Sermon on Matthew 3:1-12
Pastor Jennifer Garcia
Last week we talked about how jarring Jesus talking about the end times seems at the beginning of Advent, when there’s so much preparation for Christmas going on.
This week, our reading isn’t much cheerier. We’ve got John the Baptist telling people to repent and hurling insults at the religious authorities. Very festive.
There’s a gentleman who often hangs out in the parking lot of a grocery store near my home. He holds a sign that tells people they’ll go to Hell without Jesus, and he yells at people through a megaphone.
I often wonder how effective his strategy is. I, at least, find people loudly threatening me to be a turn-off.
And yet, our reading says that, despite John’s cantankerous demeanor, “Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to him.” Something in his message was appealing to people.
It may be because John was proclaiming that something big was coming. The prophets had said there would be a forerunner of the Messiah, that the prophet Elijah would return to prepare the way. The Gospel of Matthew’s description of John evokes Elijah—all the details about his clothing and lifestyle.
People recognized his role as someone to pay attention to because God was up to something.
John was letting them know that now was the time to examine their lives and make sure they were ready for what was coming—or rather who was coming.
As much as the word “repent” can sound threatening, it really just means to “change your mind,” or maybe more practically to “change your life.”
There’s a reason why self-help is a multi-billion-dollar industry. There’s a reason why people keep making New Year’s Resolutions year after year. The idea that you have the power to dramatically change your life for the better is appealing. And maybe transformation like that is only possible with God’s help.
So, John’s message to repent wasn’t punitive: he was inviting transformation. Most of us get to a point where we would welcome a fresh start at least a few times over the course of our lives.
So, people came to John to be baptized.
What baptism meant to them is different from what it means to modern day Christians.
In the first century, baptism was a cleansing ritual for converts to Judaism. It wasn’t something people who were already Jewish did.
But John called his fellow Jewish people also to be cleansed and confess their sins in preparation for the Messiah.
From John’s reaction to the religious leaders, we can assume that they were questioning why John was baptizing people who were already Jewish.
John responded by saying not to rely merely on their ancestors’ faith, and perhaps for the religious leaders, not to rely on their positions of power either. Instead, they should engage and connect with God themselves. He was, in his own cranky way, inviting them to join the Beloved Communtiy.
And we see in our reading from Romans that God’s mission of Beloved Community is for the whole world. Paul declared that Jesus came to “confirm the promises given to the ancestors and that the gentiles might glorify God.” Gentiles are included in the Beloved Community too—thankfully for any of us who don’t have any Jewish heritage. The Beloved Community includes anyone who wants to be a part of it. It’s open to all.
That’s God’s dream of inclusion and belonging for this world.
And our reading from Isaiah shows us another aspect of God’s vision for the world. It tells us that “with righteousness he shall judge for the poor / and decide with equity for the oppressed of the earth.” And then there’s the beautiful list of the vulnerable living safely: the wolf not harming the lamb, the leopard and the baby goat, the lion and the calf, the bear and the cow, and the snake not harming the human child.
In God’s vision for the world, the vulnerable will be safe.
Over the course of this week, though, I was starting to feel uncomfortable with this passage. The idea of cohabitating with predators started to trouble me.
Marginalized people probably won’t feel safe in the presence of someone who victimized them, even if they can’t harm them anymore. And someone who has been abused would probably feel unsafe around their abuser, even if they can’t harm them in the same way.
So, maybe the image of the wolf living with the lamb isn’t as comforting as it sounds. But perhaps it’ll help if we refrain from personifying the creatures in the Isaiah reading. Instead of reading the wolf as a human predator, we can let the wolf just be a wolf. A literal animal wolf isn’t wrong for hunting.
So, instead of the predator/prey aspect of the metaphor in our reading, we can understand it as expressing that, in the fullness of the Beloved Community, nothing will be harmful anymore. There will be no violence or injury or even anxiety about the possibility of harm—there will only be peace and safety, which will make room for joy. Fear will be replaced with delight in God.
John talked about bearing fruit. The fruit of the Beloved Community, as we see it in our readings today, is inclusion, safety, justice for the oppressed, and belonging for all.
As Lutherans, we might be uncomfortable with John’s calls to change our lives and bear fruit. It sounds awfully like works righteousness, having to do certain things to earn God’s love.
But let’s think about the image of bearing fruit. A tree doesn’t try to prove its worth by bearing fruit. It bears fruit as a natural process of living in a healthy environment and getting the right amount of sun and water and nutritious soil.
God’s creating a Beloved Community for a reason—with God’s help, we build a healthier environment together, and the fruit grows out of that.
We need God’s help to be ready for what God’s up to in the world—whether the first Christmas or the Advent of Christ at the end of time. There’s no amount of self-help books, New Year’s resolutions, or people yelling into megaphones in grocery store parking lots that can change our lives without the Holy Spirit bearing fruit in us.
In our baptisms as we understand them—distinct from John’s—God declares that we are part of God’s family forever. We can trust in that as we work together with God to create a safer, more inclusive, healthier Beloved Community where harm will give way to pure joy.
That’s God’s dream for this world. Instead of shouting that into a megaphone, let’s show it with our lives. That’s how we can prepare the way this Advent.