Who taught John the Baptist to preach? I mean, seriously, “You brood of vipers!”? How many of you would stick around if I began every sermon by yelling at you and calling you names? In all the books on evangelism and church growth that I’ve read, not one of them recommended calling people snakes as a great tool to win friends and influence people.
We don’t ever quite know what to do with John the Baptist. He shows up every Advent, just as the holiday season is ramping up to its most frenzied state of joy and shopping and merriment. Only this voice in the wilderness is not singing a joyous song of praise to announce the birth of the sweet, baby coming Messiah. No, this voice is angry! He is a wild man in the wilderness blaring insults, hollering about stones turning to children, and warning people to beware the fiery wrath to come. John the Baptist does not get much play in commercialized Christmas. Instead he gets dismissed, pushed to the side, like that one weird uncle everyone tries to ignore. You know, the one who always gets drunk at family gatherings and starts spouting conspiracy theories. Think about it. No one sells holiday greeting cards with angry staff-wielding wild men on the front and “Get ready, you brood of vipers” printed inside.
And, truthfully, I think our holidays are the poorer for it. I’ve spent the last couple weeks immersed in these words from John the Baptist, and I have to say, I’ve come to really feel a deep fondness for the fellow. I’ve come to wonder if John the Baptist is maybe not that one crazy uncle, but is in fact that crusty but wise old mentor who loves us so much that he wants more for us than we believe we are capable of and who refuses to let us settle for less than our best. So let’s take a deeper look into these words from John the Baptist, and see how this sermon really is, as the writer of Luke called it, “the good news to the people.”
Our Gospel text for today comes right on the heels of the text from last week. Last week we heard how in the middle of the reign of all these rich and powerful rulers, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, and he went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as was written in the book of Isaiah. This morning we hear the results of John’s proclamations. Crowds began gathering in the Judean wilderness, flocking to hear this wild and strange prophet, and to be baptized by him in the Jordan. John should be happy, right? This seems like exactly what he was trying to accomplish. But instead he denounced the crowds, “you brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” Um, you did, John. You went throughout the whole region proclaiming a baptism of repentance, and here are folk to be baptized, what did you expect them to do?
But what I think John was cautioning against here, is seeing this baptism of repentance as some sort of “get out of jail free” card, instead of the radical reorientation of life that it is. I think John was concerned that the crowd saw baptism like a rainy day fund, something you get done and then stick on a shelf until you need it, and then you are free to just go about your normal life. But remember, the Greek word for repentance is metanoia, which means to literally be turned around and set off in another direction. When John told the crowd to “bear fruit worthy of repentance,” he didn’t mean the crowd had to bear fruit in order to earn their repentance. He meant that if they had truly received repentance, the proof of that repentance would be in the fruit that they bore. For good fruit is the only possible response to repentance. When Martin Luther first started preaching a message of salvation by grace through faith as a gift from God, that there was nothing that humanity could do to earn God’s grace, he got a lot of pushback from the religious community afraid that without the threat of having to earn salvation, people would stop living rightly. They argued that it was only the threat of damnation that kept people in check. No, Luther argued, in fact the opposite was true. If people realized that God loved them so much exactly as they were, then the gratitude they would feel for this free gift of grace would so transform them that they could not help but do good works. And those good works would be better and more true for being done from a place of gratitude rather than a place of obligation.
But you have to know you received a gift in order to respond out of gratitude to it. Which is the point John was trying to get across to the crowd when he cautioned, “do not say to yourselves, ‘we have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham.” Don’t think, John said to the crowd, that you deserve repentance by virtue of birthright. This is a gift freely given by God and there is nothing you can do to earn it or be worthy of it. John wanted the crowd to get out of its own way, so it could be transformed by the promise of repentance God had for them.
So what then do we do? The crowd asked John. How then shall we live? And John told them. John gave them clear, concrete ethical ways of living. He didn’t tell them “the ax is lying at the foot of the tree, so tough luck for you, suckers,” and then mic drop and walk away. No, he spelled it out for them. If you have two coats, share with someone who has none. If you have food, share it. If you’re a tax collector, do your job and collect taxes, but don’t take advantage of people and collect more than your share. If you’re a soldier, be a soldier, don’t be a bully. These are hard words, but they’re not impossible. It is hard to cut through the greed, pride, or our own fear to admit that we have more than enough and can afford to give some away. We know it, the crowd knew it, and John knew it. But after tearing the crowd down with all the ways they fell short, John built them back up with these clear concrete examples of what it meant to bear good fruit, so they could have hope. So they could know they were not simply rotten trees waiting for the ax, but that within them was the potential for a bountiful harvest, and they could be about the work of bearing good fruit.
And then John got to the third part of his sermon, the reason for all this baptizing and fruit bearing. The reason this message from John makes its way into our Advent lectionary. John told the crowds that the “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.”
Jesus is coming. That is what we celebrate at Christmas, what we wait for in Advent, the coming of Christ in our midst. And John wanted the crowd gathered at the Jordan to be ready for the coming of Christ among them. Not because Jesus needed them to be ready to herald his coming. Not because the crowd could make themselves any more or less worthy of earning Christ’s love. But because John knew that when they came face to face with the living God, they would want to be ready, and he wanted them to feel the best, most prepared, most ready for the moment that they could. He wanted them to be able to stand before God with their heads held high, not because God needed them to, but because it would make the crowd feel proud to live in ways that were honoring to God.
I thought a lot about John’s final metaphor for the coming of Christ, this one about how Christ would come with his winnowing fork in hand to clear the threshing floor. How he would separate the wheat from the chaff, and the wheat he would gather in his barns but the chaff would burn with unquenchable fire. Wheat is the hearty part of the crop, while chaff is the excess that needs to be shaken off before the wheat can be stored and consumed. So, to the best of my limited knowledge of old farming practices, the way they were separated was by throwing the grain into the air. The wheat was heavy and it would fall back to the barn floor, but the chaff was light and the winds would blow it away. It is a temptation to read this text as a description of two different groups of people, wheat people and chaff people. To assume that John is cautioning that Jesus will come to separate the wheat people from the chaff people, saving the wheat people, the people doing God’s work, and punishing the chaff people, the weak, lazy people who have not earned their keep. But when I examine my own soul in the way that John challenged the crowd to do, I find the answer more complicated than that. I find within myself both wheat and chaff, both the desire to do God’s work and the weakness, boasting, fear, and pride that John cautioned the crowd against. And what John seems to be saying here, and what I’ve experienced to be true, is that the Holy Spirit comes blowing through us, like a mighty wind, like a refiners fire, and burns out all of the parts of ourselves that are chaff, leaving the best parts of ourselves behind. It is painful to have the chaff burned away. To admit our faults, our guilts, our pride, and our shame. To have laid open our sin and our brokenness, the ways we fail and fall short, as we say in the confession and forgiveness, the things we have done and the things we have failed to do. But also, isn’t that what we want at Advent, isn’t that the thing that keeps us coming back again and again, to the font and to the table, this promise that God can remake us, that God can redeem us, that God is even now working in our lives with forgiveness and grace and love to make from us the precious, blessed children of God that God has created us to be?
And so, like that crusty but wise old mentor who sees in us more potential than we can see in ourselves, John challenges us this Advent to begin the process of separating the wheat from the chaff, of seeing in ourselves the ways we fall short, and in finding strength we didn’t know we had to begin to bear fruit worthy of the incredible gift we have given. Because God is already at work within us, creating these new people from us. We know it to be true. We’ve experienced this forgiveness time and time again. But what a gift to get to be a part of this great transformation. Amen.
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