Matthew 3:1-12
In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,
"The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
`Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’"
Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, `We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
"I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire."
On the sermon brainwave podcast - Rolf Jacobson makes a great point. “What is John the Baptist doing in Advent?” Anyone who can find a way to banish John the Baptist from any part of the lectionary is a friend of mine. . .
He goes on to suggest that he would preach from the last verse of the Romans text - “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
That appeals to me. Preach on hope.
Heck, some folks get elected to office on “hope.”
(Lot of good that does ‘em.)
I told Pay No Toll that this text from Romans was calling to me for this Sunday, he sort of wondered HOW one could preach on that.
I can’t recall what he said exactly. I just remember that his questioning the practicality of preaching on that text sort of blew my whole sermon idea out of the water. Seemed to him a bit like trying to preach on a motto.
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
While it wouldn’t fit on a refrigerator magnet, it does seem sort of slogan-ish I guess.
What seemed interesting about Jacobson’s suggestion, I suspect, is that I would like to have hope. And hope seems in short supply. And hope seems to be . . . sort of Adventy - while at the same time (if you really think about hope and not some pathological sort of optimism - “I just know this Titanic is going to right itself and float on home”) - sort of Adventy and counter cultural.
Maybe that is one thing one could say about John the Baptist throughout the ages. This guy is one counter-cultural dude. The camel’s hair/leather belt thing, that might be in style at times, but NO ONE is doing the locusts and wild honey diet. No one.
Folks may go down to listen to him, might be baptized by him, but they’re not sticking around for dinner. “We’ll hit the Subway on the way back to Jerusalem.”
And so - what the heck is John the Baptist doing in our Advent preparation for the coming of Jesus?
Inspiring hope?
I wonder at the call to repent.
Question: What might inpire repentance?
Answer:
a. Sorrow for sin?
b. Fear of punishment?
c. Hope in God’s promised future?
While a and b might be correct answers for the test, c seems the most life giving, doesn’t it?
I read a sermon by Pay No Toll.
He asked this question: “Dare we hope?”
And he worked with the Isaiah text and visited with John’s call to repentance in such a way, that - - - call me crazy - - - I was moved to see the call to repentance itself as a call to hope.
Finally - let me suggest that our hope is - ever and always - grounded in the resurrection.
I’ll close this rambling bunch of non-directional meandering with a few lines of PNT’s sermon
Dare we hope?
It is safer not to lay ourselves out there. To dare is to have enough courage or audacity for something. It is to venture, to take a chance, to be fearless. But such daring can also seem like foolishness. It can seem unwise or even dangerous. The teachings of this Jesus can often strike us like this. We instinctively sense the danger, say, in loving the enemy, or not worrying about what we will eat or wear, or forgiving someone who has wronged us, or living already a future of peace when the world right now seems so filled with fear and hate.
The danger is as obvious as the bread we break and the cup we share. Blood was shed. A body broken. Jesus himself lived a future before its time and the violent world put a violent end to his rash experiment. Isn’t his cross a reminder of what happens when God’s future gets lived too early? What possibly could propel someone to take up the cross and follow? I might prefer to wait and see, but God’s future won’t let me alone. When I take and eat, I taste the wine of God’s new day.
12 comments:
I believe this is from William Loader - -
These truly are trying times. What is being tried is not God's dream and God's power. We are assured that it will come to pass. What is being tried is our willingness to be who we profess to be. Can we be a sign of hope in these times? Can we hope, not in the signs of power and force, but in the signs of faithfulness and love?
Perseverance with hope is what secures our future, not anxious living.
I'm not sure I agree with Jacobson...I think having John the Baptist is profoundly Adventy and necessary to what we are doing this season. Sure he is strange, eating Kashi's newest trail mix for dinner, and sure he is dressed like Hagrid from Harry Potter, and sure his words are harsh, but then he stops and points to the Christ. He gives the law, then points to the Gospel. In the darkness of our condition, our home among the vipers, our lives where our inner monologues don't match our outward actions, we are directed to the Christ as the source of our hope. But I'm not sure I like that language...maybe trust instead of hope. sure, life sucks, but in that guy, in Jesus the world will be brought to a place where the baby will play over the snake hole, etc, etc.
