Let the Hippos Take Over

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

December 5, 2010

Second Sunday in Advent

Let the Hippos Take Over

Matthew 3:1-12

Is there anyone in the gospels

who can drain the Christmas spirit from us faster

than John the Baptist?

The wild man of the wilderness.

The man who invented “hellfire and brimstone” preaching.

The only thing warm and fuzzy about him

were the clothes he wore.

But yet, John the Baptist is the perfect Advent preacher for us.

He’s the perfect preacher to shout out,

“Wake up!

Open your eyes!

Be alert! Get Ready!

Prepare the way of the Lord!

Prepare for the one who is coming!”

John spoke with fire and fury

of the Messiah who was to come,

and his words are just as timely for us 2000 years later,

as we wait for the Christ, the Messiah

who will come again.

“Prepare the way of the Lord.

Make his paths straight,”

he cries out, and we are hypnotized,

enthralled, listening to his every word,

even if we are more fascinated by his appearance,

than we are with what he is saying.

But then he utters one word,

one simple two-syllable word

and he loses us:

“Repent.”

We hear everything else he says,

we pay attention,

but as soon as he says “repent”,

we lose interest.

Such a simple word, yet so charged,

so weighty, too weighty for us.

Here it is the Christmas season,

when we want to be merry and light,

and John goes negative, talking of sin.

Isn’t that why we created Lent –

so we’d have a specific time of year

for us to talk about sin:

6 weeks and then leave it at that.

Of course, we’re all quick to acknowledge

that we’re not perfect,

that we have our faults, our imperfections,

that we make mistakes.

But for John to talk of sin,

that’s laying it on a little thick.

We don’t need to repent,

we just need to do a little better,

try a little harder, right?

We struggle with the very word, “sin”,

acknowledging sin,

acknowledging our waywardness.

Long before John stood in the mud of the Jordan River,

the children of Israel said to the prophets and priests,

Don’t tell us what’s wrong with us,

or where we’ve gone wrong,

“Speak to us of smooth things,

prophesy illusions.”

(Isaiah 30:10)

                          

We don’t want to hear about sin and

our need for repentance.

We want to feel good about ourselves!

But John knows us better than we know ourselves.

And more, John cares about us,

perhaps even more than we care about ourselves.

For all his “fire and brimstone” demeanor,

John was filled with the Spirit of God,

which is, of course, the spirit of love,

and he wanted everyone who heard his voice

to know the love of God, the peace of God.         

But he knows our sins get between us and God,

barriers we erect that get between the love

and peace of God and us.

John wants us to acknowledge our sin,

and then repent, turn back to God

so we’ll know fully the love and peace of God.

We cannot repent if we don’t think

we have anything to repent about.

As one theologian put it,

“How we talk about [our] sin

[determines] what we will do about it.”

(Anderson, Sin, 13)

John rants not to make us feel bad;

but he thinks we are too complacent,

too easy on ourselves

He wants us to be realistic,

to be honest with ourselves.

And it all starts with acknowledging our sin,

or as one writer has put it,

acknowledging that we are out of alignment with God.

We use all kinds of metaphors

to describe how we turn from God,

but I rather like that one:

that when we speak of sin

what we are saying is that

we are out of alignment with God.

When the tires on a car are out of alignment,

the wheels pull to the side –

the car veers off from the straight.

We know that’s not a good thing for our car,

it’s even potentially dangerous,

so we take it to the shop and get it fixed,

get the car aligned,

back to the way it is supposed to be.

That’s what John is teaching us to do:

recognize that we are out of alignment with God,

that we veer from God, turn from God,

pull the wrong direction

away from the road that God wants us on.

Why are we so resistant to acknowledging our waywardness,

that we are out of alignment,

that we are not on the right path?

Pride is our chief stumbling block of course,

pride, along with complacency,

indifference,

and of course, stubbornness.

                                                              

We don’t like to be told how to live;

we don’t like to be told what to do.

That’s been true since Adam and Eve

decided that what they wanted to do

was eat the fruit from the tree

God told them specifically not to touch.

How exasperated God must get at times,

trying again and again and again

to call his wayward children back to him.

Sending prophet after prophet after prophet

with the same message:

“You are out of alignment.”

And we time and time and time again,

not listening,

not paying attention,

or if we do pay attention,

getting annoyed with the messenger:

“How dare you say that to us!

Speak to us of smooth things.”

I have a wonderful cartoon in my office of

a pensive, somber God standing on a cloud,

looking down at the world

and then turning to an assistant standing nearby

and saying,

“That’s it; the human experiment is over;

let the hippos take over.”

Could we blame God?

After thousands of years

we still haven’t learned how to live in peace with one another;

We still think we’ll find happiness

in material success, riches, and goods;

We still don’t understand

that we have a responsibility to one another in community,

to assure that no one goes hungry,

or is left in the cold, or without hope.

We need John the Baptist to shake us up,

to wake us up, to remind us that

while we may not have to worry about being left behind
when Christ comes again,

we will still be judged and held accountable for our lives.

John calls us to examine ourselves –

To examine ourselves and acknowledge

the very fact that we are out of alignment:

to acknowledge where we are out of alignment,

and then work to re-align ourselves with God’s will.

John calls us to live Sermon on the Mount lives,

as we talked about last week,

lives grounded in righteousness, justice,

reaching out to those who don’t have enough to eat,

those who are struggling.

John puts it so simply for us:

“whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none;

and whoever has food must do likewise.”

(Luke 3:11)

John preached this message and it cost him his life.

It isn’t a popular message,

but it is God’s word to you and me.

“Woe to an age when the voices of those

who cry in the wilderness are silent. …

They summon us to our last chance,

while already they feel the ground quaking

and the rafters creaking.”

This is John, who knows that

God could turn the world over to the hippos tomorrow

and so he calls us to repent,

to turn back to God’s word,

God’s way, God’s will.

Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight.

Then – and only then –

will the glory of the Lord be revealed

and all people see it together.”

(Isaiah 40)

                          

AMEN