Sermon | Clarke Mortensen, Seminarian | December 14, 2025

Advent 3: 12/14/25

People in the Gospels have a habit of asking Jesus either/or questions, and he has a frustrating habit of not directly answering them. So when John the Baptist’s disciples come and ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” how does Jesus respond? “Go and tell John what you hear and see.” He is asking them to judge for themselves the answer to their question based on the evidence of their eyes and ears.

And what do they see? “The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” All around them, suffering is being turned into healing. And they still need to ask if Jesus is the one?

But let’s not be too hard on John the Baptist’s disciples. As a general rule of thumb for reading the Bible, any time someone does something particularly clueless or embarrassing, we ought to assume that we are one and the same. We already have the benefit of knowing Jesus’ whole story, and still how many times do we wonder if some charismatic politician or activist is “the one” who can save us? Just like John’s disciples, we need to be reminded how to tell who our savior is.

If Jesus instructs them to tell what they see, we should ask ourselves just what it is that we see. Where I come from, one of the standard ways of greeting someone is, “What’s God doing in your life?” Now if this gives you pause, I agree with you: this is a bit much for right off the bat when you’re saying hi to someone, but I’ve found that this question does come in handy, time and time again. If we’re not looking for the ways God is working in the world and in our own lives, then there’s going to be a lot we’re not seeing. We won’t see the waters in the wilderness. We won’t see the Good News among the poor. And we certainly won’t see the dead being raised by our own risen savior. Jesus is calling us to be his witnesses, but we can’t be God’s witnesses if we are not, in fact, witnessing anything particularly special happening.

Maybe you hear what Jesus tells John’s disciples, and you’re thinking, “Well sure, that’s all in the Bible, but I never see that kind of stuff in person.” And if that’s the case, let me ask: what’s God doing in your life? Because the answer is never nothing. These miracles we read about in the Bible were written down precisely because they were rare and unbelievable. If those kinds of things happened every day, why bother telling the stories?

But more often, the Holy Spirit works slowly, over time. It works in the space between “How dare you” and “I forgive you,” laboring quietly to turn hearts toward love. It lives in the eager youngster who learns to slow down and in the curmudgeon who figures out how to crack a joke. The Holy Spirit is in the business of sanctification, of making people more holy. Those are the miracles that we can see all around us, if only we are looking.

So if I ever come up to you and ask what God is doing in your life, it’s not a rhetorical question. I know we Episcopalians have a reputation for being introverts, but we can’t be afraid to tell people what we see and hear God doing, because if we’re actually looking, we’ll see the impossible happening. We’re not far away from celebrating the truly impossible: God becoming human and being born from a virgin. Now Mary being a virgin isn’t important because of some sense of purity, but because it makes Jesus an impossible child, a miracle. These are the kinds of things God does that we are called to witness and spread the word about.

But just as important as the big miracles we read about in the Bible are the small, everyday things that God does in your life. I sometimes find myself completely stopped in my tracks at how unbelievable it is that the all-powerful creator of the universe wants to have a relationship with you—you as an individual. God knows you intimately, down to the bone, still loves you—if you can believe it—and wants you to know it.

What more could we possibly need to hear and see to know that Jesus is the one we have waited for? All it takes to get started is to open our eyes and ears. So, dear people of God, what’s God doing in your life?