Teacher, what should we do?

 I preached this sermon last Saturday at a local house-church - it got significantly and quickly rewritten after the tragic event at Sandy Hook Elementary School last Friday.  I offer this as my reflection

Luke 3:7-18

John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?  Bear fruits worthy of repentance.  Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.  Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

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.”  Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?”  He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.”  Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?”  He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”

As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals.  He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

I've had this phrase in my mind all week: What should we do?  This is a perennial question, right?  Last night, after seeing the news from a variety of e-mails and Facebook posts that there had been a particularly disturbing mass shooting yesterday, my wife and I sat down to talk about it a little bit, and that's the same question that came up.  How are we supposed to respond in the face of such horror?  What should we do?

All week I’ve been thinking about John the Baptist, about how he’s got this band of folks – probably decent religious people who care about the state of their souls – and they’re following him out in the middle of nowhere and he’s calling them vipers and threatening them with God’s wrath and hellfire and brimstone.  Where does he get off, right?  What about the truly evil people who perpetrate the kind of terror we saw yesterday?  John is using some incredibly violent metaphors here: do you know what happens on a threshing floor?  I read the Little House on the Prairie series to the kids last year and I've got some inside information on this!  All winter long, when the farmers don't have anything else to do, they take bushels of wheat and spread it out on this big wooden platform and proceed to beat the tar out of it with sticks to separate the grain from the stalks.  And that's not all: the ax is at the root of the tree.  There's a winnowing fork, whatever that creepy thing is! We're supposed to be baptized by fire - or burned with unquenchable fire - and this is for the people who have actually troubled themselves to come out to the wilderness to be baptized by him.  Why is it so important that decent people get this message that God wants to seriously prune them, that they must become the kind of trees that produce the fruits of repentance?

I heard a story this week about a family out in the Texas hill country that have a farm they inherited from many generations of their forbears.  They have decided to rehabilitate the land, to cultivate it and try to make it beautiful and useful.  There’s a problem, though, in that for the better part of a century, at least some of this land was used as a dumping ground.  With decades of waste piled up, there are parts of the property where the good soil is actually several feet below the surface.  In the mean time, trees have grown up in this landfill – some of them beautiful.  I can’t but imagine there’s probably some scary stuff rotting under that land; that whatever beauty those trees provide is likely offset by the knowledge that poison underlies them, that their roots cannot be trusted.  What do you do with trees like that?

The temptation, of course, is to ignore the problem – because the solution is simply too much to be borne.  It’ll be OK, the trees look fine – it’s not really that big a deal.  But late at night, in the far corners of our minds, the anxiety is still there.  This is why all these groups of people keep coming back to John the Baptist with the same question.  What do we do?  He gives them really simple instructions – “share your stuff,” he says, and the people keep coming back and saying “wait, John, what about us, what should we do?”  They hear these simple instructions, but ones that are so deep and difficult that they simply cannot really hear them.  Did he just say to tear out the trees and cart off the bad soil and start over? Surely not.  So they keep coming back and asking.  What should we do?  Share your clothes with the poor.  What should we do?  Don’t take more than your fair share.  What should we do? Be satisfied with what you already have. What should we do?  Sell everything you own, give the proceeds to the poor, and come and follow me. 

It looks simple, right?  But we keep circling around it, because obviously those aren’t just the right answers in our particular situations, are they?  No, John, you don’t get my situation. What should we do?  There’s a lesson here, in this metaphoric farm of John’s, in this farm my friends told me about.  What we have to do is mourn the fact that we can no longer go on pretending we don’t know the roots are poisoned.  That we can’t just take part in the status quo and keep going.  We have to put the axe to the roots of so many trees that we love and tear them out so we can get to that rotten soil underneath and start setting it right.  Repent.  Turn the soil.  Repent. Don’t eat the poison fruit anymore.  Repent. Reclaim the land. Cultivate something new.  Do your part to make a new world where our neighbors and our children don’t live alone in fear of their emotions, where they don’t play out their cosmic internal hurts on the bodies of innocent bystanders, where healing is as close as the person next to you.  Repent.  Make the prophets’ visions come true.

Can we do that?  Not by a long shot.  That’s the other piece that might be just as hard to swallow.  In all this threshing and burning, chopping and digging – I might have one good acre in me; maybe two before my time runs out.  In the mean time, I’ll make my own mistakes.  So even as I work my hardest to take part in my salvation, I can only make it as far out as my own skin.  There’s a whole world out there, one that needs me, and yet needs more than I can possibly offer, no matter how realized I may be.  We must also pray that that same winnowing fork and refining fire come to each and every soul in the whole world, that each of us learn to find the good soil and plant in it.  That is what Advent is about, that is what John the Baptist is preaching about in the wilderness.  Wait.  Watch. Pray.  Repent.  Bear fruit.  And while you are doing all that, one who is even greater is coming.  One who will baptize with fire.  Prepare him room.  Amen.