You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? _NRSV

Each year it’s the same story. We spend time and money decorating our houses and churches and yards and trees with the beautiful window-dressing of Christmas; and then, just when everything looks perfectly beautiful, we invite John the Baptist to come to church and spoil the party. And he comes, straight out of the desert, smelling just like the camel that provided his coat, with the strong aroma of locusts on his breath. In he comes, dust erupting in little clouds around his shoeless feet as he stomps about the place, scoffing at our pretense, leaving spots on our freshly shampooed carpet. And he’s not too taken with all our Advent and Christmas preparations. He never is.

Instead of saying all the proper things about our beautiful decorations and our lovely Christmas trees, he simply says that it is time for us to repent. We can keep all our twinkling lights and our chrome-colored ornaments, and our “ho-ho-hoes,” he says, because God can make these things from rocks if he wants to. Why do we keep inviting such a disagreeable character back? Every year at this time the lectionary of scripture readings calls for sermons from passages in Matthew or John or Luke on the subject of the preaching of John the Baptist. And every year we have to put up with the same embarrassment to our refined tastes. There’s no denying it, “John the Baptist is just not a Christmassy guy!”¹ Maybe we ask him back each year because just when we are at our loveliest, we most need to be reminded of his message.

The Baptist does provide interesting opportunities for children’s messages, though. The culture provides images of this as a season tailor-made for family, friendship, soft lights on pretty trees, and lantern-lit, rosey-cheeked carolers. But John the Baptist blows in more like last week’s powerful windstorm, wearing fur — and not the kind you buy at Nieman-Marcus Nordstroms — with a loud voice and a pretty disagreeable message, and, don’t forget, eating bugs for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I think that mostly, our child-friendly Christmas stories are designed on purpose to put children to sleep. But you try reading about John to the kids, and when you get to the part about eating bugs, I can promise you’ll have their full attention.

In the house in which I grew up in Oklahoma City, there was a perfectly serviceable front door. Outside the front door were nice shrubs — nothing spectacular, but nicely trimmed and cared for. The door itself was solid, and the entry way in our home was attractive. The problem was, the driveway for our home was located around the side, and that’s where all the main coming and going happened. But the side and back yard of our home were sights to behold. Out of three sons, my parents had two whose idea of a good time was the piece-by-piece demolition and occasional reconstruction of old automobiles. At any given time for a period of several years, as many as eight rusting hulks of old cars in various states of decay and disrepair could be found scattered about the yard, driveway, and garage. I don’t think my parents’ garage ever sheltered an automobile that actually ran until all of us were finally long gone from the family homestead.

Now, when people didn’t know us too well and came to the house, they would drive up to the front where you could see the number on the house, park in the street, and knock at the nicely trimmed front entry. But the more familiar our friends became, the more likely they were to approach our home through the mine field that served as a back yard, next to a garage that had never known the pleasure of housing a functioning vehicle. That meant the jig was up. We could create the flimflam of a front-yard illusion for strangers and casually observant neighbors, but the ones who really knew us knew that clean façade hid a dirty fib. Naturally, my mother would have preferred that guests always use the front door, but there is something about friendship that makes back doors more inviting. I think John the Baptist only ever used back doors.

A visiting lecturer at Princeton Seminary once observed that people have different approaches to preparing for company. Some actually clean house. Others are more inclined just to hide things and hope they won’t be found — my kind of people!² My suspicion is that most of us prefer that latter approach as we try desperately to get everything in order for Christmas celebrations every year.

We fix our front yards, trim the bushes along the walk, perhaps repaint the front door and hang a wreath or a little sprig of holly on it to spruce things up. Then, to our red-faced embarrassment, in marches John the Baptist through the back door, passing through the clutter of old engine blocks and rusting brake drums, finding everything we had so hoped we had hidden away from all our visitors. Right in the middle of our preparation for Christmas and sweet baby Jesus, he says, at the top of his lungs, so that all the happy conversation at the party is brought to a deadening stop, “Repent!”

We thought our sins were carefully hidden. He knows better.

Why do we invite this disagreeable character back each year? Because he is probably right in insisting that there is no other way to prepare for the coming of a Messiah than the way he describes. He calls not for simpering and tears and gnashing of teeth: that is not repentance, just groveling. He calls for lives with actions that match claims of changed hearts. One New Testament scholar wrote that repentance is appropriate to Advent as we come clean and come empty to receive — and be filled with — the gift of God.³ John the Baptist calls his “brood of vipers” to own up to the truth about that back yard full of 1950s vintage automobile parts, to own up to the truth about their lives, to abandon all fabrications, prevarications and rationalizations that we customarily use to maintain an illusion of innocence and freedom from condemnation. “We have Abraham as our father,” “I grew up in the church,” “I gave to charity,” “all my uncles are Presbyterian pastors,” “my Daddy makes a big pledge each year,” “I wrote a 400 page commentary on Titus...” None of these nor any excuse like them can serve as a valid exemption for failure to be what we want all the neighbors to think we are.

The Jews that John the Baptist baptized at the Jordan were just as racially and religiously arrogant as we can be, clinging to the fallacy that says we can offer God something no more costly to us than the obedience and faithfulness of our ancestors.

To all our manifold excuses John holds up his hand and repeats: “Repent.” And with the people who populated Luke’s gospel, we ask, “What shall we do?” To that question, we can answer with the words of the patron saint of Presbyterians, John Calvin, who wrote that repentance means “the true turning of our life to God.”⁴ “What shall we do?” is a timeless question. It is the same question uttered by the crowds on the day of Pentecost when Peter preached his first sermon; every pastor hopes it is at least one of the questions asked by the congregation some time during the course of his or her preaching. And John’s answer is vintage Old Testament stuff:

1. Address the injustices of your world,


2. Share food and clothing with those who have none,


3. Don’t base taxes on the insatiable greed of those in a position to extract them,


4. Those charged with maintaining law and order must stop menacing the helpless by threat, intimidation, and blackmail.

All these sound almost eerily modern to our ears as John drives them home to the folks down at the riverside. What shall we do? The big answer is that a religion void of moral and ethical earnestness — simply put, void of a commitment to doing what is right — is just that: void.

These actions, and all actions of justice like them, are not the road to repentance. They are its fruit. We all know Christ is coming. What we do about it is the way by which we may judge for ourselves whether we are truly repentant or whether we just want to appear that way for the sake of the neighborhood. What shall we do? Behave as though we believe the promises of God to be true. Sounds easy. But it takes a lifetime to sort through all the implications of living as though this faith we proclaim were true.

John closed his little sermon by talking about a winnowing fork and chaff and grain and fire. We need to remember that the primary purpose of winnowing is not fire for the chaff, but saving for the grain. We are created by God to be the grain, not the chaff, to bear in ourselves the seed of goodness for the world. In this sense, in this Advent, listeners and preachers alike hear these words of that uncomfortable desert prophet and are bold enough to call his message and our response “good news.”

Copyright © 2006 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved.
Sermons are made available in print and on the web for readers only.
Any further publication or use of sermons must be with written permission of the author.

Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

___________________________________________
NOTES

¹ - Michael Lindvall, “The Grinch of the Dessert,” preached at Brick Presbyterian Church, New York City, December 3, 2003.
² - William D. Howden, "Good News: Repent!", in The Christian Ministry, November, 1985.
³ - Fred Craddock, Preaching the New Common Lectionary: Year C Advent, Abingdon Press, p. 37.
⁴ - Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.3.5.