The Christmas Party Crasher

Advent 2A: Matthew  

John the Baptist is a burr in your saddle, the car alarm you can’t turn off, that boorish uncle or ill-natured aunt at your holiday dinner—unpleasant, embarrassing and unwelcome, something you’d just as soon not be part your holiday celebrations. There’s a reason you don’t see ole ‘wild-eyed John’ on Christmas cards or as an inflatable character on peoples’ front lawns. He just doesn’t fit in next to Santa, Frosty and Rudolph. He doesn’t jibe with the Christmas spirit. 

Christmas, you see, is as straightforward a holiday as they come. Starting the day after Thanksgiving, it’s just one long string of “Holly, Jolly, Merry, Merry, Joy, Joy, Joy” as children’s eyes shine and lights twinkle and we stuff ourselves with goodies. But the moment John speaks, “Repent! Prepare! Bear fruit,” the jingles die and the cheer drains out of the room. When it comes to Christmas, John is just a buzzkill, a wet blanket. And yet for some reason, the Church insists on pushing John on us each year in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Evidently, we can’t get to the manger without going through John the Baptist. 

Considering how John is described in Scripture, you’d expect someone like that would be a total turnoff for his first century audience, as he is for us today—dressed in a camel hair suit, fingers sticky with honey and bug bits, spit flying from his mouth as he goes on and on about the end of the world as we know it and how everyone needs to change, to get ready. And yet according to the Gospels, rather than scaring people off, John’s preaching drew people in droves, from towns and cities and the countryside, walking miles in the wilderness to hear him speak. John’s message was apparently not unpleasant or unwelcome, but was in fact just what the people were hungry to hear. What gives? 

It helps to understand that John, for all his strangeness and gruffness, wasn’t some raving crazy man. Rather, what he was was a living anachronism, a throwback. He dressed like the old prophet Elijah, and he sounded like Isaiah or Amos. His appearance would have been as striking in his day as would be the arrival of Thomas Jefferson waving a copy of the Declaration of Independence in the Capitol today.  

John was a sight to see, all right, but it was his message that caught people's attention. For he didn’t just look like an old school prophet, he sounded like one too, doing a prophet’s work, “foretelling” and "forthtelling,” declaring the truth about God’s people and announcing what God was going to do with them. In this case, the news couldn’t have been more momentous—God was finally making good on his promise, God’s Anointed was on his way to establish God’s heavenly, peaceful rule to earth. The people of Israel had waited a long time for that news. No longer! Now was time not to wait but to prepare for his coming, time to “repent.” 

Now, if there is one word that best encapsulates the finger-wagging, “church lady” judgmentalism that non-Christians are so turned off by, it’s that word, “repent.” To a lot of people, it comes as a threat, a condemnation. But, that’s not at all how John’s audience heard it. To the crowds who came out to see him, John’s message was a breath of fresh air, a glass of cold water on a hot day. How can that be? What are we missing? Were people back then just a bunch of self-loathing sops who enjoyed being scolded and told they’re bad? Not that we know of. They were no more self-hating than people are today (and arguably less so).  

No, for the already put-upon people of Israel, John’s call to repentance was in fact good news. To them, it was the exact opposite of a finding of guilt; it was a declaration of pardon, release. 

To us repentance may mean owning up to how rotten you are, saying out loud that you are a selfish, sinful, deeply defective human being who grieves the heart of God and that you are very, very sorry about it. But for John and his followers, repentance meant letting go—letting go of the past, of their mistakes, of the belief that things will never change for them, that they will never change, that no matter what they say or do, they are stuck forever in the mess they have made of their lives, or in the mess someone else has made of them, that there is no hope for them, no beginning again, no chance of new life. For those who were living under the weight of that kind of thinking, John’s “repent” was an offer of a fresh start, a clean slate, a cure for despair.  

If they could come out of their comas long enough to see what was wrong and return to the Lord, then he would wash all their sins away for them, forever. They could start their lives all over again before they even dried off. The past would lose its power over them. What they had done, what they had said, what they had made happen and what had happened to them would no longer control their lives. They would no longer hear those nagging voices in their heads that told them how bad they were, how they are damaged goods, beyond recovery. Those voices would be silenced, and they would be free to begin again, listening to God's voice this time, listening to Him telling them how blessed, how beloved they were. 

That was what John was offering, and, you can imagine, there were plenty of takers. People who deemed themselves quite devout before ended up going home soaking wet, having been baptized by John. Even people who had no intention of confessing their sins suddenly found themselves welling up with tears, owning up to their misdeeds, and getting dunked into those muddy waters only to emerge spiritually clean and refreshed. No wonder people walked days to get to him. No wonder they stood around even after their turn was over, just to hear him say it again and again. "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." You see, John’s message to them was not that they had to change but that they could change. 

There are people today who need to hear these words, who long to hear them. People like the little girl who was abused by her uncle and forty years later, after he is long dead, she has not married. She will not let anyone get close. She is still keeping her forty-year-old promise never to let anyone hurt her like that again.  

