Advent - John the Baptist

A few months ago I came across an article which made me smile; it’s by Robert Fulghum and it’s just entitled – All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Nursery School

These are the things I learned, he says.

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don't hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don't take things that aren't yours.
• Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.

And I know it’s just homespun wisdom; but when you stop and think about it, aren’t most of the problems we have in the world directly related to one or more of those observations?

Wouldn’t the world be a better place if individuals and nations didn’t take things that aren’t theirs? And played fair? And didn’t hit other people? And left some room for wonder?

For all our massive sophistication - we still don’t seem able to live together. Inequality is rife; politics seems ineffectual; nations and peoples can’t seem to live together in peace and the poor and vulnerable find themselves terrorised or displaced in the aftermath.

And a Merry Christmas to one and all!

It’s maybe not the fireside chat you were hoping for two weeks before Christmas; but it’s the place where we have to begin if we’re going to do justice to the message that John is bringing us today – a message that gets us ready for the advent of Jesus by having us take a long hard look at ourselves and our world.

And John, Luke tells us, “went into all the country around the Jordan preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

And crowds went out to see him from Jerusalem and all Judaea and the whole region of the Jordan.

Crowds.  Thousands of folk, they reckon.

And the obvious question to ask is ‘why’? Why did so many go out to see him?

If I organised something similar in the parish today, and took my soapbox down to the Co-op and the White Horse and the Stead Inn and started preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, dunking people in the Eigie Burn, do you think things would go as well?

Why the difference, we might well ask.

Well, for one thing, John live in a time when faith was on everybody’s agenda. Their culture was saturated in belief. Sin, faith and forgiveness weren’t just part of their vocabulary they were part of their lived experience.

But they were also living in a time of profound disaffection. Israel was meant to be God’s people; but their country was occupied by Rome - a stronger pagan nation. And the temple system that was supposed to mediate between them and God had become bloated and self-serving.

The people were restless. They craved a more immediate, personal way of dealing with God. And that’s exactly what John’s baptism offered them, and why his message drew them out of the towns and into the wilderness.

They wanted someone to tell them how to live, and what to do with their lives. And people today want the same thing – but the difference is most folk in our part of the world aren’t looking to the church to give them the answers. They’re looking to science, or materialism, or hedonism, or the latest best seller in the self-help section.

And how do you think that’s going in our largely post-Christian society. Are we getting kinder? Wiser? More equitable? More gracious and forgiving, now that we’ve cast off the yoke of organised religion and all its superstitious nonsense?!

It strikes me we’re worse off than in John’s day because we feel the same restlessness as they did, but we’re looking in all the wrong places to try and deal with it.

Augustine once said – God has created us for himself and our hearts are restless ‘til they find their rest in him. It doesn’t matter what we try to fill that gap with, it never quite fits. It never quite satisfies. God alone can do that.

‘Repent’ John says – which literally means change the way you’re thinking. ‘Be baptised’ – submit to this ritual – ‘and your sins will be forgiven.’ He’s promising them an answer to their restlessness. Small wonder so many go out into the desert to hear him.

And of course, there were the rubberneckers just going out of curiosity – and religious leaders going out of fear for their own position. And though Luke’s not explicit on this, Matthew makes it clear that it’s the Pharisees and Sadducees John has in mind when he starts berating them as snakes.

But there were many sincere folk there too; and let’s face it you’d have to be sincere to agree to stand there naked before the crowds and publicly confess your sins before getting dunked. I’d imagine that would be a pretty life changing experience.

But the whole thrust of what John’s saying in today’s reading is that his baptism, dramatic through it is, is only the beginning of a journey. It’s not the end.

“This is not enough” he’s saying. “Your baptism’s a symbol of your repentance, your turning away from sin and towards God. But now you’ve got to live it out. You’ve got to bear fruit in keeping with repentance.”

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Some of us went to see The Muppet’s Christmas Carol with the Sunday School last Saturday. How do we know Ebenezer Scrooge mended his ways, in Dicken’s story? Because when he wakes up on Christmas morning after his close encounter with the three ghosts, he’s a different man. He buys the huge turkey and sends it to the Cratchitts; he makes a generous donation to the poorhouse; he goes and has Christmas dinner with his unsuspecting nephew. And when Bob Cratchitt comes in late the next day, he sends him off to buy more coal and raises his salary.

If your repentance is real, says John, then actions should flow from it.

“So what are we to do?” say the people

“Whoever has two shirts must give to the man who has none, and whoever has food must share it.”

And the specific advice to the tax collectors and soldiers is along similar lines – don’t take more than you have to; don’t extort; don’t bully.

It’s back to that list of things we should have learned in Nursery School.

It doesn’t sound very spiritual, does it? But when Jesus was asked what the most important command was, he said it came in two parts: Love God and Love Your Neighbour. Now of course the Love God part ought to come first. But if you say you love God and don’t show love to your neighbour, you have not yet understood the gospel. You’re in danger of being a tree that bears no fruit. And those trees – John tells us - are the ones that get chopped down and thrown into the fire.

And that should give us pause for thought this morning. What fruit can you and I point to that’s a direct result of how we’re choosing to live our Christian lives? Where have you and I inspired gratitude to God, or faith, or trust, or hope in the people we share our lives with? Are we making a difference? I hope so, because according to John it’s by these things that we’ll be measured.

It’s not enough to have your name on the roll. To be part of the club. It’s not now and it never has been.

By their fruits you shall know them, says the Lord.

We have such potential, in the church. Such amazing potential to make a difference.

Think about Christmas for a moment. Here’s a mad thought.

What kind of an impact would it make if all the Christians in the developed nations decided that for Christmas they would sponsor a child in the third world so they could get food and an education. In the grand scale of our Christmas spending, that’s far from impossible for many of us. Hundreds of millions of children would be given a chance they wouldn’t otherwise have had.

What would that say to the rest of the world about Christ and Christmas? What would it say to those young people that folk they’d never met cared enough to give them a helping hand?

Or what about the refugee crisis? Dayesh works hard to convince Muslims in the Middle East that the West hates them and will have no time for them if they dare flee the so-called Islamic State. And the kind of rhetoric we heard from Donald Trump this week plays right into their hands.

What kind of an impact would it make if we could find it in our hearts to meet the material needs of those refugees as winter approaches and give them the welcome they were told they could never expect in our countries? How would that undercut the narrative that Dayesh want to spin in the Muslim world?

If we say we are people of faith, then actions must follow.

That’s John’s challenge to his hearers. Those gathered by the Jordan, and those gathered in churches across the world, hearing his words echo down the centuries to them today.

And we could leave things there, but there’s one more important thing to take from this passage before we finish.

Here’s a question for you – maybe you’ve been asking it yourself.

If John offered a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, why do we need Jesus at all?

If God could choose to accept this baptism as a way of dealing with the sin that separate us from him, then why did we need Christ at all?

Two brief answers to that.

Let’s say you’re just coming out of the waters of Baptism. You’ve confessed your sin, you’ve been forgiven. But as you’re getting dried off your eyes flit back to John’s next baptisee, standing there buck naked.  And she’s as gorgeous as Angelina Joile, or as buff as Brad Pitt. And you find your eyes lingering on their shapely form far longer than they really ought to.

What do you do? Re-join the line and get baptised and forgiven all over again? That’s what John’s baptism would require!

In all seriousness, in Medieval times there are accounts of people choosing to get baptised on their deathbeads so that they had little or no opportunity to sin again before they left this life.

Thank God it doesn’t work that way. We believe that on the cross Christ dealt with the problem of sin once and for all. He took the consequences of our sin – past, present and future  - onto his shoulders, so we might be set free from them. He wiped the slate clean so that we can have a perpetual new start with God. As the prophet Jeremiah says:

²²    Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,

    for his compassions never fail.

²³    They are new every morning

    great is your faithfulness.

God has already reconciled himself to us through Christ – once and for all. Forgiveness is already ours to have, even when we mess up. The only question that remains is whether we’ll receive that forgiveness and live out of it as the defining story of our lives.

So that’s the first answer – here’s the second.

The people went looking to John as a kind of expert. They wanted someone to tell them how to live and what to do. And secular people in our time do exactly the same – they go to the fashionistas and the nutritionists and the economists and the Sunday supplements for guidance about how to live.

We all want an expert to help us.

What if your expert could be with you all the time? 24/7.

What if you had your own internal guide to help you learn how to live?

Well Christians believe we have such a guide. Jesus promised to send him to us.

“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counsellor to be with you for ever— ¹⁷the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.”

I baptise you with water, said John. But the one coming after me will baptise you with the Holy Spirit.

In Old Testament times, the Spirit came on just a handful of individuals for special reasons. But through the prophet Joel, God promised that one day he would send his Spirit on all people – on anyone who asked him for it.

And this is what John’s pointing to. God not just with us, around us, but somehow – mystically – in us. Closer to us than our own skin. A counsellor to help teach us how to live.

There’s a very interesting little story in the book of Acts 19, after Jesus has died and risen and the early church is growing.

¹While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples ²and asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”

They answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”

³So Paul asked, “Then what baptism did you receive?”

“John’s baptism” they replied.

⁴Paul said, “John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.” ⁵On hearing this, they were baptised into the name of the Lord Jesus. ⁶When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. ⁷There were about twelve men in all.

I’m not arguing that those particular manifestations of the Spirit should be normative. But what I am saying is that the Holy Spirit is our inheritance in Christ – sent into our lives to help us grow into the men and women God wants us to be.

Why wasn’t John’s baptism enough? Because his baptism didn’t bring the spirit into our lives; and it’s the Spirit who empowers us to live this Christian life that we’re called to.

It’s not enough just to be plugged into the church. We need to be switched on to the Spirit.