You know, I read this scripture passage from Matthew’s Gospel, and I have to wonder, maybe I’m preaching wrong. Maybe at Advent, especially, I’m preaching wrong. Maybe there’s a little bit too much of this hope and joy and peace and love. Because you know who was a much more effective preacher than I am? It’s John the Baptist.
And John the Baptist also really understood Advent since he was kind of, you know, inventing it at the time. But, you know, I’m preaching wrong. And John the Baptist did not pull any punches. This guy has zero interest in the kind of preaching the people in the pews want to hear, in the kind of practical or inspirational or nice life-applicable sermons that leadership books and church consultants say get people in the door.
His technique is not correct. And yet, here they are. Not just a congregation, but a mob out in the Jordan. You know, we struggle to get a few dozen people into a climate-controlled sanctuary on a Sunday morning.
But John, who’s dressed like a crazy person, he’s got his vestments of camel hair, a leather belt. He’s probably got honey and bugs stuck in his beard. He draws thousands of people to Jordan’s banks, miles and miles away from where they’re coming from, on foot in Jerusalem and the rest of Judea. Whenever you look at the geography of Israel, the Jordan is always the frontier.
He’s got a lot of money. It’s the whole way on the east. It marks the edge of that country. And it is the wilderness.
It’s not like there’s cities that are built along the Jordan. It’s not a river like the Monongahela or something. It’s more like a rough creek. And it is not a convenient destination for pretty much anybody, particularly those people who are coming from Jerusalem.
Jerusalem’s far away. That’s where all the people live. It’s the capital of the Roman province of Judea. And what does John say then that draws them in? Well, it draws them out.
The word berate comes to mind. That’s what John does. He berates them. He chastises them.
And his message calls for mass repentance, that is for all the people, individuals and together, to change their hearts and lives. And this is not a warm invitation. He’s not saying it and this is what God is welcoming you to. This is a demand.
It’s do it or face the consequences. He has come to prepare the way for the coming of the Lord in power and in judgment. I was having a discussion with a few Presbyterian and Methodist pastors the other day. Demand.
And one of the Presbyterians among us, I think he’s in Bridgeville, mentioned that he does his best when he’s preaching to take into account a rule that one of his mentors gave him, which is to avoid finger-wagging sermons. Yeah. And he views this as essential for pastors to keep in mind when preparing for Saturday. You don’t want the congregation to feel like you’re wagging your finger at them, telling them what to do.
And generally, I agree. But no one ever told John that, it seems. His message is brutal. And he is just point blank.
He’s not just giving a hard message. He’s also insulting the people who are listening to him. And he says, You children of snakes, you brood of vipers, in more familiar translations. And he shouts that at the Pharisees and the Sadducees, not just in general, but at the ones who are coming to see him.
The ones who are coming to be baptized, not just Pharisees and Sadducees in general, And he’s preaching, insulting the ones who we can assume are pretty decent and self-aware people, because they are coming to repent of their sins. They’re coming to see him. They’re coming to be baptized in this water. And yet they make their way out from Jerusalem, their comfortable homes in the center of the nation.
And this is their welcome. You children of snakes, John says. Who warned you to escape from the angry judgment that is coming soon? Who warned you? I can’t imagine greeting guests to church that way, right? Or to say that to somebody on the occasion of their baptism, you child of a snake, what are you up here for? In this instance, too, I think we need to pull on this insult to consider how loaded and heavy it would have been for these people, too. What? John is a prophet who’s deeply familiar with Scripture.
They almost always are. And I’d be shocked if he wasn’t referencing the Genesis story. And so what do we think of whenever we hear about snakes in the Bible? For him to call Jewish religious leaders children of snakes is an obvious reference to this devious, cursed creature who enabled sin to enter the world in Eden. And he, John, like Jesus, is always toughest on these ones who ought to be closest to God, who ought to know God best.
He knew what he was talking about with the snakes, and they knew what he was talking about with the snakes, right? And so he tells them their membership as part of God’s chosen people and in the elite of those chosen people isn’t going to help them. God can choose rocks to be his chosen people if necessary. Their gift, their role as God’s people is a gift from God, not their birthright. And John keeps pushing at them.
