St. George's, Le Mars, Iowa
15 December 1996
Donald Wacome, Lay Preacher
We have no reliable account of how he spent all those years; almost his whole life. There's some reason to think he hooked up with the Essenes, a pious apocalyptic sect on the fringes of Jewish religious life. His reappearance in the gospel narratives coincides with the start of Jesus' ministry. Out of the wild country down by the Dead Sea, John is suddenly on the scene. A caricature of an Old Testament prophet, he's oddly out of place in the New. Wearing animal skins and eating locusts with honey, John rants in the desert, preaching hellfire and brimstone, urgently calling the people to be ready for the one who is coming. Dorothy Sayers describes him in her play The Man Born To Be King: he has no humour, no patience and a one-track mind. His preaching draws large crowds. This attracts the attention of the Jerusalem authorities. They send investigators to find out who he is, by what authority he preaches and baptizes. But he won't really answer their questions. I'm a nobody! I'm just a voice crying in the wilderness! His reason for being is to point beyond himself to he who is on his way. He's preparing the way for the coming Christ. Any interest in him is a diversion, a distraction he won't tolerate. His sole concern is that we be ready for the one we're waiting for.
Part of our advent waiting is the experience of joyously mounting expectation. This is just what's expressed in this morning's psalm: Our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy! and in the lesson from Isaiah: Be glad, and rejoice forever in what I am creating! When, in our pilgrimage through the Church year, we move into this season, we encounter the blessedness of the coming Christ child. We feel the promise of Peace on Earth and good will to all!
But to put John the Baptist at the center of the lessons shifts the focus to another dimension of Advent preparation. For as much as this is time of gathering joy at our Savior's coming, it's a penitential time as well. We are called to self-examination and repentance. We who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death look for God's tender compassion, for the dawn from on high to break upon us. Part of this is to look to ourselves, to see to our readiness to receive the Lord who comes to save and forgive.
Repentance has gotten a bad reputation. That's part of the reason John the Baptist is not a very credible or attractive figure for us. He's the prototype of the disheveled cartoon prophet bearing a placard that proclaims: Repent! The End is Nigh! For the popular modern mind the biblical call to repent is moralistic and melodramatic. Its hard edge of seriousness has been dulled. There's no obvious way to incorporate the Baptist's call for repentance into our preparation for Christ's Advent.
And anyway, it's not easy to make sense of it, to avoid seeing it as at odds with the good news of God with us. When we hear the command to repent, it sounds as though we're being told to straighten ourselves out, to stop being bad, mean and lazy and to start behaving ourselves. As though the message is: God is on his way, so we'd better improve ourselves so we'll be good enough for him when he arrives. We'd better be worthy when he gets here - or else. Like "Santa Claus is coming to town," but for real.
If that's what repentance is all about we have a serious problem: if we had the power to turn ourselves around like that we wouldn't be in such deep need of God's help. If we had the capacity to heal and rescue ourselves we wouldn't be longing for help beyond all merely human possibility. If we could repent like that we wouldn't really need that child born to be our savior. Whatever real repentance is it can't be making ourselves good enough for God. To preach repentance in that sense is a cruel demand for what we can't do. It's to deny the Christian faith by denying our need for Christ.
Yet, the sad truth we all know is that Christians often do deny the faith in just this way. Think how often, and in how many ways, the Church is portrayed not as a family of persons who have thrown themselves on God's grace and mercy, but as a club for people who are good enough to belong. In reality, Christianity is not for those of us who are succeeding at being good. It's for those of us who have felt the hopelessness of that and turned to God's goodness incarnate in that Jesus whose birth we'll soon celebrate.
Then what is the repentance to which we are called, and which is an appropriate expression of faithful waiting for our coming Christ? You'll probably recall that when the New Testament speaks of repentance, the term usually used is "metanoia:" to think again, to change one's mind. For John the Baptist, Jesus the Christ is on the scene, God's kingdom is at hand. God has not forgotten his people; he is arriving, to be with us and for us. The call to repent is a call to reorient ourselves to this impending reality. God in Christ comes to the people of John's day, as he comes now to us, as healer and savior. To repent is not to heal and save ourselves as he approaches. To repent is to face up to the reality of our need. John's fiery preaching, and the baptism by which people signified their acceptance of it, aimed at breaking through the self-satisfaction, at tearing down the walls of false security in our goodness and strength. To repent is to examine oneself and acknowledge oneself as a sinner, as hopeless and helpless but for God's unconditional love. John's call for repentance forces us to focus on our own need and to put all our hopes on the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.
The Baptist prepared the way for the Messiah, crying in the wilderness the need for penitent hearts to receive the savior. Helmut Thielicke, the German theologian, wrote Whenever the New Testament speaks of repentance, always the great joy is in the background. It does not say 'Repent, or hell will swallow you up!' but 'Repent, the kingdom of heaven is at hand!' (The Waiting Father, p. 26) So the last word is that penitential Advent and joyous celebration Advent our own and the same.
It would be hard to underestimate the audacity of the good news that lies in this invitation to repent. Only our long familiarity with what the gospels say hides how outrageous, how unnatural this call is. The Jesus whose arrival John announces is a stumbling block. He subverts our sense of right and wrong, our sense of what makes sense. John the Baptist himself has his doubts. John fled the corruption of Jerusalem, seeking purity in the desert. He was a solitary ascetic who avoided sinners unless they were coming to him for baptism. I suspect he had a hard time with his cousin, who not only spent his time with, but actually seemed to like, the wine-drinkers, harlots and even tax collectors any pious person would have the good sense to avoid. After his confident public proclamations about Jesus being God's son and the savior of Israel, John quietly sends messengers to Jesus to ask: Are you the one who is to come, or are we to await for another? Jesus' response reveals how great the gulf is that lies between even John's way of thinking and God's: Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me. (Luke 7.20-23). Even John misses the point and doesn't see that Jesus isn't in the business of making people behave themselves, and that the call to repent really is a call to let Jesus love, help and save us.
In this Advent season, let us be preparing the way for
Jesus, once again opening our hearts to him in repentance.
Amen.