Advent 2
Matthew 3:1-12

Dear friends in Christ,

As we move closer to Christmas, you can just feel the need for urgent preparation. It’s hard to believe, but Christmas is now just over two weeks away. These next two weeks are crunch time, with many activities squeezed into that time frame.

Here at church, this urgent preparation has already been taking place, and will continue to take place right up through our Christmas Eve services. The musical groups in the church have been preparing songs for tonight’s Advent concert, and will continue to prepare for Christmas. This morning the Sunday school children and their leaders are practicing their parts for next week’s Christmas program. Our confirmation youth have already packed gift boxes for students away at college, and are getting ready to go Wednesday evening to help with the Toys for Tots distribution at two warehouse sites.

I know this is happening in your personal lives as well. The thing about the Christmas holiday is there is a definite deadline. You have to be ready by Christmas Eve, or you miss it, or so most of us are led to believe. So, if we haven’t yet completed our shopping, the stress increases to get that done. Some of us will be entertaining. That means house cleaning. That means planning the meal. That means cooking. There’s urgency in our activities. Layer on top of that the school musical programs on the calendar and the preparation children and families are making for those. Then there are travel plans and packing what is needed for time away. None of this is necessarily bad, in fact, I hope it all ends up to be quite delightful. But, there is no question that urgent preparation is taking place all around us like no other time of year.

This morning, in the midst of this, we hear another urgent voice. It is the voice of John the Baptist, crying out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” He is not calling out for urgent preparation for the Christmas holiday as we know it and experience it. He is calling out for something deeper, something even more important. He is crying out for urgent, spiritual preparation to encounter the Messiah, the savior, God’s own son. In the midst of all of our other urgent preparations, his is a voice we definitely need to hear, so that the spiritual meaning of Christmas does not get run over by all the other trappings that go with it.

A number of years ago a couple traveled to the offices of an Adoption Society in England to receive a baby. They had been on the waiting list a long time. They had been interviewed and carefully scrutinized. Now at last their dreams were to be fulfilled. But their day of happiness was another's pain.

Arriving at the offices of the Society they were led up a flight of stairs to a waiting room. After a few minutes they heard someone else climbing the stairs. It was the young student mother whose baby was to be adopted. She was met by the lady responsible for the adoption arrangements and taken into another room. Our friends heard a muffled conversation and a few minutes later footsteps on the stairs as the young mother left. They heard her convulsive sobbing until the front door of the office was closed. Then, there was silence. The lady in charge then took them next door. In a little crib was a six week old baby boy. On a chair beside it was a brown paper bag containing a change of clothes and two letters. One of these, addressed to the new parents, thanked them for providing a home for her baby and acknowledged that under the terms of the adoption each would never know the other's identity. Then the young mother added one request. Would they allow her little son to read the other letter on his eighteenth birthday? She assured them that she had not included any information about her identity. The couple entrusted that letter to a lawyer and one day the young man will read the message which his mother wrote on the day when, with breaking heart, she parted with him.

I wonder what she wrote? If I had to condense all I feel about life and love into a few precious words what would I say? I know I would have no time for trivia. At such a time I would want to dwell on what life was all about and what things were absolutely essential.

John preaching in the desert was in the great tradition of the Hebrew prophets. He was aware that time was running out. In his burning message he had no time for trivial matters. Soon the Savior would come, and soon he would die, beheaded by the sword of Herod's guard. He came with an urgent message of preparation that involved two key things.

The first I am going to call “humble repentance.” John's message called people to repent. They were baptized by him in the river Jordan, as a sign of their repentance. The urgent, spiritual preparation necessary to meet the savior was repentance.

For many today the word repentance is a word that belongs to yesterday. I wouldn’t doubt that some here this morning don’t know what repentance means. I’m certain that most non-church goers wouldn’t have a clue. In a world where there is a strong emphasis to build up people’s self-esteem and where everything is seen as OK, the idea that we need to admit our wrong and live differently is like some foreign language.

