Advent 3B - "More Than a Bump on the Road"

 Saint John 1:6–8, 19-28

Don’t look now but he is still here.  The human speed bump on the road to Christmas is still with us.  

I tried to deftly avoid him last week by talking about his parents, John’s parents, Zachariah and Elizabeth, and Jesus’ parents Mary and Joseph, in the hopes of giving him a wide enough berth to avoid him entirely.  But apparently, I didn’t swerve far enough because John the Baptist is still here.  He seems to be unavoidable and also, according to Tom Are, Jr., the new interim pastor at Fourth Presbyterian, (And doesn’t there seem to be a lot of interim pastors these days?) John the Baptist “comes with some anger issues.”

Are points out that in Matthew’s gospel the first words out of his mouth are, ““Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"1 Both Dr. Are and I can’t remember in all our years of preaching ever starting a sermon by calling our congregations a brood of vipers. We’ve thought about it but thinking and doing are two different matters.

In Luke’s gospel the Baptist gets a little more wound up telling his listeners: “Therefore bear fruits worthy of repentance, and do not think to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I say to you that God is able to raise up children to Abraham from these stones. And even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Therefore, every tree which does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”2

Not exactly Christmas card material.

In Mark's gospel we are treated to a kinder, gentler John the Baptist.  He's strange. He wears clothes that haven't been in style since the days of Elijah the Tishbite. And he wants everyone to know that the one coming after him will usher in a new day.  In that sense John was the original interim pastor.3

No matter the strange outfits and the blustery preaching John could pack the place, even if the place was the wilderness.  We’re talking Mariah Carey, Taylor Swift, quantity numbers here.

As Dr. Fred Craddock said once of John’s ability to draw a crowd:

His preaching was extraordinary; it’s just riveting.  Crowds came from everywhere ... they came from the towns and from Jerusalem.  Plows were left in the furrows, bread was left in the oven, shops were left unattended, school was let out early because the crowds were moving out into the desert to hear this extraordinary preacher.

I’m sure that many people who went were just curious, curious about the way he looked and the way he talked.

He was not beautiful candle burning softly in the sanctuary. He was a prairie fire, the very fire of God scorching the earth.4

 Today he is calming down a little.  He’s turning down the hell-fire-and-brimstone business and becoming a little more theologically reflective.  In fact, he’s turning into such a good theologian that his answers are becoming a bit cryptic.

“Who do you think you are, anyway?”

 “Well,” he laughed. “I’m not the Messiah, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“So, who are you then?” they sneered. “Elijah?”

“Nope.”

“The Prophet?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well, who are you then? Give us some kind of answer.”

“Okay. You can tell your friends that I’m the one Isaiah was talking about, the voice crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord!’”

“But why are you baptizing then, if you’re not the Messiah, or Elijah, or the Prophet?”

“Look, Fellas,” John said, running out of patience, “I baptize with water!” And then John reveals who he is, what his real mission is, what he has been put on earth to accomplish.  “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.  I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”5

 The water John was using was just water.  Cool, maybe not so clear, but just water. 

Jim Somerville tells the wonderful story about a fellow Baptist preacher who used to counsel with young people before their baptisms. They always wanted to know what baptism would do for them and their pastor would always tell them, “All I can guarantee is that it will get you wet.”6

When the people emerged wet from the water John didn’t just pat them on the head and say “Now you’re all clean be on your way!  And try not to get so dirty next time.”  No, he pointed them in a different direction .

Maybe even before he knew it, his message was changing.  Maybe he was beginning to lighten up on retribution business.  Drop the “brood of vipers part” from his stump speech.  Bank the fires of punishment and point the people to something other than fear and trembling. Now he seems to have found a focus and a greater purpose. Now he is pointing them to someone.  Someone’s coming. Someone good. There is someone due any day. It will be just a little while before he shows up. 

While, at this point he did not know him, he hadn’t even seen him, he knew that someone was coming who was going to offer people far more than John the Baptist ever could.

While John offered the people a chance for repentance. The one who was coming, the one we know as Jesus, was offering reconciliation.  Jesus wasn’t about pushing people away from God but personally introducing them to a love that came to them in the flesh.

That is what good churches do.  They point to Jesus.  They introduce people to Jesus. They invite people to fall in love with Jesus.  They invite people to model their lives around Jesus.

And not just the cute little baby Jesus who we will be singing about in less than a week but the full-grown, adult Jesus that John was pointing to.

As Katie Kirk wrote so wonderfully in this week’s issue of The Christian Century.

[John the Baptist] “is the weird part of the weird part of the gospel. As a person, John is very out there. But John is not seeking attention ... for himself but for Christ, who is to come after him.

John the Baptist reminds me that God loves an outlier. God does not reserve all narratives in the story of Jesus for those who are socially acceptable to the elite, those with perfect table manners and families who taught them to network. In Jesus’ story, blessed are the wacky. John the Baptist’s story teaches us to love the ones who unsettle our norms, the ones on the edges of new ideas, the ones wandering the wilderness telling us to prepare the way of the Lord.7

 John isn’t going to go away.  He’s going to come around same time, same place, every year to point us to Jesus and remind us that pointing others to Jesus is the single most important job any of us will ever have.

Jesus is there in the holly and the ivy.  Jesus is there “the rising of the sun and the running of the deer.  Jesus is there in ‘the playing of the merry organ and the sweet singing in the choir.”

But Jesus is also there in “the hurting, grief-filled, lonely, vulnerable, fearful places in life. He is found in the hospital rooms, in the shelter for LGBTQ+ teens, in the unemployment line, on the corner after another gunshot, around the dinner table with that empty chair.”

The Jesus John points us to is all the places of life, the good places, the bad places, and all the places in between.

Jesus is at work in all of those places just as John the Baptist said he would be. Jesus is at work in our weary, war-torn world now just as John the Baptist said he would be.  Jesus is at work in your life and mine, at Christmas time and all time, ever and always, just as John said he would be.

So maybe John the Baptist isn’t to be ignored, or to be avoided as just another speed bump on the road to Christmas?  Maybe he is not the one who is making our road bumpier but making our roads smooth and leading us straight to Jesus, our salvation, our hope, our love.

________________

1. Saint Matthew 2:7.  (NKJV) [NKJV= The New King James Version]

2. Saint Luke 3:8-10. (NKJV)

3. Tom Are, Jr. “The Metanoia Man.”  Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. 10 December 2023

4. Fred B. Craddock, “Have You Heard John Preach?,” in Craddock Stories, ed. Richard F. Ward and Mike Graves (Nashville, TN: Chalice Press, 2001), pp. 109-115

5. James Somerville, “‘Stronger Stuff.’ Advent 3,” A Sermon for Every Sunday, December 8, 2020, https://www.asermonforeverysunday.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jim-Somerville-Advent-3B.pdf.

6.     ibid.

7. Katie Kirk, “John the Avant-Garde (John 1:6-8, 19-28),” The Christian Century, December 15, 2023, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/sunday-s-coming/sunday-s-coming-advent3b-kirk.