"Joy"

Luke 2:8-20

December 25, 2016

I.

There is a scene near the beginning of the movie, “City Slickers,” where Billy Crystal is having a bout of mid-life depression, finally indicated by his using giant office scissors to trim the hair in his ears.  Ear hair being a sure indication that one’s life is over.  Finally, his wife urges him to take this vacation with his friends at a ranch out west.  “Go and find your joy,” she says.  I think she mainly wanted to get his morose self out of the house.  But he does, and we get a wonderful and funny film out of it.  But is joy what he finds?  Or just a few great lines and lot of laughs?  

I haven’t done a survey on the use of oversized office scissors, but I am finding many people for whom the joy has left their lives, if there ever was much to begin with.  This is kind of a puzzle for us because we live pretty comfortably, all things considered.  You’d think joy would not be that hard to come by when we have Netflix and Spotify, and Amazon will deliver anything to our door in a couple of days.  But it becomes clear that whatever modern conveniences and entertainments do for us, they don’t bring us joy.  

Our republic is in part based on a document that talks about our right to “pursue happiness.”  But happiness is not the same as joy, even though we often confuse them.  Happiness is based on circumstances, while joy is something you have inside you no matter what's going on in your life.  Happiness is superficial and can be bought.  I’m sure a 2017 Porsche 960 would make me happy for a little while, and it would only cost $200,000 (if anybody’s looking for a last-minute Christmas gift for me).  I would be happier if certain people in my various circles got along better, but since that’s about as likely as the Porsche, I am probably going to have to find it elsewhere.  Or let that go and focus on the joy.            

This is supposed to be the season of joy.  We see the word “joy” spelled out in red, green, and gold at the mall or on people’s houses.  But for many if not most of us December is more a time of stress than joy.  And our credit card bills haven’t even come yet.  This particular December is worse because I know a lot of people who justifiably feel concerned for their own safety after about January 20.  So there’s that.  

In addition to everything else we do to ensure a meaningful holiday.  Including all the many things done by some of you to make our services this weekend go well.  But there’s traffic and occasional bad weather, and if you’re  a student you have finals and papers due, and choirs have extra rehearsals.  And the lack of sunlight has a the effect of depressing people’s mood, which explains a lot about December, including the increased utilization of chemical mood enhancers, like Egg Nog.    

We can’t all find our joy by taking a vacation out west herding cattle on the range with Jack Palance and Helen Slater.  Jack Palance is dead, for one thing.  (Hopefully, the Lord is not making him angry in heaven, which is a watered-down reference to the best line from that movie, which is not quite repeatable from the pulpit.)  

And artificially pumping up the happiness often seems rather strained.  Not to be too much of a Scrooge or anything.

II.

In our passage for today the word joy appears as part of the message the angel of the Lord delivers to the shepherds about “wonderful, joyous news for all people.”  The traditional renderings talk about “good news of great joy.”  But the point is that the angel, followed up by no less than “a great assembly of the heavenly forces” glorifying God and proclaiming God’s shalom among the people, comes to shepherds, of all people.  

Being a shepherd was not a happy job.  It was cold, lonely, responsible, unremunerative, and grueling work.  Shepherds were near the bottom rank of minimum-wage workers (just above anyone employed dumping livestock excrement into the Dead Sea — which still happens by the way, as I reminded those enthusiastic young people at the mall pushing skin-care products made of salt from the same Dead Sea, which they did not appear to appreciate.  That sea is dead for a reason… but I digress).

You’d think the angels could have found a slightly higher class of people than shepherds to appear to, for heaven’s sake.  Since when and to whom do shepherds matter?  Maybe the angels had a malfunction in their cosmic GPS and intended to appear gloriously over the spectacular Temple under construction in Jerusalem, but missed an exit or something and set up over a hillside near Bethlehem by mistake.

