Get Ready!

The traditional gospel reading for the third Sunday in Advent is another John the Baptist text. The setting is the wilderness, and John is telling the people what they should do to prepare for the coming of the Messiah. But equally important is what John DOESN'T tell the people to do. Interested? Read my sermon!

The people skills of John the Baptist were… well, not the best! He would never have won a Miss Congeniality award. Calling your listeners a “brood of vipers” is not the way to get yourself invited to holiday parties! If I stood in the pulpit on a Sunday morning and called my congregation “a brood of vipers,” I’m pretty sure that they would not-so-gently nudge me towards retirement! But that’s exactly what John the Baptist said. He didn’t stop there, either! After calling his audience a bunch of snakes, he told them that they needed to start behaving themselves. He followed that up by warning them, “Don’t think that you’re all that and a bag of chips because you’re God’s chosen people. God can choose rocks to be his people!” Yeah, John the Baptist didn’t mince words. But I have to hand it to him; he got results! Luke tells us that the people who were listening not only didn’t throw rotten tomatoes at him; they actually asked him what they should do to change! Even tax collectors and Roman soldiers asked for his advice!

When we read this morning’s text (Luke 3:7-14), we spend most of our time focusing on what John the Baptist told people to do to get ready for the Messiah. But equally important was what he didn’t tell people to do! Let me ask you a question: if you heard that the Messiah was on the way, how would you get ready for him? Would you take more time each day for prayer? Maybe you’d pick up that devotional book that you never got around to reading. You’d certainly go to church more often! My guess is that if you knew that the Messiah was passing Toledo heading south on I-75 on his way to these parts, you’d drop everything and concentrate on your spiritual life. But John the Baptist didn’t say anything to the people about getting their spiritual lives in order. He didn’t tell them to head for the Temple with a sacrifice. He didn’t tell them to enroll in a rabbi’s study group to learn to quote the Torah. He didn’t even tell them to pray every day! No, his instructions didn’t focus on the spiritual aspect of life; they concentrated on the physical. He said things like, “Share your extra clothing so that people aren’t cold, and give away your extra food so that people aren’t hungry;” and he told the tax collectors and the Roman soldiers not to squeeze money out of people so that they had enough to live on. Now, isn’t that odd? Most of us believe that God is way more concerned with our spiritual lives than with our physical lives. Some people even believe that our physical life here on earth is something to be endured, one weary day after another, while we wait eagerly for the glories of heaven. But John the Baptist doesn’t seem to agree with that! He insists that God cares about our physical lives, too!

Let’s consider that for a moment. Does God really care about our physical selves? We know that God created the whole universe and called it “good.” (Genesis 1) Then he created human beings and pronounced them “very good.” And throughout the Old Testament, God told the people through the prophets that just going to church was useless if they didn’t take care of one another, especially the ones who had less than they did. And to make sure that everybody got that message that our physical selves are important, God came to us as one of us. God was born of a human woman in a physical place at a physical time. As the gospel of John puts it, “the Word was made flesh.” That’s the good news of Christmas! God comes physically to be with us as a human being that we can embrace and kiss and hold hands with! The Messiah is more than just a spiritual idea; the Messiah is one of us!

We seem to forget that, thought, on a regular basis. Watch any 1960s movie of the life of Christ and you’ll see what I mean. The Jesus in those movies never crack their faces in a smile. Some of them never even seem to focus their eyes! It’s as though they are looking through everything physical to see something spiritual, because the spiritual is what is really important. But I don’t think that the real Jesus was like that at all. I think that when he was a baby, he cried and burped and spit up and did all the other things that babies do. And when he was a man, he laughed and cried and took afternoon naps and stubbed his toe and probably even told a joke or two! His spiritual life was perfect, of course, because he knew God intimately. But if we believe that in preparing to welcome the Messiah into our lives, we should concentrate only on the spiritual, we’re missing something very important. Jesus didn’t float down into this world as a spirit. He was born as a very physical human being.

So what does all this have to do with our preparations for Christmas? Just this. If John the Baptist told us that the way to prepare for the Messiah was to physically take care of other people (and he did); and if Jesus the Messiah came to us as a human (and he did); and if Jesus himself focused on our physical lives (and he certainly did that) – well, then, maybe we should spend a little time on the physical aspects of life, too, and not just the spiritual. After all, our physical behavior reflects our spiritual behavior. There’s nothing wrong with hanging Christmas lights and singing Christmas carols and buying gifts! While it’s true that the Christmas season often feels more like an orgy of commercialism than preparation for the Messiah, those strings of lights that we put up in such abundance reflect the light that has come into our lives in Jesus Christ. Those evergreen wreaths that we hang on our doors reflect the eternal life that we have in Jesus Christ. The gifts that we give to one another reflect the gift of love that God gave us in Jesus Christ. And when we collect clothing for Rosebud, or wrap shoe boxes for the children there; when we purchase Angel Tree gifts and donate for gift cards for needy families; when we drop a dollar in the Salvation Army kettle or donate to the United Church of Christ Christmas Fund, we are living out the love that God gave to us first. So rejoice! The Messiah is almost here! Get your lives in order! And if you’re not quite sure how to do that… well, when the Messiah gets here, he’ll model that for us in his physical life so that we can be more than a brood of vipers. We can really and truly be God’s people!