Based on our Gospel reading this morning, I definitely would not want John the Baptist to serve as one of our worship greeters on Sunday morning.
Our worship greeters say appropriate things like, “It’s great to see you today.” “Good morning.” “Welcome to First Church.” Or “It’s nice to see you.”
Instead of these welcoming phrases, John the Baptist greets people with, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”
“John – how can I say this in a nice way? You’re going to need to work on your people skills if you want to continue to be one of our ushers on Sunday morning. We have a training event next month. You might want to sign up for it.”
Can you imagine if one of our greeters would say something like that to somebody entering our church for worship?
“Did that person just call me a snake? Must be having a bad day, I guess!”
If this text from Matthew’s Gospel reading this morning got your attention, then Matthew did his job well in introducing us to this wild and radical prophet of God, who we know today as John the Baptist.
We don’t find John baptizing people in a local synagogue. No. We find him standing in the wilderness, the middle of nowhere, and yet people from all around the region are coming to him to hear his preaching and to be baptized.
Baptism. Why would people go out of their way to be baptized? Why would they even think about driving past a dozen synagogues in order to be baptized out in the middle of nowhere by this eclectic and wild man named John?
“Who is he anyway? Has this guy been through the district’s Lay Speaking course or met with the district committee on ordained ministry? Somebody better check out this guy’s credentials.”
Matthew gives us a hint as to why people came from all over the place to be baptized by John. He tells us that they were baptized in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
Honest to God. These people were longing for this opportunity to confess their sins and begin anew with God.
Isn’t that great? We are given every indication in this text to believe that these people came to John with the right motives and with the right attitudes. They wanted to get right with God.
Christmas is a wonderful time of year for you and me to get right with God. That’s why the church calendar sets aside these four significant weeks called the season of Advent. To give us the opportunity to get right with God so that when Christmas day comes, we will be able to receive the gift of God’s Son, Jesus Christ in all of His fullness.
The season of Advent is a wonderful gift to the church. There are important reasons why the season of Advent is a gift to the church.
First of all – it heightens the suspense.
I officiate for several weddings here at First Church. And for each wedding rehearsal, we have the bridal party practice lining up in the order that they will be coming down the aisle.
And I always tell the bride and the person who will be escorting her down the long middle aisle (usually her father, but not always) to wait behind our sanctuary wall until the very last possible second, to give some suspense as the people wait eagerly to see the bride for the first time in her beautiful dress.
And just at the right time, she appears, and immediately begins processing down the middle aisle. And if everything goes well, the mothers are crying, the fathers are sweating, and the people are nervously awaiting the big moment to arrive. That’s what we’re after! The big build up. The heightened anticipation.
Advent is a time for us to wait expectantly for Jesus Christ to appear in all of His glory. Just like at a wedding, there are signs before the service that something wonderful is about to happen - the seating of the mothers, the lighting of the unity candles, the procession of the groomsmen – and you know that it’s only a few moments before you will see the bride coming down the aisle.
And guess what? After that long suspense – before you know it – the service is over!
We tend to appreciate gifts more as we allow the suspense to build to that special moment.
If we bypass the season of Advent, we end up limiting that special moment when we celebrate the One who is to come into the world, Jesus Christ.
A second gift Advent gives us is an opportunity for us to get right with God. Notice how the people in Matthew’s text were hungering for the opportunity to confess their sins and be baptized. There was a hunger to get right with God. There was a hunger to begin again.
And notice that this is before Jesus Christ has even started his public ministry. It would be getting the cart before the horse if we would skip the season of Advent and rush to Christmas, without having first prepared our hearts and our minds for Jesus Christ to be born in us.
Or think of it this way. If Jesus Christ would say to you this morning that he will be coming to your house to be your guest this Friday, would you end up changing your plans for this week? Would you change some of your priorities? Would you do things a little differently this week if you knew that Jesus would be coming to your house in just a few days?
The season of Advent is a time for us to reconsider our plans leading up to Christmas Day and the Christmas Season. It’s a time to rethink our priorities. And we might decide to do things a little differently in these weeks leading up to December 25. Why? Because we know that this special day in which we celebrate Christ’s birth is coming and we want to have our hearts ready to receive Him by faith.
That’s what the people were doing in our scripture reading this morning. They were coming to John the Baptist, to prepare themselves for God’s coming kingdom.
And I don’t know if you want to call it a 6th sense that John had, or if it was even more obvious than that – but when John the Baptist saw some of the religious leaders of his day showing up to be baptized, John ends up pulling them aside.
And this is why he calls them “brood of vipers.”
You see, not only was John the Baptist the worship greeter, he was also the preacher.
John was calling into question their motive in coming for baptism.
And this leads us to the third reason why we spend four weeks in preparation for the Christmas season. God wants us to bear good fruit. John reminds the Pharisee and Sadducee leaders that baptism and repentance mean nothing to God, unless it leads us to bear fruit.
John is calling for the religious leaders to have a faith that is alive and fresh and new.
And out of all these reasons for having Advent, this one really hits me the hardest. If John’s purpose was to wake me up this morning, then he did a great job, because now I’m awake.
John the Baptist is telling us that our faith is to be so much more than simply going through religious motions that have no bearing on how we live Monday through Saturday. John says - that’s not faith. Faith is bearing the fruit of obedience in our daily living. Faith is living out what we profess on Sunday morning.
Our scripture this morning is a wake up call for those of us who have been part of the church for any length of time. John is saying to us, “When you participate in these religious services, come with an attitude that your life will be radically altered.”
Every year, the season of Advent is a time for us to become more conscientious of what we do on Sunday mornings so that it connects with our everyday living.