But no, of course, God chooses the shepherds on purpose to make a point about the Messiah coming to turn things upside down, which we heard in his mothers’ hymn in the previous chapter.  The baby born in Bethlehem will proclaim that the last will be first and the first will be last.  So it is perfectly consistent for angels from the highest heaven to appear to lowly shepherds.  Shepherds do matter to God; as will lepers, disabled people, foreigners, children, women, the sick, and the “tax-collectors and prostitutes” Jesus will be famous for associating with.        

When we visited Palestine, our hotel was half a block from the field where the shepherds were hanging out that very night.  There’s a village there called Beit Sahour.  The people in Beit Sahour understand what its like not to matter.  They experience persecution every day.  Their streets are scarred by tank tracks.  I met people whose children were abducted by Israeli soldiers in the middle of the night, something that happens a lot, and is reminiscent of King Herod’s policies 20 centuries before. 

Beit Sahour is 80% Christian. The people in Beit Sahour still identify with those shepherds.  They still derive hope from the story that God appeared to a bunch of nobodies languishing under night sky suffering the business-end of colonialism, empire, and the market economy.  Because they suffer the same kinds of injustice and persecution.  

Maybe real joy is based on hope because it doesn’t depend on what is actually going on out there in the world of politics and economics.  Maybe the fact that soldiers bulldozed your house because you put on an extra room for your son and daughter-in-law can’t diminish a joy that it is based on your hope in the Kingdom of Heaven.    

III.

After experiencing the angels these shepherds go immediately up the valley to Bethlehem to see for themselves.  And all they see is a new-born baby sleeping in an animal feed trough in an obscure corner of the crowded town.  Once again it seems like there should have been a woman with them to ask for directions.  Such circumstances seem rather unlikely for the arrival of God’s promised Messiah.  Spectacular heavenly choir! — smelly and sweaty barn?

But the shepherds go back still praising God, which tells me that joy becomes real in its expression.  They trust the angels’ appearance, which after was a pretty remarkable thing to witness.  Better than the aurora borealis!  Praise is the visible demonstration of joy, as well as faith and hope.

I am reminded of the ending of my favorite Christmas TV special, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (not the ghastly Jim Carrey abomination, but the original animated version, narrated by Boris Karloff).  After the malicious Grinch destroys all the trappings of the holiday, from food to presents to decorations, and carts it all up to the top of Mt. Crumpit to dump it, the little Who people wake up on Christmas morning.  And instead of moaning in grief, horror, and rage, they gather holding hands in a circle in the village around the place where the tree had been, and still joyfully sing their “welcome Christmas!” song.

I love that!  The superficialities and the material trappings don’t matter!  Our own losses and hurt and suffered injustices don’t matter either!  All that matters is the joy, the togetherness, the gratitude, and the song.  Unlike mere happiness, joy is within us, and it gets revealed when we show that it can’t be derailed by circumstance or bad events.  It cannot be taken away from us.  It is part of who we are.  It is part of the way God made the world itself.

Joy is embedded in the fabric of creation itself; it is in our bones and our sinews.  We get in touch with it by expressing it, even if we don’t feel it and even if we don’t see any evidence justifying it.  Joy is life!

So we sing these Christmas songs now with full hearts, embracing and joy and the praise, the gratitude and the wonder.  Relying on the hope and the trust that because of this baby in this manger we know that God is with us, and everything will be good.  Everything will thrive and glow.  Everything will be made right.  Because Christ is born in Bethlehem!

+++++++

"The Lord Saves."

Matthew 1:18-25

December 18, 2016

I.

In Matthew’s gospel, we see from the very first how God is challenging our normal, standard understanding of God.  His book opens with a genealogy, where he pointedly mentions 4 women with all the men.  Each of these women was suspect and tainted.  Each was a victim in a different way.  They are Tamar, who posed as a prostitute to seduce her father-in-law, Ruth, who was a foreigner, Bathsheba, who was probably a rape victim, and Mary, who gets pregnant before her wedding.  Yet not only are they all particularly blessed by God in carrying an important part of the story of God’s people, Matthew shows how their witness and their lives are fulfilled in serving to bring into the world the promised Messiah, Jesus Christ.  

