Already we are in the second week of Advent. It’s a wonderful season. It’s always a struggle, but if we can just step back from the hustle and bustle, the obligations and the stuff, underneath it is this soft, sweet word: Advent. Arrival.

And so last Monday, I put the lights up on the outside of the house, the nativity scene went up on the mantle, we lit a fire in the fireplace and put a little Nat King Cole Christmas music on, and settled back to breathe. To reflect. To wait. To prepare.

And suddenly the front door burst open and a large man stormed into the living room smelling of camels, foaming at the corners of his mouth, with sticky honey matted into his beard! With a swipe one hand he knocked over the Christmas tree, breaking half the ornaments and with the other hand threw cold water onto the fire. He locked his eyes on us and in a voice loud enough for all the neighbors on the block to hear, he screams that word: REPENT! So much for the quiet waiting.

I wish I had four gentle, affirming sermons for Advent for you. But John the Baptist has come and his sermon says,

“Repent! The ax lies at the root of the tree.”

We have no choice but to listen. And the truth is…we need it. Badly. For we cannot understand the depth of a love that would come among us to save us… if we don’t think we need saving.

Do we need a Savior? Or just a pretty baby in a manger?

Because the church of Jesus Christ is filled with people --living, breathing, imperfect people -- we often operate with the same kind of pendulum that the rest of society does. Something gets out of balance, finally the pendulum reverses and rather than correct to the middle it goes over to the other side until it's badly out of balance again.

I listen to your stories of faith. Some of you come out of backgrounds where long ago, it seemed like all you heard, all the church said, all preachers preached was about sin. You never heard about grace, only sin until it echoed in your ears and you began to view that message as nothing more than manipulative, guilt-inducing verbiage and you tuned it out.

The pendulum moves. Years go by. Our culture turns away more and more from concepts like right and wrong, like personal responsibility. And in the church, our pendulum moves with it, away from that three letter word “sin.” We begin to think of God as the Great Affirmer in the Sky, we worship the Divine Loving Feeling. On this side of the pendulum, Cornelius Plantiga writes, worship sounds like this:

“Let us confess our problem with human relational adjustment dynamics, and especially our feebleness in networking.”

Or we mumble,

“I’d just like to share that we just need to target holiness as a growth area.”

Do we need a Savior? Or just a Positive Thought?

John the Baptist stands directly in the line of that swinging pendulum, grabs it and two-handed shoves it backwards:

“Repent.”

We need to hear John. John came preaching the law, preaching righteous living. Jesus did not negate John. John prepared the way for Jesus, and we ignore him at great peril. We listen to him with great pain. And no one (nothing) stands apart from his influence. Did you hear the first part of this scripture? In only a few verses, Luke covers history, geography, the world, the poor, the hungry, tax collectors, governors, rulers, Romans, Jews, priests…politics, economics, religion. Everything, everyone. John says to the everyone crowd coming for baptism:

“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Repent!”

Everyone. John doesn’t say,

“I have a hard word for a few of you.” “Some of you are worse than others, you stand over here, I’ll keep you under the water a little longer!”

No, his word just echoes out across the Jordan valley. Everything and everyone. John doesn’t care about lineage or religion. Don’t even start to say,

“We are related to Abraham, God has his eye on us!”

What would that sound like today?

Don’t even begin to think, “I’m a conservative evangelical,” or “I’m a socially aware Christian” or “I’m a mature Christian.”

Just receive the word: Repent. Turn around. Be honest. Leave the desert and walk back to God. Regret decisions. Feel remorse. Act differently. Be sorry. Quit sinning. Change. Repent.

I love that John’s prophetic eyes see so broadly. Remember he shouts at people who are already responding! They had come, gone out of their way, inconvenienced themselves to come to him,

“John, you don’t mean me, right, because even though I didn’t want to, I came out here today!”

But John’s words are hard. His call is difficult, and maybe that makes it more genuine. People who speak for God usually don’t offer us cheap grace or no discipline.As long as my first thought is,

“This is a word for somebody else,”

then I’m missing it.

“Oh, I wish my dad could hear this. I wish my colleague from work were here. I wish the Arabs, the Israelis, the Palestinians, George Bush, Osama Bin Laden, I wish they could hear this.”

No. This is for me. Repent. Do we need a Savior? Or is that just for others? John’s baptizing signals the start of something new going on. In ancient Judaism, baptism had been reserved for new converts to the faith, gentile proselytes, outsiders. Now this baptism of repentance is for insiders too. Maybe especially for insiders. People who often didn’t set out to do something wrong.

In 1955, a brand new concept on TV exploded. Game shows. Shows like the original "$64,000 Question" became number one in the ratings. It moved the sales of its main sponsor, Revlon, up 54 percent in six months, doubled its stock price. Copycat game shows flooded the market.

"Twenty-One" was another show that pitted one contestant’s knowledge against another. In order to boost the ratings, the producer of "Twenty-One" began to fix the show by giving contestants answers ahead of time, though it was billed as genuine competition.

The producer needed to find a winner that the audience could bond with. He stumbled across Charles Van Doren, an English instructor at Columbia University, from a well-known family. Charles was good-looking, bright and articulate. By all accounts, he was a very nice, moral, non-arrogant man.

But Charles didn’t want to be on a game show. Not at all. The producer played with his love of education, telling him that his appearance would help the teachers of America. Slowly, gradually, Charles became a bit interested. Then the producer slowly slipped in the fact that the show was fixed.

