Eighteen years ago we bought a house that had been built fifty-seven years before, in 1928.  It was in pretty bad shape but showed lots of promise.  It needed a new roof and we had to strip it on the inside from floor to ceiling and wall to wall.  The carpet was a biohazard, the old drapes fell apart in our hands as we ripped them from the walls and a yellow-greasy stain covered nearly every pane of glass.  It was a mess.  We had our work cut out for us. 

About two months into the project we got a call one night that changed our lives forever.  Billie Shotts, our caseworker at Buckner’s here in Dallas, called to say, “You have a son.  You can come pick him up tomorrow.”

Needless to say, not only was the house not ready but we didn’t have one single in it fit for a baby.  That’s the way adoption is.  You hope it’s coming but you have no idea when.  It’s the single greatest surprise of your life.  We didn’t have a blanket, a sack of diapers, a bottle or a crib.  We had to get focused, fast, and channel our elation into action.  Some of our friends who already had children happened to be in our home that night when the call came.  We turned to them and asked, “What do we do?”  They pitched in and we fanned out all across town looking for baby stuff.  And, all because we got word that a baby had been born who was going to come and live with us and we knew we’d never be the same.

What would you do if you got that news tonight, or tomorrow?  News that a baby had been born who wanted to come and live with you and change your life forever?  I’m not asking how you’d feel.  I can guess that one.  I’m asking, what would you do?  John the Baptist would say, “Thanks for asking.”  But, the way he answers is a little shocking. 

Two things absolutely amaze me about the way Luke reports John’s sermon announcing the coming of Christ, the baby who had been born to be the Messiah, God in the flesh, coming to live with us and change us forever.  First, after calling his audience a “‘brood of vipers’” and warning them of “‘wrath to come,’” an ax wielding God and “‘unquenchable fire,’” Luke says that, “with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.’”  If that’s the good news, I don’t even want to think about the bad news.  The second thing that amazes me about this sermon is the way the people responded.  You’d think they’d be looking for the nearest exit, stepping out to go to the bathroom mid-sermon and conveniently forgetting to come back.  But, to a person, devout Jews, tax collectors and soldiers, in response to this bad good news, to a person they asked, “‘What then should we do?’” 

Actually, John had already answered the question before they asked.  His introduction was his invitation, “‘Bear fruits worthy of repentance.’”  The purpose of John’s ministry was to prepare the world for the coming Messiah.  The way he does that is to say, because of what God has done in Christ, what we should do is change the way we are living.  Then, he lays out a nice two-point sermon spelling out the exact ways in which people should go about doing that.  Lighten your load and use your power to empower others.  There are variations on the theme.  But, in substance, John says, that’s the best way we can honestly and genuinely get serious about preparing ourselves for Christ’s coming.  It’s a little different than what most Christmas marketing calls us to do.  But, it’s definitely what the word of God calls us to do in preparing for Christ’s coming.

Lighten your load, John says.  “‘Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.’”  In the kingdom of God, in God’s world, no one should have two coats until everyone has at least one, no one should have two loaves of bread until all have one.  Kind of puts Christmas shopping in a different perspective, doesn’t it?   

I recently did a little walk through my closet.  I was amazed at how many clothes I have because I think that someday I’m going to fit back into them.  Some of them stuffed so far back I’d forgotten I have them.  All of this when there are people already the size I used to be who need those clothes this winter.  What should I do about that? 

I’ve also done a little walk around inside my heart.  You ever done that?  Any overstuffed closets in the cockles of your heart?  You know, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.  See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting (Psalm 139:23-24, NIV).”  Any anxiety or attitudes that might be offensive to your God weighing down your heart?  Lighten the load!  This is not easy work because, most often, these are things we’ve grown so accustomed to carrying we don’t even see them anymore.

It seems like I’ve never lived anywhere that didn’t need some work.  We recently replaced some of our fourteen-year-old biohazard carpet with some dark stained hard wood flooring.  It always looks so good in magazines.  But, it’s impossible to keep clean for more than ten minutes.  We can sweep and sweep and vacuum and sweep but it seems that all we do is stir the dust and pet hair and microscopic UFO’s to settle somewhere else.  It’s always been there, we just couldn’t see it against the backdrop of our well-worn carpet.  But, against the backdrop of dark wood, everything, I mean everything, shows up all the time.  We’ll never be able to rest again, especially if someone special is coming to visit, like we hope you all will next Sunday.  Sweeping once done only once a week or so Nancy will now need to do every day.  Sweeping in the morning, sweeping in the evening, sweeping all the livelong day!  Maybe that’s not altogether a bad thing.  We’ll have a cleaner house than we had when all that dust was there but we just couldn’t see it.

Against the backdrop of what’s “normal,” or what’s “only human” or the backdrop of “everybody’s doing it,” there is a great deal of anxiety and anger and unforgiveness and indifference and prejudice and blaming and judging and selfishness that never shows up in our hearts.  But, against the backdrop of the hard wood cross dark-stained with the blood of Jesus, everything shows up.  Against the backdrop of God’s indescribable gift of love, every microcosmic particle of sin stands out in stark relief.  Against the backdrop of a forgiving love given to us “while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8, NIV),’” it’s not easy to get away with extending forgiveness only to those that we determine are deserving and withholding it from those we deem undeserving.  It’s virtually impossible to cling to the old rugged cross while we’re still clinging to the old rugged baggage that weighs us down from serving, loving and forgiving all the others for whom Christ also died.  Lighten your load, John says.  That’s what you should do, if you want to get ready for this baby who has been born to come and live with you and change your life forever. 

