John the Manager of a Spiritual Home Depot
Preacher: The Rev. Andrew Van Kirk
Passage: Luke 3:7-18
Well, you brood of vipers…
This is everyone’s favorite Sunday in Advent, right? The third Sunday. The one with the special pink candle that stands for joy? And the special pink roses? The one where John the Baptist calls everybody children of snakes. What is more joyous than being called an immature serpent?
He also threatens them with an ax and fire. It’s a great and glorious day! Yay!
If John the Baptist’s delivery is…let’s just call it ‘moderately aggressive’, …if his delivery is moderately aggressive, the actual content of his moral exhortation is not all that radical. It’s actually, surprisingly, what you’d imagine.
In verses 10-14, three groups of people come up to John the Baptist and ask, “What should we do?” The crowds, the tax collectors, and the soldiers – these three groups forming a representative cross section of society, each group having a slightly different set of opportunities to act rightly or wrongly towards one another. One of John’s helpful insights here is this: our opportunities to sin (or do good) are not the same.
But let’s look at some of the actual advice. Look at verse 10: “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.’”
I really prefer the translations that stick a little closer to the Greek here, and use ‘tunic’ instead of ‘coat.’ For one thing, ‘tunic’ is definitely what Luke wrote. Also, I don’t even own one tunic, much less have two or more tunics. So John and I are good on tunics. Coats? It’s another matter with the coats. Does a fleece count? What about sweaters?
We certainly shouldn’t imagine that John the Baptist would be overly impressed with our holiday season and all the shopping, but also, we obviously live in a world of multiple pieces of outerwear. Additionally, we wear clean clothes, which is a critical, and I’d argue valuable, difference from John’s world. So we should recognize that the world of material goods has changed a lot in 2000 years. There are more coats in America than there are people in America and that is a great thing.
John out there trying to apply God’s truth into his hearers’ lives, the actual decisions they are making day-to-day; this is application. Application is always specific to the time and place. So this particular application doesn’t directly and literally apply to our changed circumstances. But what’s underneath John’s exhortation about the coats, and about the food, is that people who have need to share with those who don’t.
One of the places where we’ve taken John’s underlying message and applied it to our specific lives is in the Angel Tree gifts. Thank you to all of you who adopted an angel and brought gifts. Here, I want to show you something:
I love this. I always enjoy our family adopting an angel — and I will readily acknowledge that Stephanie does most of the work. But I am blessed in imagining the joy that our angel gifts bring that one child.
But I also love seeing all the gifts from St. Andrew’s together. You may never have actually seen them all in one place. But just imagine what our sharing of coats – and socks and bikes and Barbies and RC cars and all sorts of stuff – just imagine how much joy this is going to bring into the world on Christmas morning.
This goes on a while. Lots of joy.
If we were to summarize John message about sharing coats and food and summarize the verses that follow, in which John exhorts the tax collectors not to take extra for themselves and the soldiers not to extort money, we’d end up saying something like this: in summary, be honest, generous, considerate and kind. Nice, not naughty.
Let’s imagine you had gone out to see John and had just returned home. We might have a conversation like this:
Me: “So, back from Jordan River? What did you learn from the great prophet John?”
You: “Be nice, not naughty.”
Me: “Oh.”
What is radical about John is not that he says it, but that he means it. And he actually seems to expect people to do it. He’s telling people, “You are living lives of selfishness, greed, and injustice, and you must stop it.”
And apparently that is enough to make people wonder, “Is this the Messiah?”
How is that people got so excited about someone who taught basic human decency that they thought he was the Messiah!?
Certainly John had to be charismatic as a teacher. He was out there inspired by the Spirit of God. That must have been part of it.
Part of it too is that a clarion call to a high moral standard, made by someone who has the full wealth of conviction, is less common than we represent. The world constantly seeks to make peace with endemic injustice so that we no longer have to feel it. Just as our eyes eventually adjust to looking through colored lenses so everything looks “normal,” our hearts grow accustomed to looking at the world with its everyday injustice and unrighteousness. Still, it’s amazing when someone takes those glasses off.
In so doing, John the Baptist sparked an imaginative run to a world where things are actually right and people actually good, and that was a thrilling vision. It’s not so strange that people started asking, “Can you fix all this? John, are you the one?”
John responds in verse 16. It says this: “And John answered all of them by saying, “I run a spiritual Home Depot.” That’s not exactly what he says. He says “I baptize you with water.” But it’s sort of the same. John’s call to repentance, to baptism for the forgiveness of sins, to a life that is honest, considerate, generous and kind, this is DIY spirituality. Not that John didn’t believe in God or God’s grace, but that these are things a person does, you do it yourself: repent of your sins, let John dunk you in the river, and then go commit with everything you have to do better.
But Jesus is not coming to open a Lowes across the river from John’s Home Depot. Jesus is bringing in the bulldozers and excavators, the forklifts and cranes. Jesus is not bringing a new gadget to repair the plumbing of our heart; he’s bringing a whole new heart. “I baptize you with water,” John said, but “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
The Messiah is not do-it-yourself; the Messiah is God-does-it. God is going to redo you; you are not going to be the same at all.
John’s concern; his anxiety about this, is that people’s hearts are like SuperFund sites. They are toxic dumps. And you can’t build a new structure on a SuperFund site until the mess gets cleaned up.
It’s hard for the Holy Spirit to hang out in a heart that’s not honest, generous, considerate, and kind. That’s why John is out there before Jesus.
John’s message, his exhortation and encouragement, is ultimately not enough to save us. John’s work is about preparing us for salvation. Then, the Messiah comes. The Messiah is more, more than a new manager for the spiritual Home Depot. He’s a new builder. “Unless the LORD builds the house, their labor is in vain who build it (Psalm 127:1, BCP).”
And when our hearts get cleaned up, when we repent, seek forgiveness, and try to be honest, generous, considerate and kind — when we live into the Christmas spirit, as people call it — then our hearts truly long for the Messiah. The most important reason people started asking if John was the Messiah is that when they started acting out John’s message, the people felt ready, expectant, hopeful.
Yes, I love imagining how much joy those gifts will bring to children in our community this Christmas. But I also love how much joy they will bring us. It is one way, hopefully among many, in which people of St. Andrew’s have tried to live into John’s moral exhortation this season. In helping make Christmas happen for others, we’re making Christmas happen for ourselves.
It is in being John’s sort of people, the brood of vipers who are willing to do something about it, that we become open to being Jesus’s sort of people. Make some special effort this week to be honest, generous, considerate and kind. Act like a character from a sappy 1950’s Christmas movie.
A little do-it-yourself spirituality of John’s variety makes us ready for the God-does-it transformation of the Messiah. A little trip to John’s spiritual Home Depot makes us ready for the coming of Christ at Christmas. Thanks be to God.
