John was not the Messiah. John knew he was not the Messiah. John was baptizing people and telling them that while he used water, agreater One was coming who would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. And when Jesus came to John, John baptized Him and the heavens opened and the voice of the Lord spoke. What John said came true, as well. Jesus, the Messiah, did come later and baptize with the Holy Spirit and light a fire of faith. Yet too often we overlook the rest of the baptism lessons John shared with those who were gathered to be baptized and to witness these baptisms. We focus so much on what happened while Jesus was there and just after that we miss some important parts of this story.
First a little background on John. He was the son of Elizabeth, cousin of Mary, and Zechariah, priest in the Temple. In other words, John was a preacher’s kid and the cousin of Jesus. John was raised under the strictest of personal discipline, as we learn from the first chapter of Luke in which the story of Zechariah being struck dumb in the Temple is revealed. That passage tells us that John was “never to take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born. He will bring back many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. And he will go on before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous—to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” John had avitally important role, preparing the way for the Lord.
John’s preparation for Jesus’ arrival and baptism were somewhat different than we might anticipate if we were not familiar with the story. We know that what John actually did in preparation was to go out in the desert and preach to whomever would listen about repentance and sin while surviving on locusts and wild honey and wearing animal skins. It seems an odd way to get ready for the coming of the Lord, yet it fulfills many prophecies, like the favorite from Isaiah 40 about the voice of one crying out in the wilderness and the one in Micah chapter 3 that says, “”I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the LORD Almighty. 2 But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. 3 He will sit as arefiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver.””
Now if John was to prepare the people for the coming of the Lord, and the Lord was going to be like a refiner’s fire or launder’s soap, then John had best be getting people to clean up their acts and purify their lives. And this was the message we see in our passage from Luke this morning.
John is out in the desert, preaching to the people after a tasty breakfast of bugs and waxy liquid sugar. Not even acoffee and bagel! He is baptizing by immersion – dunking people under the water in a manner still practiced today by many denominations – one that mimics the life and death and resurrection to new life that we have because of Christ. And as he baptizes, he preaches to the crowd. He doesn’t just preach a happy, feel-good kind of sermon that allows the folks to go on living their lives the way they always have with extra reassurance of God’s love. John preaches the hard truth, telling people they must change their ways and their lives, giving up the life they have known for a new kind of life.
John isn’t gentle with them, starting out the portion of the sermon that we have by calling them a brood of vipers and asking, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?” John doesn’t say, “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come today and you are welcome to be just as you are a part of our church family.” Instead, John wants to know who warned them to come, who told them that they’d better get their act together before the full anger of the Lord was poured out on the evil ones of the earth. In asking this question, John is not being mean, but is demonstrating to the crowd that he is aware that some have come this day who are not sincere in their desire to be changed, but merely want to complete the required ritual because they fear the consequences if they don’t. This is not unlike the people who come to church to be earn salvation points and be seen in the right place. We don’t save up credits to get to heaven like we save rewards points for gas discounts. We don’t improve our reputation with God by going through the motions without the sincere desire to be different as Christians than we have been as sinners.
It all gets a little muddied in our modern times because we go through the stories of Jesus seasonally each year and we know and benefit from the whole story, including the salvation received by the selfless, gracious self-sacrifice of our Lord. It is not just that we don’t really think about it, but that we can’t truly understand what it meant to live in a time when Jesus had not yet come and salvation was constantly threatened by our sinfulness. But at the time John was preaching, salvation was anything but certain and the prevailing wisdom even from the highest of priests was that salvation had to be earned by good works that would make up for the sins each person committed. And few were likely to be able to do enough good to make up for the bad. People would go through all kinds of elaborate rituals to try to get those good works points – almost like the modern concept of carbon credits. Sure, you sin like a gas-guzzler drinks gas, but you do these things and it’s like buying carbon credits to offset your sins. Doesn’t matter if you reduce the sinning, so long as you earn enough credits to make up for it.
This was the brood of vipers to whom John spoke – a bunch of people who did everything they could to try to convince others of their sincerity without changing their ways of living. And what did John tell them? What advice did he give as preparation for the coming of the Lord who would refine, separating dross from precious metal, who would cleanse, removing what was dirty and making things clean? He told them, “Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.” John told the people that all the credits, all the empty points they’d earned were not what would make them worthy of salvation. Instead, they needed to produce fruit – live lives – in keeping with repentance. In other words, they needed to change their evil ways. And then, having explained that this was supposed to create a change in their lives, marking them from that moment on as being cleansed, John would baptize them with water symbolizing the washing away of sin. And that’s what baptism still symbolizes today, in part. When we are baptized, we are buried under the waters of baptism with Christ Jesus and brought up to new life, changed life, improved life, saved life. We are adopted into God’s family and are supposed to be fundamentally different after than we were before. Even from our infancy, we are dedicated to Jesus, promises made to raise us in the faith that we may learn what sin is and how to turn away from it and embrace the ways of the Lord.
Now not everyone who came to be baptized was insincere. There were many who were truly desiring to prepare for the coming Messiah. Devout followers of God had been preparing for many hundreds of years. But even those who were sincere in their desire were not off the hook with John. Scripture tells us that the crowd asked what they should do to be ready for the impending judgment. And here are some of the most important lessons we have from John:
“John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.” So even before Jesus came and preached doing good for the poor as a way of loving our neighbors, John was spreading the word that had come consistently from the Lord: be generous and care for creation, especially your fellow man.
The story goes on to tell of those whose hearts might be sincere, but whose lives were filled with sin – the tax collectors and soldiers. These two professions were known for cheating and extorting money. And when the tax collector or soldier was an Israelite, one of the chosen race, he might well believe that being adescendant of Abraham would be enough. It was understood as the ultimate version of being from a good family. Yet John told them they, too, had to change. No more were they to line their own pockets, gaining wealth from the suffering of others, but were instead to seek only what was fair – the actual tax and no more, the wages paid by the military and not kickbacks. John wasn’t any more a fan of figurative pork than the real kind – figurative pork in the sense of padding one’s own pockets with unnecessary imposition of financial burden on others. Simply having the right logo on the jacket, the right college on the transcript, the right family connection was not enough. Who each person was and how he lived in the world needed to be refined, scrubbed clean, trimmed of all excess that would drag a person down and leave him unclean.
John preached all this in a way that made clear that waiting for another day to change one’s ways was not going to work. He said, “The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” And so it is true for us, as well. We have the great blessing of assured salvation in Jesus Christ, yet we must also heed the cautions of the refining fire and harsh fuller’s soap. We must cleanse our own lives of the dross and stain of sin. We must trim the pork in our lives and be content enough with what God has given us that we willingly and joyfully share our blessings through giving to the church and caring for those in need. We need not fear begin cut down and thrown into the fire, but Jesus Himself said He would come like a thief in the night, that we would not know in advance the appointed hour for judgment, so we’d best be ready at any moment.
Baptism is supposed to change us, even as it changed people long ago. It is supposed to wash away our sins not with water as if that would be enough, but to claim us as the Lord’s in more than name. We are supposed to be changed into people who want to serve the Lord and please Him not only when we are baptized ourselves, but each time we remember it in the celebration of the sacraments. We are called to live as people of God.