From the Pulpit:

Every year at this time when even the grinchiest of us has probably at the very least  brought home a poinsettia and given a passing thought to buying a gift or two, who steps into the middle of our path but old John the Baptist with locusts on his breath and still wearing that soggy flea-bitten outfit that has never seen a day at the dry cleaners? And every year when we gather for worship, after a darling  family lights the pink candle on our Advent wreath, the one that stands out as the rejoicing candle, here we go and I have to preach about how he ranted at the expectant crowds and called them a bunch of snakes.

And I have to admit as I’ve preached this passage for nine years now up till this time I’ve always seen him as something of a bully, a spoil-sport, an unpleasant but unavoidable obstacle to be dealt with. I’ve had the mindset that if we just give him five minutes of our attention then we can get back to the real business of Advent which is anticipating baby Jesus. Well, as I said last week, my thinking has changed this year, and that rather than preparation for the future I think the business of Advent is presence in the now, it is finding stillness in the promise that is going to come true in its own time. And I have a new appreciation for John as someone far more important than a distasteful roadblock to our singing Joy to the World. 

If you ever saw the movie A Christmas Story, you actually saw a fixture of my childhood, Higbee’s Department Store in Cleveland, Ohio, where every year I would wait with mother and brother to see Santa Claus. We would ride the Rapid Transit downtown, dressed up in party clothes, I’d be wearing velveteen leggings and white gloves, and we’d look at all the decorated windows with their animated mannequins before going to the toy department where Santa’s Workshop was waiting for us. The line would stretch through several steamy rooms, and though there were elves in attendance and huge displays of toys to entice us, we’d wait quite a while without even a glimpse of Santa. And the atmosphere of excitement tinged with fear was contagious among the hundreds of other waiting children. Had I been good enough? Was I asking for too much? Would I ask for enough? 

I imagine it was something like that for the people who were waiting that day to be baptized by John the Baptist. They’d be waiting on the other side of a hill, unable to see the river, having really not much of an idea of what they were in for or even a clear notion of why they were there. Just as I imagine that there are people here today who got cajoled into coming to church or even who came on their own steam but who wouldn’t be able to say what they came for. That’s perfectly OK. God works in ways none of us  understand. So there you’d be with your neighbor, and there is great energy in the crowd as the line slowly snakes forward towards what you don’t really know except that there is a tangible sense of promise in the air. You live in a world where the Roman soldiers ride around like Storm Troopers, where the tax collectors milk you out of every cent you make from eking out your existence on rented land. Any kind of promise sounds good.

And then you crest the hill, and you can see him down in the river, and suddenly you feel it in the pit of your stomach. You see him lower a young man into the water --  it’s still too far away for you to hear what he’s saying, because he’s saying it to the man, not the crowd -- and when that man stands dripping wet and walks to the bank and into the arms of strangers who are now his family, you can see that he has been transformed, and you know that if you go through with this you will never be the same.  And as you walk forward step by step, closer and closer to the river and the strange man, you know you will go through with it, even though you don’t comprehend what it means, even though excitement and anxiety buzz through you like an electrical current.  

John waves off the next person in line. He’s taking a break. He steps out of the water, his legs bare, the pelt of his tunic dripping, and the crowd steps back, expectant, and he bellows at them, You brood of vipers. They take five more steps back, as he warns them, being a Jew is not enough in itself. The God who breathed the universe into being can create good Jews from stones at the drop of a hat. The crowd is silent, but then, because these are all people who came to him risking transformation, they say, What then should we do? They are sincere. They have taken him seriously. Those who have been baptized can already feel their transformation. The others are eager even in their trepidation. I’m so reminded of the passage from the prophet Micah: He has told you, o man, what is good: What does the Lord require? to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. John looks at the ones who appear prosperous and tells them to be generous with their clothing and food. Tax collectors, who were the equivalent of drug lords in their day stepped out of the crowd and made themselves vulnerable. Teacher, what then should we do? He doesn’t tell them to take up a different line of work. He simply tells them to stop cheating people to line their own pockets. Finally even the soldiers come forth in  sincerity and he tells them to stop bullying and robbing people. Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your Lord. 

The crowd is silent, and then a buzz begins, whispers at first, it starts as a wondering – do you think he could be the one? You know how crowds do, the crescendo has a life of its own – they look at him with new eyes, imagining they may be seeing the Messiah standing before them, but he stops them. Instead of riding the crest of their expectation, instead of accepting the mantle of holiness, he tells them who he really is, a vital hinge figure whose role it is to prepare them to receive the Son of God.  

John is an odd dude, no doubt about it. Perhaps prophets need to stand out in the crowd in order to be heard. But I have a new appreciation of John this year. He knows who he is and understands the job he has to do, and it is to shake up the status quo, to get all these people, even Pharisees and tax collectors and soldiers, to leave their cozy lives, to turn them around, so that when the Christ arrives they will have hearts open to hear him.  

Our baptism is all about repentance, which, by the way, has nothing to do with self- flagellation. The Greek word, metanoia, literally means to have a new mind. It’s that colossal light bulb turning on when suddenly everything is clear as day. And so, my dear ones, we who have been baptized must always be asking the question those courageous people asked on the bank of the Jordan that day: What then should we do? I’m told that Americans will spend $450 billion on Christmas this year. That is staggering, especially when you realize that $10 billion would enable every person in the world to have safe drinking water and $13 billion would eliminate hunger everywhere. We are going to have a Christmas tree at our house, and we are giving toys to the children, and we’ll eat delicious food, but there are consequences of our baptism as well. Once we have had the cross emblazoned on our forehead in oil of chrism nothing will ever be the same again, and there is nothing in this world that can remove it. Maybe that cross, so like an  indelible tattoo, is the stamp of our metanoia, the seal of the mind of Christ transforming our minds, opening our eyes with Christ’s own love to the suffering of the world. We cannot heal all the world’s hurts. We cannot as individuals or as families or as a parish feed all the hungry, teach all the illiterate, comfort all the suffering, but we can do what we can do, and every act of kindness and generosity counts. You all have brought toys for poor children and food for the food pantry, but we have not done all we can do. I hope you read the article in the Almanac about Tererai Trent, the woman from Zimbabwe whose dream of an American education and a PhD has come true due to the work of Heifer International. If you feel you can, please make a contribution in one of the jars in the narthex or the parish life center and let’s see what kind of farm animal our parish can send to change someone’s life. Metanoia is a lifelong process. We take step after step, most of them baby steps, once in a while a leap. And every year at this time, just when we’re ready to slip into all the sentimentalism of the Hallmark card with glittery snow and rosy cheeked children we can count on John the Baptist to get in our way and remind us that we are called not only to be transformed but to be agents of transformation. It wouldn’t hurt us a bit to ask ourselves every morning when we look at ourselves bleary eyed in the mirror, What then should we do?

 Amen.