Year A

Matthew 3:1-12

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

The Good News by John the Baptist

I have to admit Advent is one of my favorite seasons of the church year. I like the fact that during these few weeks when the world is all hustle and bustle, the church calls us to take a time out. Now, we are not literally going to stand in corners like we might have done as children, but we are going in a sense to a corner to reflect again on our spiritual lives in the hope that we can tidy them up. We want our hearts and minds to be ready and prepared to meet our Savior at his birth and again someday when the King returns. To help us tidy up and get ready, God sent us a very controversial but very effective prophet named John the Baptist. He leads us to know that the task of tidying up is not as easy as we might like to think.

It’s not easy because we have a tendency to let the culture around us snatch away much of the meaning of the birth of the Savior. If we really want to be ready for what God is still doing in the miracle of Christmas, we have to reclaim that meaning. No one is better at helping us get back to basics than John the Baptist. He tells it like it is. His sermons were genuine, compelling, and prophet-like. With one foot in the old age that was coming to a close and the new age that was being born on Christmas day, he came to interpret God’s ways to the people. Prophets had been in short supply. It had been 500 years between the prophet Malachi and John the Baptist. Maybe that is why John drew such large crowds. People came from Jerusalem and Judea, a long way, to hear John preach in the wilderness near the Jordan River “where they were baptized, confessing their sins”.

God invited John to this work, prepared him by his wilderness experience while nourishing and tidying him up, commissioned him, and then turned over to him the job for which he had been prepared. When he really got going, his words much have blistered the ears of all those people. When John begins the heart of his sermon in verse 10, he uses two images that roar out judgment. The first is an axe chopping down a tree that bears no fruit. The dead wood will be tossed into the fire. In, the second image, the farmer sifts the grain with a winnowing fork. The heavier wheat falls to the ground. The chaff John tosses into the fire along with the dead wood. These two images are what we have to wrestle with this morning.

It’s obvious that John sees the arrival of the Messiah with a heavy emphasis on wrath. If scholars are correct John was Jewish and also was an Essene who had gone out into the wilderness furious about the corruption of the people and as a protest against all the Jewish leadership of his day. The Essenes thought that everyone had it wrong. They wanted to worship God in their own way. We don’t know exactly what John meant when he predicted that the trees would be chopped down and thrown into the fire along with the chaff from the wheat but we can assume that he thought the corrupt religious leaders would be set straight when the Messiah arrived. When he saw the many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

If John expected the arrival of Jesus the Messiah to be a time when corrupt leaders would be put into their place, that certainly is not what happened. Jesus came to heal division and bring peace. His was not a time when the trees were cut down or the chaff separated out with all of it burned up. For the most part, the religious leaders and secular leaders did not change because of Jesus’ ministry. Their corruption, eventually lead them to kill Jesus. Yet, Matthew records John’s words, even if they do not quite fit with what the first coming of the Messiah meant for the world, because they help us to understand and prepare for Christmas.

Do we not share some of John’s anger at the corruption in our world? Do we not grieve over war, crime, hatred, abuse, racism, gun violence and a host of other ills? And if we are honest with ourselves we know we are not what we ought to be. All the preparing, and watching and waiting we are asked to do during the season of Advent is informed by John’s call to turn from sin and violence. John invites us to the cleansing and renewing water in baptism, the new beginning promised though repentance and forgiveness. To a peace that only God can offer, a peace that Isaiah speaks about: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion, and a little child shall lead them.” “They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.”

Jesus’ earthly ministry was closer to Isaiah’s original intent than to what John had in mind. Yet, ironically, John understood his ministry in connection with Isaiah’s words about preparing a way in the wilderness. And as an Essene, he understood that the coming of the Messiah would be a time of healing. As one of their prophecies puts it, “For the Messiah will heal the wounded, and revive the dead and bring good news to the poor.” The kingdom of God will be like this: not as expected. Neither the violent, nor the powerful, will hold sway in the kingdom of God. The first will be last and the last first. The wolf and the lamb will lie down together. This is the gospel of the prophets, the gospel of John the Baptist and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Turn and repent from every way that does not love, the least, the last and the lost.

Paul exhorts the Christians in Rome to live in harmony with one another and prays that “the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace.” And the Psalmist sings that “in his days may righteousness flourish and peace abound, until the moon is not more.” Such images are beyond what we can imagine because of the persistence of sin and violence in our world. And maybe this persistence of sin is a good back-ground for reading John’s powerful words to us today of trees chopped down and chaff thrown into unquenchable fire. We would like to think he means the religious leaders in his day. And, we might want to make them the bad guys yet we forget they are a mirror for all of us. If all of the evil people are chopped down, where would the chopping stop? Chopped down trees and burned up chaff in some of the writings of the Essenes seemed to support the idea that this refers not to specific people, but to evil itself, even the evil inside us.

One of their documents talks about what God will do with evil and injustice, “God will then purify every deed of man with His truth.” Might John be promising us not the destruction of evil people, but the destruction of evil in God’s Kingdom? This is the good news of the gospels. The one who “is more powerful than I is coming” and he calls us to new life through our baptism and a hope that transcends this world. By the power of the root of Jesse, all things are possible. 

So as newspapers, radio programs, and the evening news continue to remind us of the remaining shopping days until Christmas, let us not forget to give this gospel equal time. John the Baptist’s call to repentance is a call to acknowledge the sin in our lives, and the call to turn from it. The Coming of the Prince of Peace and the vision of Isaiah’s holy mountain are going to turn our world upside down. We can either ignore the prophecy and deny its truth, or embrace it and continue our pilgrimage of watching and preparing, ascending the holy mountain of God.