A sermon on Matthew 3:1-12 by Nathan Nettleton

At this time of the year, nearly everybody is going into frantic preparation mode, and legend says that it has something to do with the birth of a child who embodied love and peace but you get the feeling that that’s been long since forgotten. You can’t go near a shop or turn on your radio or TV without being told that you need to prepare because Christmas is coming. And we in the church play the part of the voice in the wilderness crying out that the preparation that’s actually needed for the coming of the Christ is a different sort of preparation. A preparation that expands the limits of the heart instead of the credit card.

Probably to most people, if they hear us at all, that message sounds a bit like John the Baptiser. A real party pooper kind of message, all camel hair shirts and locust sandwiches and chaff being burned in unquenchable fire. “The Kingdom of heaven has come near, so REPENT.” And you can’t get away with just a short term repentance like kids being good for a few days before Santa comes, you’ve got to bear fruit worthy of repentance. Some times I wonder whether John wasn’t preparing the way for Jesus by being so harsh and demanding that Jesus would seem like a marshmallow by comparison! In the popularity stakes, turning water into wine is going to beat locust smoothies every time.

But I’ve been giving a bit of thought to this repentance thing, and I reckon it may not be such bad news after all. You see, repentance basically means “turning around”, “changing direction”. And sure, if you’re on your way to Bali for a mid winter dose of sunshine and beaches and you have to turn around, that may not be too attractive, but if your life is doing ninety mile an hour down a dead end street then turning around suddenly looks like a mighty fine idea.

“Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is not “repent” as in “give up everything that’s good in life.” This is “repent” as in “don’t miss the boat. Don’t miss the opportunity of a life time. The Kingdom of Heaven is near and you wouldn’t want to be left behind.”

John the Baptiser and Jesus in many ways sounded quite different messages. John certainly comes across as an angry hellfire and brimstone man. You don’t find people queuing up to invite him to parties like you do with Jesus. But perhaps their messages can be seen as two sides of the same coin – John as the critique of the old, Jesus as the offer of the new. John telling us what to turn from. Jesus showing us what to turn to. But our image of repentance has often got more of the John in it – its all giving up things, and discipline and abstinence. But ultimately repentance doesn’t mean much unless there is also something to turn to, and it’s when we get a vision of what’s being offered that repentance starts to look very attractive indeed.

In fact it’s not just that repentance starts to look attractive then, it’s that repentance starts to make sense then, it starts to be something we can comprehend then. Let me give you an example of what I mean. I spend a fair chunk of my time talking with various people about where their lives are at, and as often as not I find that they’re not too happy with where their lives are at, and often with good reason. But the biggest obstacle to most of them doing anything about it is that they’re unable to envisage what their lives could be, or how they could get there. Sometimes its quite extreme. You encounter women who are living in situations of extreme domestic violence and abuse. Everyone but her can see that the best thing she could possibly do for herself is to leave her husband and start again without him. But she can’t because she has no picture in her mind of what her life could be like if she was free. She’s put up with it for so long that it is normal for her. It’s just the way life is. Isn’t it like that for everybody? It’s just life as she knows it and so there’s nothing can be done about it. Whenever she thinks about leaving him, which she does briefly after almost every beating, as far as she can think is what he’s going to do when he finds her. So the only vision of life after leaving him is a few hours or maybe a couple of days of massive anxiety until he catches up with her, beats her to within an inch of her life and drags her home. Without a vision of something better to turn to, turning her back on the present reality is inconceivable.

For most of the people I talk to it’s much more subtle. Their present lives are not characterised by violence and abuse, they’re just not feeling that they are where they want to be. I don’t know if anyone else read the big feature on the baby boomers in yesterdays Saturday Extra, but it really captured very well the sense that so many people have that somehow the dreams of their youth have come to nothing and it hurts, but there are no replacement dreams either. Even for those who have the gained all the spoils of success – the career, the home, the family, the holidays overseas – there is this restless sense that it hasn’t added up to anything, that they haven’t really made something worthwhile of themselves, but the trouble is they don’t quite know what it is they want either. And without a vision of something better to turn to, turning their backs on the present reality is inconceivable.

Now this phenomena, this dilemma is not confined to individuals, it can face groups and communities in just the same way. The biggest obstacle to achieving peace in Yugoslavia or the Middle East or Northern Ireland is getting both sides of the conflicts to envisage what life could be like in ways that didn’t involve just winners and losers. I read an article the other day about John Hume and David Trimble who together won last year’s Noble Peace prize for their endeavours in Northern Ireland. The line that stuck in my mind was its description of John Hume as a man who for 30 years had dared to imagine alternatives which neither side had contemplated.

Now I reckon this maybe very pertinent to where we are at as a church right at the present moment. We have a sense of things not being what we would like them to be, but we’re not too sure what we’d like them to be either. We know things are not going too well and it becomes cyclic. It becomes easy for any of us to think, “Well, it didn’t feel too good last Sunday, though I’m not quite sure why, but I think I’ll give it a miss this Sunday.” And then when we start talking about what the problems might actually be, that makes us feel even worse about it. Someone told me yesterday that he thought part of the reason it isn’t working was that I kept saying that it wasn’t working. That that had become a self-fulfilling prophesy. And I reckon he’s got a point. I’ve probably been sounding too much like John the Baptiser and not enough like Jesus. No one wants to turn up to church every Sunday to hear the pastor saying that turning up to church is a waste of time. Of course that’s not quite what I’ve been saying, but I can understand that it may well be how it sounds, especially in the absence of any clear vision for an alternative.