It’s almost like, along with the list of men, which includes no less than all the kings of Judah beginning with David, we find this quiet, subtle, understated, alternative but essential voice of these women.  As if to say, “Yeah, but not even these kings could bring the Messiah into the world on their own.  Even the kings needed women; and God chose these particular women, each of whom has what society would consider moral “issues;” and now God is choosing another particular woman with similar issues for the greatest task of all.     

In the prologue to John’s gospel we hear about how the Word is born into the world “not by the will of man.”  The text is not being generic here; it means not by the will or action of a male human.  Not only is bringing God into our lives not a project that can be accomplished by people in their sinful, alienated, ego—centric state, it is especially not something that can be done by any man.  God doesn’t force “his” way into the world.  

In a society run and dominated by and for men, this is a revolutionary assertion.  In a society where women were barely more than property, and often considered mere objects for pleasure, domestic labor, and child-bearing, the idea that a woman, not a man, would be necessary for God’s emergence, is a radical and subversive one.  

Indeed, the only role in this story for a man is what we see in Joseph.  His job is to get out of the way, set his privilege and his rights aside, adopt and protect what is in effect someone else’s child, giving him someone else’s name, and take on himself his wife’s likely social ostracization.  Joseph has to empty himself of all male ego, all male jealousy, all male pride, all male reason, and all male privilege.  He has to follow, of all things, his dreams.

Instead of dealing with this situation “like a man,” with decisiveness and strength, he has to let himself be used.  He has to go along with a plan he had nothing to do with, gains nothing from, and costs him his whole life.  He has to go along with a plan that is even contrary to Scripture, as it was usually interpreted. 

So we see the necessary conditions for God’s arrival among us and even within us.  We have to, as we say today, get over ourselves.  We have to let go of whatever resentments, desires, memories, moral standards, expectations, and sentimentalities we may harbor.  We have to let go of our own strength, rationality, and reputation.  We have to get ourselves out of the way.   We have to empty ourselves so that God may self-empty in and through us.

When Matthew relates that “Mary became pregnant by the Holy Spirit,” it is therefore first of all to insist that this happens outside the normal, standard, male-dominated regime of society.  Mary’s offspring will not owe his life to an earthly father.  He is not subject to the system.  

II.

Secondly, Mary’s pregnancy does not mean that some alien thing, this Holy Spirit, invades her from the outside.  The followers of Jesus have always understood the Holy Spirit to be everywhere and to fill all things.  The Spirit is the breath of God by which God creates the universe.  In Genesis, God creates by speaking, which means that God’s Voice, God’s Word and Spirit, God’s Wisdom, is embedded and encoded in everything that is.  All matter, all energy, all life, everything resonates with God’s frequency.  It all belongs to God and declares God’s glory, as the Psalms teach us.  The universe and everything in it is literally God-shaped.  

Mary’s pregnancy is a realization of something already inside of her.  The point is not about gynecology, which is what we like to reduce it to.  That would make this story ridiculous, which is fine with many people today.  If it’s ridiculous we can forget about it or ignore it.  We can self-righteously roll our eyes and decide not to say that part of the creed.  We can decide that that is an unbelievable myth that we modern people have grown out of and don’t need any more.  As if this was written to be taken literally, and since we are way too smart to take it literally, we have no choice but to reject it because of course we know better.

But what if it is not written to be taken literally in that sense?  What if it’s not about how to physically conceive a child, any more than the story of the feeding of the 5000 is about how to make bread?  What if the real meaning of this story concerns spirituality and human life?  What if it is about how we encounter and experience God?  What if it is about the meaning and purpose of human life?

This is one of those stories where, if you take it literally, you completely miss the point, which is much higher and deeper than the superficial literal reading.  Then we get into arguments about taking it literally… and lose the real meaning of the story altogether.    

