December 8, 2013 (Advent 2) – Matthew 3:1-12
Matthew 3:1-12
Everyone Lives
Second Sunday of Advent – December 8, 2013
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
Every time we get introduced to John again on the Second Sunday of Advent,
don’t you just want him to take a valium?
Offer him a massage? Maybe some aromatherapy? Scented bath oil?
The thing is, though, John has a sense of urgency that you just have to love.
There’s bad stuff going on and people are suffering and he just wants something done about it!
Is it asking too much?
So – kind of unexpectedly, he goes out to the wilderness.
The wilderness is that storied place where the people of Israel wandered for forty years after
the Exodus from Egypt.
Where they learned to care about what God cares about and became God’s partner people in
God’s loving mission to love bless and heal this world and every person in it.
Where they learned about God’s dream for them and God’s dream for this world.
But that was like over a thousand years ago by the time we get to John, right?
In that time, sometimes the people forgot God’s dream and their place in it.
So then prophets like Isaiah would rise up to remind them of the dream.
A dream of all peoples living together in peace and plenty,
when the wolf and the lamb will like down together,
and the adder will be drained of its poison.
But then the people forget the dream again.
So John takes the people out to the wilderness and calls them to change what they care about.
He says to them, “Repent!” That is, “Change what you care about!”
Have a change of heart, a change of mind, and change what you care about.
Care about what God cares about.
There’s good reason why John is so urgent about this.
Poverty and illness and injustice are rampant. Violence is a tremendous reality.
God’s dream is far from coming true.
And God’s people are not living the dream.
So John calls them to start over.
Come out to the wilderness, relearn the story, hear again what it is God cares about.
Learn how to share your manna so that everyone benefits.
And then, just like the Israelites of old graduated from wilderness school by
crossing the waters of the Jordan and entering the promised land in order to
live what they had learned –
So John has the people enter the Jordan River and come on out again so they can start over,
make a new beginning, and live what they have learned again.
He baptizes them so they can walk in newness of life – just like you were.
Now – there’s no denying this – he does get a little tetchy.
He gets all riled up – as I said last time I preached on this, when the Sadducees and the Pharisees
come out to him, he, uh, goes ballistic.
I think he thinks they are there just for the show of it,
even though they don’t really intend to change the way they live or what they care about.
But his urgency has to do with his wanting them to really change.
John really wants things and people to change.
He’s willing to use some pretty violent language to get there too, it seems.
Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
Whoa! John! Someone get him a gift certificate from that
Ten spa at the Fort Garry for his Christmas stocking!
And then he says: you know, if I can’t get you to change,
there is one who is coming after me who will scare the bejeezus out of you.
He’ll come with a winnowing fork and separate the good wheat from the chaff and then, and then
he’ll burn all the chaff with unquenchable fire.
It’s like, “Just you wait till your father gets home!”
Yeah: it’s kind of like that.
As we all know, Nelson Mandela died a few days ago, at the age of 95.
And as we also all know, he too was born into a country in turmoil,
a country of tremendous inequality and poverty and injustice and violence.
He decided to do something about it.
He joined the African National Congress that was dedicated to non-violent change,
along the lines of what Gandhi spear-headed in India in the 30s and 40s.
But after a time, Mandela came to think that non-violence was maybe not always appropriate.
In a widely circulated interview I watched this week from 1961 –
his very first television interview – a 43 year old Mandela says this:
There are many people who feel it is useless and futile for us to continue talking peace and non-violence against a government whose reply is only savage attacks on an unarmed and defenceless people and I think the time has come for us to consider in the light of our experiences . . . whether the methods we have applied so far are adequate.
So later in 1961 he founded the militant group Spear of the Nation and became its chair.
Ultimately his involvement in this led to a sentence of life imprisonment in 1964.
When change did not come about through non-violent means,
it seems as if Mandela was tempted by a similar urgency to John’s,
which threatened violence to an unjust regime.
Here’s the thing, though: when the one whom John foretells comes,
when Jesus actually turns up on the shores of the Jordan River and is baptized there
by his crazy cousin – the thing is, when Jesus comes nobody is burned up.
When Jesus comes, nobody dies – except ultimately him, of course. Nobody else dies!
Quite the opposite: when Jesus comes, everybody lives!
Jesus doesn’t kill anyone – Jesus fixes everyone.
Jesus fixes the sinner with forgiveness. Jesus fixes the hungry with food.
Jesus fixes the sick with healing.
Jesus even fixes the dead: right: far from killing the living, Jesus raises the dead. Ha!
Everyone lives when Jesus comes – even the dead.
No one is sent up in smoke: not Herod, not the Pharisees, not the Sadducees, not the Romans.
Everyone lives.
Maybe he takes a page out of Coach Noel’s book:
I know you get a lot more from sugar than from . . . Well, you know.
So it’s not surprising that later, when John is sitting in a jail cell of his own,
he sends a message to Jesus: So, are you really the one we’re supposed to be waiting for,
or . . . somebody else? What changes the people Jesus encounters is not a fiery threat of destruction,
but a fiery warmth of love and grace that they have never encountered before.
Jesus drains these vipers of their poison with his forgiveness and grace, and turns them
into the harmless asps and adders of Isaiah’s vision, who wouldn’t hurt a child.
And then Jesus goes a step further: Jesus forms communities in which everyone lives.
Communities in which men and women, slaves and free, Jews and Gentiles, blacks and whites
eat together, share bread and wine together, share their possessions together,
share their land together and live God’s dream together.
And it’s possible because Jesus figured out and lived the key to God’s dream.
The key of forgiveness that opens up the commonwealth of God’s coming.
And tith the help of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela figured it out too.
Resentment, he came to realize, is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.
When he was finally released from prison in 1990, he didn’t completely give up armed resistance
as a defensive measure, but he did recognize that a healthy nation could not be born in
violence and bloodshed, but only in peace and reconciliation:
So in 1996, with the help of Archbishop Tutu, Mandela oversaw the implementation of the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
founded on the healing balm of truth and forgiveness rather than
the poison of violence.
In 1999, at the opening address of the debate on the report of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he had this to say:
We recall our terrible past so we can deal with it, to forgive where forgiveness is necessary, without forgetting; to ensure that never again will such inhumanity tear us apart; and to move ourselves to eradicate a legacy that that lurks dangerously as a threat to our democracy.
To drain the poison from the viper, we might say,
so Isaiah’s vision and God’s dream might come that much closer to reality.
I think it took a lot of courage and a lot conviction and a lot of faith in
a God who is most at work in forgiveness and grace to implement the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.
And while no one would say that it was an unqualified success, it seems beyond doubt that
it is much, much better than what the alternative would have been.
And it has had far-reaching consequences, not least of which is
the Truth and Reconciliation process going on right now in our own country.
God’s reign of grace comes near in Jesus.
It comes near to John. It comes near to the Sadducees and it comes near to the Pharisees.
It comes near to Herod and it comes near to Pilate.
It comes near to the hungry and the sick and the grieving and the dead.
It comes near to blacks and it comes near to whites in South Africa.
And this morning it comes near to us at the table of Holy Communion,
where we are given the antidote to the poison of resentment in the medicine of forgiveness and grace.
It comes near to us and binds us together in a making real of Isaiah’s vision and
God’s dream right here and right now: at this table, everyone is fed, and everyone lives.
Yes: there is an urgency to this, but it is the urgency of love.
So together, let us come to the table, and together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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