Waiting on the World to Change

Luke 3:7-18

Take my lips and speak though them, take our minds and think through them, take our hearts and set them on fire, for Christ’s sake.  Amen

There is a current song by a popular musician, John Mayer:  Maybe you know it.  The lyrics go,             “we're all misunderstood - they say we stand for nothing and there's no way we ever could  -        now we see everything that's going wrong with the world and those who lead it  - we just feel          like we don't have the means to rise above and beat it.  So we keep waiting, waiting on the             world to change, we keep on waiting, waiting on the world to change.” 

The sentiment of this song expresses what many of us feel in this season of our living – grief over a world gone crazy with war, a sense of helplessness that we cannot deliver every soldier to their loved ones this Christmas, dread over possible terrorism and the future of Darfur and the entire Middle East.  Perhaps the most difficult thing to deal with on a personal and communal level is the shame over Abu Gahrab and the disclosure of other places of United States-sponsored Torture around the world. 

More than any other time in the church calendar, it is in Advent that we are charged with hopeful expectation.  This hope within us does not cower from the painful realities of the world. In some way we must hold these both: the pain of our world and lives and the Advent hope that empowers us to speak, live, and build a better future.  And still we feel we must wait, wait on the world to change.

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It is in this (today) context that we are given the lectionary passage for Advent that was just read.  We meet John, who became known as “the Baptist.”  Last week Ken reminded us of the gruesome, “R” rated account of the beheading of John the Baptist.  While Mark’s gospel writes about the event of John’s death, Luke fills us in on a few more dramatic details as to why John, and all the prophets, was probably not every mother’s first choice as their daughter’s date to the Junior Prom.

 “You brood of vipers,” he says. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance.”  Can you say “ARGH!” after that?

This startling and pre-Hollywood image of a squirming offspring of snakes is not hard to conjure up.  In fact, I happen to know that some of you have a significant fear of snakes.  My mom had it too.  Even 5-year-old Stevie Martenson’s flowered, stuffed-animal snake with googly eyes sent her jumping on top of the stove for safety.  In truth, though, and I know you have heard this about every dangerous creature on the earth, “they are more scared of you than … you are of them.” 

I  have read that in the Florida wilderness, varieties of vipers like rattlesnakes and water moccasins make their home.  “There you know that if you are going for a walk, you do not step over a fallen log.  You step on it good and hard first to scare the snakes out from underneath. And they run away -- they are experts at "fleeing from the wrath to come."  But it is their fear that causes them to be dangerous. Only when snakes are cornered or taken by surprise are they a problem.” [1]

To punctuate this “offspring of snakes” image, John brings up the most significant Jewish self-reference:  the children of Abraham. The Baptist says, “Do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”  The juxtaposition of  “Brood of vipers” with “Children of Abraham” should not escape us.  These are pointed and critical words of judgment.   

And yet, the listeners to John’s message do not seem to “flee away” from his biting remarks.  Instead, we find the people staying, asking more questions, and being baptised.  Clearly SOMETHING John is saying resonates with them.   It is a hopeful word that even the religious, to whom John speaks, have a hole in their armor.  Thankfully, that is all God needs to speak to us.

So what are these deeds worthy of repentance? Or “What, then, should we do?”  

I like it that John deals with each person according to her or his own life and vocation.  To one he says, “Share your possessions.”  To another, “Do not take advantage of people in your work.” 

To another, “Feed the poor.”  To yet another “Do not manipulate and lie to get what you want.” All life matters are fair game.  After all, if preparation for the advent of the Messiah is about leveling the hills and raising up the valleys, as the Hebrew scriptures say, I wonder if my Advent efforts are missing the point.  What are do your advent efforts focus on?  My advent tends to include the following:  shopping, lighting a candle every week, finding and decorating a tree, trying to find a moment of quiet to read the peacemaking daily devotional, making Christmas cookies or candy, a trip to the Gingerbread houses with good friends, and more than a few moments of tearing my hair out over money issue.  At least John does speak to pressing financial matters.

This final piece of the text is, I believe, one of the most compelling.  It says, ¹⁵As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, (notice John’s mind-reading – doesn’t Luke loves the dramatic?),¹⁶John answered all of them by saying, "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." [2]

¹⁸So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.

