The Third Sunday of Advent - St. Luke's Worcester

The Gospel reading for the Third Sunday of Advent can be found here. 

You brood of vipers! Who warned you? Bear fruit worthy of repentance!

I once read that preaching should mimic the text being preached on. So doxology should be preached in ways that praise God. And prophetic texts in ways that challenge God’s people. Laments can help us to find ways to articulate grief and loss. And so forth…

Sometimes that means that as a preacher that I need to remember that I’ve been entrusted to convey a message larger than myself, and that preaching from the lectionary means that sometimes I have to stretch out of my comfort zone in order to speak in a voice that may feel less natural for me.

Today is one of those days. Especially in the midst of a pandemic, in a congregation that is waiting expectantly for an interim to arrive, left to my own devices I’d prefer to preach comfortable words today. My pastoral instincts would kick into overdrive: comfort, comfort ye my people. Speak tenderly to St. Luke’s…and tell them everything is going to be alright.

It will be. But what we get today is the second week in a row of John the Baptist. The rhetorical scholars tell us that as he unpacks his message of repentance for the forgiveness of sins at the Jordan River that he is engaged in exhortation. So this sermon, if done right, should exhort all of you. (And me too!)

But let’s be clear: exhortation is not finger-pointing, although I know that John’s words can sometimes sound that way to our ears. His rhetoric, like his clothes and his diet and the desert where he delivers his message, is wild and untamed. This is not brie and chardonnay in the ‘burbs! John is very direct. Even so, exhortation when done correctly is about speaking the truth in love – and about encouraging us all to work on the only person we can really change: ourselves. In the twelve-step practices, which can be helpful to all of us, #4 is about making a fearless moral inventory of ourselves. To me, that’s what exhortation is about.

The essence of John’s message is that he exhorts us to live our lives in conformity with what we say we believe. He isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know. He is simply exhorting us as we gather here on this Third Sunday of Advent to live our lives in synch with what we profess to be our core values as followers of Jesus.

Notice that John the Baptist isn’t running after people on a street corner in order to chastise complete strangers. Those who hear his words have chosen to go out into the Judean Desert to listen to him. Later on in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus will remind the crowds that anyone who went out to see John the Baptist knew before they went that they weren’t going out to see some reed shaken by the wind (Luke 7:24) or a man dressed in soft clothing (Luke 7:25) John offers no smooth words. To encounter John is to encounter a great prophet like the prophets of old. (Luke 7:26-28) To encounter John is meet a truthteller who speaks with a sense of urgency and immediacy: Now is the time is Now for repentance! Sleepers awake! (You brood of vipers!)

If we aren’t careful, churchy words like “repentance” can start to become little more than cliché. We are tempted to domesticate such words, but when we do that they become nothing more than a passing feeling of guilt or shame. We’ll get over it the same way we get over a passing moment of indigestion. In fact, the word “repentance” is not about how we feel. It comes from a Greek word, metanoia; which means “to turn around.” Metanoia requires change. Repentance is about getting our act together and sometimes it’s like those old GPS before Apple and Google Maps that would say, “recalculating…recalculating.” Advent is a timie to recalculate and get back on track.

For John, what matters is not how fervently we pray or how often we make it to Church—although presumably those things can help us to better remember who we are and who we are called to become. What matters in the end, however, is how we act in the world and quite specifically with how we behave in the work God has given us to do.

“What should we do?” the crowds ask John. “Share your stuff,” John exhorts. It’s as simple as that. John isn’t here to make us feel guilty about not doing enough for our neighbors in need but to exhort us to allow God work in and through us to do infinitely more than we could ask or imagine, by cultivating generosity in us and by imploring us to live simply so that others may simply live.

“Even tax collectors came to be baptized,” Luke tells us. And they, too asked, “what should we do?” And John tells them, “do your job with integrity…don’t be greedy.” And some soldiers also came to be baptized and they asked him what they should do and he told them not to misuse their power, because when soldiers walk into a village with guns people are usually pretty scared. They shouldn’t use fear or intimidation to become bullies because they are called to something better than that, something nobler than that.

You can fill in the blanks. I think the possibilities are endless and you don’t even need to be a Biblical scholar or a Canon to the Ordinary to figure out what this text means! Formulate any question around any profession and ask John the Baptist what you should do on this third Sunday of Advent. The answer will be the same. Some professors and teachers came; some lawyers and some cleaning ladies and some priests and some engineers and some politicians and some hairdressers and some librarians and some nurses and some business people and some cops and some social workers and some students. All of them came out to the wilderness and said to John, “what should we do?”

And John speaks across the centuries and channels his inner Coach Belichek: do your job. If you are called to pick up the trash, then pick up the trash. If you are called to teach a child to read, then teach that child to read. If you are called to change the bedpans, then don’t leave it for the next shift to do. If you are called to enact a law on behalf of the constituents who elected you to office, then tell the special interests where they can go and do your job. If you are called to be a student then don’t miss the opportunity to learn.

There is a line in a film I saw many years ago, Broadcast News, with William Hurt and Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks. The character played by Albert Brooks is talking with Holly Hunter and he says to her:   

What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No. I'm semi-serious here. He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing... he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance, just a tiny bit.

 Exhortation isn’t figure pointing. It isn’t about yelling at strangers on a street corner or preachers going all “hellfire and brimstone.” It’s about reminding the gathered community that has been tempted all week to move the line just a little bit and lower their standards that we have a higher standard. It is to exhort the Baptized community to act like and to remember that we have been claimed by Christ and sealed and marked as Christ’s own, forever. Several times a year we renew that covenant and remember who we are:

• a people who renounce Satan and all the evil powers that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God and all that draws us from the love of God;
• a people who turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as Savior and put all our trust in his grace and love, following and obeying him as Lord;
• a people who continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship by breaking bread and saying our prayers;
• a people who persevere in resisting evil and whenever we mess up,  repent and return to God; 
• a people who proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ;
• a people who seek and serve Christ in all persons and love our neighbors as self - no exceptions;
• a people who strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being. 

Oh yeah, one more thing: we do all of those things with God’s help. We do not walk alone. We do all that supported by a community of faith that loves us one day at a time. That is who we already are and we are called to become by growing more and more into the full stature of Christ. No one should pretend that any of that is easy. But surely it isn’t all that hard to understand it. When we speak ill of a neighbor, that’s not love of neighbor. When we feed gossip that hurts another person, that isn’t love of neighbor. When we take short-cuts in our work that erode people’s trust in their government or their schools or their churches or their healthcare or the company they work for, that isn’t love in action either.

“What should we do, John—to get ready for Christmas?” We should do what we all know we are meant to do, the work that God has given us to do. We should act in ways that make the world around us a little bit more loving and a little bit kinder and a little bit more peaceful and a little bit more joyful and a little bit more hopeful and a little bit more life-giving. We should act in ways that set the bar a little higher. We should let our little lights shine, and not curse the darkness. And when we do these things we know we’ve had a pretty good day. And tomorrow?  Just plan on getting up to do it again, tomorrow, too, my friends in Christ. That is how we prepare the way and make the path through this world a little bit straighter. That is how we make a highway through this wilderness we have been living through. In so doing we point beyond ourselves to the One who is greater than John and greater than the Church: we point people to Jesus. Third Advent reminds us that we don’t have to be messiahs. We just need to do our jobs.