"Repent!"

Matthew 3:1-12

Just a few weeks ago, a British woman who taught Sudanese children set off a firestorm of religious passion when she allowed the children in her classroom to name their class doll Mohammed.  When word got out, people felt she had disrespected their religion.  Passions flared, and the streets filled with demonstrators demanding that she be executed. So here's one more episode that demonstrates the power of religious fervor to ignite the human capacity for outrage, for violence and revenge. For this reason, you may have winced when you heard about John the Baptist bursting on the scene shouting inflammatory accusations. "You brood of vipers!" he yelled, and he warned the wicked to repent or face unquenchable fire.  Yes, every year during Advent, John the Baptist shows up in our Gospel reading.  Listener discretion is advised.

Let's begin with a simple admission:  to get to Jesus we have to go through John the Baptist. It's striking that all four of the Gospels preface the story of Jesus' ministry with an account of John the Baptist. Further evidence of the Baptist's importance is that, out of four Gospel readings during Advent, two center on John the Baptist.  Clearly, all the Gospel writers believed that the story of Jesus simply couldn't be told, much less understood, apart from the ministry of John.  So like it or not, all the Gospels give John the Baptist a prominent place in the story. In the plot line of the Gospel narrative, it's the preaching and baptizing by John that prepares the way for Jesus.

True enough, you may be thinking, but his presence is unsettling. He strikes us as eccentric, even unhinged.  He's certainly not someone we'd enjoy visiting with at a wine and cheese party.  We would hesitate to invite him to be our guest preacher. Many of you will remember last year during Advent, when  we incorporated John the Baptist in our children's sermon.  Judy called the children to the front, and from behind the organ in burst John the Baptist, a.k.a. Ben Johnston-Krase, wearing a long black wig, carrying a shepherd's staff and shouting "Repent. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Prepare the way of the Lord!"  When he reached Judy he stuck out his hand and said, "Hi, I'm John the Baptist."  Judy responded, "Nice to meet you. I'm Judy the Presbyterian."  Indeed, John the Baptist makes an odd match among us Presbyterians. He's too loud, too in-your-face. His tone jolts us as a fire alarm does, startling us with the urgency and shrill tone of its warning. 

However, it isn't only John's appearance and manner that put us off.  His words of fiery judgment don't seem consonant with the person and ministry of Jesus. Although the two men's message was the same—"Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand"—they seemed to have a radically different understanding of how the Kingdom would come. John not only expected the Messiah to establish God's peace and justice, but also he expected that, in the process, the wicked would be put to death. "One is coming," John warned, "who will gather the righteous, and destroy the wicked to death. Repent, or you'll be swept up in the wrath to come."

But as we know, Jesus didn't behave the way John predicted. I once heard the difference between John the Baptist and Jesus described as follows:  John stood by the river Jordan calling people to come to him, repent and be baptized, while Jesus went out from the river taking the outward-reaching, overflowing love of God to people everywhere.  By any measure, Jesus failed to meet John's expectations, which is why, later, John sends some of his disciples to Jesus, asking, "Are you the one, or shall we wait for another?" John and Jesus strike us as very different characters, with markedly different styles.

So why not just ignore John?  Jesus without John the Baptist would suit most of us just fine. Just think: without John, we could ease our way into Christmas, celebrate the Lord's birth, revel in that warm feeling of Christmas, sing the carols we so love—and nothing life-changing would be demanded of us. I wonder whether, at bottom, our objection to John the Baptist is not his off-putting style of fire-and brimstone preaching, but rather his insistence that we truly change our lives.  How irritating for John to insist that we cannot celebrate the coming of heaven's rule without letting the one who comes change us. Repentance, John insists, is the all-important response to the coming of heaven's rule.

And repentance, as the Baptist preached it, has less to do with feeling sad or remorseful, and more to do with a total change of attitude and direction. "Bearing fruit," is what John the Baptist calls it, and by that he means living lives that are in harmony with coming reign of God.  In Luke's Gospel, John spells out repentance more specifically, to include such things as sharing what we have with the needy, giving food to the hungry, putting aside greed, treating everyone with fairness. It's true that John didn't correctly predict the way in which God's justice and love would be lived out in God's Messiah, but he did make it plain that only one thing counts at the Lord's coming:  a radical new orientation in the way we live. In a word, repentance.

Yet it's hard to shake the notion that repentance is a bad news word.  It's similar to all the New Year's resolutions that we make and re-make but never really stick with.  For this reason, the word repentance is linked in our psyche to guilt and failure.  Yet listen:  there's a way to turn repentance from a bad news word to a good news word. Think about when we baptized Michael this morning. We didn't proclaim that Michael had turned to God, but rather that God has turned to Michael. Baptism declares that God has claimed us, and that we are joined to the life and ministry of Christ. When we ground our understanding of repentance in baptism we no longer say, "I'm sorry for my sins and I'm going to try to do better."  Rather we say that, in Christ, our sins are forgiven, and we have each been raised to newness of life. Repentance, when related to our baptism, is a daily living out of the life we have been given. Repentance, grounded in baptism, is more of a gift than a human accomplishment.  Repentance is not our vain attempt to be better selves, but rather it is a continual dying to self. Our baptism signifies that everything  hurtful and mean in our nature has been put to death on the cross, and we have been united with the One in whom there is no violence at all, no vengeance, no desire for retribution.

So what is repentance?  It's what Paul meant when he said, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." Repentance is the daily, joyful practice of becoming the person we already are in Christ.    

Friends, John the Baptist may be a troublesome figure in our Advent reflections. But he shakes us into the realization that God comes to us in order to change us. Impossible?  Not if we will remember our baptism.  Not if we really hear the good news that our sins have been forgiven. Our life belongs to God.  We are the body of Christ.  All we have to do is act like it.