“Not so much fixed, as just show business.”

Van Doren was very reluctant. Then the producer asked how much Van Doren, a family man, made at Columbia. About $4,000 a year. The show would net him at least $50,000 to $150,000. Still, he said he wasn’t interested. But by now he was.

“Who would know?”

he asked. Nobody else, the producer responded. All this happened over many weeks.

Finally he agreed to go on the show…but he wanted to play it straight. Couldn’t be done, he was told. Reluctantly, he went on anyway, under the rigged system. He became an American hero. 25 to 30 million people would watch the show each night. The longer he stayed on, the more he hated it and wanted out. But now they had him. Now, this is hard for us to understand today. We wouldn’t think twice if it came out that the Jeopardy game show was fixed, that Ken Jennings really didn’t win 2½ million dollars. We’ve become immune to being deceived, or at least we expect it. But it was a different day in the '50s.

Eventually it all unraveled, and became a huge national issue. The game show business was investigated by a district attorney, and then a congressional committee. For a long time, caught in the midst of a long series of small lies and self-deceptions, Van Doren continued to lie. When he finally admitted what had gone on, said:

“I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last three years…”

He hadn’t meant to take even one wrong step. But many small steps seemed to eventually take him to the same ending.

We don’t always intentionally choose sin. But in self-deception or blindness, we so easily end up there. If all we can say is

“John Baptist’s message is for someone else…someone else that needs to repent,”

then we have totally missed it. Oh, we can get by. We can actually thrive, at least on the outside, being fully functional and even respected people in our culture, our schools, our churches. But on the inside, that word “Repent” cuts us to the core. Sin is subversive, it is personal, it is corporate, it is institutional, and it always cuts us off from how God has made us. And so when John says “Repent” :

• I have to admit that I have lived in nice houses, in nice neighborhoods while every day brothers and sisters around the world die from lack of food and medical care.
  
• I have to admit that the circles I run in, the ways I spend my money, the people I elect to government, the attitudes I hold often perpetuate a racism that has eaten at our country for it’s entire history. It’s not just whether I treat people of other color well when I infrequently encounter them.
  
• We need to admit that we may be hypocrites on sexuality. Rightly worrying about a Biblical approach to marriage and gay marriage, but ignoring our own addictions to pornography or mental flirtations with a colleague.
  
• We have to admit that our fierce independence from other people allows us be with people, but not to really be known. Or growing. Or accountable.
  
• We have to admit that our desire to succeed in the world may come at great cost to ourselves and others. I ran across a fascinating article this week about Oliver Stone, the very famous and accomplished movie producer and director, who was quoted as saying: “I don’t want my integrity to block my creative growth.”
  
• We may have to admit that we are filled with bitterness. We can carry it around for years and years, bitterness towards some person, some family member, some church…sometimes it’s even bitterness over some genuine wrong, but we carry it until it festers and inevitably begins to slop over onto all other areas of life.
  
• We may have to admit that we don’t really think we need a savior, so it’s hard to go to church and worship one.

“What shall we do?” the people dared to ask John. It is a common question for Luke. Later on, in the book of Acts he records the apostle Peter’s first sermon, and the listeners are convicted that they had missed God acting in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and their cry was exactly this:

“What shall we do?”

Here, John answers the question three times with such unglamorous, daily things:

“Clothe those in need. Share food with the hungry. Treat people fairly. Be satisfied.”

Repent.

It’s the time of year for me to read Dickens’ Christmas Carol. You remember how in that story, each of the three spirits has a particular job in bringing old Scrooge from hard-hearted arrogance…to conversion, to becoming a new man. When the eerie third spirit is just about finished, and Scrooge understands it is leaving him, he grabs ahold of it and falls down on the ground:

“Spirit!” he cried, tight clutching at its robe, “hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been!”

He is desperate. And the spirit leaves him in his desperation …the spirit’s job was to bring him to exactly such a place.

If the Spirit of God is active in our life, we will sometimes reach a point where we cry out,

“I can’t do it on my own, I’m empty, I want to be filled,”

like a person sentenced to walk out into the desert,

“I have to have water, I’m dying of thirst!”

So…where in God’s name is the “good news” in all this? When we quit saying “this is for someone else,” or “I don’t want anybody to make me feel guilty,” then the Baptist’s job is done. He has brought us to this place, and now simply points us to Jesus. John’s law has brought us to recognize our sin. He points us towards Jesus’ forgiveness of sin. John knew he was working himself out of a job.

“I am not the Messiah,” he says. “One comes after me…I am not worthy to carry his shoes. I baptize with water for repentance. He baptizes with fire…and the Holy Spirit.”

The fire that burns, and the Spirit that washes.The good news is not that we are trapped in sin, but that prepares us to hear what comes next: There’s a way out. Especially in Luke, good news always includes the forgiveness of sin. Dale Bruner is careful to point out that this pardon of sin is not a license to sin. But the good news is about the forgiveness of sin.

Do we need a Savior? or are we not yet desperate enough? John’s voice is loud and seems harsh. Yet we dare not ignore it. For if we turn away from the grating truth of John’s voice, we will also miss his finger pointing us towards Christ…his love, his healing, his mercy…and his forgiveness of our sin.

In this second week of Advent, if your quiet waiting is interrupted by a wild-eyed prophet shouting “Repent!”…. listen, even if it is painful. It is our preparation. For we cannot understand the depth of love arriving in Jesus, coming to save us…if we don’t think we need saving.