Second Sunday of Advent, rcl yr a, 2022
ISAIAH 11:1-10; PSALM 72:1-7, 18-19; ROMANS 15:4-13; MATTHEW 3:1-12
the Holy Spirit and fire
John the Baptist isn’t the kind of guy you’re going to be very excited about when it comes to putting together your Christmas party invitation list. I imagine me, looking at my address book. I imagine getting excited to invite people who will dress to the nines, people who will bring a nice bottle of wine, people who will bring shortbread cookies, and fellow members of the clergy even.
But then, I imagine getting to the jays in my address book … and I imagine inviting John the Baptist. And all plans for nice clothes, fine wine, cookies and collegiality begin to disintegrate.
Christmas parties are a lot of fun. At least until John the Baptist shows up. Because he’s the kind of guy who will arrive unshowered in nothing more than camel-hair coat. He’s the kind of guy who will take that oaky Chardonnay, and that velvety Cabernet, and pour them down the sink. He’s the kind of guy who is going to kick the cookies over the curb into oncoming traffic. The kind of guy who will call his host, and all his clerical colleagues, snakes in the grass, him mumbling and yelling about judgment and unquenchable fire.
In a season of joy and merriment, who really wants to hear someone say:“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near”? But this is what we get with John the Baptist: no shopping mall Santa, no hot cider in a Christmas sweater. With John the Baptist, we get a call to repentance.
But of course, we’re not celebrating Christmas, at least not yet. We are celebrating Advent, which is a far more sober season.
In a way, it would be a bit easier to preach a Santa Claus sermon than it would be to preach a John the Baptist sermon. Because Santa is so clearly a conventional moralist. His elves sit on shelves and make sure we aren’t being bad people, but good people! Be a good person, and all your Christmas dreams will come true, says Santa Claus.
This is not what John the Baptist preaches. John isn’t making lists of who’s being naughty, and who’s being nice. John the Baptist preaches repentance. And so unlike Santa, John the Baptist doesn’t preach about morality, he preaches about reality. John says repent! Change your mind, stop seeing the world as some dead thing, and start seeing the world as it is—start seeing the world as so alive and electric with God and God’s redeeming work that God’s own rule over all of it is about to break through.
For John repentance isn’t so much about being good, in fact, John’s harshest words are for those who are convinced they are already good. Repentance is the call to change your mind, the call to see and act according to the reality of a God who is shaping the world in Christ to be so peaceful that wolves will lie down with lambs, and leopards with kids, and all this will be led by a child—the child much like the one on whom we wait so expectantly. Repentance is the call to change your mind, the call to see and act according to the reality of a God who is sending a Holy Spirit that will burn away all that keeps us from living in such a peace.
One wonders why John the Baptist was such a popular preacher. “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” or so the expression goes. But there they are hordes of people coming to him, not only the people of Jerusalem but people from all Judea, and all the people in the region along the Jordan too. So there was something compelling in John’s message, there was something even attractive about his solemnity and severity.
Maybe John the Baptist was onto something when he preached a repentance that isn’t intended to make you feel bad about yourself, or even good about yourself. A message of repentance that isn’t primarily about doing good, or not being bad, or about some kind of exhaustive moral exertion, but about changing your mind and reimagining the world according to the reality of God’s inbreaking rule, about orienting yourself to the reality of what God is up to.
Now to say though that repentance isn’t about being bad or good isn’t the same as saying that there are no fruits of repentance. There certainly are fruits of repentance, and John asks us to bear fruit worthy of repentance. But the repentance comes first, and then comes the fruit of that repentance, because reimagining the world according to the reality of God’s redeeming work could only mean to begin acting in accordance to how the world really is.
But let’s get back to our disaster of a Christmas party, interrupted as it is by the man in a ratty camel coat. Because if we were to imagine having our party interrupted by John the Baptist, we should also then imagine John the Baptist getting interrupted by Jesus. Because Jesus will complete John’s teaching on repentance.
John says to us, “repent for the Kingdom of heaven has come near.” But Jesus takes one more step yet, saying, as he will later in Matthew, that if we were to strive first and above all things for the Kingdom of God—that many things would be given to us as well. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you,” says Jesus.
It takes Jesus to make it clear that repentance, and seeking God’s Kingdom, is not about a lack of good things—it’s about an abundance of good things. Wine, dapper suits, shortbread and friendship? Maybe. Probably. To be sure, though, among those good things we will most certainly find merriment and joy, and above all of this, grace, and peace.