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Third Sunday in Advent, 12/13/2015
Sermon on Luke 3:7-18, by David Zersen
John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin 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.” And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” In reply he said to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?” He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”
As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 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.” So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.
LISTENING FOR THE GOOD NEWS
In the theological heritage of my upbringing, the two words “Law” and “Gospel” were the important watchwords of any Christian proclamation. One year when I was a camp counselor, in my mid twenties, a girl from Wild Rose, Wisconsin explained to me how her pastor, old Pastor Pape, made that clear. His sermons always had a good dose of “law” during which people came to feel appropriately judged and condemned for their failures to live up to God’s commandments. Then, as if it belonged to the process, he hiked his robe, took his handkerchief out of his pants pocket, blew his nose, and proceeded to launch into the preaching of “gospel,” the Good News that God had loved and claimed us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. It was all very predictable. People knew that the gospel was coming with the hike of the robe and the blowing of the nose. There was no need to panic and every reason to relax and get comfortable.
Advent’s Emphasis on Judgment Should Not Come as a Surprise
I don’t think that John the Baptist’s audience considered the Gospel predictable as he laid everyone low with his message of fire and brimstone. The common people, the soldiers and the tax collectors all said, “What then shall we do?” There was panic in their voices. They knew, as they gathered at the river, that there was judgment around the corner—because they recognized their moral failures in John’s preaching of the law. They were culpable, and so are we.
Part of the challenge of Advent is the reminder that God is coming, coming not just as the sweet babe in the manger, but coming as the Lord of heaven and earth at the end of time. Since the sixth century, Christians have been singing an Advent hymn filled with the reminders that soon enough we will stand before the judgment seat of God:
Hark! A thrilling voice is sounding,
“Christ is nigh,” it seems to say;
“Cast away the works of darkness,
O ye children of the day.”
Such sentiments may be politically incorrect in modern America, or through much of the church year. However, at Advent, a penitential season, we are forced to ask if such words don’t have their place among us and if there isn’t someone in today’s society who serves as our John the Baptist, the one clearing the paths and making straight the highways that so that we can run unencumbered to greet the King. I sometimes ask myself, “Who is today’s John the Baptist? Is there anyone left who preaches law before the inevitable preaching of the Gospel?”
There was one contemporary preacher who preached law so forcefully that people didn’t know what to do. He challenged self-righteousness, discrimination, dishonesty, corruption, just like the Old Testament prophets had always done. However, the secular media didn’t know what to do with him. Having little religious backgrounds themselves, they were surprised that judgment had an appropriate place in Christian preaching. “He hates America,” the pundits said. “We need to do away with him,” they shouted, like Herod’s daughter, Salome, who wanted John’s head. But Jeremiah Wright, known to the public at the time largely as Barack Obama’s pastor, was a modern-day John the Baptist. And because the secularists of our day were unprepared to say as John’s audience did, “What then shall we do,” they silenced him to avoid being inconvenienced by the preaching of the law.
Recently, I was reminded of another John the Baptist in my re-reading of Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Gilead. The grandfather, in a line of three generations of preachers, was a wild, gun-toting abolitionist in Kansas where he did everything to try to prevent Kansas from becoming a slave-owning state. When he preached law, sporting unwashed clothes, wind-blown hair and a six-gun, hearers were terrified. Three generations later, people spoke of him only in whispered memories, sometimes with a grin on their faces. Today, also, we remember such preaching as if it belongs in a novel. The new trend is called “hyper-grace” preaching, the proclamation of television preachers like Joseph Prince for whom all is Gospel, all is grace.
In such a moment as this, Advent asks us to consider whether God’s judgment should really be a surprise. Is there really no justification for challenges to our failures and shortcomings? When John the Baptist says to his audience, be generous, don’t cheat, don’t complain about your wages, isn’t he speaking to us as well? And when we think that most of the condemnation falls on our neighbors, on our politicians, on the terrorists or the Republicans or Democrats, doesn’t the fault line run through our human hearts as well? (Solzhenitzn) And should we come to the point that like’s John’s audience we ask, “What then shall we do,” let’s be clear that John’s solution is of little help. John is a preacher of the law. And the law condemns, it never emancipates or frees us to want to do what it commands. That’s why John could only point a finger in the right direction. We can only look beyond Advent’s emphasis on judgment to the pink candle that surprises us in this penitential season.
Advent’s Source for Encouraging New Beginnings is the Real Surprise
The real Advent surprise for us comes not from the preaching of John, but from today’s Old Testament lesson in Zephaniah (3:14-20).
Sing, Daughter Zion;
shout aloud, Israel!
Be glad and rejoice with all your heart,
Daughter Jerusalem!
The Lord has taken away your punishment...
And again in today’s Epistle lesson (Phil. 4:4-9)
Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again:
Rejoice! 5 Let your gentleness be evident to all.
The Lord is near.
In the Old Testament setting in Zephaniah, exiles wondered whether they would ever return. And Christians in Philippi wondered with their spiritual leader in prison and a “crooked and depraved generation” surrounding them, whether there was any hope for the future. The totally unexpected response from both writers is, “Rejoice!” “Sing!” God has made you acceptable. He has worked out your future. He has redeemed you. You are his alone.
At this point, old Pastor Pape would hike his robe and people would say, “Ah, here comes the Good News.” Inevitable. Self-understood. Why were we worried? However, unlike the secular world which may think it’s surprising that anyone should preach the law, the real surprise is that good news should be found at all.
Think of it. When my cousin in Washington State emailed all the cousins that we should be wary of any Syrians coming into the U.S. and should protest it vigorously, two cousins in Germany responded that if they should be driven from their homeland, they hope that a country like Germany might take them in. Surprise. And when a couple has a terrible fight and it looks like the relationship has come to an end and one quietly says “I’m sorry,” is it not surprising that forgiveness can open a door? And when a sex-offender lives in a neighborhood and all neighbors have agreed never to have anything to do with him/her, but one dares to leave a Christmas present at the door, isn’t there surprising grace to be found in this neighborhood
Without the Gospel, without the “good news,” without grace, nothing begins again. And so we must listen for it in the Word and in the world around us. The preaching of John, with all its challenge and strength, cannot empower us. The penitential spirit of Advent, important as it is, leaves us ultimately cold. There is no redirection, no new focus, until we hear that we are loved, embraced and empowered by the love of God in Christ. There is no new beginning until we hear the promise, the assurance of God’s love demonstrated to us in our neighbor, in our family members. The pink candle surprises us in the midst of our self-understood incrimination that we can rejoice and serve again because we have heard and seen the love of God in Christ.
In Charles Marsh’s biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Knopf, 2015, p. 372), we are reminded that toward the end, Bonhoeffer surrendered all need to justify himself through scrupulous introspection and settled for knowing that God reigned in us through the strangest of glories. Christ, born again in us by faith, serves the humble, the outcast, the disenfranchised, the nobodies. And in this service, no one can be as surprised as we are. In this strange glory within us, we discover what only God could know: That new beginnings are possible when God loves us into abundant life.