People like the family man who lost his job and agreed to stay home with the kids while his wife went to work. The plan was that they would change places as soon as he found work. But after months of rejections, his energy is just drained out of him, replaced by beer and liquor, and his wife is packing her bags.  

People like the moody teenager who doesn't know what is wrong with him and who can't find anyone to talk to about it. His father is out of the picture, and his mother turns every talk into a sermon. He falls in with some teens who are even moodier than he is, and that makes him feel better. But when he’s caught shoplifting one day, and his mother picks him up at the police station, she tells him he has been nothing but trouble since the day he was born. All that remains to be seen is just how much trouble he can be. He intends to live up to her expectations of him.  

For people like this, the invitation to repent, to wipe the slate clean and start over, is good news indeed, freeing, refreshing news. 

That said, not everyone sees change as desirable, even in John’s day. Like all preachers, John didn’t get through to everybody. Pharisees and Sadducees, the “decent, respectable types”—many of them came to the Jordan river wanting to be baptized but with no intention of making any changes in the way they lived. John called them to start over and they replied, “Thanks, we’re good.” They were willing to go through the motions, for propriety’s sake, for appearances, to be seen as respectable, but that’s as far as they would go. Among themselves, they criticized John’s “extreme rhetoric,” they questioned his methods, his legitimacy, and they looked down on the masses who were taken in by him.  

John had no patience for their self-righteousness pretensions: “You sons of snakes! Slithering on down here to the water like a bunch of serpents fleeing a field being burned for clearing. Well, let me tell you, the days of resting on your laurels are over. Don’t show me your gold “Members Only” Temple card—your theological credentials cut no ice with God. Don’t tell me about your spiritual lineage or that you’re Abraham’s children. Because if God wanted more children, he’d turn these stones into a bunch of them. But that’s your problem, isn’t it? Your hearts are as dead as stones already. You’re dead wood, when God’s looking for living trees. If I were you, I’d be serious about repenting, because the axe is lying at the root of the tree. You know that axe that’s on all the Roman banners, the one bundled in wooden sticks, the fasces, that axe is going to be hacking away soon enough, cutting Israel at its roots. (Which is what happened—Rome destroyed Jerusalem) But I’m here now to lay the ground work, to get things ready for someone even more powerful. He’ll be here any minute now. He’s going to sort Israel like a farmer sorts the wheat from the chaff. Are you prepared for that?” 

Whew, that’s some fiery language! We mainline preachers tend to shy away from preaching like that. We’d prefer to stick with safer, more palatable messages about “God’s love and acceptance,” and about how God is nice so we should be nice to others. We’re happy to leave the “fire and brimstone” to fundamentalists. Especially this time of year.  

And yet there are people who need to hear this too. The credentialed, the secure, the publicly pious, the ones who smugly stand in judgement of others, who sit on the sidelines while God does his work on others, not willing to risk being changed, content in their Instagram perfect but secretly messed up lives….To such as these, John’s “repent” is indeed a challenge. To these, his message isn’t you can change, but you better.  

As with prophets before him, John’s mission was to “comfort the afflicted,” but also to “afflict the comfortable.” He wasn’t above scaring his audience half to death—anything to wake them up and make them see they were sleepwalking through their lives, confusing their ways with God’s ways, and cutting themselves off from God. 

Even here, though, the call to repentance is not meant as a judgment but as a warning. John’s message is not, “Repent…or else.” It’s “Repent, or you’ll miss the boat. Turn around, because you’re heading in the wrong direction. The kingdom is near, so don’t get left behind when the Messiah comes.” Even here, you see, in John’s harshest denunciations, there’s good news. For, implied in the command to repent is the assumption that we can. God hasn’t given up on us, the final verdict hasn’t come down. There’s still time. We can change direction.  

It's clear that how we receive John’s call to repent is affected by our attitude, by how we see ourselves. Those of us who repeatedly fall short, who feel stuck, who never seem to catch a break, who can’t imagine being any other way—to them, repentance is a gift, an opportunity. But to those of us who think we don’t need to change, who think we have our house in order, John’ message is a challenge, a threat, endangering our hard-earned sense of moral superiority. 

But in both cases, John’s message is good news. This is because repentance is not a onetime thing, something we do once and we’re done, we’re safe. Repentance is not a door we pass through once that gets us into the kingdom. It’s an ongoing activity, a lifelong practice of returning again and again when we’ve strayed from God, bending our hearts towards God, reorienting and to reordering our lives again and again in light of God’s coming to us, meeting him whenever He appears in our lives. 

The fact that the Church insists that we hear this call to repent today in the midst of the bustle of the holiday season reminds us that spiritual awakening and transformation can happen at any time, even now. We don’t have to wait till after December 25, until all our errands are done, all our presents opened, our family gathered and fed and gone home, and things start to calm down again. We don’t have to wait till then. God wants to give us a new beginning, even now. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Thanks be to God!