3 Advent C
Text: Luke 3:7-18
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
December 12, 2021
John the Baptist: Who Invited Him, Anyway?
Pick up your bulletin and take a look at the cover. There he is: . Skinny as a rail, dressed in his itchy coat, smelling like sweaty leather and camel’s hair. And those eyes! Eyes wide with – what? – it’s either divine inspiration or it’s serious mental illness, one or the other: there he is! You know, we put up the church Christmas tree yesterday and brought in the poinsettias and are so looking forward to our Christmas party, and then somebody invited this guy. There he is: John the Baptist.
In life, as the noted American theologian Mike Ditka famously said; in life there are certain tough obstacles you’ve got to get by. You want to go to medical school, you’ve got to pass Organic Chemistry. You want to be on the basketball team, you’ve got to go through practice every day. You want to be a good soldier, you’ve got to survive basic training boot camp.
And if you want to get to the joy of Bethlehem and the praise of baby Jesus, you’ve got to get past John the Baptist. The Church, in its centuries-old wisdom, has always demanded that if you really want to see into the manger in the warm, cozy stable you must first confront the prophetic madman out in the wilderness, this man whose word is as bitter and galling as his peculiar diet.
Yes, to get to Christmas you’ve got to confront John and, oh!, how John collides with what we have done to Christmas! John’s gaunt, ascetic figure during these Advent days is striking contrast to another figure I see around a lot these days, a guy chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf, bag full of gifts for those who have too much already. The contrast is striking, no? The society around us prepares for Christmas with Santa Claus; the church prepares for Christmas with John the Baptist.
Have you been getting Christmas cards at your house? We have, at ours, and we’ve received a lot of them for sure with pictures of Santa Claus. But I’ve suggested for many years: what if you were to receive Christmas cards that were faithful, not to the cultural Christmas preparations for the satisfaction of consumerist desire, but instead faithful to the way the Church prepares the way for Christmas? Then you would get, not Santa Claus cards, but John the Baptist cards. I have been suggesting this to my wife for years with no success: C’mon, Deb, let’s send John the Baptist cards this year! You would get a card from us that would say, “Greetings from our house to yours. Our thoughts of you at this special time of year are best expressed in the words of John the Baptist: ‘You brood of vipers! Are you bearing the fruit of repentance?’ May your days be merry and bright, and remember that even now the ax is laid to the root of the tree, you know, and if you are not bearing good fruit you will be thrown into the fire! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, from Bob Klonowski and Deb Burnet.”
I can’t sell that idea to my wife so I suppose I could never sell it to the Hallmark people. No, you probably won’t see nasty old John on a Christmas card anytime soon. And you won’t see him in ceramics, either; we’ve got shepherds and kings for our creche set at home, but we haven’t got John the Baptist. And I don’t suppose you will ever see John as a Christmas cookie; at our house we’ve got those cookie cutouts for stars and for reindeer and for a Nutcracker ballet dancer and, yes, for Santa Claus, but I bet even if you were to make it to every single holiday gathering that is on your calendar this month, you would find on the dessert trays not a single John the Baptist cookie.
But if you find one, the first thing you should do is break off his head, right?
So why should this be, that John is absent from our Christmas preparation? To exclude him like this is absolutely unfaithful to the gospel, you know: all four gospels have John there to prepare the way, as if to say you cannot meet Jesus until you have met this John, as if to say that you cannot know why there is Emmanuel, God with us, until John tells you why we so desperately need God with us.
And there — right there! — is the answer to my question about John’s absence. Why is John excluded? Well, we don’t want John around with his reminder that we are desperately needy people. That’s not what Christmas preparation is about among us! Christmas is this exuberant celebration of ourselves and our wealth and our own generosity. “Christmas brings out the best in us,” we tell each other, and by that reassuring ourselves that there is still within us somewhere a “best” to be brought out. Yes, John prepares the way in all four gospels, but John collides with what we have done to Christmas because what we have done to Christmas has much less to do with the gospels than it has to do with Charles Dickens. We are, like Scrooge, down deep, people who have had cheerful childhoods that only need to be recaptured with a little bit of Yuletide sentimental slush. Like Ebenezer Scrooge we are, despite our gruff, materialistic, calloused exterior, really down deep we are charming and sensitive people who are just waiting to be rediscovered at Christmas.
In other words, we rejoice in our own goodness. You put a dollar in the Salvation Army buckets at Christmastime, don’t you? I do. You’re going to pitch in for the PADS Christmas fund-raiser, to help those who need housing, are you not? I will! And you do all kinds of special holiday-time giving, I’ll bet. We do at our house, certainly. And doesn’t it make you feel good? Well, then, what need have basically good people like us for the harsh medicine that John is trying to pour down our throats? Why must we be dosed with the bitter castor oil of repentance? What need have basically good people like us for God to come to Bethlehem to save us, since we are, if we can only be appealed to positively, as Scrooge was, since we are really capable of saving ourselves?
Yes, “Christmas brings out the best in us,” we tell one another, and we could probably pull it off, this seasonal, self-delusional celebration of our own goodness, were it not that the gospels insist, and the Church insists, on making John part of our Advent. We want to prepare for Christmas our way, we want to have our beautiful Christmas live nativity, but just as the kids all processed in last Sunday with robes on and stars shining, John comes ranting and raving down the aisle, swinging invective and censure, demanding to cleanse us of our delusions with a cold dip in the icy Jordan. “White robes and angel wings!”, shouts John, “Where are the hair shirts of penance for your sin? Fruitcake! You think this is about Christmas fruitcake!? This is not about fruitcake; this is about bearing the fruit of repentance!”
To those in power, John sneers, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee the coming fire?” And we think, well, that’s all right; John should get on those scribes and Pharisees, those one-percenters, those folk who are in power. About time somebody told those people to straighten up and fly right.
Then John turns to us: “And don’t you say, ‘We have Abraham as our father. I am an active member of Faith Lutheran Church. Why, I even pledged when the church asked me to a few weeks ago.’ Don’t you give me that,” John raves. “You are not indispensable to the Lord. God can raise up a people out of the stones if God wants.” Even the chosen, the enlightened, the insiders must repent, get turned around, get washed up to be ready for this coming of the Lord.
In the end there’s really no easy or honest way around it. Christmas joy, real joy, will come, but real joy comes only by way of the truth. And belief in salvation comes, after all, only to those who believe they are in need of salvation. A gracious God provides a Savior, to those who know that a Savior is what this world so desperately needs. It’s just the truth, you know: you can’t get to Christmas, you can’t get to Jesus, until you can handle John.