Isaiah 12:1–6; Zeph 3:14–20; Luke 3:7–18; Phil 4:4–7
A story made the rounds in Eastern Europe during the final dying days of Communism. Party officials were concerned that commitment to communist ideology was fading, so they decided to test the loyalty of all those who worked for the government. Two policemen were called to be tested. The first one went into the interrogation room and was shown three pictures: one of Karl Marx, one of Jesus on the cross, and one of Lenin. ‘Can you identify any of these three figures?’ he was asked. He hemmed and hawed and finally blurted out, ‘Well, the one in the middle is our Lord Jesus Christ on the cross, thanks be to God.’ He was fired on the spot. He left the room, and on his way out, he warned his friend, ‘They will ask you to identify three people; the one in the middle is Jesus Christ, but whatever you do, don’t admit that you recognize him, or they’ll fire you too.’ The friend did as he was told. ‘Do you recognize any of these three?’ they asked him, showing him pictures of Marx, Jesus, and Lenin. ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘I don’t know the fellow in the middle, but I’m sure that the other two are the robbers who were crucified with him.’
On November 9, just over a month ago, Europe celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The breaching of the wall came to symbolize the end of Communism. The relatively peaceful transformation of Central and Eastern Europe seems old hat now, but it surely symbolizes very well our theme this morning: ‘Rejoice, God comes in mercy to turn us around.’ What better example of God turning us around, than this story of the peaceful transformation of evil oppressive regimes into liberal democracies? You may remember the euphoria caused by the events. Some academics, who should have known better, even wrote books with titles like ‘The End of History.’ The Liberal West had triumphed, the eschaton had come, the kingdom of God was at hand. History was over. We managed to forget what had happened earlier in 1989, in Tiananmen Square, in China, because for a while it looked like our system was working – until last year at least.
I don’t think, though, that this dramatic event, the collapse of the old regimes in Eastern Europe, was on the minds of those who prepared our Advent theme. After all, the Gospel text for today is the preaching of John the Baptist, with its call for repentance in the face of radical change about to happen. ‘God comes in mercy to turn us around’ is a polite way of saying that we had better turn around. John is a prophet and prophets try to shake us out of our complacency. Some of you may have read Olde Charlie Farquharson’s Testament, a retelling of the Bible in corny, rural English. His version of the Old Testament prophets is short and to the point: ‘Yer doin it all wrong!’ It’s a message that seems much more appropriate for our times. The past year seems to confirm that the prophets of doom were right – we were ‘doin it all wrong.’ It seems that the message of John the Baptist is still relevant, even in the season of Advent.
So perhaps we should take a closer look at our gospel text this morning, Luke 3:7–18. John the Baptist has just been introduced as the fulfillment of Isaiah 40:3–5, the voice crying in the wilderness. Now he is at the Jordan River preaching the baptism of repentance. John the Baptist wastes no time getting to the point: ‘You offspring of vipers!’ Harsh words, especially because they are directed at the ‘crowds.’ In modern terms, ‘You’re pure poison,’ or ‘You’re toxic, man.’ In Matthew, the words are directed at the Pharisees and Sadducees, the community leaders. That feels a little more comfortable, it’s easier to bash leaders than to change myself. Here in Luke, though, these words are directed at the ordinary people. This is not the kind of invitational sermon we’re used to. What is John the Baptist doing? I think he is trying to separate those who are serious from those who are not. Only those who sincerely wish to repent will stick around and humbly admit that the words, ‘you brood of vipers,’ apply to them. Many have come out to be baptized simply because everyone else is doing it, or because they believe that baptism might be a cheap insurance policy. The NRSV translation doesn’t quite convey what John says – a good paraphrase might be: ‘Who told you that this was how you would be able to escape the worst crisis of the last hundred years, which is right around the corner?’ The question is rhetorical: ‘Do you really think baptism will be enough to save you?’ John is saying that baptism isn’t going to save you, if your repentance, your turning around, is empty, without content. So if you came out in the pious or superstitious conviction that this was some kind of magical trick to get you out of whatever is coming, you’re badly mistaken. Baptism isn’t going to save you. Therefore (a word missing in the NRSV), do the kinds of things that will save you. What will save you? A transformation in the way you live. John continues, ‘by the way, don’t even think you can escape by claiming that you are a descendent of Abraham’ – you are ‘descendants’ of vipers, after all, poisonous, not descendents of Abraham.
