Luke 3:7-18 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
Third Sunday in Advent Sunday, December 15, 2024 “Good News Brings Good Fruit”
“You are not a cotton-headed ninny muggins.” That’s how the elf supervisor tries to console Buddy the Elf. If you haven’t seen the movie Elf (which is now 21 years old, so I don’t think I need to be too worried about spoilers), a brief explanation. Buddy is not an elf, he’s a human but hasn’t realized it. The elves make toys with incredible speed and precision. Buddy does not. In his frustration, Buddy calls himself by that insult, and the whole happy elf workshop comes to a sudden silence. It’s obvious that cotton-headed ninny muggins is just not the kind of language that is acceptable at the North Pole. Sometimes it feels like Christmas spirit is based on that sort of an expectation. There are certain things you just don’t talk about and there are certain ways you just don’t act, at least at Christmas time. As a result, everyone can be happy and busy and unbothered by anything other than fun and festivities. If that’s the case, it is striking when someone steps out of line, says something wrong, or does something unexpected. And maybe it is so jarring that it feels like the whole room goes quiet and stares and just doesn’t know what to do. Do you suppose anyone felt that way when John the Baptist spoke? Luke 3 introduces John as the fulfillment of prophecy. He is the voice Isaiah spoke of, crying out in the wilderness about making a level, straight path for the Lord. And then the Gospel of Luke follows him out into the area near the river, and the first thing that we hear John say is, “You offspring of vipers”! If that would happen in 2024, there would have to be someone nearby saying, “You shouldn’t say that. That’s mean.” There is no doubt that people can be mean. They can say things with an unkind heart and an unkind spirit. That’s not what John was doing. John was preaching a baptism of repentance. John was showing people what it meant to prepare the way for the Lord, what it meant to lower down mountains and raise up valleys. And it did not mean some superficial action or some surface-level claim. The Jews couldn’t say, “We’re Jews, so everything is OK between us and God.” John expects the people to say this. He expects them to make a claim to being Abraham’s children as if that is the thing that will make them ready to meet the King. And he dismisses their claim. If God wants children of Abraham, he can make children of Abraham out of the stones. God does not want that. He wants repentance. Repentance calls for looking at ourselves and finding the wrong, finding the evil, finding the impure. Repentance says, “I want to put that behind me.” Repentance says that I am not worthy, just like John later says. Repentance says that I deserve to be cut down like a dead tree that is good for nothing but firewood. For some who came to John at the Jordan, their visit was just for show. They did not have repentance in their hearts. They did not listen to his message. They were nothing more than hypocrites. Unfortunately, that’s a place we can easily find ourselves. Sure, we come to church so much more frequently than just Christmas and Easter (unlike some people we know), but we don’t always listen. We don’t always take to heart what is said. Sometimes we’re more interested in the latest gossip or seeing how everyone looks. Sometimes we just want people to see how Christian we look. We don’t really consider our sinfulness. We started this service by talking about joy, but joy seems quite absent from this account and from John’s words, and from Christmas preparations that are nothing more than telling us how bad we are. Not only does John talk about throwing the trees into the fire, he talks later about cleaning out a threshing floor and throwing all the chaff, all the unusable parts of the wheat plant, into the fire. And just in case we didn’t connect that talk to the ultimate, hellish consequence of sin, John reminds us that this fire is unquenchable. No, there’s not much joy in these words. But there is certainly joy in the message of John. The last verse of our text summarizes John’s message like this: Then with many other words, he appealed to them and was preaching good news to the people.