Posted Sermon: 2009_12_13 - "Doable"

“Doable”
3rd Sunday of Advent; 12-13-2009
Luke 3:7-18, Philippians 4:4-7, Isaiah 12:2-6
Last week I helped put out the manger and almost all the figures, but I didn’t put out baby Jesus. “Why not?” you might ask. Carols are everywhere. There’s only one more Sunday before Christmas morning. Why, then is the church still making us wait? And why is the church still making us listen this morning to John, the man who one commentator calls the “rough-voiced, almost reckless prophet who wouldn’t last five minutes in most of our pulpits”? Well, there are a couple of reasons.
First, because waiting is important. As Fred Craddock says, “withdraw from any occasion the anticipation of it, and even an event of great importance is much impoverished”. Or to quote most moms and dads at this time of year, “don’t look around for your presents because that will spoil your Christmas”. Patience and anticipation are an important theme at this time of year. In fact, it is one theme that the world and the faith actually have in common. John is the prophet who tells us we are to wait for another, more powerful prophet. Anticipation is one important reason, but the other reason we are still listening to John today is that he has something to say to us.
What he has to say separates the world and the faith rather drastically, and in John’s rhetoric, it sounds harsh. But if you take it apart, even just a little, you discover that crazy old animal-skin clad John has something to tell us that is, well, very “doable”. It is something that feeds our souls and takes us down the Advent road to the manger by teaching us that we must first become “content”.
When we look up the word “contentment” in the dictionary, we don’t expect to see a picture of “the Baptist” there, donning a scratchy mohair vest as he leans over to scrape up some locust for his breakfast. John makes us think of repentance, not contentment, but the two concepts are related.
A person who is content is not striving for anything. They are not looking for someone else’s food or gold. They are not searching for ways to spread their influence over an ever larger group of people. The content person has turned away from these things. The content person has, therefore, “repented” of them.
All of us by virtue of our being human are frequently striving. But John told the busy Roman worker bees who came out to see him in the desert—that is the empire builders and the puppets of the state like the tax collectors and soldiers—that they should be satisfied with their wages, content with the number and kind of their possessions. He told them to pay more attention to the con-tent of their lives than to the long list of complaints and places of compliance that drove them to seek more. He told them that there was something overwhelming to come, and to “bear fruits worthy of repentance” in the mean time, while they wait for it to arrive.
It is impossible to hide the fact that John knew things were about to change. Here he spoke of the future as a time of “wrath”, presumably God’s wrath. But he never went into detail; and in fact, he makes this strong statement and then moves on to an explication of what can be done to avoid that wrath—what kind of fruits are worthy of repentance. John’s words are fearful sounding on the surface, but he is no prophet of fear.
It is strange to me how those “left-behinders” that proselytize the end of the world dwell on the blood, gore and disaster of the end of days. Whenever they talk about how to prepare for them, they focus narrowly on being “saved”, without ever mentioning the top two things that John mentions on his list—practicing love and justice.
John gives us something that is immanently doable. He doesn’t even use vague and vaunted vocabulary like “love and justice”. No, he says, “if you have two coats, give one away to someone who has no coat; if you have food, share it”. It can’t get much more doable than that. And he doesn’t ever say that this will “save” anyone. He just says that we have an obligation always and everywhere to be ethical, but especially now as the end times approach.
“Be content,” he says to the tax collectors—collect no more than you are prescribed to collect. “Be content,” he says to the soldiers—don’t extort money, threaten or cajole anyone.
Being content is paying more attention to the content of our lives than we do to those things we want; being content in this way makes generosity possible. Mariam Kammell writes: “contentment is never an easy lesson, particularly when we have the means to attain what we wish, but it is a crucial fruit of repentance, for it reveals a steadfast trust in God and in God’s work and will”.
Are you someone that has difficulty producing a Christmas list for yourself? I am, and so is my spouse. Year after year, we rack our brains around Thanksgiving to come up with things that we want for Christmas. We usually forget to write them down, and then we have to start all over again a couple of weeks before Christmas. As our children get older, they seem to be falling into this same pattern. Now, I could be frustrated with this—but I’m not. In fact, I take it as a good sign of God’s overall providence and so I thank the Lord, that we are mostly content with our life.
John’s message is stronger than just, “be content” though. It comes out of a definite context and points to a much more subtle, but probably more essential element of contentment. We are not just to be content with what we have—but also wary of how we use our power. His message says that we should not use our power to injure others. The tax-collectors and the soldiers each had plenty of power, though they held it only as the proxy of the state. John tells them to wield that power with great restraint. He reminds them that there will be reconciliation at the end, and how they use their power today will determine how power will one day be used by others. Repentance, for John, means turning around our tendency to grasp for more than we need, whether it be goods, money, or power.
Have you ever thought about the power you have? Most of us, including me, are given far more power than we realize during the course of an average day. The key to honoring John’s call to repentance and contentment is to remember to treat everyone we meet as a child of God. Never assume you are NOT being given power by those you encounter. Here is a story from the Upper Room Devotional that speaks to this:
I stopped at the bank on my way home from work. My mind swirled with thoughts of all I had to do that evening: make dinner, finish the laundry, attend volleyball practice, grade papers. As I stepped up to the teller at the counter and passed the deposit slip to her, she threw it back at me, saying, "What do you think I am, a mind reader?" I had neglected to fill in my account information.
My first reaction was to ask to speak to the manager, but something about the look in her face stopped me. In the past, she had helped me in a friendly and efficient manner. So instead, I asked, "Are you having a bad day?"
At this she burst into tears and said, "My daughter had surgery today, and I couldn't be with her; I couldn't get the time off." I reached my hand across the counter and held hers while she cried. From then on when I came into the bank, she always said, "This is my customer." I learned her name, and she told me that her daughter had recovered from her illness.
I know that God intervened. If I had reported her, she might have lost her job, which would have complicated her life even further. God gave me patience and taught me a lesson in compassion that day. Ann V. Ingalls (Missouri, USA)
The Christmas movies are all over the cable channels now, showing us visions of green and gold Christmas trees and smiling families gathered around warm fires. So why are we leaving those warm visions of hearth and home in order to join the crowds who trekked out into the wilderness to listen to a wild man? Maybe it’s because Advent takes place in the wilderness. God does come to us in the long stretches of wasteland that lies between the campfires. Listen to these words to a familiar song from a couple of decade ago:
Now he walks in quiet solitude the forests and the streams
Seeking grace in every step he takes
His sight has turned inside himself to try to understand
The serenity of a clear blue mountain lake
And the Colorado Rocky Mountain high
I’ve seen it raining fire in the sky
You can talk to God and listen to the casual reply
But there is more to God’s revelation than just taking a journey into the wilderness, as powerful and moving as that can be. Luke finishes the passage today by telling us that the crowds were so swayed by John’s proclamation that they began to “question in their hearts whether he might not be the Messiah”. But John pointed beyond himself, to the specific revelation of Jesus Christ. And when Jesus came to him and was baptized, God upped the ante. John gave us something we can do—and Jesus gave us the example and the means to do it.
We still listen to John today because he calls the church to become a prophetic voice. Just as his birth restored the voice of his father Zechariah (last week), our preparations for the one to come restore our witness and our faith. In the final few days before the coming of that Holy night, John calls us to repent and be content—to share our goods and use our power carefully. Because we still are listening to the “voice crying out in the wilderness”, we know that poverty, inequity and hunger will not have the final word .
Come, O Come, Emmanuel—God with us…