It seems to me that if you take John the B out of Advent, you take out the one who gives us the law and points to the source of all hope. Darkness to light...take John out and you just have light.
Aaah grasshopper. New to this calling (somewhat) you are not yet sick of J the B.
Talk to me in 20 years!
You are right - though, about the light. I just saw a quote - by some sage like Neil Young or Woody Guthrie (or was it Yogi Berra???) - that went something like "to have a light, you have to have a dark to shine it in."
Of course, one might suggest that we already encounter the law in so many ways - we don't "need" John the Baptist yelling at us about it. At the same time, he doesn't let us skirt around the issue. . . that is true.
re: hope and trust. . .
I don't think the problem is "hope" but how we define hope.
Pay No Toll - our dolessharm resident DJ Hall scholar has pulled some quotes on hope, and this visits with this entire conversation:
The theology of the cross is not the discovery that there is no hope for man. It is, rather, the confession that the hope there is, is a judgment against the hope that men conjure up. It does not fix its sights on the darkness, but on the light that can only be seen in the darkness – and that makes the darkness very dark. It does not counsel withdrawal or resignation, but honesty. What is undertaken must be purged of the false hope that is maintained only by keeping itself from exposure to the data of despair. (Hall, Lighten our Darkness, p. 150)
I'll quite now. . .
In Jesus Christ for Today’s World Jurgen Moltmann speaks of researchers who predict the future via extrapolation. “What they understand by future is the extrapolated and extended present, and by way of this understanding they repress the future's new possibilities. According to this interpretation of things, the future is what is going to be, not what is going to come. There is only the eternal becoming-and-passing-away. There is no final Advent.” p. 138
I think of this in Revelation “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.
It is my understanding that a more Greek way to say it would be “the one who is, was and always will be.”
Moltmann contrasts extrapolation with anticipation. . . noting that anticipation is open to surprise, to be open to something new. . . Motlmann - “In this interpretation, the future is not what will be; it is what is coming to meet us. English makes this point when it talks about 'the coming year'.”
thus
“• Talk about God's future is not an extrapolation from the past and the present. It is an anticipation of God's new world in the midst of this old one.
• God's future is experienced only in expectation of its coming. The new creation in Christ which we experience, and the rebirth from the Spirit which we experience, are the true anticipations of God's future which makes all things new.”
It was never my intent to throw a wet blanket on the idea of preaching Romans 15.13. I was just wondering how it might be done. There is the tie-in with the Holy Spirit. There is the nature of hope in the darkness, as suggested in the comments by New Guy. There is the effect of hope (joy and peace, I guess) that sustains people in their dark times. One could weave in and out of such things, while coming back to that verse. That might work.
I think the business of whether John the Baptist is suitable for Advent is something like the preacher's foil. One complains about it, shows how it seems so out of sync with the world around, and then takes it as an opportunity to push to a more profound understanding of what God might be up to. Such a rant might be a pretty fun way to get started. Do you suppose Jacobson really believes all that he said? Perhaps not.
One other thing that draws my attention in this text is the business about repentance. In our adult class a few weeks ago, a parishioner's crabby and self-righteous mother was visiting from out of town. (I know her. She's a former parishioner of mine, herself.) She complained about her minister's assertion that God forgives everybody, and wanted us all to agree that you had to repent before you could be forgiven. It was an awkward conversation, to say the least. But it did remind me once again that there are some unhealthy notions out there of what repentance is, what it means, how it works, what John and Jesus might actually be talking about and so forth. Is it a pre-condition for grace or is it more like waking up to a profoundly new situation? Frederick Buechner, in Wishful Thinking, says this in his entry under repentance: "To repent is to come to your senses. It is not so much something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, 'I'm sorry,' than to the future and saying, 'wow!'"
