There he goes again, that loud-voiced firebrand of a prophet! Year in and year out—come
every Second Sunday of Advent—the lectionary makes sure that we don’t reach the baby Jesus
without having first confronted John the Baptist, the one the renowned Episcopal priest and
preacher Barbara Brown Taylor has called “the Doberman pinscher of the gospel,” “God’s
watchdog.”
Indeed, John is such a wild and wooly character, such a rugged and ascetic
nonconformist that many today find his figure to be scarcely believable. I mean,
really—living out there in the desert eating locusts (yuck!) and wild honey (hmm, yum!) and
wearing that scratchy old camel-hair tunic of his, too busy bellowing out the cry “Repent!”
to spend time cooking hot meals or laundering regular cloth garments.
But each Advent the lectionary lifts up this loud, bold-voiced John yet again in order to
remind us that the coming of Christmas serves a goal far more weighty than simply celebrating
the birth of an amazing child. For the coming of Christmas is meant to launch within our
lives an unsettling chain of events that begins with repenting our sin—that is, with turning
our own lives around, toward God’s will—and then continues onward and outward from there
toward turning the entire world upside down, toward redeeming all of its unjust institutions
and power structures, toward transforming the whole of human existence.
And it’s the fulfillment, the realization, of this truly wondrous goal, through the action
of God, that’s depicted for us in the prophetic vision recounted in today’s First Lesson.
Promises the prophet Isaiah: into this ever-so-troubled world of ours, filled as it is with
violence, injustice, and despair, God will send one who’s imbued with God’s own Spirit, with
God’s life-giving, despair-ending, ardor-bestowing, future-creating, world-transforming
Spirit. Into our world, God will send one who’s able to infuse new life into even an old
stump, one who’s able to set in motion a process for establishing justice and peace both here
in society—between the rich and the poor—and also in nature—between wild animals and
cattle—such that no one shall any longer hurt or destroy another.
Now, Isaiah does not name this One-Who-Is-to-Come, but we Christians inevitably fill in
that blank with the name “Jesus”! And it is the rough-hewn, hair-shirted John, John the
Baptist, who, like a blast from a ram’s horn, sounds for his generation the alert that, in
fulfillment of ancient prophetic longing, the advent of the Messiah is soon to be. Yes, it
is this stump-uprooting, wilderness-clamoring, justice-demanding John, John the Baptist,
who’s been sent by God to prepare the way, the “turning-the-world-upside-down” way of the
Lord.
As Matthew portrays this scene, out to John in the desert wilderness, in quest of his
baptism of repentance, stream whole groups of people who are widely recognized as religious
leaders. These include laypersons as well as priests, ones identified in our text as Pharisees
and Sadducees. But John, instead of welcoming these folk with open arms, blasts forth at them,
saying, “You bunch of snakes!… Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”
What are we to make of this blast? Well, perhaps these people were just “toying with [the
idea of] a change of heart, flirting with the message of this strange evangelist. Perhaps they
wanted [just] a bit of his message, but not too much—enough to clear [their] conscience and
remove [their] guilt, enough so that they need no longer be haunted by the past, enough to feel
good again”—but not so much as to require that they actually change their ways or use their
leadership positions to change society’s ways. John’s blast is telling them that true
repentance requires of persons and institutions a radical transformation. For “Repentance has
to do…with a new heart and [with the fruit of] a changed life.” (Charles Cousar, in Walter
Brueggemann, et al., Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV—Year
A [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995], pp. 17–18)
This ancient scenario puts me very much in mind of today’s America, where large numbers of
us—whether part of red states or of blue—are, figuratively speaking, wanting to go hear John
preach in the wilderness. That is, we are wanting to elevate the influence of “values” in our
culture. Yet, like those Pharisees and Sadducees of old, so many of us don’t have a vision of
just how all-encompassing the “values” espoused by the Messiah really are, of just how radical
the changes being called for by the Messiah really are.
Make no mistake about it. Repenting of our personal sins is important, and we who call
ourselves progressive are much too prone to consider as inconsequential conservatives’ focus
on personal righteousness—on being sexually faithful, on being philanthropically generous, on
being devotionally pious. Yes, we do indeed need to repent of our sexual infidelity, of our
philanthropic stinginess, of our devotional barrenness.
Yet personal sins are not the be-all and end-all of “values” issues. For it is the case
that we affluent and comfortable Americans, whether “progressive” or “conservative”—it is the
case that we “let the powerful institutions of our society do most of our sinning for us”—from
our federal government, with its commitment to pre-emptive warfare at the expense of other
peoples’ lives, right down to Wal-Mart, with its commitment to low prices at the expense of its
own workers’ wages and benefits. The sins of these institutions serve us so well, offering us
security and a better lifestyle, so we stand by in silence and reap their harvest. (See David
Hilfiker, M.D., “What Would Repentance Look Like?” in The Living Pulpit, July-September,
2004, Volume 13, No. 3, pp. 22–23.)
