“The Man in the River”

Matthew 3:1-12

December 5, 2004

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

Some of you look like the outdoors type, the kind of people who might like, every once and a while or as often as you can, to leave the lights of the city, its conveniences, and some of it’s comforts for the woods or the wilderness. Some of you look like the kind of people who would gladly trade an evening sitting on the couch by the fireplace for an evening sitting on a stool in front of a fire, maybe with a hot dog or a marshmallow heating up over it’s flames. Some of you look like the kind of people who would trade your Sunday go to meetin’ clothes or the ones that you wear to work for a comfortable pair of jeans and an old shirt. Some of you even look like the kind who, if you could get away with it, might trade in you car with a car seat in the back for a four by four truck. Some of you would rather drive things like tractors and four wheelers for hours on end than to spend a minute waiting at a stop light. Others of you do not seem like the outdoors type. If you fall into that category, I suspect that mud and bugs are awful things. If this is you, then your idea of roughing it may be staying at a Holiday Inn that does not have a microwave and coffee maker in every room.

If you do not like being in the woods and the wilderness, you might not like where I would like for us to go this morning. But it is all right, because I will only ask you to go there with your mind’s eye and with your imagination. If you are the outdoors type, you will still have to do that. This morning I would like for us to get out of the city, the city of Jerusalem that is, and make our way to the wilderness and to the River Jordan where John the Baptist is. John is a prophet from the old school, and the first real prophet to turn up in Israel in some three hundred years. To be honest with you, he looks like he has wandered out of a retirement home for really old prophets. For sure he is dressed that way. On his back is camel’s hair, a leather belt is tied around his waists. His breath wreaks of locusts and wild honey. No one wore clothes like John did, not for years and years, not since Elijah, one of the greatest prophets of all time. John’s hair and beard look like they have not ever seen a pair of scissors or a comb. Surely his look is some kind of a statement. If you were around in his day, that would have hit you like a ton of bricks. The man was definitely a messenger, predicted by Isaiah, dressed like Elijah, and sent by God.

Maybe that is why the people flocked to see him. They went out of their way to hear him and eventually to be baptized by him. To be honest with you, I do not see what there is about him that is so inviting. I think that if I were around back then, I would have gone to great lengths to avoid him. He reminds me of the street preacher that I encountered a few years ago while I was in New York City. I was there with a group from my college, a fine arts trip is what they called it. A couple of us were walking in a busy part of that city. We all saw him standing on top of a box. In one of his hands was the biggest Bible that I had ever seen. Equally impressive was his long and pointing finger. He was preaching, yelling really, at anyone who would listen. His message was that if we did not change our ways and repent of our sins, we were going straight to hell.” I don’t mind telling you that the three of us looked at one another and quickly crossed the street so that we would not come face to face with him. He was what you might call a self appointed prophet. Most self appointed prophets tend to position themselves in the middle of somewhere, like a busy sidewalk. They profess to know the answers. And if you get near them, they dare you to ignore them.

John the Baptist is not like that. John the Baptist is nothing like that. He positioned himself in the middle of nowhere. He set up shop in the wilderness, miles and miles from everyone else. The truth is that if you wanted to go out and see him, to hear what he had to say, you had to go out of your way. If you were planning to do that, you had to borrow a donkey or have enough water for the trip. And the trip, by the way, was not a safe one. To get to where he was, you had to travel down crooked paths, where thieves often stood waiting for unsuspecting travelers. You just have to wonder what was so intoxicating about John that impelled hundreds and hundreds of people to go out there, to the River Jordan valley, to the wilderness. Matthew tells us that the people of Jerusalem and all Judea and the region along the Jordan went out to see him and to hear him. That means that everyone is out there or on their way out there. I wonder why they went. I wonder why the people from Jerusalem, which is where the temple was, went. The educated ones, the religious leaders were in Jerusalem. Why didn’t they go there? Why would you take the chance, to go out to the wilderness, to listen to John? If you wanted a word from the Lord, you could have done that there in Jerusalem, in the Temple. If you needed something extra, you could have doubled up on the weekend’s worship services. You could have even gone to the contemporary one that they offer on a Thursday night. If there was something important and significant going on in their lives, they could have made an appointment with one of the chief priests. Anyone who would turn away from all that and set off for the wilderness was looking for something else, something more. Something that they had not gotten in the Temple, in a worship service, or from a priest. And evidently John had it.

