"THE NARROW GATE OF PEACE"
Texts: Isaiah 40:1-5 and Luke 3:3, 7-20

We are reading Luke together this year. Today we fast-forward from John the Baptist’s birth to his actual preaching.

John was not the type you wanted to get stuck with at a party. He would mutter under his breath: Impeach Herod! Or, Away with the high priesthood! He scoffed at fine clothes. While others drank their Scotches and eggnog he carried his own bottle of water. Printed on the bottle were the words, Save the Jordan!

He had not gone to the finishing school for clergy called Seminary, where they teach you how to preach and pray and not offend. He was schooled in the wilderness, he alone with God, no spiritual props, no social insulation. Alone with the Holy One.

He may have spent some time in the Essene community of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but he belonged to no school, no group. He was a one-man reform movement in first-century Judaism.

I

He was baptizing in the Jordan River. "A baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" is how the text puts it. Repentance: Metanoia in the Greek, a change of mind, heart. The great Hebrew word behind the Greek is Shuv: Return. Return to God.

John’s message was closest to the Hebrew prophet Malachi. Through Malachi God said, "You have turned aside from my statutes.... Return to me, and I will return to you." The Lord is "like a refiner’s fire," said Malachi, purifying you as silver and gold are purified in the fire.

John preached the coming judgment of God as a refiner’s fire. And he said to some, "You brood of vipers! Who told you to flee the wrath to come?" Can you see a brood of snakes wiggling away to escape a fire?

Martin Luther, who for all his brilliance and spiritual truth bore the anti-Semitism of his age and culture, cited this passage and called all Jews a "brood of snakes" - - as have many other Christians caught in a hatred of our spiritual mother. But John’s charge was more specific - - and more general:

You come thinking a dip in the Jordan is all you need. What you need is metanoia, shuv. A new mind, a return to the ways of God. It’s a sharp message to our easy American religion that wants baptism without repentance, forgiveness without confession, wholeness without holiness, salvation without metanoia, spirituality without the Spirit of God. It’s religion as a shopper’s delight: God R Us.

He said to them at Jordan’s edge: You lean on your spiritual lineage, saying, "We are children of Abraham; Abraham is our father!" I tell you, from these stones God can raise up children of Abraham.

It’s a sobering word for us children of Abraham: Jewish children, Christian children, Muslim children. We all like to claim our lineage, our chosenness. God belongs to us, fancies us.

John says, Your lives prove your lineage. You say you are children of shalom, peace, salaam. But your actions do not show it. A tree is judged by its fruits. An axe is laid to the root of the tree. What doesn’t bear fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

Wendell Berry writes:

We all have holy war traditions and peace traditions in our scriptures and histories. The question for Abrahamic religions today is whether we Christian, Muslim, Jew can recover the peace traditions within our own faiths, and whether we will disavow the holy war, crusade, jihad impulses of our traditions and prove ourselves true children of Abraham. If not, God will raise up others, and our fruitless branches will go into the fire.

II

You may ask at this point. What is the good news in John’s preaching? Is there any gospel there?

Here it is - - and it is what made him a threat to both Rome and Jerusalem, Herod and Herod’s Temple: Anybody could be saved. Anybody could come and be baptized. You didn’t need to pay a temple tax to the priests; you didn’t have to be the right family, race, nation, gender or class. It was like the Pentecostal movement in America begun in the Azuza Street revival in L.A. Black, white, brown, rich and poor, male, female, educated and uneducated, religious and not religious: All were coming. The Spirit could fall on anyone. It was falling on everyone. Just look!

III

And John didn’t leave us with a one-sentence warning, Repent, Or Else! He told us "How repent!" He showed us what metanoia looked like. The crowds asked him, "What then should we do?" (There had to be someone in the crowd who whispered, "Don’t ask!") And he said, Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none. (Maybe next week we should bring an offering of coats!) And whoever has extra food must give to those who have no food. (Maybe an offering of can goods! Bring them to the altar. Stack them higher than the poinsettias.)

Even tax collectors came to be baptized! Half of you should hear: "Even Democrats came to be baptized!" The other half should hear: "Even Republicans came to be baptized!" The Jordan was open to everyone. Still is. And the tax collectors asked, "What should we do?" And John said, "Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you." In other words, honest business practice. Beware of greed.

Soldiers were there too, asking, What should we do? They were probably Herod’s soldiers: Jews who joined the occupying army of Rome. Like Maliki’s army in Iraq, Arabs soldiering other Arabs in America’s name. Not the most popular of people. And John said, "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation. Be satisfied with your wages." In other words, no plundering and extortion. No misuse of power.

