Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

The Way Home

Homily by Lisa Wiens Heinsohn

for St. John’s Episcopal Church

The Second Sunday of Advent

December 07, 2025: Matthew 3:1-12

We are in Advent. When I was growing up, I went to a church that did not honor the season of Advent. In fact I never heard of it until I became an adult. At first when I encountered the season of “Advent” I thought it was pretty much synonymous with “Christmas.” At the first Episcopal Church I went to I remember wondering why, during Advent, were we not singing many of the Christmas carols I loved so much? I had no idea that churches throughout time and space had always honored a season of holy waiting, even of urgent longing, during the weeks leading up to the birth of Christ. Advent is the Church’s New Year, and it comes, not with fanfare and fireworks, not with a declaration that everything is good and OK, but with longing. It comes with a willingness to face the things our souls and bodies and world are missing. As the wheel of the year turns toward the winter solstice, the darkest time of the year, we are invited to get quiet, and to get in touch with our deepest needs.

For some of us, because of our life circumstances, we’re already there. Some of us have lost loved ones, some of us are unhappy at school or at work. Some of us are experiencing the weight of the national political turmoil, which impacts the entire world, not only our nation. Later this morning we are going to offer our blessings to our sister Stefania, who with her siblings from Haiti has been making a new start here in Minnesota. But Temporary Protected Status for people from Haiti has been terminated and therefore her visa will not be renewed, so she must return home this week or risk never being able to return. I am heartbroken and deeply distressed that this is happening. Good people of conscience can disagree about immigration policies, and creating them collectively generally comes up with a better outcome than any one person’s opinion, which is how democracy works. But there are times in the life of the world when public policy and our leaders cross a line, and I believe we have reached such a time. The President’s recent dehumanizing words toward our Somali neighbors, and his previous words toward our Haitian friends and other countries, were cruel and wrong. These words characterized whole groups of people as sub-human, and this is dangerous and unworthy of the character needed in our leadership. It is clearly incompatible with Jesus’ Way of Love, as our scriptures command us to welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, and do unto others as we would have them do unto us. These policies and the rhetoric coming from our national leadership have hurt our own community here at St. John’s.

Now, this week I have been considering how much of this should be said in today’s sermon. I have prayed about it and listened. And this week I happened to pull an old journal off my shelf while organizing my books, and it fell open to a page in May 2005 where I wrote about having listened to an interview with Elie Wiesel, that great Jewish writer who survived Auschwitz as a teenager, though the rest of his family was slaughtered. Mr. Wiesel was talking about his life of prayer, and he said that for him, the most important commandment is not to stay idly passive while great evils are committed. I was considering how much of this to say in today’s sermon. Our church’s namesake John the Baptist features prominently in Advent as one who showed holy courage in the face of the evils of empire. And I had my answer about how much to say.

And so we begin our new year, in Advent, by naming our longings. We don’t rush too quickly toward Christmas, though Christmas is surely coming just as Jesus followed John the Baptist and the Messiah was to follow the return of the prophet Elijah in our sacred stories. We long for this world to be a place of kindness that reflects the reading from Isaiah, where the wolf lies down with the lamb, a baby can put a hand over the den of a snake, and where “they shall not hurt or destroy on all God’s holy mountain.” Each of you has your unique place of longing and of need, and facing that directly is what Advent is all about.

The people of Israel at the time of Jesus were experiencing longing like this. Matthew’s gospel, where today’s reading comes from, was written soon after the time that Rome razed the city Jerusalem and its Temple to the ground, and Jews fled into exile to all corners of the globe. So they were desperate. They needed hope. And into that longing Matthew’s gospel was written. In the midst of that season of hopelessness, Matthew introduces us to John the Baptizer, who appeared in the wilderness according to the prophet Isaiah, saying “Prepare the Way of the Lord.” Lest you wonder why he was wearing camel’s hair and eating locusts, those were signature characteristics of the prophet Elijah before him. He was signaling to anyone who knew their sacred stories that he was the prophet returned, that he was there to point toward the coming Messiah. Everyone knew that the return of the prophet Elijah meant the Messiah was coming. Rome would have no idea what the camel’s hair or the locusts meant, but the people of Israel did, and it fired them with hope and wondering in the midst of their longing.

Isaiah had been written when Jews were exiled to Babylon – another time when the Jews had been homeless and suffering. When Isaiah says, “Comfort, comfort O my People,” and “prepare the way of the Lord,” he is saying that God is making them a way home out of exile. The way of the Lord is clearing all the obstacles between you and God; all the obstacles between you and home. God was saying to them, you are getting ready to end your exile, you are getting ready to go home. So when John the baptizer appears in the wilderness crying out and quoting the prophet Isaiah, all this history is triggered for the listening Jews, and it is all triggered for us too. They and we remember the messenger who led them out of the oppression of Babylon, and out of the oppression of Egypt too. It’s no wonder they flocked to John the Baptizer from all over Judea and everywhere else. They were oppressed by the Roman empire just as their forebears had been oppressed by Babylon and Egypt before that. And John came, proclaiming “the way of the Lord” – the way home – through the most unlikely character imaginable, Jesus of Nazareth, whose way was about radical mercy and love and belonging for all.

John’s words ignited dry tinder in the Jewish people, the dry tinder of their longing and suffering and hope. So you see, it turns out that this place today’s world is in is not at all the first or only time the people of God have faced enormous difficulties. Jesus himself was a political refugee to Egypt. This is why we can have courage to face our longings. We are living the next chapter of the sacred stories that form our imagination and our identity, in continuity with our spiritual ancestors.

Advent reminds us that “as long as we let the world, instead of the gospel, narrate who we are, we are complicit in our slavery to empire.”[1] We can face and name our longings for justice and kindness and character and honesty. Then we can do the urgent work of asking God to help us see the good news that has already come. The good news is that in Christ we are given a third identity, a different narrative, a narrative of radical love and mercy for all. It’s a narrative that goes beyond this strange binary between left and right in this country that is not natural. Jesus shows us the way home through the exile of not-belonging that is created wherever empire oppresses or devalues anyone, because whenever anyone is excluded, no one can truly belong, no one can truly be safe. The “way of the Lord” gives us an identity that transcends party and gender and nationality and age and color. In the way of Jesus, the love of God builds bridges where there had been only separation. It leads to the Beloved Community where a vast sea of people of every language and tribe and nation worship at the throne of God.

So have courage to name your longings. Have courage to name the places you or others are in exile and do not belong. If you are at peace right now, have the courage to look around and see the anguish and the longing of many around you. And from that place, it’s time to pray and then act. With our Bishop’s full awareness and support, a group of us at St. John’s are working to hopefully bring something called “upstander” training. Instead of being passive bystanders watching while others are hurt, we learn how to be active witnesses, not to be violent or to become hateful ourselves, but to embody Jesus’ Way of Love on behalf of those who are among the most vulnerable in today’s world, our immigrant neighbors. We pray in hope and faith that God does answer prayer, often through our hands and voices and hearts. We stand in a long line of spiritual ancestors who have been exiles before, we know what wilderness is like. The good news of Jesus is that there is a way home. Not home that is a physical place, but home that is the Beloved Community where everyone belongs, world without end. This is who and why we are. Amen.

[1] Anathea Portier-Young, “Apocalyptic Preaching,” June 1, 2009, in Working Preacher, http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=1835, accessed December 7, 2025.

10am Service