I was reading about a guy named Dennis, who lives in Katy, Texas, and how he needed some same-day dry cleaning before he left on a trip. He remembered one store with a huge sign, “One Hour Dry Cleaners” which was located on the other side of town.
Since he needed his clothes dry cleaned right away, he made the drive across town. After he filled out the tag, he told the clerk, “I’ll be back in an hour.” And she said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t get this back to you until Thursday.” Dennis said, “But your sign says, ‘One Hour Dry Cleaners.’”
“I know,” she said. “But that’s just the name of the store.”
Those of us who carry the name Christian, but fail to act like the one whose name we bear throughout the week, are like those religious leaders who came for the ritual as long as it didn’t change their way of living.
Advent is a time of the church year to heighten the suspense of the coming of Jesus Christ into the world. It’s a season that helps us to get right with God. And it’s a season that reminds us to bear good fruit.
Penny and I were walking through one of the anchor stores at a mall on a Sunday afternoon during the fall season when it occurred to me that there were Christmas decorations all over that store. There were Christmas trees, greenery, ornaments, and wreaths everywhere throughout this department store. I mean, what’s next? Some church will probably decide to celebrate Christmas in July, or something crazy like that!
Usually I take this early Christmas stuff all in stride, but this time, it hit me the wrong way. Do we really want to bypass the gifts of the Advent Season, just so that we can celebrate a hollow Season of Christmas?
I said to Penny that they might as well leave the decorations up throughout the year. Just have Christmas sales throughout the year. Or maybe mix the Easter decorations with the Christmas decorations and the stores could call it Eastmas shopping year round.
And as I walked through that store on that beautiful sunny October day, all I could think about was, “You know, I’m not ready for Christmas. I’m not ready to rejoice in the Savior’s birth in the middle of October. God is still working on me. I need Advent!”
I need the season of Advent to heighten my anticipation about what God is going to do next. I need the season of Advent to be a season of repentance and preparation for the coming of the Messiah to our dark and broken world. I need the season of Advent to get my heart right with God.
He attended a men’s retreat weekend over twenty years ago, not because he wanted to, but because he was coerced by his wife. He had attended church – maybe not regularly, but on occasion he would come.
He went to this retreat dragging his feet. “Why did I agree to go on this weekend? Just think of what you could be doing, if you weren’t stuck at this men’s retreat.”
But he was there to stay. The first night didn’t go so well. It was kind of slow. They were asked to practice the spiritual discipline of silence, and so from Friday evening of the retreat until breakfast the next morning, they were encouraged to not speak out-loud, but to use that time to be in silent prayer with God.
To his surprise, that silence was needed. God began to work on him and he began to think about things that were out of order in his life. He started to feel God’s presence again. He hadn’t felt this way in quite a while, because he had gotten so busy with life and work. You know how that goes.
And as the weekend progressed, he started to feel not only God’s presence, but God’s love through Jesus Christ. He was able to connect with the other men on the retreat who were just ordinary men like he was, but who could also sense that God was up to something that weekend. Something powerful. Something wonderful. Something life changing.
By the end of that retreat, he had made a decision to allow Jesus Christ to be number one in his life, in his marriage, and in the life of his family.
When he came home from the retreat, his wife asked him how things went, not knowing what a loaded question that was. To her surprise, his face gleamed with excitement as he shared how he had been able to reconnect with God in a powerful way.
He told her that he wanted them to work together as a couple in having Jesus Christ to be first in their marriage and in their family. Worship took on a whole new meaning for him. He began to see his job as a way to serve God and others. He got more involved in the life of his church. He asked how much they had been giving financially to the church and when his wife told him, he was appalled. He said, “We’re going to start tithing our money immediately. Let’s do the math and begin giving that amount.” When faith has an impact on our bank account, usually that means true transformation is taking place.
That men’s retreat became that significant period of time that he needed to receive Jesus Christ into his life in a new and fresh way. That weekend retreat became for him, his Advent – his time in which he set aside time to allow God to work on his heart. The light of his faith, which had just been a flicker of light before that weekend retreat, had all of the sudden lit up in such a way that it ended up transforming his life.
This past summer, some of us didn’t have electricity for several hours. I think the church was down for about six hours. And when it got dark, I can’t tell you the number of times that I went to flick on a light switch, expecting there to be light, and of course nothing happened.
And after every time I reached for a light switch during that power outage, I was reminded of how much I take light for granted. I just expect it to magically be there. So we lit candles, used the flashlight, and spent the remaining time waiting patiently for the power to come back on. And when it finally came back on, I was that much more appreciative of the precious gift of light.
This past week during my young adult bible study, I asked them since many of them have young children, “Are your children getting pretty excited for Christmas?”
Thinking that they would say something about toys and presents, one set of parents said how their son is really into Christmas lights. All he wants to do is to see the Christmas lights on people’s homes.
In these remaining three weeks of this season called Advent, let’s focus on the light of Christmas – let’s take our bibles, find some space during our daily routine, and maybe hang on to the sermon outline found in the bulletin that lists our weekly scripture readings for this month, and allow the suspense of this season to build, and to use these weeks as a time to get right with God, and to bear fruit in our homes, in our jobs, and in our daily living.
Let’s face it. John the Baptist would have made a lousy Sunday greeter. But that’s what you get when you have a wild man in the middle of the wilderness shouting, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”
Let’s pray:
Lord God, the second advent candle is lit and we can’t wait for the celebration of your Son’s birth. We want you today. We want you now. The light of the Advent Season is getting brighter, and yet, we also need more time to get our hearts right with you. Take our broken lives and prepare them for your coming. This we pray in the name of the one who is to come, Jesus Christ, the light of the world. Amen. .
Hallelujah! Praise the Lord!