In John Steinbeck's story "The Wayward Bus" a dilapidated old bus takes a cross country shortcut on its journey to Los Angeles, and gets stuck in the mud. While the drivers go for assistance, the passengers take refuge in a cave. It is a curious company of people and it is obvious that the author is attempting to get across the point that these people are lost spiritually as well as literally. As they enter into this cave, the author calls the readers attention to the fact that as they enter they must pass a word that has been scrawled with paint over the entrance. The word is repent. Although Steinbeck calls that to the readers attention it is interesting that none of the passengers pay any attention to it whatsoever.

And that’s how repentance is often viewed in today’s world. It’s overlooked. There is no need. It’s not on the radar screen. It certainly has nothing to do with Christmas, for goodness sakes.

But I would argue that humble repentance, as an urgent preparation, has everything to do with the meaning of Christmas. Repentance is not just saying we’re sorry if we’ve been caught doing something bad. Nor is repentance merely turning over a new leaf, like making New Year’s resolutions, something else we do this time of year. Nor is repentance just saying a prayer of confession, although that may be part of what we do. Instead, repentance means to turn around and go in another direction. What John the Baptist wanted his audience to hear was to turn their lives around and turn towards this one coming called the Messiah.

Humble repentance is very appropriate as we approach another Christmas. After all, the reason we have Christmas is to celebrate the birth of the savior, who came to save us from our sins. God cares so much about our human sin, our imperfection, our flaws, that he sent Jesus, born in the stable, to take care of that problem. To humbly confess our sins and to repent before this child, seems to me to be exactly the right approach to our Christmas celebrations. The words of John do not take away the joy of Christmas. They make the joy possible. This is good news. Repentance and forgiveness are possible, because the savior is born.

The second word of urgent preparation from John is to bear fruit. “Bear fruit worthy of repentance,” he tells the Pharisees and Sadducees. In other words, show by the way you live your life that you have turned and you are following the savior.

Maybe some of you have heard about or even seen the movie currently out, “What Would Jesus Buy?” If I see it at all, I’ll wait for the DVD. But I did see some clips and an interview with Minnesota native Bill Talen who assumes the persona of the Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping. If you haven’t heard, he and his choir go around to shopping malls urging people to stop shopping and giving in to all the pressures of consumerism. In the interview he was asked to answer the question, “What would Jesus buy?” His answer wasn’t too bad. He said, “I don’t know exactly what Jesus would buy. But I think he’d buy less, and give more.”

I do think giving more, giving of the self, whether that be time, or talent, or money, is the way we bear fruit for the kingdom. It’s the giving away of oneself for others that is the fruit of repentance.

Some of you are familiar with the Christmas short story “The Gift of The Magi.” It is a story about a desperately poor young couple living in New York around the turn of the century. Neither had money sufficient to buy a gift for the other so they each secretly went out and sold something of worth. He sold his prized pocket watch to get her a braid for her long hair. When he presented it to her she removed her scarf to reveal that she had had her hair cut and sold to purchase a chain for his pocket watch. The point of the story is obvious. Both gifts were now useless to the couple. But the true gift was the spirit by which both of the gifts were given. It was the sharing of self that truly mattered.

I want to publicly thank you for the many ways you have shared and bore fruit on behalf of this congregation throughout the fall. Many of you have given gifts to our building fund to help pay for this space where so many meaningful activities take place. Many of you have given generously to our general fund through your offerings, which is the core fund that makes so many things possible. Many of you have given special gifts to help others such as our Tanzanian students, the Graeve family, Operation Christmas child, or our Good Neighbor Fund. Many of you have given time to sing or teach our children or deliver meals on wheels or work with our youth. These are all examples of bearing fruit worthy of repentance. As we approach Christmas, I challenge you to be even more generous, buy less and give more, so that together we can continue to make an impact for Christ in our world.

Someone once asked the late Packer coach Vince Lombardy what was the secret to his coaching success. He responded: “I had my team constantly concentrating on the fundamentals.” Today John gives us the fundamentals for spiritual preparation for Christmas. Repent and bear fruit. May this be our urgent preparation in the days to come. Amen