So the challenge then is to articulate a vision for what’s possible. First a John the Baptiser style quick recap on the bad news just in case you’ve missed it. I am convinced that the troubles facing this church at present are facing almost all churches and that the churches as we have known them are dying. Most of the small ones like ours will die within the next five to ten years, while the bigger ones may have the resources to prop themselves up for about twenty. The reason the churches are dying is that what they do is not sufficient to inspire, equip and support people to rebel against the callousness, greed and crippling conformity of our society and to live a radically Christian alternative. This is not because the churches are not doing what they used to do, it is because the pressures, stresses and dangers facing this generation are massive and unprecedented and our approaches were designed for a simpler era. No previous generation has been aware that its personal and national aspirations and dreams are actually doing horrendous violence to our mental and spiritual health, our intimate relationships and even to the ecosystems on which we depend for our air, water and food. But most people cannot envisage a significant alternative for their lives so, like the beaten wife, they continue on the same path working to get the promotion, renovate the house, pay off the mortgage and get the kids into the right school in the hope that those things will make life worthwhile. The chronic nagging dissatisfaction is the repressed knowledge that it won’t. The present models of church worked as long as we thought the basic ingredients of that dream were OK and we just had to help people to be more loving and righteous as they lived it. But now that we know that the whole dream is dysfunctional and poisonous the church’s role has to shift from Christianising the dream to replacing the dream with a Christian alternative and equipping and supporting people to embrace it. And I know of very few churches whose ways of being are up to even attempting that. And just to finish the bad news I have to confess that I can’t see the answers half as clearly as I can see the problems.

So if that’s the bad news, what on earth is the good news? Well there is good news. Very good news. And the good news starts with the one who is always coming to us and calling us to follow. The one who comes to us as a baby born in a shed behind a pub, and as the cosmic Christ embodying within himself all the passion, pain and love of the planet. The good news is that the answers are in him, in Christ, for it is always Christ who opens up the way of freedom and life in each new era. It is Christ who will ensure that the flame of faith is carried faithfully through the massive upheaval of this generation and incarnated in fresh and life-giving ways for the new era that is being born before us. And the good news is that if we are prepared to release our grip on the baggage of the passing era, we can be caught up in the wind of the Spirit who blows who knows where but who always blows out the cobwebs with the breath of new life and fresh hope and constantly reborn love.

Now if that’s all I said, it may well be true, but you’d all think I’d copped out and given you a bunch of ideological claptrap with no detailed steps to get us started with, and you’d be right. To some extent that is all I can do, because the specific steps are things we need to decide together in our discussions and I have no right to use the power of the pulpit to try to push my particular version of where to from here. But I can’t just cop out that easily, so I’m going to offer a few signposts at least.

If we are to be one of the churches that will carry the faith into the new millennium we need to be a people who covenant together to journey deeper into the life of God. In prayer, in worship and in expectant silence we seek to yield ourselves to God’s design, allowing God’s Spirit to heal our brokenness, purge our delusions, restore our integrity, and lead us into fullness of life and love. That will require of us the discipline of regular times for silence and prayer, for it is only as we withdraw ourselves from the noise and insanity of modern life that we can hope to hear the whisperings in our hearts. And it is only as we listen regularly, with our minds attuned by the hearing of scripture and participation in the liturgy, that we can learn to discern which of those whisperings are healing words of counsel from the Spirit of God.

If we are to be one of the churches that will carry the faith into the new millennium we need to be a people who covenant together to journey deeper into solidarity with one another. People standing together united in the grace of God can withstand the forces of competitiveness, selfishness and acquisitiveness. They can find new ways of simplicity, faithfulness and community. And they can support one another as they go through the withdrawal pains from their addictions to the old ways and affirm one another in their new life-giving choices even when they bring derision and attack. They can create communities characterised by celebration, by hope, by sharing of resources and energies and time, and by the growth of Christlikeness in both individuals and in the common life.

I say that we need to covenant together to do these things, because it is only by covenanting together, by making promises to one another, that we create the secure space in which we can take the sort of risks we will need to be taking. The security of covenant relationships enables trust and courage and intimacy.

Such churches will stand out as genuine and credible alternative cultures, as oases in the lifeless deserts of a world insanely bent on self-destruction. But for us here today the question is where do the first steps from here to towards that vision lie? And that’s why this afternoon we will seek to decide what things we need to be starting to do now to set us on paths of real growth in our worship of God and our Christian formation of one another. What do we need to be doing together so that we can, in the midst of the noise and chaos, discern together the whispered leadings of the God who is leading us forward? I’m as scared as any of you by the uncertainty of the path before us, but I’m excited to be part of a church that has the courage to look reality in the face and take up the challenge of being genuinely Christian into the unknowns of the new millennium. Many churches have opted for palliative care to just help them die as painlessly as possible. I’m proud to be part of a people with the guts to choose life instead.

“Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near.” Repent. We’re not being called to turn away from everything that’s good in life. We’re being called to turn away from that which has passed its use-by date, that which no longer gives life, that which would now just anchor us in irrelevance and decay. And more significantly we are being called to turn to something, called to embrace of the new possibilities that are opening to us, to launch out with courage and grace into exciting new visions and hopes for the future. And the Christ who is born anew in every age will go with us always.