“Hearts prepared for God”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, December 5, 2010 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York
“Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near. … The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” (Matthew 3:1-3)
If you stumbled into church this morning distracted and thinking of myriad things unchurchly, our gospel lesson should have reminded you that we are into Advent now, and today we get our yearly dose of wild and wooly John the Baptist. Advent is the season of preparation for the coming of God into the world and every year we are treated to John the Baptist’s strident and emphatic wilderness preaching in which he sounds like a televangelist or one of those religious fanatics you see standing on city street corners with signs calling you to repent or burn in hell. Needless to say, John the Baptist is not a character to whom one warms up easily. I doubt any of us would be thrilled if he wandered into our church on a Sunday morning and even less so if he stood in the pulpit and shouted at us, calling us a “brood of vipers!” Unfortunately, much of his tirade was directed at people just like us, so, like it or not, we need to try to get a handle on what he’s about. As we all know, John the Baptist was the forerunner to Jesus. He warmed folks up so that Jesus could come along and move in for the spiritual kill so to speak. He was sufficiently popular in his day, and had a large enough following that when the gospels were written you’ll notice the gospel writers took pains to make it clear that Jesus was the one who really counted, and John was merely a messenger.
Part of what makes John’s message hard to hear is the “churchy” language he uses and the way that language has been used and misused throughout two thousand years of Christian teaching and preaching. Those words “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near” and “bear fruits worthy of repentance” sound almost banal and certainly tired and worn. For us Episcopalians and other mainline Christians they bring to mind a caricature of the “fire and brimstone” kind of Christian preaching that we tend to dismiss. What is too bad about that is that John the Baptist spoke a profound truth about people and their relationship to God, their faith tradition and religious life that we modern, liberal Christians are apt to ignore because his delivery isn’t our style! If we look beyond the “churchy” language and reframe it into language and images that make more sense to our world, we’ll find ourselves every bit as much on the hot seat as were those Judeans and Pharisees and Sadducees who flocked to the banks of the Jordan river to hear John preach.
John was all riled up because he observed all those good Judean citizens, the merchants, teachers, farmers, housewives and schoolchildren living their lives as if God didn’t really matter, as if the word of God that they had received in the Torah, the God who appeared as a burning bush to Moses and a pillar of fire to the wandering Israelites was a comfortable and respectable piece of their lives, but not the central focus nor an important component of their personal identity. “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our ancestor’; for God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.” In other words, don’t rest on your laurels as Jews. Just because you were born Jewish and have attended the synagogue fairly regularly does not mean you are living in relationship with God in the way God is calling you to do. If you say you are a child of Abraham, show it by how you live your life.
The word “repent” in Greek is metanoia, which means to change your mind or to turn around, to go another direction. It calls people to a real change in the way they live, a re-orientation of their lives so that God is the central focus, not this world, not their career or their family, or their house or some other worldly concern. When John talks about the baptism of fire and the Holy Spirit that Jesus would bring he is pointing to a time when he hoped that people would be passionate about God, when they would have energy for God. When people enter into that passionate relationship with God, when they really care about God then they care about what God cares about. And then the kingdom of heaven becomes reality. The kingdom is near, says John. Near, but not here.
I’m involved in Hindu Christian dialogues here in Rochester and in preparation for our session tomorrow night was reviewing an interview between a Hindu guru, Swami Tathagatananda, with Harvard scholar and author Diana Eck, in light of the words of John the Baptist. He said,
This is the temple that counts, [pointing to his heart]. They say people in America are very religious, meaning they frequent churches or synagogues or temples. They have an altar at home with a cross or a picture of Kali. That is that. But nothing changes in their lives. But I tell you, it is not what you do or know in your head that matters. Finally, it is whether your heart is transformed, whether your life is transformed. That is the only thing that matters. (Diana Eck, A New Religious America, p. 103)
Transformation of the heart is what mattered to John the Baptist too. It’s what mattered to Jesus. It’s really what we mean when we talk of the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God. It’s what John the Baptist meant when he called those folks on the river bank to repent and to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.” He was really challenging them to show forth in their lives what they said with their lips about their religious faith and their commitment to God. What he calls for is much more than a mumbled “I’m sorry” for certain misdeeds or bad thoughts. The swami’s words, “Nothing changes in their lives” rings all too true for lots of modern Christians. Think about it. What has changed in your life because of your commitment to Christ? What would be different if you decided not to practice your faith anymore?
One thing that I have come to understand as I have studied other world religions, particularly as they are lived out in this country today, is that people who identify themselves as Muslim or Jewish or Buddhist or Hindu in this society strongly identify with that religious identity. It is an important piece of who they are and of their sense of their own and their family’s identity. Mosques, temples and synagogues have considerably less difficulty meeting their budgets than do mainline Protestant churches today because the folks who join those religious organizations feel a strong connection to them as central and important to their identities. Being a Muslim, being a Jew, or Hindu matters and so they support the mosque or temple or synagogue with their financial resources so that it will continue to be there. The sad reality for mainline Christianity is that being a Christian or an Episcopal or Methodist or Presbyterian Christian is not really an important or central piece of the sense of identity of most folks who consider themselves “members” of such churches. They identify more strongly with family, or profession or socio-economic status than with their religious faith. How far we have come from the ideal that John the Baptist was calling for so long ago on that Jordan riverbank!
Perhaps this Advent we will take the time to listen to crazy ol’ John the Baptist. Crazy as he seems, he knows something about us that we are too ready to forget. We are hardwired for relationship to God, we humans yearn for the divine. From time immemorial, in remote African villages and soaring European cathedrals, on the banks of the Jordan river and the banks of the River Ganges, human beings have turned themselves toward the divine with longing and expectation and hope. My favorite preacher, Fred Craddock in his sermon on John the Baptist says:
You know what the moment of truth is. We all want it; we don’t want it. … You don’t have to be down and out – that’s a mistake many of the churches make. They think you can minister to people only when they’re down and out, got a crisis, family falling apart, got fired, on drugs, this and that, and in swoops the church. “Can I help you?” Look the people who are up walking around and doing great, they have the same need. That’s not the difference. We don’t wait till somebody’s down and out circling like a vulture. “One of these days you’ll go down, and then we can help you.” And finally there you are up over a little general store, in one room, 15-watt bulb swinging overhead, and you’re on a bare mattress, cigarette butts floating in ….stale beer, and then we come and say, “You need the Lord.” That’s what the person needed before.
That moment of truth that John the Baptist delivers is the reminder that we all need God, we are programmed to reach for God and when we make the effort to do so our hearts may well be transformed. In this season of Advent we read and sing and pray about longing and expectation and hope, looking ahead to the story of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. The important birth that we all truly await is the birth of God in our own hearts. Our lectionary readings today speak eloquently of human hope for a time when “the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid,” when “they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain.” John calls us to prepare the way of the Lord, to make his paths straight. He calls us to turn around to open our hearts to significant transformation, to become a people for whom our identity as Christians, as people of God is the most important aspect of our personal identity. Quite simply, he wants God to matter to us, to be important enough to influence how we live our lives, the choices we make, how we spend our money, how we raise our children, how we govern ourselves. Let us heed the words of hymn 76 as we move toward Christmas, “let each heart prepare a home where such a mighty guest may come.”
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