"What Gift Can I Bring?

 ...VOICE"

- Rev. Bob Thomas
Senior Pastor

Gospel Lesson

Matthew 3: 1 - 12

Advent 'V-Power' II

The mother of a little girl was preparing herself to attend a very special social event that she had been looking forward to with much delight…

The new dress she had bought for the occasion was carefully laid out on her bed.  But the little girl didn’t want her parents to go out that night and she put up quite a fuss about it.

When the mother was out of the bedroom, the little girl thought she had found a way to keep her mother home.  She took a pair of sewing shears from her mother’s sewing basket and she slashed the new party dress—ruined it completely. 

When the mother came back into the bedroom she just couldn’t believe her eyes, she was almost stupefied by what she saw.  But instead of exploding into a fit of anger, she just fell across the bed, crying bitterly, completely oblivious to her daughter’s presence in the room.

When the little girl saw her mother’s reaction she realized the seriousness of what she had done, and she started to tug at her mother’s skirt, calling out, “Mommy, Mommy,” but her mother continued to ignore her, acting as though she was not in the room. 

The little girl, more and more desperate, cried out louder, “Mommy, please!”  At last her mother responded.  “Yes, what is it you want?” she asked.  And the little girl answered, “Mommy, please take me back!”

The little girl had seen through to the heart of the matter.  She didn’t say, “I’m sorry.”  She didn’t say “I wont’ do it again.”  She didn’t say a lot of things that might need to be said later.  She had sensed somehow that the problem of the moment was the broken relationship between herself and her mother, and she cried out, “Mommy, please, take me back!”

This is what is at the heart of today’s Gospel call to repentance.  Every time we ask God to forgive us we are saying, “God, please take us back.”   

            The call to repentance is preached today by the fiery John the Baptist—the voice, the one preparing the way of the messiah.  Our 4-part Advent theme is Advent V-Power.  Last week we heard the OT prophet Isaiah articulated the Vision of hope in the midst of the despair of our personal and corporate exiles.  Today John the Baptizer insists that we hear his voice calling for repentance.  The season of Advent is a time of waiting and preparation before Christmas.  But it is not only a time for preparing to celebrate the first coming of Jesus, but also his second coming…and that is why we turn to the Voice of the Baptist this morning.  Now some have warned that we modern people do not like to hear about sin and repentance.  And that John’s message might anger people.  That may be very true.  But I’m convinced that there is a deep longing among the people of God for a clear word about what God wants, expects and makes possible for us.   God is able to take our pitiful, broken little lives, turn them around and make even us bear fruit for the kingdom.  So come with me now out into the wilderness to hear the Voice of the one crying…

            Noted preacher and scholar Barbara Born Taylor writes that “self-appointed prophets tend to plant themselves right in your way so you have to cross over to the other side of the street to avoid them.  They get in your face and dare you to ignore them.”  But John the Baptist didn’t do that…so come with me now out in to the wilderness where John planted himself in the middle of nowhere.  John set up shop in the wilderness, and anyone who wanted to hear what he had to say had to go to a lot of trouble to get there, borrowing the neighbor’s donkey or setting off on foot with enough water for the journey, which led down lonely trails infested with bandits.”

            To hear John preach, you had to trek way off into the blazing hot desert, traverse relentless hills of thick sand, and make your way down to the Jordan River far away from any city.  For all your efforts, you would be met with John’s brand of fire and brimstone preaching.

            His message:  “You bunch of snakes!” (What a way to start a sermon!!)  “What do you think you’re doing slithering down here to the river?  Do you think that a little water on your snake skins is going to make any difference?  It’s your life that’s got to change, not your skin!  If your life is changed, people will be able to tell.  You’ll bear fruit.  And don’t think you can pull rank because you are a descendant of Abraham.  Descendants of Abraham are a dime a dozen.  God can take these rocks and make them into descendants of Abraham.  What matters is your life.  Is your life green?  Is it bearing fruit?  Because if it is deadwood, then it goes into the fire.  Repent!  The kingdom of heaven is near.

