3 Advent 2012

Advent 3, 2012
          So when does the Good News sound like bad news? Probably when the preacher is wearing camel skins, has locust and wild honey breath and begins his sermon with the words: “You brood of vipers!”
Most likely this is a great way to stir-up a bunch of Baptists, but I would guess there are a lot of us who would shy away from this sort of preaching. All the same, Luke’s Gospel tells us that the people were already gathering to be baptized by John, and even after being called to task, they were only more eager to know what they needed to do to change.

Now there is part of our modern culture which might see this situation as a response to emotional extortion. We might feel that these poor wretched sinners are looking for repentance because they feel brow-beaten by John’s words… I can say it definitely makes preaching a sermon on it a bit tenuous—especially when we start talking about unquenchable fire (that always makes us squirm).
But the fact is that these people were showing-up well before John starts in with the fire and the chopping-off of branches stuff. What we’re witness to instead is a group of people truly responding to John’s call to repentance because they realize how badly they need it.
  
While John’s words are jarring and even frightening; it’s as if he is a kind of physician who is delivering a tough prognosis to the patients of this world. In a way he’s explaining to a weary, sin-sick people that they needn’t live this way anymore. He invites them to see that the broken world system that perpetuates greed, selfishness and violence is just a shadow, or even a husk that can be cast away. But he explains that the only treatment for our illness is repentance.
I can’t imagine the spectacle of this scene, but we’re told that there is a diverse group gathered on the banks of the Jordan River. This is evidenced by tax collectors, and soldiers who are asking what things they need to do to bear these fruits of repentance. Very simply, John exhorts them to simply be content and not strive to take from others—which is a little anti-climactic when John has spent all of this time preparing people for what sounds like the worst.

But in truth, outside of being content and taking care of others, the fruits of repentance that he speaks of are not that hard to reach. Unfortunately, as easy as all of it sounds, things are still not alright in the world, and the symptoms of this fact are terrible.
As I’m sure any of you would have expected, the tragic mass shooting that happened Friday morning in Connecticut has reshaped my sermon. Because what happened in this sleepy little town is a stark reminder that things are not alright.

We, as a culture, are not alright.
We as the human race are not alright.
In fact, what happened Friday should be evidence of our inability to pull ourselves up out of a kind of “pop culture of violence.” What I mean by this is that after the senseless murder of innocents; we will be inundated for days with new speculation into why and how such a thing could happen again. We’ll be witness to any number of multi-million dollar ad campaigns about gun control and second amendment rights. The name of the young man responsible will be immortalized as one more enigmatic piece in this puzzle of why we can call school shootings epidemic. Which is to say nothing of how tragic it is that we even have a term like “school shootings” in our daily vernacular. And while his name will be remembered in cultural memory, the names of his victims will be lost to time…

 But throughout all of it, the one thing that will be continually affirmed is that if you’re looking for a way to make a splash, and make a name for yourself, and you’re just selfish enough to commit to it—you can at least be infamous by committing this kind of evil act.

It’s not my intention to stand here today to talk about the problems of bullying in our schools that can lead to making people into predators. It’s not my intention to make this my forum to talk about gun control. Instead, I stand in the pulpit to remind us all that these things are symptomatic of a much deeper issue.

I wish that by telling kids to be nice to each other that we could stop bullying from happening. I wish that stricter gun laws would be enough to end the staggering amount of gun related violence in our country. But these are only symptoms; and our media seems to be working harder and harder to displace the blame through endless red herrings. Sadly all of this leaves us less clearly informed, and only more polarized, narcissistic and distant from one-another…separation and isolation—two of the more definitive bi-products of sin.
But it’s not only media that is to blame, because after all they’re only delivering what our culture says we want. In any case, what we find as we try to parse out the meaning of this tragedy, and every other tragedy in this life; what I’m sure we find is the choice between allowing this system to shape how we are or being freed from this system through Christ to be who we are…

The people who showed up on the river banks the day that John was preaching were not people who had fallen prey to a guy passionately preaching hellfire and brimstone. These were people who were roused by God’s Spirit to say that this is enough. These people responded to a call back to reason—a call to receive the promise of repentance.
So today, like every day we’re invited to make the choice to either fall into this broken pattern, or love God with all of our heart, soul mind and spirit; and our neighbors as ourselves…

Bearing the fruits worthy of repentance then, means that we will not allow ourselves to accept the poisonous, broken systems of this world as the only option. It means affirming the good, believing the good and inspiring the good in others. It means no longer ignoring violence of every kind—whether it’s systemic or symptomatic. It means no longer hiding behind church doors until better days come; because we know that it is our responsibility to affect the change we hope to see.
Bearing the fruits worthy of repentance means no longer ignoring the plight of the poor, the sick, the homeless, the lonely or the aged. It means no longer being content to be a sleeping giant.

John’s words to us are very simple: “Wake up!” Live life as if you had been redeemed from darkness. Live as if the negative cycles in our lives have been cast-off like wheat chaff and are waiting to be thrown into unquenchable fire.    

While we may not immediately see the positive effects of those ripples that we send out into the world through our good works and lively faith—when Jesus returns, with his winnowing fork in hand; when he returns to burn away the husk of this world so that the true world and the life giving grain can be seen: that’s when we’ll know and understand that we have made a difference in this world, because we have made a choice to bear good fruit…fruit that is evidence that our life and love of Jesus Christ means something to us.

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