Sermons

Dec 17 - The Rev. Christopher McLaren - Will you hear John preach?

Listen to audio version of this sermon.

Advent 3C December 17, 2006
Text: Luke 3: 7-18
Theme: Will you hear John Preach?

He is wet and wild, physical and unkept, this Son of Zechariah and prophet of God. He breathes the clean fresh air of the desert, bathes in the Jordan River, eats strange foods, accessorizes with leather, and speaks with such passion that the crowds cannot stay away from his revival meetings.

We stumble over him every year at about this time. He is JC’s cuz. But he doesn’t sound much like Jesus when he preaches. He is a little rougher, a little edgier, a little less politically correct, and Jesus’ preaching wasn’t all that tame.

Now John the Baptist, he didn’t get to preach in a, beautiful church like this one – who would have given him a pulpit, who would have invited him from the dusty desert into the sophisticated city? No, John preached on the margins of society, he was relegated to the Galilean outback, the desert. You had to go to John in order to hear him, you had to make an effort to hear John’s kind of preaching.

John was a fierce preacher of the raw truth. John after all, was a prophet, and prophets tell the truth. And if Advent is about anything it is about hearing the truth in order to get ready for the coming of Truth itself in the manger at Bethlehem. John preached the brutal truth at times and one has to wonder why so many people traveled to the desert, the wilderness to hear him preach? Who wants to hear a preacher who screams and yells, says things that sound insulting, and who seems bent on putting the fear of God into you?

As it turns out, lots of people wanted to hear that kind of preaching, “Multitudes.” When John preached people dropped what they were doing in the city and ventured out into the wilderness, city folk like us who couldn’t get preaching like John’s at the Cathedral or their big fancy churches.

And indeed, they head some preaching!! John preached, “You bunch of snakes, slithering before a coming fire, who warned you to try to escape the wrath you deserve?”

In fact, in the New Testament we seem to have a really interesting homiletical library of images and parts of sermons from John’s preaching. Let me give a little samplin’ and please indulge me as I always feel that this preacher from the Galilean outback somehow needs a south Texas edge. And mind you, I wasn’t born in Texas, I just got to seminary there as quick as I could.

One of John’s sermon themes went like this:
“You think you’re so high and mighty, being sons and daughters of Abraham, well that’s some seriously false security. There is a bunch of lifeless stones in this here muddy river, and God’s going to make a family for himself out of these stones. The comfort you thought you had in your good breeding, don’t amount to much, repentance is what matters and you all could use a bit a repentance from what I can tell.”

Or this:
“You are like trees that don’t produce, your fruit is bad, small, shriveled, and sour and here comes the orchard’s owner with an axe in his hand ready to make a heap of firewood out of your fruitless selves.”

There’s a heap of dray chaff mixed in with the good wheat. God’s going to start a fire to burn up that chaff. His winnowing fork is in his hand and he is ready to sort you out, the good from the bad.”

“I wash you with water, but the one who comes after me, will scorch you with fire and purify you with his Holy Spirit!”

“The judge is coming. He is about to hold court, and I’ve got your summons right here.”

John was saying some powerful things that amounted to something like: “You better get washed up. If you’ve been cheating people, go make it right, if you’ve been abusing your authority it must end today, if you have more than you need, you best start sharing with those in need.”

“The ax, the judge, the fire, the fierceness of God’s Holy Spirit is on its way, in fact it is near! I’m warning you. Get ready!”

Why would people flock to the wilderness to hear a sermon like that?

I believe people came to hear John preach because of one surprising fact about us, we want to hear the truth. Oh, to be sure we are skilled at avoiding the truth about ourselves. There is a propensity to avoid it, to cover it up, to deceive and devalue the truth. But, there is also within us, at the moments when we are most ourselves, a desire and longing to know the truth about ourselves, a yearning to grow, to change, to be truly better than we are. And we cannot be better if we cannot or will not hear the truth ringing in our ears and hearts.

Advent is intended as a time of honesty, a time to take stock of our lives in such a way that we prepare for the coming of Christ in the world, and in our lives. John speaks words of honesty, words we need to hear even though we haven’t left the comfort of our city church. John challenges us to live lives that reflect that honesty about our condition.

As theologian John Heagle says:
In an age which offers a variety of escapes from the human condition, Christians are more than ever a sign of contradiction. They continue to believe that the search for God must begin with the acceptance of the human. They believe this because it is in the stable of humanity that God has come in search of us.

In the human experience of Jesus, God became available to us as the depth of human life. Thus a Christian believes that the experience of ultimate meaning comes not from a leap out of the human condition, but a journey through its dark waters.

John knew that the way to God required a journey through the dark waters of the human condition. He wasn’t scared of those dark waters. In fact, Johnny B waded into the muddy Jordan River with thousands of people who were in the midst of discovering the truth about themselves and longing for God’s healing touch. And for some strange disarming reason this wardrobe-challenged, wildman prophet of God helped to open up people to the truth about themselves while at the same time pointing them to the power of God’s Spirit at work within them.

Despite ourselves, we long for that kind of honesty in our lives. We both desire and need someone to hold up a mirror to us, for us to see our faces, our lives as they really are. Yet honesty is only the beginning. In being truthful, we are on our way to being changed. John tells the truth, and lets the truth do its work. Sometimes the truth hurts, cuts, wounds. But behind the truth is another deeper reality, God. Behind the sometimes-awful truth about ourselves is the Power of God to change us. If John’s words sound difficult or harsh, they are, but they are spoken out of the conviction that the love of God overcomes our resistance and brings us new life for which we long.

Advent holds the promise not only of truth, but of truth that changes because it is grounded in love. Our passage today ends with this line:

So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.

What is the good news? The good news is this, when repentance and forgiveness are available, the truth about ourselves can be good news, judgement need not be feared.

I have always liked what Frederick Buechner has to say about Repentance: To repent is to come to your senses. It is not so much something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, I’m sorry,” than to the future and saying “Wow.”

I like this description because it reminds me that repentance is not a punishment, but a chance for a new beginning. Repentance is an opportunity to know the warm embrace of God’s love and forgiveness in our lives. Repentance is something to rejoice in because one has discovered both the truth about oneself and the truth about God and both have a future together.

John preached a message of repentance, to anyone who would hear it. Get ready. God is coming. This was John’s message. He truly believed that no person willing to embrace the truth about themselves was beyond the reach of a gracious, forgiving God who comes to us, so that we might come to him.

John preached that; he still does. You can’t get to Christmas without first meeting John in the wilderness. Multitudes have.

By God’s grace you will too.