He pushes even further and he says, the axe is already at the foot of the trees. Every tree that refuses to produce good fruit will be chopped down, will be thrown into the fire. Judgment will come and no one is going to be above it unless they take the opportunity to change right now. And John, for his part, doesn’t sound to me to be particularly optimistic about that working.
The tone that he projects to me is not one who expects that people will be listening to his prophecy, will be changing their hearts and lives. He wouldn’t be calling them snakes otherwise. If a leopard can’t change its spots, surely a snake can’t become a chipmunk. If a tree is nothing left but a standing snag of timber that has stopped bearing fruit for decades, it’s dead.
Okay. The axe is coming, John says. Israel’s dried out forest is going to become a field of stumps very soon. And it’s hard to argue with him, as far as I’m concerned, when we look out at the state of our world, ourselves, our relationships, our churches.
Is the fruit that we bear worthy of repentance, worthy of changed hearts and lives? Do we live among a den of snakes? Are we snakes? And we have to ask ourselves these things. I don’t think this criticism fits this congregation, but I want to mention, God knows churches more than almost anywhere else in the world. can feel like snake pits of gossip, abuse, spitefulness. I can think of plenty of congregations that John would step in and would say, you brood of vipers.
But he wants us to think about that. If we’re starting to think this way, if we’re starting to dig deep and be really honest about ourselves, whether we’re stumps, whether we’re snakes, I think we’re starting to wrestle with John’s message for us. To recognize how deeply in need of a redeemer we are individually and just collectively as a church, as a world. And yet I told you that John knows his scripture, right? Yes.
Prophets usually aren’t freestyling, making up their own images. They’re remixing the stories that they’ve inherited from scripture, from the world around them. And for John, we know this because as mentioned right here in Matthew, John, of course, knows Isaiah. John knows Isaiah very well, another prophet just like him.
And as it happens, the very first prophet, the very first piece of scripture that Jesus ever publicly quotes, we’ll get to this in the spring, but in his first ever sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus quotes Isaiah. Isaiah was well known. And just as John is riffing on these snake images from Genesis, I would be shocked if he didn’t have Isaiah in mind as well. Because snakes show up more than once in the Bible.
And so as he’s discussing these dens of vipers, these tree stumps, what else is he thinking about? We might think, if we just look at Genesis, that this den of snakes, these children of snakes, that they’re irredeemable. That that’s what John is saying, that you people are snakes, you’re never going to change. We might think also that these stumps of trees that are cut down for refusing to bear fruit worthy of repentance, we might think they’re dead, they’re rotting, they’re passing away into nothing. Isaiah has a different vision.
And Isaiah says, ‘A shoot will grow up from the stump of Jesse. ‘A branch will sprout from its roots. ‘The Lord’s Spirit will rest upon him, ‘a spirit of wisdom and understanding, ‘a spirit of planning and strength, ‘a spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord.’ So the Messiah, this king and savior, is going to emerge from a stump.
A stump of a people that’s refused to bear fruit. And not only is this stump, which is the line of David, which has been a wreck pretty much from the start, this people of Israel, also a wreck from the start, not only are they not doomed, They are the root of the new thing that God is doing. And this great judge promised in Isaiah is coming. He’ll usher in a new kingdom.
He’ll reconcile God and people. And he’s going to renew all the earth. He’s going to make it even more glorious than it was at the moment of creation. And Isaiah says it’ll look like this.
The wolf will live with the lamb. The leopard will lie down with the young goat. The calf and the young lion will feed together. And a little child will lead them.
The cow and the bear will graze. Their young will lie down together. And a lion will eat straw like an ox. A nursing child will play over the snake’s hole.
Toddlers will reach right over the serpent’s den. And there’s that snake again. Different. the culmination of this sort of like fairy tale litany of what the world will be like there’s that snake this primeval satanic creature that’s been irredeemable since like the beginning of time cursed since the very beginning of creation it’s been raised up it has been redeemed it’s been recreated it doesn’t want to bite babies anymore The rattlesnake has become like a golden retriever.
It’s playing with toddlers that are messing around around its nest. There’s no danger. There’s no hostility between them. There’s nothing to fear.