This story basically tells us an essential spiritual truth, that we do not have to wait for God to come to us from out there.  We do not have to look elsewhere for God.  We do not have to seek God outside of ourselves.  We do not have to wait until we are given something from beyond us that we do not already have.  God does not invade the world or us.  

The Holy Spirit is already in Mary, as is the case for all of us, and everything.  She only has to be open to her true self, to who she really is.  She only has to be open to the destiny God has already placed within her and within everything.  True spirituality involves letting go of whatever in us is keeping us from knowing and participating in our true Self.  

  

III.

Joseph is instructed in a dream to bear responsibility for and give protection to this process as it unfolds in Mary.  His first job is to protect her from the law and its self-righteous enforcers.  He has to protect her from the humiliation and public disgrace she could expect from the upright religious people.  He has to protect her from the authorities who would presume to protect society.

And in embracing her, he himself has to share in her disgrace.  That is the character of his protection, to take on himself the humiliation and hostility resulting from this unusual and scandalous circumstance.  He is to give up his fear and replace it with a love that stands with her.  God could have waited until they were safely married to do all this.  But that would rob Joseph of the opportunity to lose his own illusions and fears, jealousies and control.  The new life is never cost-free, easy, convenient, and comfortable. 

He is told to name the child Jesus because “he will save his people from their sins.”  “Jesus” means “the Lord saves” in Hebrew.  The word “save” means heal, restore, deliver, and make whole or complete.    

Sins are the specific manifestations of sin, which is the discontinuity between who we think we are and who we really are.  Because we are living in a world we have concocted out of our ego-centric, self-serving, fear, our lives are disordered and destructive, out of synch with God’s reality.  We’re off the mark.  We are living a lie.  Jesus will save people from this condition and its consequences by revealing and demonstrating the truth.  He will show us what it is like to be in synch with God’s reality.  He will himself be the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  It will be by following him that people come into harmony with God.  In following him people literally get real. 

This happens, he will show, by humility.  In Jesus, God self-empties, becoming flesh to dwell among us, and even taking on our own death, on a cursed Roman cross, no less.  He shows that to realize God’s life we have to give up our twisted excuse for life.  We do not have to receive anything new so much as lose what we are holding on to which gets in the way of God’s Presence already with and within us.   

For God saves us from within us and among us.  This is what Joseph’s dreams are telling him.  Do not fear.  But now salvation is arising in this child who will be born to Mary.  God is going to be with-us, as Isaiah prophesied, conceived within a woman and emerging among us as one of us.   

Once we stop putting so much time and energy into maintaining our false selves, God’s life begins to emerge.  God seeps up into human life through the broken places and the broken people; God identifies with them.  God’s activity is characterized by self-emptying.  God pours life out in love.  Here is God’s m.o.  God finds the empty places and fills them.  God finds the cracks and shines through them.      

IV.

What we see here is not the powerful, violent, retributive, strong, male, explosive, penetrating picture we usually have of God.  Matthew is asking us to look at how God not only chooses the weak, the gentle, the generous, the abused, and the unlikely, but now in his gospel we will see how God blesses and  becomes these qualities in Jesus, redeeming them, transfiguring them, and showing them to be the Way to life and salvation.

+++++++

The One Who Is to Come.

Matthew 11:1-10

December 11, 2016

I.

The season of Advent asks us to focus on John the Baptizer, who is the Lord’s advance man, getting people ready to receive him.  Here we have an indication that even John has his doubts about whether Jesus is really the One.  

John is in prison for his anti-government activity.  So he may have felt depressed that his work is fruitless and frustrated.  If his agenda is to announce the coming of the Christ to all of Judea, he hasn’t succeeded.  And he notices that Jesus’ ministry, while it has an identical basic message of repentance because of the nearness of God’s Kingdom, is different.  John is a severe ascetic, featuring rigorous fasting and self-denial.  Jesus, on the contrary, is known for such laxity of lifestyle that some accuse him of being a glutton and a drunkard.  If John is about judgment and wrath, Jesus expresses forgiveness and love, gathering to himself all manner of low-lifes, sinners, infirm, and outcast people.