            Tough message. Scathing.  Yet crowds came.  People from Jerusalem and all Judea braved the elements and journeyed out into the desert to hear the voice of John preaching in the wilderness.  You can’t get that kind of preaching at First Church Jerusalem.  They came to hear John’s message of repentance.  People were being baptized.  Lives were being turned around.  Transformed. 

            Take another look at the fiery eyed prophet, clothed in rough camel skins, standing knee-deep in the Jordan.  John is not an exocentric, he is a living anachronism…John is dressed like the old prophet Elijah, no question about it, and the moment of his appearance is as sobering in its context as would be the arrival of Thomas Jefferson waving a copy of the Declaration of Independence in today’s Senate chamber.

            John is not out of this world he’s just out of sync…but so what?  Simply put, if we fail to understand that john represents the past, we also cannot understand what he has to say about the future.  John, like Jesus who follows him, preaches a message of repentance, but “repentance” is a slippery word, a weasel word. We cannot fill it with meaning for our lives until we have come to grips with this character who has stepped out of the pages of the Old Testament and into the pages of the New…

            Christians rejoice in the king of repentance which buries the rags of soiled past in favor of the white garments of a new future.  But even though this comes closer to John’s message, this is not yet fully the kind of repentance which John proclaimed. 

            The repentance John preaches is not a mid-course correction; it is more radical than that.  The repentance John preached is not a repudiation of the past; it is more complex than that.  The repentance John preached calls for a revising of the past.  It calls for us to look behind before we dare to move ahead.  It calls for us to encounter the past we have lived through but have not fully experienced, the past we have inherited but not inhabited, before we enter a future we do not yet comprehend.

            Repentance is not just personal it must be corporate.  John the Baptist came preaching the truth, the truth about us.  He came nonviolently, doing nothing to move his hearers but speaking the truth.  John spoke the truth about our collective condition.  He spoke out of the conviction that truth could make its own way in our hearts.  John spoke out of an implicit conviction that the truth is transformative.  When the truth is spoken, and when the truth is heard, hearts are changed, lives are done over, transformation is given.

            John called on people to change in light of his message. Repent!  Having help up the mirror of truth to their lives, John was sure that radical turning around, complete repentance was possible, because every time we ask God to forgive us we are saying, “God, please take us back!” 

            And as the people of God we have a job to do.  It is to stand up in the midst of our city and proclaim that God reigns, that the one thing that can never be taken away from us is the soul of a people which belongs to God because it comes from God.  It can neither be bought nor sold nor taken from us by force.  But I will tell you the truth—it can be given up, it can be surrendered, it can be lost to us, bartered for the idols of violence, greet and apathy. 

            We have a job to do.  It is to incite hope.  To bring good news, as Isaiah the prophet says, to the oppressed; to bind up the brokenhearted; to proclaim liberty to the captives; and to announce that God reigns.  To comfort the mourning, to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.  To wear the robe of God’s righteousness and to be found worthy of is crown of salvation.   

            Now to do this you have to thirst for Righteousness more than you thirst for anything else and to live this way you have to meet physical force with soul force, to live out your calling you have to become the hands that build up rather then those that tear down.  And all of this is something we cannot do on our own.  But we have this radical hope that it is something that God will do through us, if we do not surrender our souls to the gods of consumerism, despair and hate.  Listen to the Voice of the baptizer crying in the wilderness, “Repent!” so that we are not only prepared to celebrate the miraculous birth of Jesus in the manger of Bethlehem but also allow God to reorder our lives so we can bear fruit so that when the final trumpet sounds we’ll hear another voice that says; “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”  

            Let us pray:  Come to us, thou long expected Jesus, Lord of new beginnings.  Come to us where we are, surrounded by the veneer of joy and premature peace sold by greeting cards and shopping malls.  May the axe of truth chop through our defenses and attempts to domesticate the Gospel. Give us a glimpse of how strange is your way through the peculiarity of the One who was sent to prepare it.  Help us to look squarely at John the Baptist, the VOICE of one crying out in the wilderness, and open our hearts to receive his message of repentance as good news in order that our lives might be transformed and we might truly be prepared for your coming among us. 

Amen and amen.