Many years ago, while teaching a Sunday School class of teenaged boys and girls, I asked the question, “are you a Christian?” They all said yes enthusiastically. My follow-up question was, “what makes you so sure that you are a Christian?” A young man raised his hand and said, “I am a Christian because my mother and my grandmother are Christians.”
In today’s Gospel (Luke 3:7-18), the crowds flock to John to be baptized and with his bold, fiery voice, he exhorts the people to face themselves and come to true repentance resulting in transformed lives, that bear “fruits of repentance.” But within the crowd there appears to have been some who were skeptical, doubting their need for the baptism of repentance due to their great family heritage. John addressed that attitude saying, “do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘we have Abraham as our ancestor’…….” Some of John’s hearers perhaps believed that salvation is based on the privilege of being a member of an ancestry to whom God had covenanted to be “God to you and your off-springs after you” forever. (Genesis 17:7).
John is the messenger who introduces the crowd and us to God’s new way of being with all people, through Jesus Christ, the Son of God. With Christ’s coming, all people are offered the gift of salvation. We are all invited to become more fully who God created us to be. To travel that journey into wholeness, we admit our sins and accept responsibility for our inner thoughts and attitudes, the condition of our heart and soul. We then commit to turn away from the wrong and toward God’s way. Our expectation of God’s transformative blessings is rooted in who God is, His infinite love, mercy, and grace, and not on the merit of ancestral distinctiveness or privileges.
So moved by the urgency of his message of repentance, the crowd, including tax collectors and soldiers, asked John, “what should we do?” John responded by urging all to act with fairness, kindness, compassion, justice, and regard for all persons. But on our own, we are incapable of living this way of righteousness. The good news of great joy this, the third Sunday of Advent is that the coming of the most powerful One, Jesus Christ, offers the promise of baptism into “the Holy Spirit and fire”. The blazing fire of His love will burn away the chaff, the blindness, and deceptions of our lives, and recreate us, the wheat into new persons who by the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, strive to live into our calling to be children of God acting with kindness, love, and mercy. We rejoice in the Lord always because God’s offer of salvation is for all people, all nations and His mercy towards us is unending. Amen.
