Some twenty years ago I was walking through a a station of the London underground and I saw a sign in bold black letters which said, “NO BUSKING.” I did not have the foggiest notion what I was being told I should not do. I knew that in that part of the world cars had boots and bonnets, not trunks and hoods; I knew that braces did not fix your teeth but held up your trousers; I knew that you rode lifts, not elevators— but busking was an utter mystery. And I certainly did not want to be deported or declared persona non grata for inadvertent busking.

Sometime later on I found out that buskers were people who entertained in streets or subway corridors, usually with a hand out for contributions. And when I checked the dictionary yesterday before I wrote this sermon, I was vastly relieved to read “Chiefly British.”

I want to talk this morning about a busker. He came to the L’Enfant Plaza station of the Washington Metro at the height of the morning rush hour, a youngish, unprepossessing man wearing a t-shirt and a baseball cap. From a small case he took out a violin, then set the case open on the pavement and salted the kitty with a couple of bills and some change. He began to play, and people kept coming by, lots of people hurrying to their mostly mid-level jobs in one or another of the federal bureaucracies. They heard the music— the acoustics were surprisingly good in that particular venue— but mostly they just dashed past, too rushed, too pre-occupied to listen. Occasionally a passer-by would begrudgingly toss some money into the open violin case; most people did not. Perhaps the problem was the music; our busker did not begin with “Danny Boy” or “Turkey in the Straw,” but with the chaconne from Bach’s Partita Number 2 in D minor, a piece about which Brahms said On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings.”

Certainly the problem was not the instrument: our busker’s violin was a Stradivarius for which he reportedly paid over three million dollars, including the trade-in on another Strad.

The busker’s name was Joshua Bell. He is one of today’s foremost violin virtuosos. He has literally played before the crowned heads of Europe. His 45 minute performance netted him $32.00. He was a flop.

But then, nobody expects to hear a musician of the first rank playing for nickles and dimes in a subway. And we human beings are slaves to our expectations, our engrained habits, our pre-occupations— we are all like the 1700 men and women, their Starbucks in their hands, their cell-phones at their ears, rushing toward their cubicles and computers as they did every working day, too busy, too pre-occupied, too wrapped up in the mundane to notice greatness when it was right there.

In today’s gospel we heard about a doubting John the Baptist. Matthew has told us earlier how exultingly he had proclaimed the coming of the Messiah, but now it seems John has heard some stories about what Jesus had been up to and—well, it just didn’t sound like any Messiah John had been expecting. Where were the armies? Where was the triumph? Where was the vindication of God’s people? And when Jesus said, “Go and tell John what you hear and 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,” I don’t think John’s heart was set at ease, even though what Jesus said strongly echoed second Isaiah’s messianic vision of the return of the exiles to Jerusalem. Matthew strongly implies that John died a disappointed man, because John seems to have been blinded by the traditions in which he was raised, deaf to the good news of love, fettered by his own rhetoric and old understandings.

Even Jesus’ final words about John echo disappointment— in this case, Jesus’ own disappointment about John: “I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist, yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”

And why is this so? Could it be because those least in the kingdom have their eyes open to see the world around them in all its true horrors and splendors? Could it be because their ears are fully open to cries of loneliness and despair and to shouts of unmitigated joy? Could it be because their hands and arms, their legs and feet are ready and eager to work for a kingdom not of this world? Could it be because they have found a voice with which they can proclaim good news to other people desperately in need of something good in their driven and vacuous lives? Could it be because they are able— as John perhaps was not-- to see their Messiah in the faces of the men and women around him— even in the face of a busker churning out Danny Boy for the zillionth time?

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