Luke
3:7-18
7 John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him,
"You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8
Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, "We
have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to
raise up children to Abraham. 9 Even now 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." 10 And the crowds asked him, "What then should
we do?" 11 In reply he said to them, "Whoever has two coats must
share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise." 12
Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, "Teacher,
what should we do?" 13 He said to them, "Collect no more than the
amount prescribed for you." 14 Soldiers also asked him, "And we, what
should we do?" He said to them, "Do not extort money from anyone by
threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages." 15 As the
people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts
concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, 16 John answered all of them
by saying, "I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I
is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize
you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 17 His winnowing fork is in his hand, to
clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the
chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." 18 So, with many other exhortations,
he proclaimed the good news to the people.
Whenever I read
about John the Baptist I cannot help but ask myself, “What was it about John
that brought folks out to see and hear him?” I mean, think about it, there’s no
way John makes it today as a preacher: he doesn’t dress very well (camel’s hair
and leather belts went out in the B.C.’s), he’s got shaggy hair and an unkempt
beard with bits of his strange breakfast stuck in it (which is crazy since he’s
standing out in the middle of a river—you think he’d take the time to splash
his face and slick back his hair with some of that water he’s dunking folks
in!). Then there’s his message and presentation style: John isn’t exactly encouraging,
doesn’t have what you might call a “bubbly personality.” He doesn’t tell jokes,
he doesn’t rattle of memory verses, he doesn’t tell compelling stories, and he
shouts—even calls people snakes! I mean, come on! Why are there crowds of
people hanging around listening to him, crowds of people being baptized by him
when he would be asked to leave, tone it down, or hush up altogether if he was
preaching today? I have to tell you, I don’t get it, so I have to ask, “Why?”
Were people just
curious about what was going on out in the wilderness? After all, John was a
bit odd even for his day. Maybe people just wanted to see this site they had
heard about: “Yeah, there this guy out in the Jordan River called John, and
man, he’s got folks stirred up. They say he’s something else, whooping and
hollering, dunking folks in the river telling them their sins are forgiven. You
want to go check it out?” I’m sure there were some folks who just had to see
the site of John for themselves; hearsay wasn’t enough. They wanted to
experience this thing firsthand. So, maybe folks were gathering at the Jordan
out of curiosity, to see this strange fellow they had heard about from folks
talking in town.
Then again,
there really wasn’t a whole lot going on in those days to capture one’s
attention. There were no daytime soaps, no gameshows, or “news” channels (after
all, there was no electricity, never mind televisions). There wasn’t much in
the way of distraction for the common folks of Judea, nothing really in the
realm of “affordable entertainment,” so I can imagine folks standing around:
“Hey Earl. What’re you up to this afternoon?” “Well, I thought I’d watch the
sand dry. What about you?” “Well, I thought I’d see how long I could hold my
breath again. You want to do something different, go see what this John the
Baptist business is all about down at the Jordan?” “Sure, why not?” Maybe it
was pure boredom that drew people to the Jordan. After all, there was a day
when there wasn’t anything going on on Sundays, so folks showed up at the
meeting house because they had nothing better to do (no games on TV, no practices
to take the kids to, no brunch deals at the café in town). Perhaps folks just
needed something to pass the time, and John was better than staring at the sun.
But curiosity
and boredom won’t keep the attention of many people. Curiosity can be quenched
by the site of whatever it is that causes the interest, and boredom is seeking
entertainment or distraction, but John wasn’t an entertainer and he was more
than a distraction. So what was it then that brought so many out to the
wilderness, out to hear John? Maybe they were seeking something; maybe they
were seeking an answer. Perhaps they were folks looking for something they
couldn’t find on the display tables in the market. Maybe they were folks
looking for more than just another fad, another “get-right-quick” scheme. Is it
possible that the folks who came out to be baptized by John in the wilderness
had questions that couldn’t be so easily answered by the same institutions that
had always promised to have the answer to every question? Could it be that we
can come to a place in our lives where we have questions that cannot be
answered by the same, old, once-reliable methods that brought us this far?
Whatever
questions, whatever inquiries brought these crowds out into the wilderness,
John doesn’t exactly greet them with words of good tidings: "You
brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits
worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as
our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up
children to Abraham. Even now 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 can’t help but imagine there were more than a few folks who
turned around and went home, but those who stayed, those who listened to John’s
words, heard him call them out. John called them out of their previously
comfortable way of thinking about religion as an inherited system of rules and
laws, of “dos and don’ts,” of family heritage. See, John calls them out of
their way of thinking that everything was fine so long as they could open the
family Bible and trace their heritage back to Abraham—the one God had made a
covenant with way back in the Old Testament. John calls them out to a life that
“bears fruit worthy of repentance,” especially after so many of them likely
came down to the Jordan believing John’s baptism was a “quick fix” for their
religious woes. It’s only after this fiery welcome from John, only after this calling out, that the
folks in the crowds start to reveal why they are there in the first place. They
have a question: "What then should we do?"
It’s a fitting
question to ask the Baptizer, to ask any preacher who simply shouts at the
congregation to “get right with the Lord!” It’s the question one asks when
they’re most helpless, because it’s a question we all ask when we simply don’t
know what to do—and we hate not knowing what to do. Of course, you and I live
in an era when, if we don’t know what to do, we can simply Google it. We can
pull out our phones, ask Siri how to tie a full Windsor knot, search Google for
the way to properly plunge a clogged commode, we can even get step-by-step instructions
on how to build a moonshine still (not that any of you would be interested in
that). It seems we’ve all but eradicated the need to ask “What should we do?”
Yet, there are still those instances in life, those deep, spiritual corners of
existence, when Google can’t seem to give us the right answer, when Siri lets
us down, when there doesn’t seem to be a video tutorial or a .pdf of
easy-to-use instructions. When we face those times in our lives, those times
when we (like those in the crowd at the Jordan) ask, “What should we do?” I
think we secretly hope that we already know the answer.
We hope for a
“religious” answer. You know, when the world seems dark, when life seems to be
hitting a rough spot, when we can’t sleep at night, when the stress seems almost
too much, or when we simply want to know how to be a so-called “better
Christian,” we hope the answer to “What should we do?” will be a religious one.
“Just pray more…read your Bible more…go to church more…” I think we secretly
hope for answers like that. I think we hope for answers like that because they
at least make some kind of sense to us. It makes sense to us that if we want to
get on God’s good side we should do more of those things that sound “churchy”
and maybe do less of those things that don’t sound so “churchy.” But what about
when we do all of those sorts of things and it doesn’t help? What about when we
do all of those things already or when they don’t seem to be enough (because,
truthfully, they aren’t enough)? What then?
When we ask “What
should I do?” and the usual, churchy answers aren’t enough, it seems most folks
fall back to looking for easy, “quick-fix” answers. Too often, people approach
faith the same way they approach losing weight or making money: they’re after
an easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide that is hopefully not too intense and
won’t ask too much of them. We ask, “What should we do?” and we expect answers
like: “If you can do this one thing for ten minutes every day…with these ten
easy steps you’ll have a happier, more fulfilling life…if you can change just
one thing about your daily routine, it should be this…” We want “click-bait” answers, solutions that
draw us in because they sound catchy, because they’re clearly outlined and
presented to us. Truth be told, I think one of the reasons we like these sorts
of answers too is because if they don’t work, we can always blame the one who
came up with them (of course, they can in turn blame us foe not doing them the
way they prescribed). We like systematized, neat, organized answers to life’s
hard questions, but then again, sometimes I think we like it if there’s no
answer at all!
Think about it:
how many times have you told yourself or someone else, or had someone else tell
you, “Just be patient, it’ll all blow over?” Or how many times have you thought
to yourself, “This isn’t really my problem; it’s up to someone else to fix it?”
I know some of you have said or thought, “Well, there’s really nothing to do
because this is all a part of God’s plan anyhow.” When we ask, “What should we
do?” sometimes we hope the answer is “nothing,” that the best thing to do is
leave everything alone and hope for the best, to “let sleeping dogs lie,”
because, after all, we might wind up making things worse!
“What should we
do?” we ask when faced with the great mysteries of faith, and so often we want
answers that fit our preconceptions, answers that fit neatly into religious
categories, answers that are easy to follow, or answers that require us to do
nothing. The truth, however, is that the answer to that very question is
one that is not so easy, and that means it’s an answer we seldom (if ever) want
to hear.
Three times, we hear that very question from those in the crowds by the
Jordan, and three times John gives them very real answers in verses 10-14: “And the crowds asked him, ‘What then should we do?’ In
reply he said to them, ‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has
none; and whoever has food must do likewise.’” This isn’t even Sunday School stuff—this is regular,
old, pre-school sharing! “Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and
they asked him, ‘Teacher, what should we do?’ He said to them, ‘Collect no more
than the amount prescribed for you.’” John
tells these tax collectors to simply do their jobs of collecting the taxes
without extorting more from folks, which was the way many tax collectors made
their livings, the way many of them made a comfortable living and were despised
by so many. “Soldiers also asked him, ‘And we, what should we do?’ He said to them,
‘Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be
satisfied with your wages.’” Soldiers used their positions of power,
their intimidating place in society in order to threaten others and blackmail
them into giving them money. John calls them out on their abuses of power and
calls them to a life in stark contrast to what they had been so used to, what
they had considered to be proper and normal.
You see, when
these from the crowd ask John, “What should we do?” he doesn’t respond with a
churchy answer, nor does he give them some prescriptive answer for securing
their personal comfort, nor does he let them off the hook by proclaiming the
inevitability of what is to come. No, John in essence tells them they have to reshape
their lives! They must reorient their lives to think less of themselves, to
want less, to think more of others and how they may show compassion to others. When
John speaks of the ax already lying at the roots of the trees, we like to think
that’s a metaphor for those people who aren’t “saved,” those people who aren’t
like us, those people who haven’t been dunked in the water. But what if John is
speaking of the ways that God is purging our lives of those selfish desires
that keep us from loving God and each other? What if the winnowing fork in the
coming Christ’s hand isn’t a tool meant to cast souls into hell, but an
instrument of refinement, meant to toss our selfishness, our egos, and our
personal comfort into wind, into God’s cleansing fire of compassion?
What should we
do? It’s easy to boil it all down to a few steps isn’t it? To say we have to
pray this prayer, walk this aisle, be baptized a certain way, go to this many
services, read this translation of the Bible, don’t do this handful of things
or associate with these kinds of folks, make some kind of stand on certain
issues, and then, when that day arrives, when Jesus shows up, you can tell him
you followed all the rules and you told others they had better follow those
rules too, and Jesus will pat you on the back, say you kept out of trouble,
kept your nose clean and now you’ll get that plot of paradise you’ve been
waiting on. But here’s the thing, if following Jesus doesn’t change something
deep within you, if it doesn’t compel you to let go of yourself, to share with
others, to seek justice, to change the world, to love God and your neighbors
more, then are you really following Jesus, or are you still trying to find
those easier answers to the question, “What should we do?”
This Advent, as
we look forward to the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, and his return in the
coming future, let us strive to show love to one another, to answer the
question, “What should we do?” by the way with live our lives, and may our
answer be one of unconditional, Christ-filled love. Amen.
