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IT DOES MATTER
Matthew 3:1-12
A sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church by Carter Lester on
December 8, 2013, the Second Sunday of Advent
I have a quick question for you this morning: Which is more important in telling the story of Jesus – a description of his birth in Bethlehem, or a description of John the Baptist?” The answer the gospel writers supply may surprise you. The story of Jesus’ birth is told in only in two of the gospels: Matthew and Luke. But John the Baptist appears in all four of the gospels. For the gospel writers, John the Baptist is a pivotal figure who cannot be ignored. But for many modern churchgoers, John the Baptist is a an unwanted and unhelpful guest.
Kerry and I have a former pastor-turned-teacher, David Bartlett, who has written, “Every congregation I have served as pastor has been populated in large measure by Christians recovering from Christian judgment.”[1] What he means is that he is had many in his congregation who have changed congregations, if not left the church altogether for a period of time, because of the judgment they have experienced at the hand of other Christians. Perhaps they had gone through a divorce; perhaps they had expressed doubts or dissented from the church leaders; perhaps they had the audacity to suggest that there might be more than one way a Christian could vote. Whatever the reason, they experienced not only guilt but also judgment from other members of their former congregations. And so, David writes, when it comes to John the Baptist’s message of repentance and judgment, they are inclined to run the other way. Do you ever feel that way when it comes to John the Baptist and his message of repentance?
Other Christians and congregations may bypass John and head right to the manger for another reason. I heard a colleague talk about a conference on church growth he attended where a megachurch senior pastor told the pastors attending the conference that his church had gotten rid of prayers of confession and the reading of the names of the deceased on All Saints Sunday. His advice: get rid of all such “downers,” as he called those features of worship. Instead, he advised his audience to play only happy music and preach only positive messages. And he had the growing numbers in his church to back him up. I think we can be confident that there was no place in his congregation in Advent or any other season for John the Baptist. “”You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come!” – talk about your downers!
And yet, here he is – again – in our Advent, because every time we begin a gospel, before we get to Jesus, we run into John. He is a hard man to miss when you read the gospels.
Because he was a hard man to miss then. John was a big attraction – even though he was out in the wilderness. At that time, in first century Palestine, the people traffic flow was always towards the city. That was, after all, where the Temple was, and where the markets were, and where the government bureaucracies were. But John single-handedly reverses that traffic flow. “Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him,” Matthew tells us. And it is not just the rank and file of the common people are going out to see and hear John. Even the Sadduccees and Pharisees, the cream of the crop,come out to hear him, Matthew tells us. They are the ones, by the way, whom John calls“a brood of vipers.” John apparently failed to attend the conference on positive messages or the one on how to win friends and influence people.
What do the people see when they see John give his stump speech in the wilderness? A unique vision even for those times. They see an Old Testament prophet who looks like he was sent from central casting. He wears “clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey,” Matthew tells us. What do they hear? John’s message can be summed up in one sentence: “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
And here is the nub of our problem with John. It is not his appearance. After all, nearly all of us have bad yearbook pictures so we are not going to judge that book by its cover. And most of us can live with the second part of the message: “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Then and now, who doesn’t want the Messiah to come, who doesn’t want the kingdom of heaven to come closer?
No, the problem that most of us have with John is the first word of his message: “Repent,” and the words of judgment that follow, words that include images of unfruitful trees being chopped down and wheat and chaff being separated before the chaff is burned up in a fire. That John is talking about first century farming practices hardly takes the sting out of his words. Even if farmers then did cut down unfruitful trees and burn them for fuel and separate wheat and chaff before burning the chaff, who wants to have such words applied to us?
“Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Why can’t we just ignore these words? Why can’t we just skip John and go right to the manger?
The short answer is because the gospels don’t skip John. The longer answer is because John is the necessary forerunner of the Messiah. He is the ultimate preview of a coming attraction, pointing to the Son of God and Messiah who is to come after him.
But the still longer answer is this: the message John is bringing is not a downer. Instead it is good news for those who listen and follow the words. But only if you keep “repentance” and the “coming kingdom of heaven” together. They go together like peanut butter and jelly, or as John might say, like locusts and wild honey. How? Let me explain?
