THE GOSPEL OF JOHN THE BAPTIST
A Sermon by Dean Scotty McLennan
University Worship at the Stanford Memorial Church
December 13, 2009
Bracing words this morning from John the Baptist to those who were coming to be baptized by him: "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance...Every tree...that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."[i] The crowds that gather around John want to know "What then should we do"[ii] to avoid this fate? This sets up John to preach his gospel: "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise."[iii] He tells tax collectors not to take any more than the prescribed amount and soldiers not to extort money by physical threats.[iv] "So," as this morning's gospel lesson[v] tells us, "with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people." If John's gospel message is followed, the promise is that of the ancient Israelite prophet Zephaniah, as you heard from the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament reading:[vi] "The king of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst; you shall fear disaster no more... He will renew you in his love...will save the lame and gather the outcast...will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth."[vii]
In today's gospel lesson, John the Baptist also predicts that one even more mighty than he is soon to come. The people are wondering if John is the Messiah, but he says, "I baptize you with water, but [the] one who...is coming...will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."[viii] As we sang in the opening hymn, "Through you, O Jesus...solace, strength are known; Without your love we fade like grass, like wilted flowers our lives will pass."[ix] Elizabeth Boulton, a minister at the Old South Church in Boston, wrote recently in Christian Century magazine: "John the Baptist is calling for a [radical] change... Jesus is no picnic either... Can you hear him, counseling not only that rich young ruler but you and me? 'Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor...then come, follow me' (Luke 18:22)."[x] "But that's too hard!" we exclaim. "We can't do that!" Elizabeth Boulton uses the example of the pain of her giving birth to her son: "After six solid hours of labor, transition arrived, and I grabbed my husband by the collar of his shirt, pulled him close, and groaned, 'I can't do this anymore!" Then I took hold of the midwife. 'It's too hard. I can't do it.'" But the midwife looked her straight in the eye and said, "Liz, you are doing it. Right now. This is what you were created to do -- and you're doing it." Boulton remembers, "So we breathed and I pushed, and after some of the most painful, difficult hours of my life, a slippery little baby came into the world. We took one look at him and fell in love."[xi]
John's gospel message is one of love: share your clothing, share your food with others in need. But it's also one of promise: You don't have to struggle alone. The midwife is coming who will stand by your side and remind you in your travail to be a better person: "You are doing it. Right now. This is what you were created to do [to love until it hurts] -- and you're doing it. Keep breathing. Keep pushing!" The sweet fruit of the repentance that John calls for, the sweet fruit of Advent, is the new baby on its way. All creation is now groaning as if it's in labor.[xii]
Deep in human consciousness, despite our egotism and selfishness, is a commitment to community, to helping each other out. Even in America, the land of rugged individualism, we raised our barns together, travelled in wagon trains across the plains together, and recognized our mutual interdependence in our use of water out here in the arid West.[xiii] We sing of the heroes and exemplars who led us on our way, and it's still important for us to be well networked, both here in the Silicon Valley and throughout the global village.
But the gospel of John the Baptist isn't docile and heart-warming. It's bracing and challenging and demanding and painful -- and ultimately totally, ecstatically satisfying. I've always loved author Anne Dillard's framing of what Christian discipleship requires in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk.[xiv] She asks why we people in churches so often seem like cheerful, brainless cruise ship tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute. Instead, "We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god...[will] wake someday and...draw us out to where we can never return."[xv]
And in her book For the Time Being,[xvi]Dillard reminds us what obstetrical wards are really all about: "The doctors and nurses wear scrubs of red, blue, or green, and white running shoes... They consult one another on the hoof. They carry clipboards and vanish down corridors... There might as well be a rough angel guarding this ward, or a dragon, or an upwelling current that dashes boats on rocks. There might well be an old stone cairn in the hall by the elevators, or a well, or a ruined shrine wall where people still hear bells. Should we not remove our shoes, drink potions, take baths. For this is surely the wildest deep-sea vent on earth: this is where the people come out."[xvii]
Advent is not just a quiet, sweet time of patient waiting for a baby to be born and for the light to begin to shine in the darkness. Not in the hands of John the Baptist or Annie Dillard. It's a dangerous, precarious, demanding time that should shake us by the collar in the midst of mobbed shopping malls and Christmas Muzak-filled elevators. Slow down! Get your head up and look around! Simplify! Figure out what really matters! Who really matters! How your life should be committed and recommitted! The red-faced John the Baptist is screaming at us, "Repent!" The red-faced Jesus, just beyond him, is screaming, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their crosses daily and follow me."[xviii]
What does God do, Annie Dillard asks, if God doesn't cause everything that happens? Does God cause anything that happens? Sometimes dazzlingly she shows an edge of herself to those who seek her. Sometimes the sky is carousing around her, dramatically. Sometimes he wallops us for thirty seconds at a time, touching a mind or a heart, making a loud sound. "Such experiences are gifts to beginners. 'Later on,' a Hasid master said, 'you don't see these things anymore.' (Having seen, [though], people of varying cultures turn -- for reasons unknown, and by a mechanism unimaginable -- to aiding and serving the afflicted and poor.)[xix]
"Plunge into God," said scientist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. "By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagine it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers." Teilhard goes on: "I can and I must throw myself into the thick of human endeavor, and with no stopping for breath."[xx]
What are we to do, again? "Subject...more matter to spirit... Lift up the fallen and...free the imprisoned...Establish in this our place a dwelling place of the Divine Presence...work for the redemption of the world... extract spiritual power without letting any of it be lost... Force the gates of the spirit, and cry, 'Let me come by.'"[xxi]
"A new baby is on its way. Can't you feel it? All creation is groaning as if in labor. God's new world is slipping into being even now, and with the Spirit's help, we can play our part, breathing through our teeth, letting our skin be stretched, and throwing the doors of our hearts wide open to change."[xxii]
BENEDICTION
There is strength here in Advent, like the sinew of a mother's arm.
It shatters the bitter pride of wealth. It levels the clay-foot thrones of tyrants;
It upholds the forgotten, the scarred. The hunger of both body and soul will be filled.
The holy one cleaves to those who keep faith; it will endure in those who serve mercy.
And the promise made to our ancestors will be kept. AMEN.
(Adapted from W. Frederick Wooden)
NOTES
1
[i] Luke 3: 7-9.
[ii] Luke 3:10.
[iii] Luke 3:11.
[iv] Luke 3: 13-14.
[v] Luke 3: 7-18.
[vi] Zephaniah 3: 14-20.
[vii] Zephaniah 3: 15, 17, 19.
[viii] Luke 3:16.
[ix] Charles Coffin, "The Baptist Shouts on Jordan's Shore" (1736), New Century Hymnal translation (1993).
[x] Elizabeth Myer Boulton, "Living by the Word: Reflections on the Lectionary," Christian Century (December 1, 2009), p. 20.
[xi] Ibid.
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] Raymond C. Miller, Twentieth-Century Pessimism and the American Dream (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1961).
[xiv] Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper, 1988).
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
[xvii] Ibid., p. 36.
[xviii] Luke 9:23.
[xix] Dillard, For the Time Being, pp. 167-168.
[xx]Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as quoted in Dillard, For the Time Being, p. 171.
[xxi] Dillard, For the Time Being, p. 173.
[xxii] Boulton, "Living by the Word," p. 20.