John is so concerned about Jesus’ ministry, that he manages from prison to send some of his disciples to check Jesus out.  He wants to know if they really are on the same side.  So they find Jesus and ask him, “Are you the One who is to come?  Or should we look for somebody else?”  Are you the Messiah, the Christ, the chosen, anointed Redeemer of Israel?  Are you the Bringer of the Kingdom of Heaven?  Or is John mistaken about you, and we need to keep a lookout for someone else?

I think this is a question many bring to church with them.  Even some who have been attending for years, may still have this question lurking in the back of their brains.  Is this Jesus the One?  Is he the only One?  Is he the One who can save and heal me?  Is he the One I should follow?  Is he, well, God?  Is he worth getting up early on a Sunday and schlepping over here to hear about?  Is he worth associating with these other people who seem to think he’s worthwhile?   Is he going to change my life for the better?  Or should I continue to shop around… maybe check out Buddhism or Islam… or better yet, just sleep in and not deal with institutional religion at all and just, you know, be spiritual on my own?

The answer Jesus gives to John’s disciples is basically, “You tell me.  Look around.  See what is happening here.  You tell me if this is what you are looking for.  You tell me if this is what the Christ is supposed to be doing.  You tell me if I am the One for you.  See for yourself.  I am not going to give you a speech and try to sell myself to you.  Look around.  You tell me.”    

So presumably they do just that.  Perhaps they interview people in Jesus’ group. Perhaps they watch what is going on, observing the disciples and how they treat each other.  Maybe they see what kind of a community they have, how they pray, what they teach and preach.  Maybe they listen to what people in the villages and in the countryside have to say.  The probably do the same kinds of things we would do to evaluate a ministry today.

Jesus tells them and us what they’re going to find.  “Those who were blind are able to see.  Those who were disabled are walking.  People with skin diseases are cleansed.  Those who were deaf now hear.  Those who were dead are raised up.  The poor have good news proclaimed to them.”

II.

These are the marks of Jesus’ ministry, then and now.  They describe a community where the living God is active and having a direct impact on people’s lives.  This is the proof that Jesus is who he says he is.  This is the proof that we are his disciples and that he is with us still by the power of his Holy Spirit.

When someone comes to our church and wants to know if Jesus is the One for them, we need to be able to say exactly what Jesus says here.  “Look around.  See for yourself.  Talk to people; listen to their stories.  You tell me.”

And in doing so we do have to get beyond the limited, literal, reductionist interpretation of these things.  Yes, Jesus heals people of physical sickness, and that sometimes happens today.  At the same time, these are metaphors for larger and deeper issues.  The church is not primarily a health clinic.  So this is about overcoming more than bodily illness, disability, and death. 

• So being a place where “Those who were blind are able to see,” means that we bring people to enlightenment, true knowledge, real perception, and broader understanding and awareness.  It means people come to see from a higher, wider, and more inclusive perspective we see more of the relationships and connections between us that unite us.  
• When we talk about how “Those who were disabled are walking,” we mean helping people who were paralyzed by fear to get somewhere in their lives.  We bring people to experience new freedom, empowerment, and ability.  We give them permission and bring them to emancipation from powers that had held them back or down.   
• In Jesus’ day, people with skin diseases were excluded from worship and from the community in general.  They were forced to live apart as pariahs.  One of Jesus’ most characteristic actions is to welcome and include all kinds of people in his circle, especially those whom society deemed to be diseased and defective and dangerous.  By embracing them, we in the church cleanse others of their social label of being defiled and infectious.  
• “Those who were deaf now hear,” means that we allow people to hear others’ voices, especially cries for help and justice.  It means we value open and honest communication, we speak the truth, and we listen to each other with an empathy that identifies and resonates with people.  
• The church has always been about bringing people from death to life, this is what baptism symbolizes.  “Those who were dead are raised up” from the things that keep people spiritually dead and inert, like addiction, like anger,  shame, and hatred.  Like ideologies that keep us locked in dark tombs of despair and convention from which we see no way out.  
• Finally, in the church, “The poor have good news proclaimed to them.”  Jesus is here accessing the teaching from Leviticus on Jubilee and sabbath.  These were times built into the economy for release from indebtedness, restitution of lost property, and equitable distribution of wealth.

