“we piped and you did not dance, we wailed and you did not weep”

Sermon preached at Evensong on Sunday Advent 2 (December 2006)

Tonight’s second reading is the second half of a larger passage about John the Baptist. Jesus’ remarks about John come after John has sent his own disciples to see whether Jesus is the Christ. Jesus responds by healing many people and preaching the good news to the poor and telling John’s disciples to reply with what they have seen and heard.

Jesus next turns his attention to the crowd. He exclaims that some of them have taken John’s preaching of repentance and forgiveness to heart and some have not. He compares those who do not accept John’s teaching to children who become hostile when someone won’t follow their lead: “we piped and you did not dance, we wailed and you did not weep”.

I believe that the church today can take Jesus’ message to heart. It can be easy to get upset when other people walk to the beat of a different drum or when they don’t follow the lead that we set. From my own perspective as a priest at Saint Mary’s I get frustrated when I go to other churches and they worship in ways that are different than what I prefer. I also get frustrated looking at the various factions of the church trying to push and pull the everyone else in many different directions. In my perfect world everyone would always follow my lead, but most likely my idea of a perfect world isn’t exact the same as yours.

I think that one way that we avoid falling into the “my way or the highway” trap is to follow the example. Of John the Baptist John knew that Jesus was from God because he saw that he spread the love of God to others through his words and his deeds. I think that we can do the same. I don’t think that concentrating time and energy on spreading division and trying to force others to go our way is very productive. However, when we concentrate our time and energy on spreading the love of God to others through what we do and what we say, then not only do differences seem less important but we find that more and more people join us as we follow the way of Christ.