It’s Advent, that wonderful, delightful time to prepare for Christmas. And there are all kinds of ways we do that: we might light candles on an Advent wreath, put up a tree, decorate the home, hang some boughs, put up some lights outside to light up the world, baking, shopping for presents, shipping gifts, sending Christmas cards. But who among you reflects on the fact that you are a “brood of vipers?” I don’t see a single hand going up. It’s not the usual Advent preparation we think about, but it is the one that John the Baptist calls us to today. We usually think about repentance as part of our Lenten preparations for Easter, but it is a part of these Advent preparations. It is a minor note, but it is here: “You brood of vipers. Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”
We don’t normally like to talk about sin and repentance, although we do it every week and put up with it during Lent, it is not something we like to talk about all that much. And yet it is the very thing that John is calling us to take some time to think about today. Even though we would like to think about all the joy and peace and love of this time of year, and would prefer to think about that Peaceable Kingdom that Isaiah writes about, that beautiful image of the wolf living with the lamb, and the leopard lying down with the kid, and the lion and the calf and the fatling together, and a little child leading them. It is a beautiful vision of vegetarian lions, a world so transformed that the predator and the prey no longer have to fit in those roles, but can be companions with each other. That is the hope, the vision that we have, that we long for, that we yearn for at Christmas. We have all those great Christmas stories, like the Christmas Day Truce when everyone laid down their arms, these little in-breakings of the Peaceable Kingdom. But here is the thing: if we want to have that kind of Peaceable Kingdom, we have to have reconciliation. And if we have reconciliation, we have to have repentance. So we have to move through that uncomfortable place in order to get to that comfortable one. That lamb is never going to trust the wolf unless the wolf says, “you know what? I screwed up. I hurt you and I made you feel unsafe, and I am going to do things to show a life worthy of repentance to bear fruit so that you can begin to trust me.” That is going to take time, and it is not easy. We want easy answers, we want this Peaceable Kingdom to break in instantly, but that is not how things work. We have to go back to this Gospel, go back to John the Baptist who is preparing the way of the Lord in the only way we can welcome Christ, and that is to take time for self examination and look at the ways that we have fallen short.
It is not easy. It is not easy for all kinds of reasons. It is not easy because sometimes we don’t even know we did something wrong, it may be something really minor and we just didn’t get it. It is not easy because sometimes we did something wrong and it is really clear but it is too painful to confront that reality. It is not easy because sometimes it is really complicated and messy, there has been a lot of wrong and both sides, and where do you begin? Sometimes it is complicated because I didn’t really do it, it was somebody else, someone in the past, and I don’t want to face the fact that I am benefitting from it. It’s hard. It’s complicated. It’s messy. We’re ignorant of it. There are all kinds of reasons why it is hard, and there are all kinds of reasons, therefore, why we must take the time to really look at what we’ve done with our lives and try to figure it out and do something to try to change things.
A couple of weeks ago I preached about origin stories, and I mentioned the movie Frozen 2, which might come up in sermons a lot. I think Frozen 2 is a meditation on this very challenge of repentance and reconciliation. In the movie, Elsa and Anna find out that what they had thought was a good thing their ancestor had done turned out to be a really bad thing. This great dam that he had built as a gift for the native peoples up north turned out to have ruined their way of life and it made things worse for them. It did not help, but rather destroyed their crops. And he did it intentionally in order to benefit himself. The only solution to this problem was to break the dam, but that risked destroying their home. So you can see the complications here: they didn’t do it, and the only way to fix it is going to hurt them, so how are they going to solve it? In the end, in a very Disney way, there is a simple answer: Do the next right thing. Anna decides to do the next right thing, which is to destroy the dam in order to right the wrong and fix the problem. That has consequences, but it is a Disney move, and Elsa fixes them in the end. No bad consequences happened, but that is not how it always works in the world.
So while we are doing all the wonderful Advent things we should be doing, getting the gifts together, baking the cookies, preparing the home and hearth to welcome Christ this season, we also need to prepare our hearts to welcome him into our lives. If we are going to do that, if we are going to allow this little child to lead us, we have to do the work of self examination and figure out what we need to do to do the next right thing, and to bear fruit worthy of repentance.
I’m intrigued with John’s analogies, even though it is sometimes hard to focus on them because his language is so striking: one gets stopped on the phrase brood of vipers and don’t listen to the rest of it. Or you got stuck on unquenchable fire. His image here is of the wheat and the chaff. Do you know what part of the plant is the chaff? It is the part protecting the kernel of wheat. Sometimes we hold on to the things that we do wrong because they are protecting something for us, they are keeping us not comfortable, but perhaps less uncomfortable. We have to pull that away, and when you pull that away we have the seed that can either make new life or nourish life. But we can only do that when we pull the protective chaff away from it.
The other thing in John’s image that I find so striking is that the chaff is burned in fire, but that fire can bring new life as well as it cooks something, as it provides heat, as it provides light. God is able to take these things in our lives that have gone wrong, he is able to take Good Friday and make Easter, make new life, new hope, new joy. God can bring about this Peaceable Kingdom if we allow him to do it.
AMEN