III.

And we don’t spiritualize or psychologize these categories either.  Each one of them leads us to concrete action in the world, not just a change in opinions or mindset.  Each one changes our actual behavior, what we do and say, how we relate to each other and to God’s creation.  We relate to these areas in how we vote, how we spend our money, how we use our time, and what we do with our bodies.

These six things, at least, have to be happening in every church, in my view.  When people ask if Jesus is the-One-who-is-to-come, we have to be able to point to where these things are happening around and among us.  Because these are the indications that we are disciples of Jesus Christ and that we have his authority and power.  

Because doing these things is not normal in a society and economy that prefers people stay blind, lame, unclean, deaf, dead, and broke.  Because those who view themselves in these broken and defective ways are easy to convince that their salvation is in working for someone else and buying things.  Such people are easy to control and herd into dead-end jobs and superficial, temporary relationships.

These are the people to whom God sends us.  Unfortunately, too often they are precisely the people the church has wanted to stay away from.  Some imagine, with some justification, that the only people welcome in church are those who have it all together.  As if this were where healthy and successful people came to congratulate themselves that they are not like those other pathetic losers who aren’t “saved.”

No.  Jesus’ gathering is a place where healing and wholeness happen, and healing and wholeness don’t happen to people who did not start out diseased and broken.  If you think you have it all together this is the last place you belong.

John’s disciples presumably look around and see and hear what Jesus is doing.  Then they leave.  We don’t know if they were impressed or disappointed.  We don’t know what they report back to John, whether this Jesus is the real deal, or just some faith-healer.  It is possible that they didn’t get it.  The Christ is supposed to baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire and divide the wheat from the chaff.  Is that what they see in Jesus’ ministry?  Is what Jesus is doing spectacular enough to warrant the title of Messiah?  Or do they decide to wait for someone else?

Some were apparently not convinced.  Jesus’ disciples run across disciples of John for many years, all over the Empire.  They seem to have come around eventually, because John is viewed very favorably in the New Testament.  But if they are looking for fireworks, or a revolutionary army to finally overthrow Rome, they don’t find it in Jesus’ group.

IV.

In the end, Jesus suggests that John’s ascetic, firebrand, prophetic ministry is a preparatory stage that maybe we have to pass through before we can perceive and participate in what Jesus is doing.  It’s like the stages of grief, we have to go through the denial and the anger, the depression and the bargaining, before we arrive at the kind of acceptance that finally heals us.  You have to sort of exhaust all other options and discover that they don’t work, before turning to the One whose Presence does work.

Jesus says that’s okay.  It may even have been his own path, to go through that case first; he goes to John as well, remember, before he fully realizes his own calling and identity.  John baptizes him.

Now Jesus demonstrates that the Kingdom of God gets revealed and activated one broken person at a time.  This may not be the fire and brimstone John expects.  But it is what works.  Jesus’ approach is not to overthrow the system from above, but to undermine it from below by creating small communities of love, hope, peace, and justice, places where healing and growth happen, places where the Kingdom of God breaks in like light through the broken places, and the broken people, of the world.

+++++++      

Brood of Vipers.

Matthew 3:1-10

December 4, 2016

I.

In all four gospels the story of Jesus begins with a story about a man named John who appears in the desert east of Jerusalem, along the Jordan River, preaching.  As always, the desert, the wilderness, is the place where interesting things begin to happen.

John does not show up in the city, which was controlled by the elites who ran things.  It is in the desert that Israel’s future emerges, ever since the time of Moses.  Often the prophets live out in the desert, like Elijah.  Prophets, and God, often approach Israel from the fringes, the margins, the edges.  They are usually outsiders to power.

