Second Sunday of Advent

               December 9, 2007

        The parish had contracted with the lowest bidder to paint the entire exterior of their beautiful white church.  The Vestry had negotiated the price and the painter set to work.  About halfway through, the painter realized he had underestimated the amount of paint that would be needed.  He thought to himself, “I have to make at least a little profit on this job.”  So, he thinned down the paint.  The square footage covered by each five-gallon doubled.  As he neared the end of the job he had to thin just a little bit more.  The last gallon covered about three times the area it should have covered. 

     As he finished and was admiring his work, it began to rain.  And it rained and rained.  Then, it rained some more.  The white paint, thinned as it was, began to run down the sides of the church, and ran off into the storm drains.  The painter fell to his knees and cried, “Why me, Lord?”  And suddenly, a voice was heard above the thunder, “My son, repaint and thin no more!”  Boo…hiss.

    Each of the four canonical gospels begins with the mission, ministry, and message of John the Baptist.  Mark and John place this second great Advent figure right at the beginning.  Matthew, from whom the gospel for this Second Sunday of Advent comes, and Luke have the infancy narratives and then John the Baptist appears on the biblical scene.  John’s first word is “repent.”  That same word, of course, is the first to come from the mouth of his cousin, a fellow named Jesus.

     Matthew tells us that people came from all over the place to hear John the Baptist.  We might have gone out to hear him in the same way and for the same reason we would go to tent revivals down in the mountains.  It was entertainment and a way to have a good laugh.  What yelling and screaming those preachers would use to make folks afraid to stay on the same course in their lives!  However, most of the folks in Jerusalem and Judea and the entire region along the Jordan looked at John and realized this might be the one they had waited four hundred years to hear.  This might be the prophet of God who would appear before the coming of the Messiah.  That’s exactly who he was; God’s mouthpiece.  That means John is called and sent by God; like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Amos and Ezekiel.  John is not speaking for himself.  He’s speaking for God.

     Those who first heard him were shocked; surely by his appearance and diet, but even more so by his words.  At that time the only people who would have been expected to be baptized were converts to the faith.  These folks would have been non-Jews who wanted to become Jews.  John simply told them that they had better examine closely the whole notion of thinking they were “God’s chosen people.”  John’s challenge to them even brought into question the covenant they thought they had entered into with Yahweh. They needed to be baptized, since they were just like everybody else.  There is no birthright here.  Any false sense of spiritual superiority is shattered.  John said, you think it’s a big deal that you should say you have Abraham as your father.  God is able from these rocks lying about to raise a new crop of Abraham’s seed.  A whole lot of people claim to be the children of Abraham and look where that’s taken us.

     John’s words are also aimed at our self-satisfied hearts.  Do we think we are right with God because of some accident of birth that randomly had us born in the USA?  Do we think because we are Episcopalians, or Republicans, or Democrats, or Libertarians, or conservatives, or liberals we are on God’s good side?  John would ask us to doubt such a claim.  What’s he’s saying is that the only way to get right with God is to admit we are not right with God. 

     That brings us around again to that wonderful biblical word, “repent.” We assume it means to feel bad for all the horrible things we have done and to feel equally terrible for the good things we should have done, but didn’t do.  Repentance also means saying out loud that we are selfish, sinful, deeply defective human beings and we very often grieve the heart of God and that we are profoundly and genuinely sorry about it.  John’s wants to move us beyond mere words.  Genuine repentance, for John the Baptist, is a verb.  Action is required.  We have to do things differently in our day to day lives. 

     Garrison Keillor captured that paradox between emotion and action in one of his stories.  He called it “Larry the Sad Boy.”  Larry the Sad Boy was “saved” twelve times in the Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church.  It was an all-time record.  Between 1953 and 1961, Larry threw himself weeping and contrite on God’s throne of grace on twelve separate occasions.  This was unusual in a Lutheran church that wasn’t evangelical, had no altar call, no organist playing “Just As I Am Without One Plea” while the choir hummed and a guy with shiny black hair took hold of your heartstrings and played you like a cheap guitar.  This was the Lutheran church, not a bunch of hillbillies.  These were good, solid Scandinavians, and they repented the same way they sin: discreetly, tastefully, at the proper time, and bring a Jell-O salad for afterward.  Twelve times.  Even the fundamentalists got tired of him.  God didn’t mean for us to feel guilt all our lives.  There comes a point when you should dry your tears and join the building committee and start grappling with the problems of the church furnace and make coffee and be of some use, but Larry kept on repenting and repenting.

     John the Baptist would have told Larry the Sad Boy, “Even now, Larry, the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals.  He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary.” 

     John the Baptist appears again this day, in the wilderness of our hearts, advising us to repent.  More than words will be required.  We will need to take some action and begin to bear fruit worthy of repentance.  I suspect it will have to begin down deep in our hearts, where God wishes to dwell.  Amen.         

        ~The Rev. G. Thomas Mustard