As John makes clear, he is less concerned with the details of the coming transformation than he is about the ‘fruits’ that people produce, the kinds of concrete actions that will save people. To use more contemporary language, John is convinced that a socio-economic crisis is just around the corner that will result in large-scale social collapse. Those who are not part of a sustainable social network will not survive. People need to change the way they live, socially and economically, to rebuild the intricate social networks that make it possible for societies to survive serious crises. Three representative groups or individuals ask him what would count as evidence of repentance. All three are ‘marginal,’ or ‘outsiders.’ These are the ordinary people (the ‘crowds’), plus two groups of people who are excluded even from ‘the crowds’: tax collectors and soldiers. Luke has a special interest in tax collectors, they show up more than once in his gospel as representatives of all those who are excluded even from the ordinary people of society. One of Luke’s themes is that Jesus wants to reintegrate these outsiders into the community. He has another pointed reference to tax collectors in 7:29: when John’s disciples come to ask whether Jesus is the Messiah, Jesus replies that ‘among those born of women no one is greater than John, but the least of those in the kingdom is greater than John.’ Luke adds an editorial comment: ‘And all the people who heard this, including the tax collectors, acknowledged the justice of God.’ The ‘crowds’ does not mean, as it does for us today, the relatively comfortable middle class; here, the crowds refers to the mass of people in most societies, most of the time, who have two changes of clothing, or only one, or not even one. Most people probably had one. It may be a challenge, but we need to use our imaginations for a moment. Imagine a poor person who has managed to cobble together two changes of clothing – one for work, and one for Sunday, or for job interviews, or for impressing the girls. To ask that person to give up one of his or her changes of clothing is asking a lot. There goes months of hard work, the discipline of saving tin
y amounts of money here or there, the first steps out of poverty.
It is easy to say that John did not ask much of the tax collectors and the soldiers. Again, it may help to imagine the context in which they lived and made their daily ethical decisions. It’s possible that some tax collectors at least got rich – Matthew tells the story of one named Zaccheus who had become very wealthy. I suspect that most of them did not do as well. And neither tax collectors nor soldiers earned a large salary. Tax collectors were able to charge extra; soldiers were able to take advantage of the families that billeted them. But these were the perks of the job, this was why one became a tax collector or a soldier. To ask them not to do this is a bit like asking a money trader or a bank executive today to give up his bonus. Bonuses are part of their salary. You just don’t give them up. Years ago, I taught English in Egypt, with MCC. My students were adults, some were teachers. Teachers were very poorly paid in Egypt, as were most public servants. My personal allowance, or spending money, was more than a teacher’s salary. I asked my students how they managed to live on their salaries. They didn’t, they told me, they earned their living by tutoring. You become a teacher, not to teach, but because that’s how you met students to tutor. None of my students had become rich by tutoring, they just managed to survive. I suspect very few of the tax collectors or soldiers had become rich by charging extra or abusing their power. It’s hard to get rich off people when most of them have only one change of clothing.
John is telling the tax collectors and soldiers how to rejoin the community. They have been trying to earn a basic living by squeezing as much as they can out of people who have very little. They should instead rely on the generosity of the people. I don’t think it’s an accident that the advice to the tax collectors and soldiers comes after the advice to the ordinary people. The ordinary people are instructed to share what little they have with those who have none. The tax collectors and soldiers can have confidence that if they stop trying to take things by force, the people will share with them what they need.
John concludes his sermon with the familiar image of threshing and separating wheat from chaff. This is a metaphor of what will happen when Jesus the Messiah comes. The final verse of our reading today sums up what John has done: ‘So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.’ Sharing freely with those who have less, and not taking more than belongs to us, having trust in others in our social network, this is the good news, gospel.
The people who went to John to be baptized were motivated by different things. Some were motivated by fear, some went because everyone was doing it, some went because they believed that God would come visibly with a big army and they wanted to be around for the fireworks, some were sincerely repentant. John wasn’t very interested in motivation; he did his best to weed out those who were unwilling or unable to produce fruit, to live the kind of life his view of repentance called for. How is this good news for us today, during advent, as we rejoice that God is coming to turn us around? John the Baptist warns the people that concrete actions are required. Okay, the people say to him, what should we do? John gives them fairly specific instructions. If John the Baptist would come to TUMC to preach, and we asked him to give us concrete examples of things we should do, what would he say? We have public resources that were lacking in his world, resources that make us less dependent on others: employment insurance, health insurance, short and long term disability plans, pensions. These are good things, I think, but it has changed how we take responsibility for each other. And, as we are reminded almost daily, even the best net still has holes. What could John say in our context? I think he would, or should, say something like the following: invest in social housing, reform the Employment Insurance system, reform your tax code so that excessive bonuses are not so attractive, restructure the Canada Pension Plan, don’t give in to lifeboat ethics, and so on. Great ideas, but they don’t sound very prophetic, do they? They sound more like an academic trying to be a politician. As least these are answers aimed at the broader social good; if John the Baptist were a financial advisor, he would give you other advice: pay down debt, make sure you have enough cash on hand to last at least three months if you lose your job, make sure you have saved enough for retirement, and so on. Again, this too is all very good advice, but it’s the kind of advice that assumes you are on your own, that you can’t or shouldn’t count on family, friends, or the government. Since I am not a prophet, nor an academic, nor a politician, I won’t try to give a concrete answer to the question of what we should do.
