'A'   //  Advent 2  //  12-9-07  //  Celebration of Worship, Northside Presbyterian Church

 

Scriptures    Isaiah 11:1-10     Matthew 3:1-12

 

 

Here the Pharisees and the Sadducees are – the religious reformers and temple-keepers of the day, respectively. They take a holiday trip to a faraway place. They sidle up to the river. They expect to luxuriate in its cool, cleansing effect, an easy baptism ... before heading back to the fleshpots of civilization where they belong. No locusts and wild honey, for them.

 

And confession? Well … OK. They need this place to unwind and unload the burdens of their institutional responsibilities. But certainly none of what John is about to tell them.

 

"I baptize you with water for repentance," John cries out to his drop-in visitors. "Bear fruit worthy of repentance."

 

 

There’s that word – redux. Repentance. It's become the Halloween word of our Christian faith. Much like its predecessor – sin – repentance has received such bad press over the last two American generations, in particular.

 

Let's gently lay aside our religious tract images of this word for a moment. Let’s leave behind the hair shirt and the long hair in the desert wilderness and by the city street corner.

 

Repent is the English translation of the Greek word metanoia – which is actually a combination of two words: “meta” – a complete change; "noia" –the mind. A complete change, or transformation, or revolution, of the mind.

 

But why do we even need repentance? We who proclaim Abraham, and Jesus, and our pious grandmothers with their family Bibles, as our ancestors. We, who wade into the shallow waters of our own faith after them. We …

 

Why do we need this repentance? Wouldn’t we rather have the revolution be consummated in one great Christmas life, and not in the advent of our own? Wouldn’t we rather admire that one great birth ... and not experience our own?

 

The birth of a child is usually preceded by joyful expectation. But this lectionary text – which appears in some gospel form or another each of our three lectionary years at this time – this lectionary text stresses the birth, really, of a ministry.

 

For when we approach the banks of the River Jordan to receive its soothing balm for our hurt lives … when we scan its placid surface for cheap grace even as the mud of  river bottom mercy trickles between our toes … no soothing, suckling, cooing Christ child can be found. And no swaddling clothes await us on the shore behind.

 

 

So let us hear clearly the Good News being offered today in Matthew's narrative. For while it's potential judgment that John is wanting us to hear, it’s God’s mercy that John is wanting us to receive. For while it’s the chaff he proclaims that waits to be burned, it’s fire and the Spirit that sets our lives ablaze.

 

The fire that purges. The fire that separates, wheat from chaff. The fire that burns away the dross, leaving what is pure behind.

 

Pure people? Hardly. Purity in people? Certainly. But first, let us make room for the chaff gathered ‘round our baptismal covenant to be burned away – be that chaff church apathy, career worry, pocketbook mission, pricey holidays. How is it that we can allow fire and the Spirit to leave standing the whole grain of discipleship at Northside? How may Christ's advent actually become our own?

 

For let us admit: we love our chaff. If you’ll pardon the world-play: Generally speaking, our chaff doesn’t chafe! We have grown so accustomed to the chaff in our world that we risk missing the wheat of God’s vision ever-present, all along. And so wolves lying down with lambs, and leopards with the kid – God’s vision for Israel in Isaiah today – strikes us as completely abnormal, even though that has always represented God’s normal – God’s intent – for the world.¹

 

 

We hear two sides of the same prophecy today – one from Isaiah, the other from the Baptizer. In today’s case, some of the bad news comes to us from the New Testament, and much of the good news comes to us from the Old. To embrace Isaiah's announcement of God’s vision – a vision intended all along – we are called first to listen to John's denouncement of our myopia. To become rooted in the fruited soil of news offered as good, we are called first to uproot the deadwood of the news that is bad. To make ready for the new birth, we are called first to suffer its pangs – the breaking forth of our wombs and tombs of isolated illusions.

 

New birth … of baptized bodies. Of individual bodies, aching for renewal. Of a body of people, longing for hope.

 

 

It seems to me that our Advent hope in this greatest of all mission wheat fields of today – the United States of America – can only come through our birth and rebirth as the body of Christ. For in our Advent story today, we find ourselves baptized into the painful and penitent process of being grafted into Christ, that we may graft others into that body as well.

 

And once we become grafted into Christ – have become his new body, the Church – we find the newness of life incarnated by a small child with divine expectations transformed, into his incarnation as this small church with very human needs and desires. Needs and desires – for justice, for mercy, for peace, for love – we can only understand once the axe is laid to the root of the fruitless trees of our discipleship.

 

Trees that have grown bare, because although we have preserved them – have conserved them – and we may have even admired them … in the midst of it all, we may have forgotten what they actually were there for.

 

The great preacher Fred Craddock tells the story of the dedication of a beautiful building at the University of Oklahoma. It had a tall tower … great facilities … all kinds of marvelous things. All oohed and aahed at the sight. So much so that, at the dedication, a young man – the campus minister – shocked many with a very brief prayer: “Lord, burn down this building, and scatter these people for the sake of the gospel.”²

 

 

 

Whoever has ears, let them hear.

 

 

 

Birth is a very painful process. And, birth is a very joyous process.

 

It's particularly painful if you are born in a manger in Bethlehem ... or, in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan.

 

But it can be joyous, when the cave- and the city-dweller – the lamb and the wolf – the kid and the leopard – the calf and the lion and the fatling can lie down together ...

 

... and a little child shall lead us.

 

                               

¹From Walter Brueggemann, Peace (Understanding Biblical Themes series) [St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001]. Cited in “Sermon Seeds”, lectionary notes from www.ucc.org.

 

²Fred B. Craddock (Mike Graves and Richard F. Ward, eds.), Craddock Stories [Chalice Press, 2001], p. 90.