A Sermon
Presented by Rev. Merlin T. Batt,
Interim Pastor of St. Matthew’s UCC,
At Maiden, North Carolina,
On the Second Sunday of Advent,
December 10, 2006

Scripture Lesson: Luke 3:1-20
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In all my years I have never seen a Christmas card with a drawing of John the Baptist on the front! Have you? On ancient icons and other sacred art which portray the crucifixion of Jesus, you will often see John the Baptist along with Mary the mother of Jesus positioned at the base of the cross,  pointing upward to the Crucified. But not on Christmas cards! Snow scenes, gift-laden sleighs, Santa Claus, children on sleds, small villages with white-steeple’d churches at the center, gaily decorated Christmas trees, Nativity scenes, yes, but not John the Baptist! He never makes it on the front of a Christmas card, not even on those you find in Christian book stores.

That’s very odd in light of the fact that every year the story of John the Baptist appears in the suggested Bible passages for two of the four Sundays of Advent. Always on the Second and Third Sundays of Advent, the Gospel lesson is about John – his appearance, his preaching, his self-understanding, and the effect he had on the crowds who came out in droves to hear him. In other words, those churches, like this one, which have a preacher who uses the Revised Common Lectionary can’t get to Christmas without first encountering John the Baptist, whom I have been known to call a “snarling prophet”!

Consider what Presbyterian preacher and author Frederick Buechner wrote about this impolite, crude misfit of a man who rudely interrupts the Christian’s journey to Christmas every year. He wrote this:

John the Baptist didn’t fool around. He lived in the wilderness around the Dead Sea. He subsisted on a starvation diet, and so did his disciples. He wore clothes that even the rummage sale people wouldn’t have handled. When he preached, it was fire and brimstone every time.

The kingdom was coming all right, he said, but if you thought it was going to be a pink tea, you’d better think again. If you didn’t shape up, God would give you the axe like an elm with the blight…He said  being a Jew wouldn’t get you any more points than being a Hottentot, and one of his favorite ways of addressing his congregation was as a snake pit.

You’re only hope, he said, was to clean up your life as if your life  depended on it, which it did, and get baptized in a hurry as a sign that you had. Some people thought he was Elijah come back from the grave, and some others thought he was the Messiah, but John would have none of either, “I’m the one yelling himself blue in the wilderness,” he said, quoting Isaiah. “I’m the one trying to knock  some sense into your heads.”

Now, I know you’re going to thank me because I have cut in half the number of times you have to deal with that old snarling prophet this year. You see, instead of John’s being the focus this Sunday and next Sunday, I chose to put both weeks’ readings about John together and read them as one longer Gospel lesson. As a result, you only have to hear one sermon about John this Advent! How about that? Merry Christmas!!

Kidding aside, let me take a few minutes to provide some historical background so we can better understand this strange prophet and also hear the challenge his words bring to our lives all these centuries later. When John showed up preaching in the Judean wilderness in the 20’s of what we call the first century, Rome had ruled the area for about a hundred years, but only recently had there been a Roman governor living in the area. Immediately prior to that, a madman named King Herod was in charge. You know the Roman governor’s name. In fact, you say it every week in the Apostles’ Creed - Pontius Pilate.

At that time, the reigning emperor was Tiberius, ruling from Rome, a ruthless man who was already being worshiped as a god in some parts of the empire. Two of the former King Herod’s sons were ruling in the north of Palestine – Herod Antipas and Philip. Like Rome itself, they ruled by fear and oppression. You might think of them as being in the same mold as Saddam Hussein. And the high priests in Jerusalem were no better, corrupt appointees of the emperor. Over the years, Jewish resistance movements had come and gone; in most cases they had been brutally put down.

In short, things were a mess! If you lived then, you wouldn’t have to be a genius to see that things couldn’t go on as they were for long – something had to happen. Many devout Jews in that day expected that a movement would begin through which their God would bring Israel once again out of their present slavery, a new Exodus, if you will, but this time it would mean freedom from the oppressive power of Rome.

So when a fiery young prophet named John appeared in the Judean wilderness, going from village to village telling people that the time had finally come, that God was coming soon to take decisive action, you can believe they were willing to listen and do what John said. They came in great numbers to hear John preach. And what he told them was very much like what the old prophets of Israel had told their ancestors who were held captive in Egypt – that their desperate situation was the result of their sins, their bleak situation the result of their worshiping idols rather than the one true God.

Applying the lesson of their forebears to the current situation, John said they needed to get their act together. Because God was coming soon, John insisted they had better get their moral and spiritual lives in order. So John called for a renewal which must begin in the minds and hearts of his hearers. And he provided a symbolic way for them to get started with the transformation of their lives. He stood waist deep in the Jordan River and beckoned them to be baptized, to enter into the water, much as Israel had done when they left Egypt by way of the Red Sea. In this richly symbolic way, John went about, as it were, preparing a pathway for the Lord himself to return to his people.

