Luke 3:7-18

“No on wants to be chastised by John the Baptist this close to Christmas. No preacher wants to read this text when preparing for his third Advent sermon. No parishioner wants to be challenged by John’s words as she sits in the pew enveloped in thoughts of final Christmas preparations and purchases.”[1]

That’s how one of my commentaries begins its reflection on this morning’s passage from Luke. The author and I had similar reactions. Here we are, finally closer to Christmas than Thanksgiving. The theme is joy (we even have a pink Advent candle for emphasis) and then John appears, even after appearing last week, spouting off about repentance, and wrath, and fire, and the coming judgment of God’s promised Messiah. “One more powerful than I is coming… His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Luke concludes the thought, “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.” Good news?! Does that sound like good news? John’s appeal isn’t so easily discerned, and the news he shares sounds a bit frightening, truth be told. “The ax is already lying at the root of the trees; every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”

John clearly believed in the imminence of the Messiah’s coming, and he clearly believed that with that coming also came the eschatological, end-time, apocalyptic judgment of God. You better be on the right side of that judgment, says John. The wrong side is bad, and the time to get on board isn’t tomorrow. It’s now!

I’m not sure how far removed from town John was. One pastor told me that he was 50 miles away, which means it would have cost people a considerable effort to get to him. I have my doubts that the trip was that long, but I don’t doubt that the effort to reach him was significant. They finally get there, on the very edge of the wilderness, and they are greeted with this: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” That hardly seems like a recipe for church growth. You would think he’d be a little more encouraging. Can you imagine making the effort to be here on a Sunday morning only to be insulted?

But, it occurs to me that the insult may not be entirely directed at them. I always assumed that a “brood” was like a pack, or a flock, or school of vipers. But, it’s not. Brood means “children of,” or descendants of, or fruit of. They are the fruit of snakes; they are the product of a people, of a tradition, that is in need of reform and repentance. It won’t help your judgment at all, John says, to say that your are part of the traditions, the club, the chosen tribe, because God can raise chosen people from these rocks you are standing on.

“What can we do,” the crowd wants to know, “in the face of this imminent judgment?” And, this is where the news starts to sound good. “Repent! Turn around! Turn to God! And, turn to neighbor!” The solution is pretty easy and doable, actually. “Share what you have with those in need; do your work honestly; treat others fairly.” What would not have been doable is the solution that would have been prescribed by the religious authorities. Notice, there’s no mention here at all of religious ritual or temple worship. There’s no directive here to seek purity through the normal rights of the religious establishment. And, this is especially good news for 2 out of the 3 groups that ask John what to do because neither tax collectors nor soldiers (both having sold their souls to the Romans) were offered any hope through the temple.

But, with John there is hope for everyone. There are no limits on eligibility. A change of heart, a change of mind, a change of habit is all that is asked, and you don’t have to be special or in any way qualified to accept the task.

“Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” It is an interesting question and there are different ways of hearing it. I wonder if we might hear it like this: “What are you doing here?” I mean, why are you really here? Are you here for the spectacle of it all? Are you here because others are doing it? Are you going through the motions? Do you somehow feel obligated? Or, are you here because you are actually seeking the one who is coming? Are you here because you want change in our world and in your life? Are you here for transformation, to replace the burden of self with the power of God? Are you willing to take the plunge and really ask for it?

 

If those are John’s questions for the crowds, I think they are certainly good and relevant questions for us as well.

A line from Annie Dillard comes to mind. She writes,

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ”[i]

She sounds a bit like John the Baptist, doesn’t she? If this isn’t your experience of God from attending church I would argue that you are far from alone. If crash helmets seem unnecessary, I think I understand. I’m also aware, however, from my own experience that the God we perceive and receive is related to our answers to the questions I was asking earlier. Why are we here? What we get out of the experience is related to what we give to it. It is related to that prayer that we say every week: Oh God, “We offer ourselves, and all that we have, in union with Christ’s offering for us. By your Holy Spirit make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world.”

In many cases the prophets were right without knowing how right they were. Or, they were right in ways that would have surprised even them. And, I believe this is true for John. The apocalyptic end-time judgment of the world was imminent, but that’s because with Christ something of the end, something of God’s glorious victory of love over lovelessness, had been born into the world. The holy presence of God was there upon the earth. The holy Spirit of that God would be poured out upon all. And that Spirit will baptize us with a fire that doesn’t so much consume us as refines us, if we’ll let it. He’ll separate the wheat from the chaff that is within us; he’ll relieve us of our dead and fruitless inclinations; he’ll bring us deeper and deeper into the very life and presence of God, if we’ll let him.

 

This is actually a fairly scary thing. Crash helmets might actually be called for, because who knows where God will take us? Who knows what God will do with us and to us when “all that we have and all that we are” belong to God? Who knows? What we do know, and the reason we’ve themed this Sunday “Joy”, is that what God has in store is good. The news about what God is doing within us is Good!

 

[1] FOTW, Year C Volume 1, page 69.

[i] Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.