Luke 3:1-8a
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, 2 during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 3 He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, 4 as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah,
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.
5 Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low,and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth,
6 and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’ ”
7 John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8 Bear fruits worthy of repentance.
If you’ve been here the past few Sundays you might’ve noticed that I’ve been talking a lot about the apocalypse, perhaps more than a person should, but then that’s because Christianity is an inherently apocalyptic faith. To be a Christian is always to have one on eye the horizon, anticipating Christ’s appearance, the awareness that time is short providing the impetus for a purposeful life. But, of course, that’s not really what most of us take faith to be about; we tend to avoid the sort of people who fixate on the apocalyptic. One of the more embarrassing characters in the Christian landscape is they guy, to be found wherever you go, standing on the corner exhorting anyone who can hear to repent. Whenever I see that guy I tell myself the comforting story of how much I’m unlike him.
The thing is, that guy can make a fairly strong claim that he is simply following in the footsteps of John the Baptist, preparing the way for the Lord. John, by all accounts, was quite the character himself, wearing animal pelts, eating locusts, hanging out in the wilderness, and, I presume, foregoing personal hygiene. He was not the sort to worry about fitting into polite society, and thus apparently he wasn’t afraid to speak harsh truth, even to powerful men like Herod, which led to his imprisonment, then beheading. I imagine John wouldn’t have second guessed himself either; he knew who he was and what he was about.
Today’s passage, after locating John with unusual historical specificity, tersely states that, “the word of God came to John”, then immediately that, “he went into all the region around the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”, and then immediately it identifies John as the one of whom Isaiah prophesied, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord’.” John successfully followed his calling and people responded to his message, so much so that many began to wonder if he himself was the messiah, so John made clear that there was one more powerful than him to come.
Today’s theme is “preparation”, and in the first place it’s worth asking ourselves if we are prepared to hear and heed John’s call to repentance? Repentance is the kind of religious word that we avoid using nowadays; it sounds severe, judgmental. We would prefer to live and let live rather than presuming to impose our “personal” opinions about God, morality, and so on. But that is not to say that we are a society unfamiliar with the concept; for instance, take climate activism, which is essentially a call to repent of our consumption habits, our reliance on fossil fuels, a call to live a different kind of life.
The thing about climate change is that, while most of us probably accept the scientific consensus that human activity is altering weather patterns, few of us feel motivated to do anything serious about it. And this apparent stubbornness in the face of impending calamity provokes the true believers to employ increasingly apocalyptic rhetoric: “We have three more years to save the planet! Act while there is still time, lest we all perish!” This can take on a distinctively religious aspect; perhaps there is an inherent human tendency toward apocalyptic thinking.
My intention is not to adjudicate the merits of climate science and the consequent moral imperatives. What’s interesting is that, despite the case being made on exactly the terms that modern people “ought” to find persuasive - science and such - and despite the majority “believing” in it, the evidence suggest we don’t really seem to care much. Perhaps some of us have made some small adaptions - opting for food with less packaging, buying an electric car - but few of us have performed what might be called repentance. There are many ways of accounting for this: We’re selfish people who can’t let go of our lifestyle, or we’re simply lazy, or distracted by other apparently more pressing concerns, or we don’t think our best efforts will make any difference, or perhaps though we know we’re “supposed” to believe we’re not actually convinced it’s really true.
This sounds a lot like the conditions that prevent people from turning to God, with the additional complication that we know we can’t make the case for repentance on terms that people will find persuasive. We assume that such a message will be met with more or less the same reception as the fanatic in the park preaching to deaf ears. But before we go trying to convince others, we might want to first ask of ourselves if we’re actually convinced? Have we repented and received forgiveness? Or do we say we believe while taking no action? Are we living a new life?
When I ask these questions of myself, I realize that I don’t have satisfying answers. I imagine you might be the same, especially if, like me, you’ve always been a Christian. When there is no clear before and after, the difference it makes is unclear. On the other hand, all we have to do is look at the lives of people like John and the one to whom he pointed, our Lord Jesus, and it becomes clear that our work of repentance is not yet finished, that we persist in sins which need forgiveness, that we are not fully participating in the new creation.
It’s easy within the church to describe this discrepancy as a moral failure, and to implore people to try harder. To be sure, some of us, myself included, do need to try harder, but the more fundamental problem - the reason we struggle to try harder - is that we can’t imagine the difference it might make, we can’t conceive of a different kind of life. This is especially true of this historical moment in which we inhabit a cultural cul-de-sac where we’re comfortable but dissatisfied, where the future produces anxiety more than promise. We’re just trying to hold on. We have little appetite for risk.
In world like ours, how might we, like John the Baptist, prepare the way of the Lord for others - and for ourselves? How might we take the rough and crooked, possibly untraversable path to Jesus and make it smooth straight? How do we fill in the valleys and remove the mountains that obstruct the possibility of faith? What do we need to do?
I’m not sure that we’ll manage, like John, to draw crowds seeking baptism simply by proclaiming a message, though maybe we should be more willing to find out. People in his day were primed to receive such messages while people today are primed to reject them, it seems to me. Still, his word to them is a word for us, which is to bear fruit worthy of repentance, to change course, to forsake one kind of life for another. If this faith is worth having faith in, then when put into practice it will bear fruit. If it does not, we have hard questions to answer. There must be some confirmation of the truth, and perhaps the only way to discover that truth is to risk faithfulness without conventional forms of persuasive evidence to support it. The order of operations is not so much, believe then repent, but repent then believe. John came to make people uncomfortable, and that’s exactly what many of us need, especially since, as we saw last week and which John reminds us here, judgment is coming.
When the people heard John they asked him what they needed to do? What are these fruits of repentance? His answer is remarkably simple and practical: “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food should do likewise”. We must provide for others out of our abundance, John says. What would it be like to part of a community who do that for one another? Can you imagine? Seems like it would be a blessing to all - so then why not be that kind of people? What is actually stopping us? Should it?
The tax collectors and soldiers - two classes of people who could use their position to exploit others - also came to John for baptism and he told them to practice justice and be content with an honest income. Do we use our positions to gain advantage for ourselves, to maximize personal benefit at the expense of others? It is presumed, in large part, that to be a selfish actor is to be a rational actor, but what if we rejected all that and prioritized faithfulness to Jesus, trusting that this would provide all the fruit we need?
It’s important to see that John is not calling people to different beliefs; he’s not providing new content about which to have faith. He’s calling them to live a new kind of life, one that anticipates the coming kingdom. You prepare for that coming kingdom by living as if it has already arrived. You don’t wait for the day to come. If it will be true then, it is already true now.
One of the foundational tenets of this community is that for belief to believable it must be embodied, it must actually be put into practice, and that this practice is unavoidably relational. It consists of things like sharing our clothes and food, and treating one another with justice and integrity. Faith means faithfulness. And we know this because the object of our faith is not a message but a life, not just words but the Word made flesh. Repentance looks like following Jesus. And while we should each individually do this wherever we go, I’m convinced that that we’re especially called to do this together, in relationship with one another, in a community. How do we prepare the way of the Lord? By being an Incarnation.
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