“The kingdom of heaven has come near.” What John means is this: that when Jesus arrives he “embodies and expresses the peace, love, and mercy that God wills for all people.”[2] Jesus will take on all that opposes God, even death, and in his resurrection we see that nothing ultimately thwarts God’s will and purposes – not sin, not death. In Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, the kingdom of heaven comes near – but only partially so. When the kingdom is full here, fully revealed, then we will see that all that opposes God’s love and justice will be rooted out, like barren fruitful trees. When God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven, then all evil, all injustice, all oppression, all sin, will be thrown out, like chaff separated from the wheat and burned.
“The kingdom of heaven has coming near” is unadulterated good news – except for those who do not want to change. That is why John is so critical of the Pharisees and Sadducees: they do not want to change, to bear the fruit of repentance. They are too happy with the status quo, too presumptuous, too arrogant to think they need to change.
And that is why John cannot talk about the kingdom of heaven coming near without shouting “Repent!” Because we are all sinners, we all fall short of being like Jesus. No one can presume that our respectability or the length of our church membership can exempt us from repentance. The line between sin and selfishness, on the one side, and goodness and love on the other side, is not a line that is drawn between “us” and “them.” Instead, it is a line that cuts somewhere near the middle of each one of us. Each one of us, just like the world we live in, has something that is beautiful and full of grace, and each one of us also has something that is dark and sinful. And God wants to get rid of all that is dark and sinful – cut it down like a dying tree, burn it up like chaff.
“Repent” – what John means, what the Bible means, when that word is used is not self-loathing. We are not being called to hate ourselves or carry around a burden of guilt with us for the rest of our life. No, John is saying something else. Repentance literally means “to turn,” “to change.” To repent is to turn from our occupation on self and what others might think of us and to turn towards God and what God thinks of us. To turn from focusing on our issues and our needs to focus more on the issues and needs of our brothers and sisters. To repent is to change that which does not reflect God’s goodness, wisdom, and love. To repent is to change any words or behavior that is not Christ-like.
The truth is we are responsible for the brokenness in our lives, for the ways we have let others down or even hurt them. And we bear some responsibility for the brokenness of the world by our failure to have the courage to act to change things, by our silence, by our going along with values or practices that are counter to the values and practices of the kingdom of heaven.
“Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” You have to hold both parts of that sentence together to understand why what John has to share is good news. “The kingdom of God has come near” – past tense. God did not wait for the world to become sinless before Christ came into the world. And God does not wait for us to become sinless before God loves us. God’s love reaches out to us just as we are, before we have even repented.
“Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” - but God also loves us too much to leave us the way we are. That is why we are called to repent, to turn, to change. Remember the opposite of love is indifference and one thing God is not is indifferent.
Bill Muelhl underlines this point in his description of an Advent-kind of scene that took place outside of a nursery school classroom:
“One December afternoon...a group of parents stood in the lobby of a nursery school waiting to claim their children after the last pre-Christmas class session. As the youngsters ran from their lockers, each one carried in his hands the ‘surprise,’ the brightly wrapped package on which he had been working diligently for weeks. One small boy, trying to run, put on his coat, and wave to his parents, all at the same time, slipped and fell. The ‘surprise’ flew from his grasp, landed on the floor and broke with an obvious ceramic crash.
The child...began to cry inconsolably. His father, trying to minimize the incident and comfort the boy, patted his head and murmured, ‘Now that’s all right son. It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter at all.’
But the child’s mother, somewhat wiser in such situations, swept the boy into her arms and said, ‘Oh but it does matter. It matters a great deal.’ And she wept with her son.”[3]
It does matter. It matters a great deal. What we have broken, where we are broken, matters to God – because we matter to God. We matter a great deal.
Friends, in the midst of doing all of the preparations for Christmas that take us to Christmas tree lots and malls, that sends us frantically running around to do all of the things we think we need to do to prepare for Christmas…may we take the time to be still and worship, be still and pray, to be still and listen, so that we can do the real work of Christmas: repenting, turning, changing. Not to make God love us – God already does. And, not on our own but with the help of God’s spirit.
Because the kingdom of heaven has come near. And, by the grace of God, that which is broken doesn’t have to stay broken.
[1] David L. Bartlett, “Matthew 3:1-12: Pastoral Perspective,” in Feasting on the Word, Year A, Vol. 1, David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 44.
[2] Thomas Long, Matthew, Westminster Bible Companion series (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 27.
[3] William Muelh., Why Preach? Why Listen? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 82.