Sermon preached by The Rev'd Nicholas Lang

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

The Second Sunday of Advent, December 9, 2007

The blessing of God, the creator and savior of humankind is upon us with peace and with promise. Amen..

One night, a man and his wife were sitting in their living room when out of the blue he said to her, "I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the plug." She got up, turned off the TV, and threw out his beer. Drastic response. I don’t think that is what he expected.

Well, we have just been invaded in the Gospel text by the ranting of John the Baptist making his annual Advent visit so I thought I should begin the sermon with some humor. I wonder when you arrived here today if you expected to hear a Gospel like this in a season when “Have a Holy, Jolly Christmas” is blaring in the mall. Yes, it’s unavoidable: every Advent of our lives we have to get past John the Baptist in order to get to Christmas.

But he is probably the last person we want to hear from. He reeks of fire and brimstone Christianity, a brand of religion with which many of us are familiar and from which we have blissfully escaped. It’s a style of church that has been used to threaten, frighten, or even condemn. Most of us want nothing to do with it anymore.

Can you even imagine someone like John showing up for an interview for the position of rector with the search committee at the local Episcopal Church—unkempt beard, scraggly hair and all. And, if to be polite, as we Episcopalians are wont to be, he were invited back to preach on a Sunday morning, how many people do you think would exit before collection time?

My guess is that the Pharisees and Sadducees who came out to hear him preach that day did not expect what they got either. “You brood of vipers!” “You snake-like phonies” is a fair interpretation of that. Eugene Peterson’s translation of this passage says it this way: “What do you think you’re doing slithering down here to the river? Do you think a little water on your snake skins is going to make a difference? It’s your life that must change, not your skin!”

Now these were the guys, the religious groupies, who presented strong opposition to the ministry of Jesus. They thought that, just because they were descendents of Abraham, they had a direct line to God. They believed that their ancestry was a protection from God’s anger. John as much as says that descendents of Abraham are a dime a dozen. It’s what we do with our life, how we treat one another, what is in our heart and, most importantly, the good fruits we bear that matters,—not our pedigree. And, if we think we’re on God’s “A list,” and look down on others we think are not, we better climb out of the sewer of holier-than-thou-ness.

What are we to make of this strange man called John the Baptist? Father Paul Friesen, rector of St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, preached a sermon about him in which he suggests that in order to understand John we might look at Baghdad’s National Theatre because good theatre is often prophetic and actors are often prophets—especially actors who have fallen on hard times.

The National Theatre in Iraq was once renowned for what it no longer possesses for obvious reasons. The Theatre is impoverished. The actors are no longer paid and the government can’t even afford cab fare from the theater for the few actors left. And they need to travel this way. They gather props from the pillaged streets. Everyone who comes into the theatre is frisked for weapons. Performances can only be held during daylight. It is dangerous work. Fourteen actors have been killed since the war began.

So why continue? Why put themselves in harms way and do it with no pay to boot? Simply this: the truth is spoken regardless of the cost. As one of the woman actors said, “Our play is a miniature version of reality. Reality. Not the political spin of the media. Not the hatred of the dozens of militias. Reality—the truth about humans and their society. Few perhaps want to hear it in Baghdad, but they will hear it when they enter the theatre. The truth, now. “I think,” preached Father Friesen, “that John the Baptist would have understood Baghdad’s National Theatre.”

Like these faithful actors, John was a prophet—someone endowed by God with the mission and power to speak the truth, to give their listeners a good dose of reality. It was also their calling to give voice to the silence of the forgotten, suffering people.

Prophets see and feel the depths of human misery and are unafraid to confront the reasons behind it. We hear John’s message this morning on the heels of the words of another prophet, Isaiah, who uses the image of a tree to talk about the difficulty of the era in which he was writing and the hope of the future in the coming of the Messiah, Jesus, the root of Jesse.

Isaiah looks forward to the time when God would make everything right and “the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” This is the messianic age of reconciliation and peace, the new reality that will break forth in the Kingdom of God.

To get there, John says, we must be baptized, not just with water, but with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Fire. This suggests for me images this week of the raging flames and burned out home in Bridgeport, a tragedy that took three or four lives. Most of us fear fire and see it in terms of its power to create utter devastation, loss, and heartbreak. But there is another perspective about fire that we need to remember if we are going to find the good news in today’s Gospel.

Throughout the Scripture, fire is a reliable sign of God’s presence, what the Hebrews called the Shekinah. God spoke to Moses out of a burning bush; a pillar of fire guides the people of Israel through the wilderness; when Moses went up to Mount Sinai to get the ten commandments the people below thought the mountain had been enveloped by fire. This is the fire of God’s presence and with it comes another word that scares us: judgment.

But the judgment that John the Baptist shouts about is not a judgment of condemnation or damnation or punishment, but rather is about the experience of being known by God, being seen through, seen into, deeply and to the core, and recognized for who we really are. It is about standing before God without our masks, our titles, our possessions, our pretenses with nothing but our wounded hearts and the story of our life to commend us.

We both want it—and fear it. To be really known, to have the truth about ourselves, to let the reality of who we are set free, exposed, is both frightening and reassuring. The fire of which John speaks is not the fire of destruction, but rather the fire of transformation, one that lights up our lives, changes us, restores us, and shapes us more into the image of God in whom each one of us was created.

The good fruit we are asked to bear is to be discovered in the glimpses and glimmers of God’s Kingdom breaking in among us. As sisters and brothers of Jesus, we, too, are rooted in the stump of Jesse, and it is our mission to bear good fruits and bring them to a hungry and waiting world. Where there is hatred, the fruit of kindness. Where there is despair, the fruit of hope. Where there is anxiety, the fruit of patience. Where there is violence, the fruit of peace. Where there is abuse and intolerance, the fruits of justice and gentleness. Where there is greed, the fruit of gratitude. We are God's branches, and as such, we are the ones who can offer these blessings to others. John Lennon once said that, “if everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.”

People of God, this is not a Gospel meant to scare us nor is John the Baptist—overgrown eyebrows and beard, weird eating habits and all—someone whom we should fear or shun. The pitch fork of which he speaks and assigns to the hand of Jesus is yet another metaphor. It might best be unpacked by looking at the way mother eagles stand on the edge of their nests and, at the appropriate moment in the life of their young, begin to destroy those very nests, pulling out the feathers, leaves, and twigs that once served as the foundation, flinging them into the air.

The baby eagles, of course, look shocked at what their mothers are doing, but the mothers pay no attention. They continue to excavate the interior of the nest, as the young eagles watch their security crumble around them. Do these mothers not love and want to care for their young? Of course they do. But they know something that their offspring do not yet know: eagles were not meant to perch in their nests. They were meant to soar.

John’s forceful preaching today brings us the good news that none of us will escape the loving, compassionate experience of knowing the presence of God, and, in that Shekinah, in that loving encounter, have the revelation of who we are—all masks, titles, possessions, pretenses gone—and who we are called to be: God’s own beloved, our lives transformed by the fire of the Holy Spirit, laden with good fruits to share with the world around us, created not to perch in the safety of our nests but to soar.