This sermon was preached at Whittier UMC on Sunday, December 8th, 2019, based on Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 3:1-12. You can listen to it by clicking below.
Would you pray with me?
God who loves us too much to let us stay the way we are, thank you for bringing us all to this time and this place. Be with us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Sometimes I think Advent is hard for us. Sometimes, I think Advent is hard. And it’s not necessarily the busyness of the season, though that plays a part, and it’s not just because we’re impatient for the joy of Christmas, though that’s present too. I think that Advent is hard for us because we are people who have no need for prophets.
See, Advent is the season of prophets. It’s the season of God-inspired people speaking out about the way things are and the way things should be. Walter Bruggemann, an Old Testament scholar who’s really shaped the way I think, says in The Prophetic Imagination that prophets have two roles: they criticize and they energize. Prophets name the problems in the world for what they are and they offer a vision of a better future. They criticize current pain and they energize us by revealing hope, joy, peace, and love that will come to fruition one day. The Prophetic Imagination genuinely changed my life—if any of you want to want to reimagine how you think about the Old Testament prophets, I’m happy to lend you my copy.
We see both criticizing and energizing in our two prophets from today’s readings. John the Baptist begins his ministry by calling for repentance and fruits worthy of repentance, criticizing the disobedience of the law. Isaiah on the other hand offers this beautiful vision of what the future will be like when a just and righteous ruler rules. When it comes to the prophets, and to faith in general, I guess, you really can’t have one without the other. Righteousness without repentance isn’t true righteousness—you’re covering up the problem without solving it. But repentance without the hope of righteousness is just shame and guilt and self-flagellation. If you’re going to criticize, you have to offer hope that things can be better. If you’re going to offer hope, you have to be honest about the way things really are.
And to be honest, both John the Baptist and Isaiah were living in fairly precarious times. Isaiah is in Judah, watching the Babylonians gather their armies, preparing for an attack. John is in Judea under the rule of King Herod, a cruel man who was installed by a foreign government, Rome, to rule over Judea. Both of them are dealing with empires at the doorstep, always on the verge of a crushing attack by enemy soldiers. And while their leaders are wheeling and dealing with the empires, the people of Judah are barely scraping by, living in deep poverty. These were anxious times, with wars and rumors of wars, all while many didn’t know where their next meal was coming from.
So into these anxious times come the voices of prophets. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near! says John. Prepare the way of the Lord! Bear fruits worthy of repentance!
And people flock to John. They hear a call to repentance and they come running. Because it’s not just personal repentance that John is after. Confession is one thing, and an important thing. I think we make better communities when we’re honest with ourselves about our wrongdoing and commit to being better. But the repentance John is talking about isn’t just individual—it’s communal. John is calling for all of Judea to turn away from the ways of Rome, the ways of Herod, and toward the ways of God. By proclaiming the kingdom of heaven, John isn’t pointing toward our individual salvation, John is talking about the saving of all things, the introduction of the reign of God, the reign of a son of God who will judge with righteousness and faithfulness, bringing about a transformation of the world where the wolf can lie down with the lamb and no one will hurt or destroy on all God’s holy mountain. And we have to repent, for we are surely not ready for that reality.
But the people who hear John, they run to him, because his message of repentance is a message of preparation. Prepare yourselves for days of justice! Prepare yourselves for days of righteousness! Prepare yourselves for days of peace, when we won’t worry about Rome or Herod. Prepare yourselves for days of fullness, when God will make all things right. Get yourself ready to live in this new world that is about to unfold. We need all the people we can get to be ready for God when God comes, for the Messiah, God’s anointed. The people who flock to John are preparing themselves as a part of a movement hoping for change.
And this is why, I think, Advent is hard for us.
We are not a people hoping for change.
Oh, sure, we’ve all had health scares and struggles with health insurance, but we’re not ready for that system to change. Sure, many of us have struggled to make ends meet, but that doesn’t mean we need to change the way businesses and markets are run. Sure, we’ve all had our hearts broken by gun violence and the news of gun violence, but even if change was possible, what would it look like? Our world is full of insurmountable problems, but that’s just the way things are. We just have to do our best with what we’ve been given.
We are not a people hoping for change.
Because change is painful. Change means letting go of the solid ground we’ve found. Change means giving up the reality we understand and can live in. Change means giving up on the way we’ve been living and seeking a new way to live. Change means repenting.
Now, for Isaiah and for John the Baptist, change in the community, in the nation, was directly tied to change in the heart of the nation’s people. There’s no communal change without individual change. There is no realization of the wonderful vision of peace that Isaiah speaks about without each and every person agreeing to live in ways that lead to peace. Individual change leads to communal change and communal change feeds back into individual change.
This is why John targets the Pharisees and the Sadducees. They weren’t ready for change. They weren’t really ready for repentance. They would continue teaching long after John’s baptism that the kind of change that Jesus would usher into the world isn’t necessary. They would stay as they are. They wouldn’t be able to bear fruits worthy of repentance. And because they were leaders of the community, their opposition to change stopped others from changing, because the communal is individual and the individual is communal. It’s why Jesus talks so much about the yeast of the Pharisees ruining the entirety of the dough. We’re all so connected.
But.
Since we’re so connected.
One person who repents, who prepares themselves for the reign of Jesus, can change it all.
This is what we do each Advent. At the beckoning of the prophets, we look around at the pain in our world. We see it, even the parts of it that don’t reach us individually, and we say no more. We declare that this is not the kingdom that we’re preparing for. We repent of all the pain that we have participated in, any unrighteous anger, any hate, any fear. We turn away from ways that bring more pain into the world, preparing ourselves to live in God’s world where there will be no more pain, no more violence, no more death, no more strife.
We settle into our preparations.
We focus on peace and what we need to do to make the world more peaceful.
We focus on hope and how we can share it in the world around us.
We focus on joy, because we know that joy will spread like wildfire, giving light and energy to those in need of it.
We focus on love, because that is what the kingdom of heaven is built on. Love is how we make this world more like the world to come.
And if we do all this, if we truly see the world for the way it is and prepare for a change based on love and peace and hope and joy, if we spend our Advent repenting and preparing the way of the Lord, then we can change the world.
Just as the prophets told us.
Amen.
All text and pictures (unless otherwise attributed) © Jo Schonewolf, 2019. You can view a full archive of our sermons by clicking here.