The child’s not afraid of the snake. The snake’s not afraid of the child. And this fall, this entrance of sin has been undone. And now even this creature, this serpent, the devious source of sin itself is made new by the grace of the Messiah.
what we’re seeing is that new life doesn’t emerge despite the presence of sin and death. It doesn’t emerge despite the fact that the world is snakes and stumps. It emerges from those places specifically. And none of this means that what John is proclaiming on the Jordan’s banks is wrong.
It just means that there’s a full, bigger picture that John is speaking from. And this is where we have this kind of tension in Advent, because just as powerfully as Isaiah proclaims that the stump is going to be redeemed, John the Baptist reminds us that there’s still an axe that looms for those fruitless trees. It’s still in our interest, in the interest of the people of God, to be the people of God. John’s message is not wrong.
It’s just a warning that we can’t have that new shoot without also acknowledging that dead stump is among us. The vipers, the tree stumps of Jerusalem might not be ready for the Messiah right now. They kind of prove that. And John does warn that it’s got to be now.
The time to flee for what is to come is now. It’s always now. Don’t put it off. Now is the moment that salvation is coming.
Now is the moment that the Son of Man will enter the world. The kingdom will take root. And just Jesus standing in our midst will be judgment upon us. For our sin, our short-sightedness, our selfishness.
And John’s words should sting for us. They should feel sharp because we are in a position that is a lot closer to those Pharisees and those Sadducees, those snakes, those. than the desperate masses who are coming to the river, who are longing to be set free from their sin to achieve a new life. We tend to be more like the Pharisees than those people.
And I don’t think it’s incorrect to say that even now, the promise of Jesus coming and turning the whole world upside down resonates more at the margins of the world than in the temple, in the palaces, in the churches. And yet, the salvation that Jesus is to bring has brought for us ripples out in every direction. But, It begins on the margins of God’s people, way out on the frontier, on the border, in the wilderness along the Jordan. And then it travels inward to Jerusalem, to the Jewish people, and also outwards to the Gentiles.
Salvation isn’t just this kind of one-way flow that it comes here and goes there. God’s work isn’t just within the church moving outwards. It’s also outside moving inwards. It can move from faraway Bethlehem, the Jordan Valley, these places that nobody ever wanted to go, into the heart of Jerusalem.
And so repentance, which is translated in the CEB as changing our hearts and lives, because the word is turn in the Greek. That means giving up this kind of prideful illusion that we have. We think God only works here. We think God only works with people like us.
That we good people have what the sinners out there need if they would just come and get it. But John’s movement of baptism and repentance, and also later the Methodist movement, thrived because they didn’t believe that. They didn’t believe that they had something that everybody else needed. They believed that God is doing things in the world that everybody is invited to.
Methodism, from the beginning, took off in the world precisely because it was born within, but reached outside the church. Now, Wesley and the first Methodists, they went where the Spirit was already at work. And then, whenever they came back, they lit the church on fire with the Spirit that they met out there. As the people got in touch with what God was doing out there, they brought it back.
And this is why Wesley went out to preach at the mouth of coal mines to mill workers on their lunch breaks from the top of tombstones when he wasn’t allowed in churches. The spirit was working out along the Jordan. This is why he trained his preachers in medicine. They were pretty much doctors at the time to bring both the word of God and also the care of God to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to access it.
And it’s always true. It was in Wesley’s day. It was true in John the Baptist’s day. God is doing something out, out in the wilderness.
That’s what John is showing us. You know, you and I might be children of snakes. We might be the trees that have failed to bear anything close to what God has created us to bear. where is the failure in your life? You know, the broken relationship, the resentment that you hold on to, But, the spiritual apathy that you have written off as dead wood, that God might be ready to chop up, that God might be ready to make a new sprout within you.
That’s how God works. Who are the snakes that you envision when you think of these children of snakes who you can’t imagine being transformed, who live in places you would never go? John says, change your hearts and lives. Prepare the way of the Lord. Repent.
Go where the Spirit is working. And the good news of Isaiah’s promise, of John’s promise, of Jesus’ promise, is that we await this Advent the truth that snakes can change, that new life can shoot up from dead stumps. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
