I was on vacation Sunday the 6th, so I don't have a sermon to post from that day. Here's Advent 3...
So, with many other exhortations, John the baptizer proclaimed the good news to the people...
I sometimes wonder what those "other" exhortations might have been.
Because what we hear in this gospel lesson doesn't sound like very good news to us.
We hear good news in the other 2 readings for today: the prophet Zephaniah says, "Sing aloud! Shout! Rejoice and exult with all your heart!" Why? Because, "The Lord has taken away the judgments against you... The Lord, your God is in your midst.”
Then we ha ve Paul, another early sharer of good news, and he follows right along Zephaniah's joyful path. "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice." (& if you ever went to Christian camp, or maybe Sunday school or Vacation Bible School, & you learned that song, you're probably singing it - and now you know where it comes from!) But “Rejoice!” he says - “The Lord is near!”
The Lord is near, and so joy is bustin' out all over the place in our readings this morning. It's always that way on the 3rd Sunday of Advent – all readings point to joy, which is why it used to be known as Gaudete (gow-DAE-tae) Sunday. Gaudete is Latin for “rejoice.” It's the theme of the day - Rejoice, God is near! Rejoice - God is in your very midst! Rejoice!
If you're anything like me, then, it kinda makes you wonder how John the Baptizer managed to sneak his way into this set of readings. Sure, he's part of “the Lord is near” crowd – he points out that “one more powerful than I is coming...” – but he doesn't make it sound like much to rejoice over.
There he is, out in the wilderness, where he's been for much of his life, and now, crowds of people come out to where he is preaching, out there by the Jordan river. They come to be baptized by him. Now, if we had crowds of people coming here to be baptized all at once, we would be rejoicing, but John the baptizer? He's not exactly the one you would want to be greeting people at the front doors of the church.
“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath that is to come?” (That's not the kind of thing they teach you to say in Evangelism 101, by the way.) “Bear fruits worthy of repentance.” - Don't just say you've changed. Show you've changed. The ax is at the root of the tree, ready to cut down every tree that does not bear good fruit. “One more powerful than I is coming,” John tells them. “I baptize you with water...” but he's coming with the Holy Spirit, with fire, with winnowing fork in hand, ready to clear the threshing floor – and the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.
I don't know how many of us would have welcomed this message from Jesus' cousin, John. We Lutherans like our preachers with a little more love & grace, and a little less fire and brimstone. Because we don't really want to be reminded that there is stuff we need to repent of, we don't want to think of the things we have done or left undone, of the ways we have not loved God with our whole hearts, have not loved our neighbors as ours elves. We are reminded of those things often enough – by the ones we have hurt, maybe just by our own guilty conscience. And we certainly don't want to be reminded that feeling guilty or sorry isn't the same as repenting. Repenting means turning around, doing an about face. It means changing our ways. I could tell you stories – and you could tell me stories – of things done that can't be undone, words that can't be taken back, regrets carried. But those regrets aren't always enough to make us change our ways, are they?
That's what makes us squirm when we hear John the baptizer preaching to us today. We know there are things we haven't changed that we should, wrongs that we have not tried to make right. We don't like being confronted so boldly with the reality of our sins & shortcomings, and we sure don't like the sound of the consequences John puts out there. This business about trees without good fruit being cut down, about the chaff being separated from the wheat and being burned in unquenchable fire can make us downright nervous. This lesson doesn't seem to give us much cause to rejoice on this Sunday of rejoicing.
But there is reason to rejoice! There is good news tucked in John the baptizer's words to his listeners this morning. Because the one who is coming is more powerful than John. The one who is coming comes with a winnowing fork in hand, ready to sort out the wheat from the chaff, preparing to gather the wheat into the granary. That's the whole point of this exercise, to gather in the wheat, to reap a harvest. The focus is on the grain, not on the chaff.
This isn't a matter of dividing up the good people from the bad people, the in-crowd from the outsiders. Every grain of wheat grows with chaff. Chaff is the dry, outer husk that surrounds the seed of life within. It's inedible, unusable, not fit for humans to eat. And before it can be used, the wheat has to be separated from the chaff. You know where I'm going with this, right? We are like that wheat, complete with chaff of our own, all those qualities and habits that aren't worth keeping, that keep us from being the fruitful harvest God longs to have.
And that's where the good news comes in. One is coming who is more powerful than we are, and he can separate the wheat from the chaff. He doesn't abandon us to our own efforts to clean up our acts and make ourselves wo rthy. He comes, and he baptizes us with the Holy Spirit, and with that purifying fire, he slowly but surely burns the chaff of our lives away. (There's a lot of it – maybe that's why John says it's an unquenchable fire, because there's a never-ending supply to work with.)
And while that's happening, that same Holy Spirit draws us ever deeper into the life of Jesus. The roots of our lives grow deep & strong, anchored in Jesus, the source of all life.
And when our lives are rooted in him, when we draw our lives from him, the fruits of repentance are bound to grow, fruits marked by generosity and fairness and justice and contentment.
There is good news in this gospel after all. So, rejoice! The Lord is near. The one who is coming is more powerful than we are, more powerful than the powers of sin & death, and he comes to save. Thanks be to God!
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment