"What Should We Do?" (Third Sunday of Advent)

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 off 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.