To explore this, let’s do a little word association.  Are you ready?  What comes to mind when I say, “Good News”. Unconditional Love? Grace?  Forgiveness? Mercy?  Forgive me if I missed something in Sunday School, but since when did being tossed into the unquenchable fire become good news?  Does this not seem more of a Good Friday text than a “waiting for the blessed miracle of” the ‘potentially no crying he makes’ Son of God?  I am thinking that by this point, if I were in that baptist’s crowd, I would be high-tailing it to Ray’s Boathouse for happy hour.  (Maybe that’s why I am a Presbyterian and not a Baptist.)  I have to admit that some years the only Good News of Advent has to do with just making it through the Holiday season so I can have a little break and pay off the credit card.

Waiting for these first Advent people was NOT about sitting around with their candles burning, cup of cocoa in one hand, advent devotional in the other gazing at a sparkling tree.  (Not that I don’t appreciate that.)  The first Advent was not about waiting on the world to change.  It was not static.  It was about change:  for themselves and the world.  It was about “don’t put it under the tree – put it in my heart!”   It was about justice making in their community.  It was about diving into a cold river to wash away all that kept them from God. 

The final part of this passage is such a vivid image.

¹⁷His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." [3]

As a graduated farm girl, I have an affinity with agricultural imagery.  Presently, at least, in the Palouse, the only crop that is burned is grass:  Kentucky bluegrass mostly.  This is how it goes.  In early June every year, the grass fields are swathed during the moistest time in the night and they sit as green-ish lines snaking around the hills.  There the thicker piles are turned with a pitchfork as they dry in the sun.  Round about the 4^th of July or so, they are harvested with one of those huge grass-hopper-like combines. (An aside here:  I don’t know how many of you saw the animated movie, Cars, but I loved their personification of the combine.  In the evening, after a long harvest day as a teenager, I would sometimes sit on the porch and watch those enormous insects make their way back to the shop and always thought that they looked like monster grasshoppers against the sky.)  The combine does the ‘winnowing’ by separating the grain and depositing it into a tank while simultaneously spitting the chaff out the back.  From there the seed is emptied into a truck or trailer and brought to the Grain Elevators to be tested and eventually sold. 

When the harvest season is complete and September arrives, farmers have two options to prepare their field for the coming year.  1.  Plow the field under or 2.  Burn it.  The better choice for the soil, albeit worse for the air, is to burn it.  Burning the “chaff” and the field arrests the growth that might continue part way through the fall and protects the field for the soon-to-be freezing weather.  Burning the chaff-filled fields also aids the following year’s yield by replenishing the soil with much needed nutrients.  Plowed fields are not nearly as productive.  They need the fire.  It is part of the redemption of the field, if you will.

It may not have been John’s intent to soften the image as I did.  However, it is interesting to note that he uses fire both in relationship to the unquenchable fire and in connection to the baptism of the Holy Spirit and “of fire”.  I think it is good to remember as we look at the more difficult seasons in our lives or the life of our country, that sometimes the fire, when we are in it, seems unquenchable.  It can be hard to imagine that anything redemptive will ever come from it.  We can feel like we are either tumbling out of control or being consumed in fires of fear or haughtiness or judgment.

 In the spring, though, when the fires have long since died off and after the winter has had her way, even the burned fields that have been laying exhausted and near-dead bear new fruit.

Advent is not about waiting on the world to change.  God calls us where we are to prepare the way for the coming child.  Together, let us light a candle to dispel our sense of powerlessness which only serves those who believe themselves powerful.  Let us clear a smooth path so that the injured and disheartened soldier can find his way home. Let us fold down the sheets where the abused can find rest. Then, as the prophet Isaiah says, we will be “washed in the river of forgiveness and drinking from the wells of salvation.”

I would like to close with words from Archbishop Oscar Romero who was martyrd in El Salvador in the 1980’s.

It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of
saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession
brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.
No set of goals an objectives include everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects
far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of

liberation in realizing this.

This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s
grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the
difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not
messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.[1]

— Archbishop Oscar Romero (martyred on March 24th 1980