If we want to hear the Word of God, it is always more likely to emerge from people and communities that are not wealthy, powerful, or privileged.  The Word almost never comes from successful people in business or government, or even religion.  It never comes from the center because too many compromises have to be made in order to achieve success by the world’s standards.  

We generally complain about the “decline” of our traditional churches.  That just means they’re not as successful as they were when I was a kid in the 50’s and 60’s.  But I suspect that the more marginalized and powerless and unsuccessful we become, the more likely we are to experience the Word of God.  There are no distractions in the desert.  In the desert you have nothing to lose.  Reform and renewal among God’s people has usually come not from the established, well-compensated, educated, titled leaders, but from the losers, the excluded, and the marginalized.

The message that John delivers is, “Change your hearts and lives!  Here comes the Kingdom of Heaven!”  Literally, John means change your way of thinking, change your mind, change the way you see things; turn around and move in a different direction!  Open your hearts to what is coming!  God’s Kingdom, God’s way of peace and justice is already here!  We need to adjust ourselves so we can see it and live in it!

The Kingdom of Heaven is something we can’t perceive unless something in us changes.  We need the spiritual equivalent of glasses, corrective lenses, to overcome our ego-distorted and corrupted vision, so we can see what’s really there and not continue to assume that the blurry, indistinct, conflicted and confused world we see with our imperfect eyes of flesh is true.  

We have to be attuned to the right wavelength, not just as observers, but as participants.  The Kingdom of Heaven is something we only become aware of when we start to participate in it, when we start to live according to its laws and values.  The more we do it, the more we see it.  The more we practice the more is revealed to us.

II.

And the Kingdom of Heaven is an alternative political reality.  It is opposed to the kingdoms of this world, which are based on violence, fear, anger, greed, and sin generally.  Matthew uses the word “heaven” where the rest of the New Testament usually talks about the “Kingdom of God,” probably because because of Jewish misgivings about over-pronouncing God’s name.  But it creates a misunderstanding that the Kingdom of Heaven is something we only attain after death.  God rules from heaven, and making God’s Kingdom active on the Earth is the goal of John and Jesus.  Jesus himself will teach us to pray “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.”

The point of John and Jesus is to bring people to live together in community according to the rules and values of God, as given in Scripture.  This creates an alternative polity which is inherently threatening to those who control and benefit from the economy and system they have set up.

Matthew then quotes Isaiah’s prophecy about God’s people returning from exile in Babylon, and applying it to the situation of John.  Just as God was miraculously delivering the people to the Promised Land back then, so also now God is spiritually bringing people into the Kingdom of Heaven.  John’s role, like that of Isaiah, is to proclaim it and prepare the way.

John subsists on what little the desert provides.  He does not wear manufactured or bought clothing; he does not get his food from the agricultural system.  He wears animal skins, and he has this diet of bugs and honey.  In so doing he declares his independence from the urban economy, which maintains his authenticity and moral purity.  He is therefore immune to the charge that he is benefiting from the system he is criticizing.  John may be a little off, but he is not a hypocrite.  He doesn’t compromise at all.  He chooses a radical asceticism, connected directly to the Earth, and renouncing all the benefits of a corrupt and unjust economy.

Not even Jesus goes this far.  Jesus doesn’t stay in the desert; he chooses to engage with people in society and share their lives.  Paul goes even farther and uses the benefits of the Roman Empire including his own privilege as an official citizen to undermine and oppose the Empire.  John’s approach is not mandated; we don’t all have to live as strictly as he does.  But sometimes we need these folks way out in what we might call an extreme place, to help us move forward.  We need the monks and the hermits and the Amish and others who refuse to participate in this or that aspect of modern, urban, technological existence.  We need them because their vision and model prepares the way by showing us things can be different.