Use your power carefully, too.  It’s not a question of whether we have power, only a question of how we use it.  Both tax collectors and soldiers knew how to use the system to take advantage of those over whom they had power.  So do we all.  All of us have power.  We have intellectual power, financial power, sexual power, the power of the spoken word to bless or to curse.  If the coming of Christ tells us nothing else, it tells us how God has chosen to use his power.  Remember?  “At just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5:6, NIV).”  People who are serious about getting ready for Jesus will take a serious look at how they use their power. 

Frankly, this is one of those moments when I feel like I am preaching to the choir, literally.  Friday night at Christmas Dinners, near the end of the performance, I had this feeling come over me that is somewhat difficult to describe.  A friend of mine who once met George Bush told me that, even though you know that he is just another human being, when you are in the presence of the President of the United States, it’s a humbling experience to be in the same room with that much power and notoriety. 

That’s how I felt Friday night in the presence of our choir.  I was just a few feet away from some of the finest servants of Jesus I have ever known in my life and it was awesome to be in the presence of that kind of spirit being lived out in flesh and blood right before my very eyes.  Not to mention the music and the props, Bud tells me that, in the twenty-five years this church has produced Christmas Dinners, they have prepared, served and cleaned up after some 25,000 people, as best they can tell.  To watch the choir and other volunteers slave away with such intensity to make that production what it is and smile the whole way is truly an unforgettable sight to behold, the same as it will be when we do Christmas Day Lunches in just eleven days.  To watch all these people work so hard and do so for no other reason than to use their power of music and servanthood for the simple joy of helping other people keep the true meaning of this season at the forefront each and every year by actually fleshing it out looks, feels and sounds, well, so Christlike.  If you want to know what servants look like in action, hang around with this group of people seated behind me for a while. 

So, why this Advent message from John about Jesus who, he says, is coming to “‘baptize’” us “‘with the Holy Spirit and fire’” and with “‘His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire’”?  In some ways these images are troubling; in other ways there are liberating.  These are images of a God coming to empower us by living within us, to walk with us day by day.  Like farmers did in the days before combines when they’d throw the harvested grain into the air and let the wind separate the good from the useless, these are images of a God who will never stop refining our character, no matter how far we’ve gone in learning to serve him.  In some ways, I feel like I’m just getting started.  As fire refines and purifies all it touches, God refines us by helping us lighten our load and eliminate from our lives what is useless, even evil, always calling us to seek even more ways to participate with him in bringing his kingdom to be on earth as it is in heaven. 

The preacher today might call you to join the church or to believe in Jesus and all of that is well and good.  John’s Advent message goes even further.  It calls us to do something more than just affiliate with an institution or publicly affirm what we believe.  Believing is easy, if that’s all it means to be Christian.  That’s just not all it means to be Christian.  I like the way Eugene Peterson says it.  “It has always been more difficult to come to terms with Jesus as the way than with Jesus as the truth, more difficult to realize the ways our thinking and behavior” must become “fused into a life of relational love and adoration with neighbor and God, God and neighbor.”  Yet, “only when we do the Jesus truth in the Jesus way do we get the Jesus life (Eugene Peterson, “Transparent Lives,” Christian Century, November 29, 2003, pp. 21-22).” 

That’s why Luke calls it the “good news.”  Do you hear that?  The joy, peace, meaning and fulfillment we seek in the Christian life, the joy, peace, meaning and fulfillment that so often seem to elude us after we’ve sung the Christmas carols and spent our way into debt every December 25 buying more stuff we don’t need but others do, all of that is on the other side of doing the Jesus truth, not just believing in the Jesus way.

I know.  This all sounds like a troubling contradiction, like we’re actually saved by works, not by faith.  But, the word of God, coming to us through John, does not allow us to separate what we believe from how we behave.  In fact, eventually, how we behave is what we believe.  Or, to put it another way, more often we behave our way into believing more than we believe our way into behaving.  A dear friend said that the thing that strikes him most about John’s sermon is that it teaches that spiritual practices lead to spiritual beliefs and experience, not the other way around.  Sort of like Jesus telling the rich man to sell everything and come follow him.  My friend said, “I’m not sure I want to believe that badly!”  How about you?  It’s like the parable of the sheep and goats (Matthew 25).  Jesus said that, when God gathers all of humanity together in judgment, what will separate those who are kingdom people from those who are not will not be how well we can recite the tenets of our beliefs but whether we actually fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, clothed the naked, took care of the sick and visited those in prison.  In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught us in what we know as the Lord’s Prayer, that our experiencing of God’s forgiveness is mysteriously linked to our willingness to simultaneously extend forgiveness to others.

So, this is what repentance means.  When we have turned from a preoccupation with ourselves “to an occupation with the kingdom of God,” our lives “will take on” a very unique look.  “When” we “have trusted in Christ and put his kingdom first, certain” ways of living and relating, not just to God, but to each other will “mark” our lives (George Mason, What Should We Do?, The Wilshire Pulpit, Wilshire Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas, December 17, 2000).

I’m still amazed at how much we actually did that night, almost eighteen years ago.  What we’d been hoping for so long finally came true, totally surprising us.  The feelings were indescribable.  It was too good to be true.  But, pretty quickly, we looked around at where we lived and realized we weren’t anywhere near ready.  We had to get focused, in a hurry, if a baby was going to feel welcome in our world.

When someone told us that a baby had been born and was going to come and live with us and change our lives forever, we looked around and asked, “what then should we do?”