overhead transparencies.  God is right here in the picture that is of us.  Can’t find God?  Keep looking, watching, or waiting.  As we look with hope, with faith, and with love, God is not hidden at all.  God is in plain sight.   Instead of asking “What would Jesus do?," ask "What is Jesus doing?"