John the Baptist Was Obviously a Yankee Luke 3:7-18, Philippians 4:4-9, Zephaniah 3:14-20 Year C, 3 Advent, December 14, 2003 The Rev. William V. Livingston, Rector Church of the Resurrection, Starkville, Mississippi Because of her religious imagery, in seminary we read Flannery O'Connor's writings about southern living. Some of my non-southern classmates had trouble with what they considered the hypocrisy of many of her characters. I tried our southern politeness and avoidance of directness. You know what I mean. Our southern genteel upbringing requires that when, as a dinner guest, you encounter improperly prepared food or a dish foreign to your normal diet which looks and tastes nauseating, you compliment the host as you restrain your gags. A true southern gentleman can call someone an SOB in such a way that the other is not sure whether you insulted him or if he should thank you for the compliment. Not meaning to insult any of you without southern roots, but we can obviously tell John the Baptist was a Yankee. First, here he is out on the banks of the Jordan River - without a fishing pole! Instead folks have trekked through the heat and dust to come out there to hear him and to be baptized. How does John respond? "You brood of vipers!" That was equivalent to actually calling someone an SOB in John's time, and no one would have mistakenly thought that John meant it as a compliment. No, John is perfectly clear. And just like a Yankee, he doesn't care about their heritage. He doesn't care that they are descendants of Abraham. That's like saying to someone, "I could care less how many generations your family has been in Starkville or that your great-great-great-grand-father was Jefferson Davis' best man. Besides being a Yankee, John's an extremist. "Don't prune back the tree in spring. Don't cut off a few dead branches. No, the whole tree has to go! Dig it up by the roots so that it can't grow again." According to John, God wants to plant a brand new tree on your plot of ground. Being the Yankee that he was, John probably didn't even know about the only two essential tools every southern boy's tool box: For what moves that ain't supposed to - duct tape, and for what don't move that supposed to - WD 40. For John, there's no spraying a little WD 40 here and there so that things work a little smoother or using a little duct tape to hold that banister together. No, it's "Down with the house, bring in the wrecking ball!" According to John, God plans on rebuilding from the ground up. So, here we are in Advent, the rest of the world is decking the halls, and we Episcopalians are out looking for purple candles. The rest of the world is out shopping, and we're being harangued by a first-century Yankee revivalist wielding an ax. It's "Tidings of Comfort and Joy," versus "Flee from the Wrath to Come." As he does this time each year, John the Baptist turns up. Just when we're getting desensitized to the tear-jerker Christmas TV shows and settling into our holiday party schedule, just when the clerks at all the stores are answering the phone, "Thank you for calling XYZ Store, this is Bill wishing you a very merry Christmas, how may I help you?" two weeks in a row, you come to church to find the real meaning of Christmas and find this obnoxious Yankee yelling, "You brood of vipers!" Regardless of what the rest of the world is doing, John keeps telling us there is no Christmas without Advent. With no since of southern charm, he tells us exactly what we don't want to hear, and does it with a total fixated conviction that means one of two things: either John really was a Yankee, or he's got us pegged. Well, obviously John's bluntness caught the attention of his audience. Luke tells us that they called out, "What then shall we do?" It's like having the doctor tell you that because of your life style, you've developed a life threatening condition. "What now, John? What happens next?" John's advice is simple and practical -- live charitably and honestly. If you are like me, John the Baptist can catch you by surprise. You get that terrified feeling in the pit of your stomach that maybe you'll actually have to take him seriously and change your life. You feel welling up inside you that question people always ask when John the Baptist has gotten to them: "And me . . . what should I do?" When this happens, that's one of the sure signs that God's tidings have gotten through our mirage of gentility and spoken to us bluntly. We have no choice but to respond from the gut. It gets you where you live. But then the Eddie Bauer catalog comes, and flipping through it you get caught up in picking out that perfect sweater. Or you pick up the magazine that just came in and flip through those catchy titles: "Building your wealth in a volatile market." "Improving your Spiritual Life without guilt." How bad can it be? You really need to finish getting those Christmas cards out and wrapping the presents now that the tree is up. Besides, it's too late in the evening to do much thinking anyway. Once again, the ax is blunted, the Yankee's wilderness bluntness muffled. But not without a price. When we muffle the voice as God speaks to us in one way, we invariably muffle God's voice elsewhere in our lives as well. God isn't a Sunday buffet lunch where we can pick and choose the items we want. If we ignore the parts of the Gospel that most bother us, the whole thing fades, becomes less compelling. If we never let ourselves be compelled by prophetic passion, the rest of the passionate Gospel gets watered down too. Paul writes to the Philippians, "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice." and Zephaniah cries out from the lectern, "Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion; shout O Israel! Rejoice and exult with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem! The Lord has taken away the judgments against you, he has cast out your enemies," but if we ignore John's bluntness, the words sound remote, too distorted to make a difference. John's radical bluntness had two sides: it brought everyone before the challenge of submission to God's grace and submersion in the Jordan to signify it; and it demanded of all nothing less than goodness in behavior flowing from goodness of attitude. John calls for a genuine repentance and a commitment to the life-style of a covenant people. However, to say that we can never be worthy of God's grace misses the pont of John's challenge. We must live a life that reflects the grace we have received. John's preaching contains three emphases: a prophetic warning against the coming judgment, a call to justice and compassion in our dealings with others, and a confession of the coming Messiah. As a post-resurrection people, we are to live into all three of these. If we distort God's Advent voice, we also distort the voice of Christmas. And, we miss the fact that eventually, sure enough, the tidings John proclaims do turn into tidings of comfort and joy. They have to. They are the harbingers of Christ, the Lord of Life become flesh for us. The God who created us comes to re-create us, to make our bodies, whether virile toned muscular ones, overweight under used ones, or older deteriorating ones into partakers of the divine nature. The only real tidings of comfort and joy are the tidings of Jesus, the whole Jesus, the crucial and complex one to whom John points the way. We do not have two Christs: one the sweet infant in the manger and the other the thresher yielding his winnowing fork throwing out the chaff. The cherubic creche child is the same as the baptizer with spirit and fire. We cannot have one without the other. We cannot have a real Christmas without a real Advent. His message is one. His love is one. So which is it, a little duct tape here, a little WD 40 there? Will we continue to distract ourselves with denominational and parish conflicts? Or, will we allow John the Baptist's Yankee bluntness to shatter our protective rationalization, so that Resurrection can be a place where hurting souls enter to come into the presence of the Holy and they and we are transformed?