Now if you are ready, whether you are the outdoors type or not, let’s lace up our boots and make our way out there to the wilderness where John and hundreds of others already have gathered. We will all need enough water for the trip. I will ask God to protect us from the thieves on the crooked path. Because this is communion Sunday and a worship service in which we have baptized a couple of folks, I will help us arrive in a timely manner. In fact, the wilderness in just ahead and the River Jordan is just in front of us. One by one the folks from Jerusalem and Judea and the region near the river are making their way into the water. That is where John is. Can you see him? He is in the middle of the water, soaking wet, with a shivering soul wiping the water from his eyes and the droplets from his beard. In between the baptisms, John preaches about the one who is coming after him. I get the sense that his words come as if God Himself were whispering in the prophet’s ear. They come one sentence at a time. “I baptize you with water but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” His message is even old school. I think that he should have started with a joke or told a story. Not John. He gets right to the heart of it. Now John does not have the details of the one who is coming. He doesn’t know his name or what he will look like. What he did know is that one world was ending and that another one was coming in. He also knew that this new world would be carried in the arms of God’s chosen one.

Now friends, before we turn around and come back to the sanctuary, I think that you need to hear what John says. He says that there is something that we need to do to get ready for all of this. It is so important to John that he repeats it three times in twelve verses. What we need to do, says, John, is to repent. Now that is an old fashioned word, isn’t it? What would you expect from an old school prophet like John? Repent, he says, for the Kingdom of Heaven has come near. Now some two thousand years later we wonder if this kingdom is any closer than it once was. Things have changed since John preached at the top of his lungs in between baptisms. We do not hear the word repent often these days and because we don’t, it is not something that we think about. The word repent and guilt go hand in hand. I heard someone say this week that there is an absence of guilt in our world. They may be right. Have you seen the new show on ABC, Desperate Housewives. It airs on Sunday nights and these housewives have made the cover of Newsweek Magazine. In an episode a couple of weeks ago, a young boy was drinking and driving. He hit a woman on their street, Wisteria Lane. He panics and drives away. His family hides him and the car. But there is something that troubles the teenager’s mother. When she talks with her son about what happened, she is amazed at the absence of guilt or remorse for what happened. Some folks are pretty happy that feelings of guilt have been dethroned.

As a preacher, I don’t mind telling you that it is hard to talk about repentance if guilt is not around. What is repentance anyway? Some folks believe that it is a word that belongs to yesterday, that it is equated with sack cloths and ashes and mourners benches. Some think that repentance is what you do only if you are caught doing something that you shouldn’t have done. Is that what it is? Isn’t repentance more than blurting out, “I’m sorry?” Isn’t it more than turning over a new leaf? Isn’t it more than starting over again? Isn’t it something that we are supposed to deal with and not ignore?

John Steinbeck has a story entitled The Wayward Bus. In it, an old bus takes a cross country shortcut on its way to Los Angeles. Somewhere along the way, the bus gets stuck in the mud. While the driver goes for help, the passengers take cover in a cave. The mixture of people is a strange one. It is obvious that the author was trying to say that they were lost in more than one way. As they enter the cave, Steinbeck calls the readers’ attention to the fact that as they enter, they must pass a word that has been scrawled with paint over the entrance of the cave. The word is repent. And in his story, no one pays attention to the word.

How can we not pay attention to the word repentance, especially on this Sunday, as John preaches it at the top of his lungs? Let me take a stab at what I think repentance is. I think that it means changing your life. I think that it means changing directions and going down a different path, one towards God. The people in the River Jordan understood that. They nodded their heads when John preached and they knew that in the waters of the Jordan was their chance to come clean and to stop pretending that they were someone else. They knew that it was their chance to change their lives! They knew that if this great one was coming, then they had better be ready for him in every possible way. It is your chance, too, friends. Would you go home with this question on your heart. What is it in my life that I need to repent of? What is it in my life that I need to change? What is it in my life that needs to go down a different road and a better path? Let us pray.

(Special thanks to both the outdoors and indoors type who were willing to go to the wilderness with me in our sermon this morning. Thanks to the writers of Desperate Housewives for material in this sermon. And thanks to Barbara Brown Taylor for her help with a thought or two about John the Baptizer).