“Merry Christmas, You Bunch of Snakes!”

Luke 3:1-14

December 6, 2009 + Second Sunday of Advent

Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ

400 Glenwood Drive

Chattanooga, Tennessee 37404

Every year it’s the same story. We spend time and money decorating our homes and churches with the beautiful window-dressing of Christmas. Then, when everything looks perfect, John the Baptist storms in and spoils the party. Here he is, the wild man straight out of the dessert, smelling just like the camel that provided his coat, with the faint aroma of locusts on his breath and leftover honey in his beard. In he comes with never a by-your leave, dust erupting in little clouds around his feet as he stomps around, scoffing at our religious pretense, leaving spots on our clean carpet. And he’s not too taken with all our Advent preparations either. He never is.

Instead of saying all the proper things about our beautiful decorations, our lovely Christmas tree, our carefully-crafted worship service, he simply shouts at us that it’s time to repent. We can keep all our twinkling lights and sparkling ornaments, he says, because God doesn’t need them or want them. God wants something from us that is far more difficult than putting up a few wreaths.

What a downer he is! Why do we keep inviting such a disagreeable character back each Christmas? Every year on this Second Sunday of Advent the lectionary calls for sermons from passages in the Gospels on the subject of the preaching of John the Baptist. So if we do what we’re told, every year we have to put up with this embarrassment to our refined tastes. Why do we do it? Hold that question for a moment and let me tell you one of my Otsego stories.

In the house in which I grew up, there was a perfectly fine front door. In the yard leading up to the front door were nice shrubs and bushes, nothing spectacular, but nicely trimmed and cared for. The door was solid wood and the entry way into our home was attractive. But on the side of the house next to the front door was a gravel driveway leading to our back yard and back door. That’s where all the main coming and going happened. But the back yard and back porch of our home were never very attractive. Garbage cans and abandoned toys littered the area. And since there was no walkway from the gravel driveway to the back porch, at this time of year one had to slosh through mud and snow to the back door.

When company came who didn’t know us too well, they would park in front of the house, come up the front walk, and knock at the attractive front entry. But the more familiar our family and friends became, the more likely they were to approach our home through the mine field that was our back yard, next to our garage which usually held everything but the family car, and then come stomping up on the back porch and knock at the back door. Actually, many of them just walked in because the back door was never locked. The front door was always locked. I never figured out the logic of that one! Naturally, my mother would have preferred that guests always use the front door, but there is something about family relationships and friendships that make back doors more inviting.

I read an article some years ago (William D. Howden, “Good News: Repent!,” in The Christian Ministry, November, 1985) by a clergyman who observed the people have different ways of preparing for company. Some actually clean house. Others are more inclined to hide things behind the sofa and hope nobody notices that they are there. My suspicion is that most of us prefer the latter as we desperately try to get everything in order for our Christmas celebrations. Every closet has an unwritten sign: “Don’t Look In Here.”

We clean up our front yards, trim the bushes along the walk, hang a wreath on the front door to spruce things up. Then, to our red-faced embarrassment, in marches John the Baptist through the back yard and in the back door. He doesn’t even bother to knock. He just walks in, muddy sandals and all. And he has the gall to look in all the closets and behind all the furniture to see what we have hidden there. Without batting an eye, he stalks into the center of our Christmas party and brings the conversation to a deadening stop with his greeting: “Merry Christmas, you bunch of snakes!”

Why do we invite this disagreeable character back each year? Probably because somewhere deep inside we know he is right in insisting that preparing for the real meaning of these days means something more than putting up a few sprigs of holly and singing “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” We have turned Christmas into a holiday for children and forgotten it is a call to changed lives for adults. Christmas is not a time just to clean up our houses but to clean up our act. When John calls us a “bunch of snakes” who need to repent, he means that we need to own up to the truth about our lives, to abandon all the fabrications, prevarications, and rationalizations that we customarily use to maintain an illusion of our innocence and freedom from condemnation. “We’re Americans. We have Abraham Lincoln as our father. We grew up in the church and have been members all our lives. We give generously in the Stewardship Campaign. We support many worthy charities. Our family has been Congregationalists for three generations. We have always done “the right thing” and people in the community think well of us.” And the list of our supposed virtues goes on and on.

Those pilgrims that John baptized at the Jordan were just as religiously and racially and nationalistically arrogant as we can be. We cling to the fallacy that God is so fortunate to have us on God’s side. We hold to the false faith that we can please God with a little lip-service and window-dressing.

To all of our excuses and evasions, John holds up his hand and says: “Repent.” With the people in Luke’s Gospel we ask, “What shall we do?” Since we don’t use this old-fashioned word much anymore in a Liberal Church like ours, what does it mean to “repent.” The best answer I can give is that true repentance means changing our lives so that they will be the lives God wants us to have. But what does that mean? In our scripture lesson we heard the answer John gave to the people of his day. What do you think he would say to us today? I won’t presume to put words into his mouth but I believe I can imagine him saying something like this.

   1. We should share food and clothing with those who have none, yes, and be sure that all who need it have housing and health care, including illegal immigrants.

   2. There should be an end to tax breaks for the well-to-do and no more bail-outs for banks and financial institutions who have clearly demonstrated their lack of fiscal and moral responsibility.

   3. Those charged with maintaining law and order must stop threatening the helpless with racial profiling, intimidation, and deadly force. Our President and those in power must be made to realize that those who live by the sword of war will surely die by it.

I suspect that my updating of John’s prophetic preaching will be as upsetting to some as were his words 2,000 years ago but if the angels’ message of “Peace on Earth and Good Will toward all people” is to have any meaning in this Christmas in the year of our Lord 2009, this is only a beginning of what we need to do to turn our lives and the life of our nation in a different direction. That is what it means to celebrate Christmas as God wants us to.

John closed his little sermon by talking about a winnowing fork and chaff and grain and fire. We need to remember that the primary purpose of winnowing is not to provide chaff for the fire but to save the grain for the good of humanity. There is a story of a little boy who went to his first Christmas service. When asked what it was like, he said, “I want some of that ‘umphant.’” Some of that what, his parents wanted to know? “You know,” he said “I want what everyone was singing about at the end of the service; O come all ye faithful, joyful and try ‘umphant’” I want to try some of that ‘umphant.’” In this sense, in this Advent, you and I hear these words of this disquieting desert prophet and are bold enough to call his message and our response “Good News.” For in justice and mercy, God is triumphant, and so, joyfully, are we.