Actually we can sum up the thrust of John’s ministry by using one, small Hebrew word - shub. Say it with me, “shub”. The word is translated into Greek as “metanoia” and into English as “repent”. The Hebrew meaning  of the word is very simple and earthy. Shub means “turn back.” Shub means “Stop, turn around, and go in a different direction!” Shub! Repent!

Now what do you think of when you hear the word “repent”? Immediately I think of fire and brimstone preachers shouting passionately and warning people of damnation, of revivals under tents on hot summer nights, of wild-eyed characters on street corners holding signs bearing threatening quotations from the Bible and pointing boney fingers at passers-by.

At least I used to until I heard about the rural church which arranged for a contractor to paint the exterior of the building. Maybe you heard about it, too. Within a few months after the paint job was complete, the people began to notice that the new paint was not holding up.

The property committee looked into the matter and determined that the paint had been watered down and applied too thinly. So they complained to the contractor, who finally agreed to redo the job at no cost to the church. When the painters arrived at the church, they found a sign on the front lawn, left for them by the property committee. It read in bold, black letters, “Re-paint, and do not thin again!”

But John wasn’t joking when he looked his listeners in the eye and said “Shub!” and thus called them to repent. Neither was his cousin Jesus when He began His ministry with the same call to repentance. But neither John nor Jesus used the word shub in the superficial way that some do today, to mean merely “feeling sorry” for one’s sins. John and Jesus had in mind something far more radical than that. When they said “Shub!” they were calling for a fundamental transformation in the way people think about the world and life, a revolution in thinking which brings about a change of direction in one’s life and an about-face in one’s conduct.

I saw an example of this wider meaning of the concept of repentance in the news last week. As you know, the Iraq Study Committee presented to the President, the Congress, and the American people its long-awaited findings and recommendations about the war in Iraq. Now, whatever you happen to think about the Bush Administration’s initiation and conduct of the war or about the recommendations of the Committee, what I want you to notice is that the Committee’s report was a call to repentance. Whether it was appropriate or not, you must decide.

When I say this is an example of the wider meaning of repentance, what I mean is, the Committee was not asking the Administration merely to feel sorry about the mistakes it may have made in the past and try to do better. Rather, it was calling for the Administration to adopt a whole new way of thinking about the situation in Iraq and, therefore, to make a radical change in the direction of American foreign policy in the future. Shub! Stop, turn around, and go in a different direction! That’s repentance in the biblical sense of the word.

Here in the middle of Advent, halfway to Christmas, John the Baptist appears before us in Scripture once again. Through him we hear addressed to us the Gospel’s call to repentance before the coming of the Lord, or even before the coming of Christmas yet again, when our hearts and minds may be open to the claims of God in Christ in a special way.

I assume that throughout our lives we all need to make “course corrections” now and then. The priorities and values we learn from Christ get changed and distorted by the world, sometimes so slowly and imperceptibly we don’t realize what is happening, sometimes with our eager and willing cooperation, and other times under the almost irresistible pressures of modern life. So we need on occasion to take a hard look at our lives, to think anew about our life in the light of our commitment to Jesus Christ, and then to make necessary changes in the way we behave, the way we relate to others, the way we go about our everyday lives, the priorities we set, the values we live by, and the purposes we pursue. John the Baptist today calls each of us to take a hard look at our lives and make the necessary course corrections. Shub!

Tom Ehrich, an Episcopal clergyman living east of here in North Carolina, writes a daily reflection to which I subscribe. In Thursday’s offering, he began his reflection this way:

It is still dark when I drive my son to high school swim practice. The streets are busy with cars, trucks, and school buses. Invisible except for their headlights, workers press on to the offices, classrooms, construction sites, shops and factories where they will pour out this day. The valleys on Roxboro Road and Guess Road are ribbons of yellow lights. On the attractively crooked roads of our suburban enclave children wait for yellow buses. I steer around the potholes that make the way rough.

Is this exile or the “good life”?

It isn’t a war zone in Iraq or killing field in Darfur. Nor is it a penthouse high above Fifth Avenue. Some live better than we do, some live worse. Here in the middle, food and shelter are adequate, electricity lights the night, streets are safe, opportunities beckon. Yes, fewer jobs feel secure, and Christmas giving might be leaner this year. On the whole, though, it would feel churlish to complain.

And yet I wonder. I think many of us wonder. Is this the best we can do? Not “best” in the sense of most income or most comfort, but is this the life God has in mind for us?

Here in the middle of Advent, well on the way to Christmas, John the Baptist looks at us across the centuries and yells “Shub!” And thereby he calls us to imagine the life God has in mind for us and to make the necessary course correction as we prepare for the Lord’s coming. Shub, my friends, shub!