At the same time, I don’t want to simply shrug my shoulders and say it’s too complicated, the world is very different, there are no solutions. Nor do I want to take refuge by saying that the situation is much better now than it was in the days of John the Baptist. I think it is, but it’s still far from the way it can and should be. Despair, or apathy, or complacency, are enemies of the gospel.
So I want to turn to our other New Testament reading for good news. Paul is probably writing this letter to the Philippians from prison. Chapter 4:4–7 is also a series of exhortations. We don’t think of them as ‘prophetic,’ but we should – following them will produce fruit, so they too are gospel, good news. What does Paul exhort his readers to do? First of all, he tells them, they should rejoice. We have a songbook titled ‘Rejoice’, but I don’t think Paul had a style of singing in mind when he commands us to rejoice. I think he’s talking about an attitude that is the opposite of despair or apathy. Paul continues: we are supposed to be recognizable for our gentleness, or equanimity. This is more than mildness, I think it is the quality of someone who can spend several hours in traffic without succumbing to road rage. Paul then interrupts his instructions with the statement that the Lord is near. Paul’s writing is rushed, the sentences pile up one after the other. There are no conjunctions between this statement and the exhortations that come before and after, no words like ‘therefore’ or ‘because.’ Paul seems to have thought that Jesus would return very soon but he does not explicitly connect these instructions with Jesus’ return. The final exhortation is not to worry about anything.
In verse seven Paul sums up. Paul gives us the reason why it isn’t foolish to follow his exhortations. How is it possible to live with joy, with quiet confidence, without worrying? Because the peace of God, which is beyond our capacity to understand, will protect our hearts and our thoughts in Christ Jesus. Paul probably told the Philippians what he meant when he was with them, establishing the church. He doesn’t go into detail here, so I will take advantage of the preacher’s prerogative to make some suggestions.
We should not overlook the social context of Paul’s exhortations: it’s easier not to worry when you are part of a social network that you can count on. But there is something deeper here than a socia
l network. I think it is this gift of peace that makes our repentance possible. This gift of peace allows us to go on living with the confidence that we are on the right side, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary. In psychological language, it is a basic positive orientation; in Biblical language, it is God removing our heart of stone and giving us a heart of flesh. In the language of traditional Catholic theology, it is God’s operative grace. If we do not reject this gift of God’s grace, or God’s peace, God also gives us the gift of cooperative grace; God cooperates with us so that we are able to live the way we know we should, the way we want to live but are not able to live on our own. Paul says that this peace is beyond our capacity to understand. In more prosaic terms, we might say that you can’t turn someone into an optimist by argument. Paul goes on to say that this peace will protect our hearts and minds. To translate this once more into the contemporary idioms we’re familiar with, we might say this: despair can have negative effects on our spiritual and mental life. If you don’t believe there are solutions, you won’t be bothered to look for them, and you won’t be willing to try them if someone else proposes them. If you don’t think that there’s any point in working for a world that is more just, you will spend most of your resources on pleasure or personal gratification.
I started this sermon by mentioning the fall of the Soviet Empire. The fall was due at least in part to the resistance of thousands of men and women who refused to give in, who continued to believe that a different order was possible. The peaceful transition was the result of decades of efforts to build alternatives to the dominant ideology. Many men and women spent their lives working for the transformation but didn’t live to see it happen. Many probably believed it would take a lot longer than it did. I think they are examples of people who bore the fruits of repentance.
I think we are here this morning because we have accepted God’s gift of peace; at some level we have all said yes. Some of us did so in familiar North American Christian language and in contexts like Sunday School, youth groups, the church. Some of us did it in other language or cultural forms. We are open to prophets who can show us ways to build God’s kingdom in our own situation. We live in trust that we are not alone, that there are crowds of others who are willing to share with us: share their vision, share their resources, share their good ideas. One of the fruits we believe we are called to produce, is to pull down some of our own walls and to be more welcoming. I don’t know what that will look like, or how long it will take. But we can already rejoice, because God comes in mercy to turn us around.