Repentance is both law and gospel, I believe. I'm tempted to preach a "Getting Through the Holidays" sermon this week. I've got no shortage of people who are living in the darkness of grief, stress, discord, addiction and doubt who crave the hopeful message that there's the hope of finding a new direction. That they are not doomed to despair. Just this last month, I've had more grocery isle conversations with people dealing with some heartbreaking stuff. And for those brave enough to admit it, they have confessed a loathing of the upcoming holidays - at least the way our Xanax culture has built them up to be.
John the Baptist comes along as that quirky neighbor who you've otherwise avoided, but has now graced you with his empathetic presence and is willing to sit on the porch with you to first listen and then share the good news that God's love isn't some pie-in-the-sky anti-depressant, but is nearer to us than ever before. Perhaps the reason people were flocking out to listen to John is because he was willing to diagnose our brokenness and point us to a new reality.
I'm going to preach on John the Baptist this Sunday. So I appreciate y'alls comments on repentance, and just what the f it is. I certainly appreciate Pay No Toil's take from Buechner that repentance is an awakening to the future and the goodness that awaits. But I don't think it resonates to well with hell-fire John the B. To me his call to repentance is very much law, and in that way, different from Jesus' (Mt 4.17). Note that in Matthew John does not offer "baptism for the forgiveness of sins." John's message to the brood of vipers is what is getting me here. The tone is not graceful. He says God's wrath threatens because they don't produce fruit. Instead they rely on the excuse that they are a part of Abraham's family. Their sin is being revealed.
So what I'm thinking about asking in my sermon is this depressing question: "As the religious people of Jesus' day claimed relation to Abraham as their excuse for their crappiness, what excuses do we use today?" As much as I hate that question, I feel like it is the direction the text is taking me. Damn it all.
A quote from Frederick Dale Bruner's "The Christbook: a Historical/Theological Commentary on Matthew 1-12": "The wrath of God is not the intepmerance or irritability of God; it is the love of God in its friction with the injustice and hatefulness of persons. It is the warm, steady, patient, but absolutely fair grace of God in collision with the manifest selfishness and unfairness of human beings. . . God's wrath does not contradict God's love; it proves it. A love that pampered injustice would not be lovable."
Maybe that quote contradicts everything I just wrote...
"Maybe that quote contradicts everything I just wrote..."
Wouldn't be the first time!
Maybe.
Maybe not.
The one thing I might say to Bruner's comment would be that perhaps grace is not "fair."
Maybe not at all.
Yet it might well be a corresponding unfairness that counters the unfairness of the human community. . .
Although the Girardians can drive one nuts with their lingo - and their near Gnostic sense that they're the ones in the know - I do sometimes like their take that the wrath of God is not in God's self - but in our mis-apprehension of who God is.
I guess the question there would be - who's misunderstanding. John's? The Brood's?
Girardians play with barbies.
Another quote from the same book: One fruit of the mainline churches' craven skipping of the judgment of God texts that are on every other page of Scripture is a dull gospel. After all, what urgent need for a gospel is there when Christians' lives are in no ultimate danger, when -- as we hear constantly -- "God is love, and we are accepted as we are?" Teaching the John the Baptist texts honestly will restore the needed message of God's judgment to our churches."
I think there is a secondary problem.
Not only the mainline's skipping judgment, that results in a vapid declaration of a God of love.
The Evangelical's pronouncement of an equally vapid judgment that damns people to hell because they didn't . . . I don't know - - follow the Four Spiritual Laws - - - or whatever. . .
So, in the face of that nonsense, what is a clear announcement of the law, in concert with J the B's clear announcement?
For what it's worth, Bruner is a mainliner. I agree that some evangelicals don't know how to preach the law.
A clear announcement of the Law? How about: If you don't love God and neighbor, then you fall short. You're missing out. Wake up.
I don't know. How do you preach the law?
like everything else I preach
POORLY!
Does it help that feel badly about that?
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