John’s preaching was ethical living regardless of your circumstances. When times get tough enough, painful enough, confused enough its easy to say, "What the hell; it doesn’t matter how I live." But it does. Sir Thomas More put it this way: "The times are never so bad but that a good man can live in them."

Thomas More, you may remember, stood against King Henry VIII. Henry became obsessed that Thomas More, his Lord Chancellor, affirm his supremacy over church and endorse his divorce and remarriage. More resigned his chancellorship rather than be forced to support the king. But that was not enough. More was asked to take an oath of loyalty or lose his life. The playwrite Robert Bolt captures the moment of moral decision in his play A Man for All Seasons. More’s daughter, Meg, begged him to take the oath, saying that God would know his heart. More, now imprisoned in the Tower of London, replied,

More, like John, was executed by beheading. But he stayed true to himself, to the best truth he knew.

John preached the narrow gate of peace. The wide gate is peace as a sentiment, peace as a warm feeling and greeting card ideal. The narrow gate of peace - - the gate that leads to life, as Jesus put it - - is the narrow gate of personal integrity, of truthfulness and honesty, of the refusal to exploit one’s power for personal gain. It is the narrow gate of justice which looks out for the well-being of all people and as the Hebrew scripture puts it, "judges with equity for the poor of the earth."

John’s preaching cost him his life. He was too critical of the powers-that-be, religious and political. He criticized the policies of Herod who wanted to be thought of as king of the Jews. He denounced Herod’s marriage to his brother’s wife. Herod could not stand such truth.

IV

But there was more to John than fiery prophet of repentance. He came to prepare the way for another, to point to the Christ.

On your order of worship is a reproduction of the figure of John the Baptist, a detail from one of the most famous paintings in the history of art: Grunewald’s Crucifixion from the Isenheim Altar piece. There he is pointing. It was painted for the hospital chapel in the monastery of St. Anthony. I’ve reproduced a larger portion of the painting a few pages on in your order of worship. He is pointing to the crucified Christ. The figure of Jesus on the cross is painted in horrifying detail. One can imagine the patients in that hospital – victims of plague, disease and war – identifying with the suffering of Christ.

Turn back to the cover. There is John holding the scriptures in one hand, pointing to Jesus with the other, pointing with that impossibly long finger to the Christ. Karl Barth had this picture in his study. The church’s vocation, like John’s, is to point to the Christ. As Paul said, "For what we preach is not ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your servants for Christ’s sake" (from II Corinthians 4:5). Pointing to Christ, becoming servants: this is our purest calling.

Words are painted there between his face and finger. In Latin, "I must decrease; he must increase" (from John 3:30). And painted at his feet is a lamb with a copy, echoing John’s words as Jesus comes to be baptized: "Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world."

John knew that his teaching was not enough. We needed more. God sent more. People asked, "Are you the Messiah?" and he said, no, and pointed to another:

Wind and Fire. Spirit and Flame.

He is the one who will bring new birth by the Spirit of God. He is the one who will purify us with fire as silver and gold purified in the fire.

We cannot capture the wind, nor conjure the Spirit at will. But we can pray for it and open our windows and doors to it. As Wendell Berry prays in his poem "To the Holy Spirit":

O Thou, far off and here, whole and broken,
Who in necessity and in bounty wait,
Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken,
By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.³

And Fire. He is fire too. John uses the image of the farmer throwing his wheat into the air. The wind blows the useless chaff away. The good grain falls to the ground. The one is thrown into the fire; the other is baked into bread.

So we throw our lives into the wind of God, asking for the chaff to be blown away, and the grain to be made into bread.

But the fire is also flame, the flame which brings light to the world, the fire in our bones, the fire in our hearts which makes us God’s instruments, God’s flame.

Annie Dillard, alone in a cabin in the Northwest, watched a moth fly too near the flame of the candle on her desk. Its wings caught fire and were consumed. Then its hollow body caught fire and attached itself upright to the wax and became a second wick, a second flame. This moth aflame became for her the image of the artist, the saint.

What more could we pray than for some moment we might be a candle lit for the world? Not all the time, or even most of the time - - how could we bear it? But here and there, now and then, by the grace of God, the flame of God! Baptized in fire.

The desert mothers and fathers, immas and abbas, fled the cities and went into the desert in the fourth century to save their souls. What they found there was God, the compassion of God for them and for the world. Then they returned to the cities to be the compassion of God to others. Many stories have come from their experience. Here is one: