The Man Who Warned Us of The Wrath to Come

Phil 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18

John said to the crowds ... “You brood of vipers,
Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” ...
Even now, the ax is lying at the root of the trees,
Every tree that does not bear good fruit
Is cut down and thrown into the fire” ...
So ... John proclaimed the good news to the people.

We live in troubled times, at least as troubled as the first century, more so I would say. So maybe we need a John the Baptist in our midst. Maybe it would do us some good to hear ourselves called a brood of vipers. Consider what vipers are: creatures who inject their own fatal poison into others, poisoning the life of others, debasing it. And hard as it is to think of ourselves as vipers --- for there is much good in us humans, much creativity, much greatness and beauty of soul: just think of all the art, architecture, music, poetry, novels, plays we have produced and love and cherish; think of all the small and great ways we humans have shown care and compassion for each other --- and yet in our past and in our present, amidst all our greatness and goodness, we have brought upon ourselves, and continue to bring upon ourselves, real, sometimes even unimaginable evils; that is, unimaginable until we have done them. For was not the holocaust unimaginable, until it was both imagined and realized — and realized not in some backwater but in a highly civilized nation, the land of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Kant, Goethe, Einstein. And is it not also true that the recent high school shooting of four teen-agers by a fifteen year old was also unimaginable, that is, unimaginable until a few decades ago when those high school killings began occurring and occurring and occurring. It was certainly unimaginable in my mind and in my parents’ mind and in everybody else’s mind when I was a high schooler in the late 1940’s. So who knows what unimaginable evils lie ahead of us? Well, that’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it. For we live in a time when the unimaginable is part of our daily fare. Who could have imagined computers, cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, who could have imagined their consequences, for good and for evil, upon our lives. And who could have imagined a president, now an ex-president, calling his lost election rigged — and that lie leading to the storming of our Capitol building by thousands of his followers shouting “hang Mike Pence” and “death to Nancy, and ending up with a vandalized Capitol, five dead people and a multitude of injured. And then there is the most unimaginable of all, for how many of us, until relatively recently, ever imagined that our beloved cars and planes and trains, and all our nicely warming home furnaces, (how many of us imagined) that the exhaust fumes from these fossil fueled machines could so change our climate as to threaten life as we know it, not only human life but the life of all earth’s inhabitants, except perhaps the cockroaches. Am I wrong to worry that though we may start out as vipers, we may end up as lemmings, unable to stop what we are doing, that we will just keep on going as we are going, heading straight to the cliff, and over it. Ringing in my ears, these days, are John the Baptist’s words, there is a “wrath to come.” I fear for my grandchildren, my great grandchildren, I fear for all our children. What kind of future are we constructing for them? And yet I know, you know, for all the Bible’s talk, the church’s talk, about our sinfulness, about God’s judgment upon us, our faith, ultimately, is not about fear but the dispelling of fear. Think of those words from that great hymn, Amazing Grace: “T’was faith that taught me first to fear, and grace my fear relieved.” And it’s true that even in this morning’s gospel reading, where so much is made of axes, winnowing forks, and unquenchable fires, there are, tucked away, two notes dispelling fear.

The first is found in the final line of today’s reading; it is the editor’s comment on John’s fiery talk. He calls it “good news.” I suppose if we think that the truth is always a good, then hearing us called vipers, and hearing there are dark consequences for destructive actions, could be understood as good news, but it’s a bitter-sweet, ironic kind of good news. I prefer to think that the editor is thinking the good news lies elsewhere. And that elsewhere is not hard to find; it lies in John saying, I am not the messiah. And we, the people, can say, thank God for that. For despite John envisioning the messiah as someone coming with a winnowing fork to clear the threshing floor and to burn the chaff in unquenchable fire, we know better, we know the messiah, the Christ, comes with grace, with forgiveness, with redemptive power to heal, to move us from our destructive ways, to remind us that we are created in the image of God, that there is something sacred in our being, in the being of all of us, so we are to treat each other as beings in the image of God, as if there is something sacred in us, even in all life, for all life is created by God. Of course, the image in us is broken, that is why we can act as vipers to each other and vipers to the earth and its inhabitants. But in Christ, the image of God is not broken, it is fully present; that is why we call Jesus the Christ, even the Son of God, why we say Jesus Christ is fully human, fully divine, and most importantly of all, why we say there is the power of redemption in Christ, the power to heal us, for in opening ourselves to the image of God in Christ, to the spirit of God in Christ, we are opening ourselves to God’s power to draw us to goodness, for we are not alone in this vast universe, we are not alone in fighting our tribal, self-interested, viperish impulses, the very ground of being, the creator of the universe, is with us, drawing us to the good. That is our great hope, that is the great hope, the good news of this advent season, and every season. And sisters and brothers in Christ, that hope tells us who we are, we believers: we are bearers of hope. We are to bear hope even amidst all our uncertainties, even when things look so bad as to make hope unbearable, to make us fearful, to drive us to despair. For it’s true, fear, despair is possible. But let us remember that fear, despair is not required, for we know that there is redeeming power in our midst, there is grace in our midst, and its face is Jesus Christ, our incarnate Lord. Praise God for this great mercy.

Praise Christ.

Amen.