Authenticity is important.  It may be why people from that whole region, including Jerusalem, trek out to see what John is about, submitting to his ritual of dunking people in the Jordan River after they confessed their sins.  The Israelites had crossed the Jordan River when they first came to Canaan, after their liberation from Egypt.  Being immersed in that particular river is a sign of crossing over into God’s Kingdom; it’s a sign of emancipation.  And water of course represents both washing and rebirth.  And the people confess their sins as a way of leaving their old selves behind before they go down into the water for renewal.

III.

At this point, the text says that many Pharisees and Sadducees come to be baptized.  These are members of two establishment parties.  They were the people in power.  Perhaps some of them are inspired to confess their sins and be baptized. 

But John has harsh words for them no matter why they came to him.  He doesn’t welcome them like the privileged and powerful people they are.  “You brood of vipers!” he thunders.  “You children of snakes!  Who warned you to escape from the angry judgment that is coming soon?  Produce fruit that shows you have changed your hearts and lives!  And don’t even think about saying to yourselves, Abraham is our father.  I tell you that God is able to raise up Abraham’s children from these stones.”

(I am still waiting to see those words decorating the mall in December.)

Calling someone a snake was no more of a compliment back then than it is now.  Some folks back then apparently thought that baby snakes ate their way out of their mother, causing her to die.  This might account for John’s image of parasites sucking the life out of the very tradition that gave them birth.  John expresses surprise that they have come to him at all, since they are wholly invested in the system that is bringing down God’s wrath.  Usually Pharisees and Sadducees are so self-righteous and clueless that they have no idea they are doing anything wrong.

They need to start producing good fruit, which is a common metaphor for doing good actions, behaving well, obeying God.  Instead of working to sustain a system that is keeping the people in different kinds of bondage, they need to start setting people free.  They need to start leading a community that reflects and expresses God’s will for justice, peace, equality, inclusion, and healing.  They need to start doing what the Torah says and not just talking about it, and applying it in the most self-serving ways possible.

They are relying on their ethnicity?!  Assuming that merely claiming Abraham as a blood ancestor is going to make a difference?  Seriously?  John says that since God can make descendants of Abraham out of any common piece of rock, they should not depend on that.  Indeed, ethnicity is over.

This is Paul’s point as well, especially in Galatians.  The assumed spiritual superiority of being Jewish, claiming Abraham as an ancestor, is not working anymore.  We are not any better than Gentiles, says John to his own people.  Not only are we not exempt from God’s judgment, being the chosen people makes us the lightning rods for it.  We have the Torah, we’re supposed to know better.

Our sense of superiority, exceptionalism, uniqueness, and inherent godliness as a nation, is wrong.  Otherwise we wouldn’t be conquered by the Romans in the first place.  We’re just like every other loser country, squashed under their ruthless system.  The angry judgment is already here.

IV.  

God doesn’t do a DNA test for salvation.  God looks only at what we do out of our trust in God.  Can it be said that we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God, in the words of the prophet Micah?  Are we welcoming strangers and aliens?  Are we adequately providing for the needy?  Are we peacemakers?  Are we faithful disciples of the One who is to come?  Are we showing these qualities in church as well as in society?

John is saying that we get to choose our future.  On the one hand he says, “Here comes the Kingdom of Heaven!”  On the other hand he talks about a coming angry judgment.  It seems that both are coming.  We have to decide which one we’re going to receive.

Which one we receive is based on our “fruits,” our actions, our behavior, our relationships.  Do we demonstrate love, joy, justice, healing and peace?  Do we live lives of prayer, acceptance, forgiveness, and generosity?  Are we known by our gentleness, simplicity, and grace?  If so, we are already letting God’s Kingdom shine through us.

But if we are reacting out of anger, fear, separation, judgment, condemnation, ethnic or national superiority; if we are resting on our privilege, status, wealth, or power; if we are propping up injustice and inequality; if we are bullying people with mindless vulgarity… then we can expect God to apply the same wrath to us that we dumped on others.

The time is always now to start getting this right.

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