Third Sunday of Advent
December 13, 2009
Luke 3:7-18

Uninvited Prophet

Before you mail out those invitations to this year’s Christmas party, I have some advice to offer: Don’t invite John the Baptist. Take his invitation out of the stack. He’s not the kind of person who is likely to be a barrel of laughs.

Can’t you see him arriving at your doorstep? He doesn’t wipe his muddy feet. He smells as though the camel’s hair coat he’s wearing has not been long separated from its original owner. He eschews the glass of eggnog you offer him and heads straight for the buffet. He sniffs the cheese ball, scowls at the smoked salmon, and dismisses the artichoke dip out of hand.

"You brood of vipers," he bellows. "Don’t you have any locusts and wild honey?"

Your other guests remember all of a sudden that they left the water running at home, or that they forgot to tell the baby sitter something important. They grab their coats and head for the door.

"What interesting friends you have," they say. You get the distinct impression that you will not be on their Christmas card list next year.

Don’t invite John. If ever there was a born party pooper, it’s John, son of Zechariah.

If it’s any consolation, I didn’t invite John to worship this morning, either. He just showed up. He does it every year, about this time. Just as Mary Kutter and Norma Meier have put the poinsettias in the window sills, and the temperature drops enough to make us feel all chilly and Christmas-y, there he is: a blast from the Biblical past.

You’ve got to give him credit, however. The guy gets around. He’s just in from Copenhagen where he appeared with Al Gore at a panel discussion regarding global climate change.

That was a disaster. Perhaps you read about it. The moderator asked, "Mr. Baptist, what incremental changes might you suggest we make in our lifestyles to reduce our carbon footprint? "

John jumped out of his chair and turned the table over. "Incremental changes!" he bellowed. "Incremental changes. I’m not into incremental changes. I say repent. Change now. Look at the sky! Look at the sea! Look at the polar bears! Bear fruits worthy of repentance!" Then he stormed out and joined the protestors on the other side of the police barricades.

Whether he is standing knee deep in the Jordan, or staring down the water canons in Copenhagen, John brings an inconvenient truth: You can’t have Jesus as your Savior without changing the way you live. Jesus is not going to save the world by whisking his followers away while the mess we’ve made of creation is left behind. No, Jesus saves by embracing the world, by loving it to death – his death -- and by calling his disciples to follow suit.

We tend to get John wrong. We tend to think of him as a prophet of pure doom. "Even now the ax is lying at the roots of the trees," he says. The sea level is rising. The polar caps are shrinking. The next thing you’d expect from John is, "Build a spaceship and get the heck out of Dodge." But that’s not what John says. What Johns says is, "Bear fruits worthy of repentance."

In other words, properly understood, John is the prophet of hope. There’s a little time left. Not much, but enough. The future doesn’t have to be a bonfire of dead trees set ablaze by God’s wrath. A fruitful garden is still a possibility because of who God is and what God wants for creation.

People flock from Jerusalem and the countryside to hear John’s message, and a lot of them take it to heart right way. "What then should we do?" they ask. John’s answers are specific and surprisingly practical.

To the crowds he says, "Share what you already have. You don’t need two coats. You don’t need all that food in your cupboard. Share it with your neighbors."

To the tax collectors (Who let them into church?) John says, "Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you. Quit skimming off the top. Just because everybody else in your profession cheats doesn’t mean you have to cheat, too. Who knows? You could give tax collectors a good name."

To the soldiers he says, "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusations, and be satisfied with your wages. Might does not make right. Those with power are not exempt from the requirement to do justice."

It doesn’t take much for John to leap out of the first century into the twenty-first, and land smack in the middle of the decisions you and I must make every day. Do we build that second home? Do we write that smaller check to the United Way? Do we downsize our charitable giving just because we’re cutting down on luxuries? What are the fruits that befit repentance?

As I was writing this sermon I got an e-mail from James Vance, the coordinator for next year’s Presbyterian Habitat House. Only it’s not going to be the Presbyterian Habitat House next year. If it gets built at all, it’s going to be the Methodist-Presbyterian house – a Methoterian house. For the first time in recent memory, the Presbyterian congregations in town aren’t able to pony up the funds for a house on our own, so we’re asking the Wesleyans to help out. Having hearts strangely warmed, they’re glad to help, but even they aren’t sure they can come up with the money.

What accounts for the shortfall? Is it the bitter fruits of the recession? Or is it the limited harvest of the fruits that befit repentance? I’m in no position to judge, but the one to whom John points is. Ax in one hand, winnowing fork in the other, John’s Messiah is coming to separate the fruitful from the fruitless, the wheat from the chaff. If you want to be ready for him, you have to make some urgent changes.

The reason we need John so badly, despite his uncouth ways and backcountry manners, is that he embodies two essential aspects of the Christian faith: ethics and eschatology.

On the one hand, the faith is about the present – about the down-to-earth ethical decisions we are all called to make. I had a Scottish theology professor who would get all red in the face and pound the lectern, telling us "Make no mistake. Christianity is at all points ethics!"

He was right. Following Jesus is about ethics – how you treat your neighbors, the human ones as well as the non-human ones. How you spend your money. Where you set your thermostat. What you drive. The candidates you vote for. It’s about ethics.

On the other hand, there is more to the faith than the present. Christianity is also about the future -- the future God is working out in God’s own time.

The fancy word for this future expectation is "eschatology," the doctrine of last things. For some Christians "eschatology" means catching the last train to heaven while everyone else is left standing in the station, but that’s a terrible distortion of the doctrine of last things. A truly Biblical eschatology calls us to put our trust in the God who is working God’s purpose out, the God who began the redemption of the world in Jesus Christ, and will complete that redemption in God’s good time.

Do you see why eschatology is so important? Without it, we are left to our own devices. Our only hope is in human effort to make the world a better place. Another term for this approach is classical liberalism, which is good-hearted but historically naïve.

Liberalism sees Jesus as an ethical teacher, but not the Messiah of God. It thinks highly of our capacity for good, but it can’t account for people like Adolph Hitler and Osama Ben Laden, or events like the holocaust and 9/11. Liberalism simply cannot cope with what Reinhold Niebuhr called "man’s capacity for evil." Good works alone cannot save the world. It is mired too deeply in sin.

But God can, and God will.

John the Baptist does not say "Be good and the world will become a better place." He says, "Get right with God, who will make the world what God intended in the beginning. God’s Messiah is coming to sort things out, and if you’re not headed toward God’s future in Christ, you need to turn around. Not later. Right now.

The question John puts to us, as we shove him out the door and hunt for the air freshener is not "Are you ready for Christmas?" John’s question is, "Are you ready for Christ?"

Grab your hammer and saw. Start building in the direction of Christ’s reign. Re-order your priorities. God’s Messiah will not wait forever.

 

 

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