Luke 3:7-16

Click here to view the full sermon video, titled "GOOD."

 

This world is a scary place. It didn’t always feel that way. I had what has since been come to be called a “free range” childhood. From an early age I walked a little less than half a mile to my neighborhood school. Sometimes with a friend, often by myself. It was uphill, but not both ways and only occasionally in the snow. My parents left the house to go to work and I was expected to get myself to and from school. In the sixth grade I started taking dance at a studio on the other side of Denver, so on days when I had class, I would ride the bus into downtown Denver where my mom worked so that she could drive me the rest of the way to dance. Most days after school my friends and I would roam around our suburban neighborhood of cul-de-sacs unsupervised. Sometimes I would ride a bus all the way across Denver by myself to visit my grandmother at her senior living apartment complex. None of this felt strange, or dangerous at the time. However, a generation later, not once were our own kids left quite to their own devices like that. The world felt more dangerous. But was it? Is it? Has the world gotten scarier, or has our level of awareness made us more afraid? Back then information generally came in three forms: the morning paper, hourly news updates on the radio, or the evening news on one of three national television networks and their local affiliate stations. There was no such thing as the 24-hour news cycle, or the endless points of view and dissembling of current events offered by the internet. Surely the same dangers existed then that do now (with the exception of those posed by new technologies) we just weren’t hearing about them, or seeing them. We weren’t awash in all the information about all the ways kids could get into trouble, or be hurt. We had to really pay attention if we wanted to know what was going on in the larger world beyond the ones circumscribed by where and how we lived. Now it’s hard not to know. We have to work hard to avoid paying attention to every war, every disaster, and every upheaval taking place every second of every day. 

And if all that weren’t bad enough, now we come to church desperate for a dose of Christmas spirit, desperate for some kind of holiday cheer only to be met by that wild-eyed wilderness prophet, John the Baptist, calling names (you brood of vipers) and preaching unquenchable fire. Good grief! Why can’t things be like they used to be? Now, there are two ways to play this. We can decide that it’s all too much, it’s all too scary, and opt for a kind of anesthetic nostalgia that will numb us to the pain and the struggle of it all. We can cut the reading short and pretend that John didn’t just allude to the winnowing fork of the one who is to come that will separate the wheat from the chaff. Or we can recognize that if this season of Advent is meant to prepare us for the coming of Christ, then John is the one sent by God to prepare the way. Even in Luke’s birth narrative, John comes first. In utero, John leaps at the sound of Mary’s voice greeting his mother Elizabeth, calling attention to the fruit of her womb. He may not find a place in our decorative creche. But the voice of John the Baptist is essential in preparing us to hear and receive Jesus when he comes. Because John casts our attention, and so too our lives, in Jesus’ direction.  And that changes everything, including us. 

There’s a small, beautiful show on HBO Max called Somebody, Somewhere that takes place in Manhattan. Manhattan, Kansas that is. I was watching an episode this week from the third and final season. One of the characters, Joel, has moved in with his boyfriend Brad. Brad attends one of the Lutheran churches in town and invites Joel to the men’s bible study with him. Joel is a little nervous about the whole thing. It seems like his fears are realized when he recognizes one of the participants. After the meeting concludes and Joel is folding up chairs and putting them away this person approaches him. “Hey Joel,” he says, “it’s Brett. Do you remember me?” You can see Joel’s discomfort. “Yeah, I remember you” They make some small talk and then Brett says, “I’ve seen you at church, and I- I haven’t said, ‘hello’ to you because I’m ashamed about how I treated you in high school.” Joel tries to minimize it, “No, we were young. It was such a long time ago, it’s okay.” “No,” Brett replies, “it’s not okay.” “It’s fine,” says Joel, clearly flustered. “It was wrong,” says Brett. Later, in the car, Joel’s boyfriend mentions that he overheard the exchange. “I just wasn’t expecting that,” says Joel. “Well,” says his boyfriend, “it’s good to know that people can change.” “Can they,” asks Joel. “Yeah,” says his boyfriend, “I think so.” 

John thinks so too. That is why he is out there in that wilderness. When we first hear him call those coming out to see him a brood of vipers it’s easy to think he’s talking about someone else. Surely, he’s not talking about us. Surely, we’re not a brood of vipers. Surely, we don’t need to change. Maybe it isn’t having Abraham as an ancestor, but we’ve all got our litany of justifications for why we shouldn’t be included in the brood. We point to our job, or our credit score, or our bank account, or some other qualification for special treatment. We’re here at church aren’t we? We try to be good parents, good kids, good friends, good citizens, good employees. And the problem isn’t so much that we regularly fail at being all those things at some point or other. The problem isn’t that we’re a brood of vipers. The problem is that we think we aren’t. The problem is that we think all these other things can save us from having to account for the chaff in our lives. What should we do? 

Three times that question gets asked, by the crowds, by the tax collectors who have improbably come out to hear what all the fuss was about, even by the soldiers who were likely there to keep an eye on John. What should we do? What should we do about the situation in Ukraine, or Gaza, or Sudan, or Syria, or anywhere else in the world where the blood of innocents is being shed? What should we do about the rise of authoritarian regimes and the loss of bodily autonomy? What should we do about shrinking arctic ice and the increase of catastrophic weather events and the new normal of record high temperatures? What should we do about all the things that we know about and can’t escape that make this world an increasingly scary place to live, or to consider bringing children into. It’s oddly comforting to recognize that while the players may change, the game remains largely the same. What does John address? Well, clearly if you’ve got more than you can use and someone else doesn’t have enough, share what you have. The human impulse to hold onto more that we need is the whole reason why Jesus taught us to pray only for today’s bread, today’s manna. More than that is usually too much. And resource guarding doesn’t just put us at odds with one another, it betrays our trust in God to provide for what we need. If you are in a position to manipulate and financially defraud someone, don’t. If you hold the kind of power that allows you to shake people down for money, or use force to get what you want, again, don’t. It’s that simple. This isn’t rocket science. To paraphrase a bit of Rabbinic wisdom, “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are your free to abandon it.”  Or as North Carolina singer/songwriter and activist David Lamotte put it in a recent Ted talk. If you think you can fix the world, well that’s naïve. And if you think you’re going to save the world, that’s probably shooting a little too high. But you can absolutely change the world by starting where you are in small, but meaningful ways.  

Notice too that the call isn’t about changing someone else. The crowds aren’t told to change the behavior of the tax collectors and the soldiers, and vice versa. As Jesus will teach, first remove the plank from your own eye, then you will see clearly. Long before it became a cliché, John’s answer to the question, “What should we do,” was that we should be the change we wish to see in the world, attending to the good that is ours to do in a world where the enormity of the problems before us feel insurmountable. We do it not for some reward or recognition, but for the sake of what changes when we recognize our surplus and become instruments ourselves of God’s provision for others. What changes when we make proper use of the position and power we have to make the lives of those within our orbit easier and safer. When we see the blessing of our own lives as a blessing not simply for ourselves, but for a world that is changed for the better by the good that is ours to do, here. And now.