Burn the Church

Propers: The Second Sunday of Advent, A.D. 2019 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

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

It’s hard not to like John the Baptist. He’s so bold, so wild, so over-the-top. In some ways he seems the perfect foil for Jesus, the “bad cop” in the Messiah’s good-cop/bad-cop routine. John is the long prophesied voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord! Make His paths straight!”

“Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees,” growls John. “Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” The Kingdom of God has come near, he proclaims. The Messiah, the Christ is come. “I baptize you with water for repentance,” says John. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire!”

He makes for quite the character, doesn’t he, wandering the wastes, clothed in camelhair, feeding off of locusts and wild honey? Driven by the spirit of Elijah, John would seem right at home amongst the wild-haired placard-wielding Endtimes preachers populating the street corners of most every major American city. And so we are tempted, perhaps, to dismiss him as a kook—or at least as an overzealous herald, whom Jesus thankfully comes to calm down with a gentler Gospel.

But to dismiss him is to miss the power of John’s preaching. For what he does, better perhaps than any other prophet of the Bible, is to boldly and fearlessly proclaim a defiant hope in the midst of utter desolation and defeat. John has no fear of the powers and principalities surrounding him. He knows, rather, the One who is coming behind him, whom he has been sent to proclaim. And this makes John unstoppable. Even the man who will eventually cut off John’s head still fears thereafter the words of his mouth.

John lives in a broken time. 2,000 years ago, things were not going well for the people of God. Indeed, the previous several centuries had seemed nothing but one long, slow, agonizing defeat—conquest and exile, humiliation and loss, over and again. The government was hopelessly corrupt. A false king sat on the throne, and the once-proud and independent nation of Israel had been relegated to just one more backwater province in the ever-expanding march of the Roman Empire.

Religion was in even worse shape. Factions had split the people of God. One group sat fat and happy in the Temple, servile to Rome in order to cling to what petty power and money they’d managed to accrue over the chaos of the last few centuries. Another group busied itself in riling up the middle class, such as it was, by stressing purity of ritual and virtue signaling, claiming for themselves the mantle of the not-so-silent moral majority.

And then of course there were groups out in the desert who just threw up their hands, proclaimed everyone else to be irredeemably vile, and so gave the middle finger to society at large as they marched themselves right out the door.

Israel, in short, was broken, divided, and despairing. And so at last they were ready, proclaimed John, to face the glorious Judgment of the Lord.

Judgment, in the Bible, is not simply punishment. It is not some divine spanking meted out by a heavenly Freudian father figure. Rather, in the Scriptures, judgment is God’s will that the truth be fully known. And the image for that is fire. Like fire, truth reveals things for what they truly are: by its light we can see ourselves clearly, warts and all; and we can see clearly the glory of God revealed in His love and His will for our flourishing. He comes that we might have life, and have it abundantly, after all.

Fire burns away all that is false, all that is corrupt, all the dross that creeps into those veins of precious metal deep within. And it thus purifies the gold, the silver, the iron, those glorious materials that glow and burn like fire when immersed in fire, so that they can be shaped into what the Maker intends for them to be, strong and beautiful and true.

John’s world is full of dross and corruption, and the coming of the Christ is going to burn all that away: no more corrupted Temple priesthood, no more false king on the throne, no more Caesar dictating life and death from half a world away. Instead, in their place, we shall have a glorious and a loving and a merciful King, who shall unite Jew and Gentile, lamb and wolf, lion and fatling together in a Kingdom of ultimate peace. And this shall be accomplished not by sword and steel but by liberation, forgiveness, and the resurrection of the dead.

In the vision of Isaiah, of wolf and lamb—in the proclamation of John to his brood of vipers—this new and ancient Kingdom does not kill off half the population, does not do away with the wicked. The wicked are still there in the promise. But their wickedness is not. The tree that shall be cut, the chaff burned up in fire, does not represent one group of people against another, but everything in us that separates us from love of God and of neighbor.

The sword of the Messiah shall enter your heart, and there cut out of you all that is not properly human, all that is not properly you. We shall be conquered. We shall be judged. We shall be burned up in the all-consuming furnace of God’s love. And thus shall we be freed! We will be made new, every day, throughout the years of this life here below. And we shall rise like Christ Himself from our grave, ascending triumphant into Heaven, bright and blazing as the stars.

Here below, judgment and mercy seem to conflict, to cancel each other out. But not in God. In God, perfect mercy and perfect judgment are one and the same thing: perfect Truth. And the Truth will set you free.

I have often been struck by the bizarre and haunting parallels between John’s world and our own. Few times and places have so resembled first century Judea as does twenty-first century America. If you don’t believe me, read The Satires of Juvenal. But this is, in fact, Good News—for it was in such a time and place as this that Christ chose to inaugurate His Kingdom.

We have lost faith in our institutions. Few view the government as truly legitimate. 75% of us disapprove of Congress. And as for religion—what a mess we have there. Sex scandals continue to rock the Rock of Rome. TV preachers peddle get-rich-quick schemes and pawn them off as faith. And the Protestant Mainline, once the sure strong mast of civil society, is hemorrhaging membership, money, and property so catastrophically that I can only describe it as decapitated.

And so deprived of wise and humble shepherds, our people put their faith in—what? Entertainment? Consumerism? Politics and pop culture? No wonder we’re dealing with entire generations of None-Of-The-Aboves. Our authorities have betrayed us. We’ve lost our faith in higher things. And so we are left with trying to find happiness alone, behind screens, drowning in debt and in mountains of stuff. Thus has US life expectancy fallen for four years in a row.

And if John the Baptist were here today, he would say—excellent. At last you are ready. Now is the time for the real work to begin. Prepare yourselves! The Kingdom of God is at hand! Repent and turn again, for every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire! Come, Lord Jesus! Come and tear down our broken world! Judge us, forgive us, raise us up and set us free!

This is our great opportunity. At last, the Church can be divorced from civil religion, from plastic patriotism and mindless militarism. At last we can be freed from consumerism and conformity. At last we can start to be Christians again! The Church is losing everything—thank God! Lose the money. Lose the power. Lose the societal respectability. Lose the acedia and the apathy and the dead weight of milquetoast expectations. Lose everything, and rise immortal!

Take from us all that is not Christ and see what we become. For only when the tree is felled can a shoot rise up from out the stump of Jesse, and a branch grow out of his roots. When we have nothing worldly left to lose, then shall we be free. Aren’t you sick of worrying about money? I sure as heck am. If the Church as we know it has to die, then so be it. Only then can the Church arise again to a glory the likes of which we cannot yet imagine.

Even so, come Lord Jesus. Throw us into the fires of Your love. And may the truth blaze out from us as from the burning bush to enlighten the entirety of Your world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.