The Prophetic Goal [Advent 3C]
The Rev. Jeremiah
Williamson
Luke 3:7-18
The Prophetic Goal
“So, with many other exhortations, John
proclaimed the good news to the people.”
Did he? Is this what we are
calling “good news”? You brood of
vipers? Calling a crowd a slithering
pile of baby snakes does not sound like much of a compliment. The axe is lying at the root of the
trees? That’s not good news for the
trees. Chaff burning with unquenchable
fire? Good news for cold hands, I
suppose, but you don’t want to be the fuel for that fire; it’s unquenchable.
Why are people even
showing up to hear this so-called good news?
And they are showing up. I mean,
it’s not like you just stumble across this guy on the way to work. He’s not standing on the street corner
outside of the cool new camel milk café. (I don’t know what people drank on the way to
work back then.) John the Baptist, you
might remember from last week, was out in the wilderness – well off the beaten
path. If you wanted to find John, to
hear John, you had to make an effort.
The people in that crowd, you know, the brood of vipers, they must have
actually wanted to be there – or at the very least had an annoyingly persistent
friend who dragged them out into the desert.
It’s kinda like buying an expensive ticket to a Don Rickles’ show: like you’re
there on purpose, but also there is a decent chance you’re getting roasted.
John comes out
strong. He doesn’t mince words. There is no opening act to loosen up the
crowd. He goes right in with the vipers
thing. Is this what the people trudged
through the hot, hostile desert to find, to hear? They probably could have been insulted at
work or at home.
And yet they show up
at the banks of the Jordan to listen to John the Baptist. He launches into a sermon that would have
cleared out a lot of churches. And yet,
these folks, they stay. There was
probably a good bit of shifting and squirming, but they stay and they listen. This is, believe it or not, why they came
out, why they showed up.
You know, the thing is,
John’s message is not an easy message.
Repentance sermons never are. And
that is what this is. John is
challenging these people – challenging them to live better lives, to be better
people. And while the Gospel writer, Luke,
calls this Good News, if there is good news in there, you gotta look for
it. It’s not that obvious. The wrath and the waiting axe are much more
obvious than anything that might be called good.
Now we know that John,
living out in the desert, eating locusts, wearing rough animal skins, is not
angling to become a celebrity preacher or a populist politician. That’s probably obvious the moment he opens
his mouth and immediately insults his audience.
This gig was not the plan; he fled to the desert to leave society, to
get away from people. And ultimately, not
only is this a job for which he did not apply, it’s a pretty thankless job; his
confrontational style will directly lead to his imprisonment and
execution. But the people come and so he
preaches. It’s not for the paycheck or
the celebrity, but there’s got to be a reason he is doing this.
John wandered out into
the desert and the word of God found him there.
It got in him. It filled up his
mouth and so he spoke it. Becoming a
prophet was not his choice; it was his destiny.
It seems there are a lot of people in the world today who actually want
to be prophets; I suspect many of them stopped reading this story before John’s
decapitation. The world is full of
self-appointed prophets wandering around with axes, looking for trees to
fall. If you want someone to put you in
your place, just log on to twitter.
Folks will be happy to cut you down to size. And then they will walk away patting
themselves on the back.
But the difference is:
John the Baptist doesn’t mic drop at the end of this sermon. You know what he does? He welcomes the people into the water. He baptizes them into a new life. He sends them off with practical ways to
change their little corner of the world.
It’s downright pastoral.
John’s ministry was costly;
it cost him his life. And for all
intents and purposes, there was no practical reason to get into this
business. Except maybe one, I think John
loved the people who showed up at his waterfront property. I’m not sure he wanted them there initially,
but I do think he had compassion for them.
He cared and so he preached with purpose. And I don’t think the purpose was to provoke
them to anger or to publicly shame them.
I think John cared enough to say whatever was necessary to get the
people to ask that life-changing question: “What then should we do?”
The message starts out
hard, but John’s expectations are surprisingly simple. David Lose points out that John’s answer to
their question is something “most of us first
heard in kindergarten: share, be fair, don’t bully. But if somewhat obvious, it
is at least also within their reach. John does not tell the crowds to join him
out in the wilderness, he does not ask the tax-collectors to abandon or betray
Rome, and he does not urge soldiers to a life of pacifism. Instead, he points
them to the very places in which they already live and work, love and laugh,
struggle and strive, and suggests that these places are precisely where God
calls them to be, where God is at work in them and through them for the sake of
the world.”[1]
In the hard message
there is a grace that within reach. There
is an urgency in John’s message, that much is true, but the urgency is
doable. He doesn’t expect the people to
overthrow the Roman Empire; they couldn’t.
Instead he invites them each to poke their own hole in the system – by living
generous lives rather than self-indulgent lives, by seeking justice and showing
mercy rather than wallowing in self-interest. Small changes with big impact.
You might not be able
to change the world by yourself. But you
can poke a hole in the system – a hole that will allow light to pierce the overwhelming
darkness. You have the opportunity,
daily, to choose generosity instead of self-indulgence, to seek justice and to
show mercy even though wallowing in self-interest is so much easier. You have the power to introduce love into
every moment of your day, into every interaction. You have the power to show mercy to the
people in your corner of the universe.
It might seem like a small thing, but a little bit of love can drive out
a world of hatred.
John had just one
voice. But that one voice echoed through
the wilderness, through the Gospels, through the Church. That one voice is still speaking to those who
long to be challenged into something better.
That one voice was heard by crowds of people who were driven into the
desert by the possibility that life could be better, that they could be
better. And they walked away wet and ready
to poke holes in the brutal, violent, indulgent reality of their world.
Advent is the season
in which we are called to prepare the way of the Lord, to prepare our world for
the coming reign of our Christ. In a
world that often feels so far away from Heaven on Earth that feels like a
daunting task for any one person. What
then should we do? We poke holes. We live beauty in the face of brutality; we
combat the indulgence of our age with generosity; we do justice and love mercy
and walk humbly. We love and love and keep
loving until hatred is an endangered species. I can’t do it alone; you can’t do
it alone. But if each one of us starts living
the life to which we are called in baptism, if together we start doing “thy
will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we will tear a hole in this present
reality big enough for the kingdom of God to come through.
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