Dec 15, 2024

I speak to you in the name of God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Today we celebrate the third Sunday in Advent – often called “Rejoice Sunday”.  Our readings this morning are supposed to deal with rejoicing in the Lord.  But I’ve been challenged this week to find the rejoicing in John the Baptist’s words to us today.  Let’s be honest.  John warns his hearers about the ax that is even now at the root of the trees and the threshing floor and the fire that is to come if we don’t repent in both word and deed.  It seems designed more to frighten us than to send us out into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit. 

“With many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.”  I don’t know about you, but if this is the good news, I’d hate to hear the bad news.

And yet.  And yet.  If we look deeper, John has great good news for us today.

John’s message today is direct and blunt – and he follows in the footsteps of the Old Testament prophets.  God’s people need to repent of their ways to walk along the path that leads to salvation.  They need to change their hearts and minds to follow the Messiah.

“Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’”, John says.  His message seems to be falling on a lot of deaf ears.  Many Jews of this time believed that physical descent from Abraham was all it took to be an Israelite.  Being descended from Abraham would guarantee them a place in the great nation that God had promised to him.  It would guarantee their salvation.

But John is warning his hearers – don’t try to weasel out of repentance just because you can trace your physical ancestry back to Abraham.  Don’t try to live off the faith of your ancestors, John cautions, using the wonderful imagery of a brood of vipers – the sort of animals who eat their way out of their mothers’ womb.

John makes it clear to his listeners that they need to stop focusing on their physical heritage, and start focusing on their faith.  It was Abraham’s faithfulness that characterized his relationship with God – and so to be a true child of Abraham, they needed to exhibit the same kind of faithfulness.  Faithfulness to God and to God’s commandments and to living the life that God intends for God’s people to live.

And in all this, John exposes how people are justifying their decision not to repent.  Their justification that their heritage will save them.  Maybe they tell themselves that God somehow needs them – instead of realizing that the God who created the universe can easily create new children of Abraham from the rocks that litter the wilderness and the desert.

John’s call to repent rings just as true for us today as it did for those people who went into the wilderness some 2,000 years ago.  And just as John was for them, so he is for us – a herald, and a prophet.  Because – and I can’t emphasize this point hard enough – John is not telling us what it means to follow Jesus.  Or even how to follow Jesus.  What John is telling us is what we have to do to be able to follow Jesus.  Living a life characterized by honesty and concern for those in need doesn’t come from following Jesus.  It’s the other way around.

But the temptation to justify ourselves didn’t pass away with John’s generation.  It’s a universal feature of being human, isn’t it?  So how do we rationalize away our own need to repent?  Maybe we tell ourselves it’s okay because we live in a Christian nation.  Maybe we tell ourselves that our robust prayer life is a genuine substitute for committing our lives to God.  Maybe we tell ourselves that because everyone is going to experience God’s grace anyway, our response to God doesn’t really matter.  Or maybe we tell ourselves that we don’t need to change our lives because we already know how to act ethically –as though the point of repenting is to make the world a better place.

All this ignores the fact that God calls us – through John the Baptist – to live a life of continual repentance.  That following Jesus – to respond with our whole hearts and minds – means continually turning our back on the temptation to live lives of self-centeredness.

So how do we do this?  How do we prepare ourselves to hear the message of Jesus that will start at Christmastime and continue through the next season of Advent.  Don’t be the vipers, John says.  Be the wheat.

John’s metaphor of the wheat is the key to understand how repentance and rejoicing are joined at the hip.  The farmers of this time would take the wheat from the threshing floor and throw it into the air.  And the heavy kernels of wheat would fall to the ground.  Kernels full of nutrition that can be ground into flour and baked into the bread that gave life in John’s world and ours.  Kernels full of potential that can be planted and spring forth as each individual seed becomes a whole new plant that can provide life for others.

And then there’s the chaff.  The husks and the stalks that fly off instead of falling to the ground.  They no longer serve a purpose.  They can’t give life, but instead are gathered up and burned.

And so my friends, this morning we rejoice.  Because it is good news – Gospel – to hear that the proper way to prepare for the advent of the humble servant is to be thrown into the air.  To be separated from our greed and our self-indulgence.  From our hypocrisy and our selfishness.  It’s Good News to know that everything that is not worth keeping can be shaken off and thrown into the unquenchable fire of God’s justice.

So as we prepare our hearts to receive Jesus – to hear his message that the Kingdom of God has come near – rejoice!  Let yourself be thrown into the air by the One who has come and is coming again – so that what is worth keeping can fall to the ground and be used for God’s purposes.  So that we can be prepared for the spiritual transformation that a life in Christ brings.  Amen.