But our lesson from Isaiah makes it quite clear how important it is for the behavior of
institutions as well as for the behavior of individuals to be evaluated and judged in light of
God’s intention that justice and peace shall reign in the world and in light of God’s desire
that in every nation the meek, the poor, and the socially powerless shall stand on an equal
footing with the brash, the wealthy, and the powerful.
Yet for some reason we progressives have not been able to express with a voice so loud and
bold as our conservative brothers and sisters our vision of values that need to be
strengthened in American society. Somehow, we have not succeeded in effectively engaging our
conservative sisters and brothers in dialogue about the necessity for governments and
corporations, for principalities and powers, to repent and to follow the way of higher
values.
Imagine how positively transforming it would be if we progressives were able, with a voice
as loud and bold as John the Baptist and Jesus himself, to summon our nation’s governments and
corporations to espouse a value higher than maximizing power and wealth. Imagine how positively
transforming it would be if we were able to summon our nation’s governments and corporations, as
Rabbi Michael Lerner has recently put it, to espouse the value of maximizing people’s ability “to
be loving and caring, [to be] ethically and ecologically sensitive, and [to be] capable of
responding to the universe with (wonder and awe) [rather than with shock and awe].” Imagine if
we “could talk[, with a voice both bold and convincing,] about the strength that comes from love
and generosity and [imagine if we could] appl[y] that [strength] to foreign policy and
homeland security.” Imagine if we could call, with a voice both bold and convincing, “for
schools to teach gratitude, generosity, caring for others, and [a] celebration of the wonders
that daily surround us!” (Rabbi Michael Lerner, “The Democrats Need a Spiritual Left, November
4, 2004, found at www.commondreams.org/views04/1104-01.htm, p. 2)
It seems to me that the last time the raising of progressives voices in a call for national
and corporate repentance had a genuinely transforming influence or effect was when our moral
agenda was linked with the spiritual politics articulated by that John-the-Baptist-like figure
named Martin Luther King, Jr. But as Rabbi Lerner has observed, “We cannot wait for the
reappearance of that kind of charismatic leader to begin the process of rebuilding a
spiritual/religious Left.” (Ibid., p. 3) We must undertake that task ourselves—and right
now.
The basis for a progressive spiritual/religious platform within Christianity is clear. The
word “justice” occurs about 130 times in the NRSV translation of the Bible; the word “peace,”
some 270 times. There can be no doubt that the elimination of poverty and the ending of war
are in fact the urgent moral issues we progressives believe them to be. Yet—to cite just one
particular economic issue out of many—in this, the richest nation in all the world, more than
11% of all households have to struggle mightily to feed themselves, and a third of these are
not successful in that struggle.
As Bob Herbert of the New York Times put it in his column of Nov. 22, “we don’t hear
much about [these statistics] because hunger is associated with poverty, and poverty is not even
close to becoming part of our national conversation. Swift boats, yes. Sex scenes on ‘Monday
Night Football,’ most definitely. The struggle of millions of Americans to feed themselves?
Oh no. Let’s not go there. What does that tell [us] about American values?”
And as for the moral issue of war, can one even begin to imagine that the Jesus who told his
disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane to put up their swords—can one even begin to imagine that
this Jesus would sanction, under any circumstances, a pre-emptive war?
Yet somehow the issues of economic justice and peace, of the ethical and spiritual behavior
of principalities and powers, of the ethical and spiritual behavior of governments and
corporations—somehow these issues have been allowed to disappear from our nation’s moral radar
screen. Thus, the very heart of the Bible’s prophetic witness has been eliminated from our
national discussion of “values,” and both corporate greed and governmental militarism have been
offered a free and hellish license to do most of our sinning for us, while most of us stand
silently by.
It was Martin Luther King who once said: “We shall have to repent in this generation, not so
much for the evil deeds of the wicked people, but for the appalling silence of the good
people.”
John the Baptist, Jesus himself, and Martin Luther King—all of these possessed both a
trustworthy ethical compass and a loud, bold voice, and all of them showed us through their
lives how a steadfast, vocal moral minority can turn the world upside down, can redeem unjust
institutions and power structures, and can transform human existence.
So let us this day pick up the prophetic mantles of John, of Jesus, and of Martin. Let us,
like them, dare to offer the world spoken testimony to just how much God values justice and peace.
Let us, like them, call to repentance institutions as well as individuals, and let us, like them,
do so with a loud, bold voice.
Let us pray:
“O God, [You} whose will is justice for the poor and peace for the afflicted, let (the urgent
voice of Your herald John) pierce our hardened hearts and announce [to us] the dawn of Your [reign].
Before the [coming of Jesus,] the one who baptizes with the fire of the Holy Spirit, let our
complacency give way to conversion, oppression to justice, and conflict to acceptance of one another
in Christ. We ask this through [the one] whose coming is certain, whose day draws near: Your Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and
ever.” Amen. (Excerpts from the English translation and the original alternative opening prayers
from The Roman Missal © 1973, International Committee on English in the Liturgy, Inc. [ICEL].
As quoted in “Repentance,” The Living Pulpit, July-September, 2004, Volume 13, No. 3, p.
49)