Sermon:  Rejoice, You Brood of Vipers

Texts: Zephaniah 3:14-20; Philippians 4:4-7; John 3:7-18

Date: December 17, 2007

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

            Rejoice in the Lord always, You brood of vipers! Again I will say, Rejoice. Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? The Lord is near. The Lord, your God, is in your midst. Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not worry about anything.  Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Do not fear, O Zion; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. He will renew you in his love.  Rejoice and exult with all your heart.  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.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

And the crowds asked, “Huh?”  I mean, “What then should we do?”

              I’ve just been playing a little game that was included in a book we have called Surrealist Games.  The game, which is sure to make any party a hit, is to give your guests a bunch of newspapers or magazines from which they are supposed to clip out words or phrases and rearrange them.  The most surrealist text resulting wins the prize.  Surrealists are all about jolting you into a new state of consciousness by messing with your ordinary view of the world, as in the riddle “How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?”  Two; one to hold the giraffe and one to put the clocks in the bathtub.  (And the crowds asked, “Huh?”)

            Anyway, I got off on this little surrealist tangent because in our Bible study this week, Jean was insistently asking why the flat-out joy in the Old Testment and Epistle readings was combined with crabby old John the Baptist yelling about snakes and repentance and axes and fire and stuff.  There is—perhaps you noticed—quite a contrast in the tone of the assigned readings for today.  It amused me to try to toss them together to see whether some new state of consciousness would rise out of saying, “Rejoice, you brood of vipers!”    

            I think something fresh does come out of combining the two flavors of scripture we had dished up this morning, something akin to sweet and sour chicken, or whatever dish you like that combines what initially seems like they wouldn’t go together.  Repentance and joy; they go together surprisingly well. 

            Here’s what I mean.  First, there is John’s refreshing honesty about the human condition as he addresses the people who come out to the wilderness for baptism.  He doesn’t try to flatter these people at all.  “You brood of vipers!”  And the people stick around to hear the rest of the sermon!  Know why?  I think it’s because they are well acquainted with the snaky mess of sin slithering around their souls, and it’s kind of a relief to hear someone call a spade a spade once in a while.  It’s like, “Oh, you know me.  You know that even if I look good on the outside, what’s on the inside is a muddle, to put it mildly.”  A muddle puddle of good intentions and frequent failures, generosity and unchecked greed, compassion and an astounding level of apathy about the world’s problems.  You brood of vipers—Oh, you’re talking to me. There’s the first little whiff of joy; we don’t have to pretend we are so great in the presence of the irascible John.

            So there’s this bracing honesty about who he’s talking to, and then there’s the invitation to change, with an apparent confidence that it could actually happen.  Why would he be wasting his time shouting at the brood of vipers standing on the shoreline if he thought they were a lost cause?  He’s challenging them to repent as if he thinks they can do it.  That’s actually pretty good news, even if it does follow on the heels of some fiery threats designed to motivate lackadaisical sinners.  (I always want to laugh after the gospel finishes one sentence with “burn with unquenchable fire” and follows it with “So, with many other exhortations he proclaimed the good news to the people.”)

            Good news.  I could change.  You could change.  We could change.  Repentance is always an option.  There’s another little whiff of joy, eh?  We’re not sentenced to muddle around in the same ol’ puddle of sin forever.  We could be new people, starting today.  Rejoice, you brood of vipers!

            While I can’t completely approve of John the Baptist’s scare tactics, I really appreciate the reminder that we don’t have to settle for being the people we are right now or settle for the world as it is.  We can turn toward the light in a thousand ways every single day.  That’s what repentance is, you know, turning.  As the old Shaker song goes, “Turning, turning, till we come round right.”  We can turn, and we can shape how the world turns as well.  Dorothy Day, leader of the Catholic Worker movement, wrote this poem entitled “A Case for Utopia” which points to the possibility of turning like John does:

The world would be better off

if people tried to be better,

and people would become better

if they stopped trying to become better off.

For when everyone tries to become better off

nobody is better off.

But when everyone tries to become better

everybody is better off.

Everyone would be rich

if nobody tried to become richer,

and nobody would be poor

if everyone tried to be the poorest.

And everybody would be what he ought to be

if everybody tried to be

what he wants the other fellow to be.[1]

Dorothy Day committed her life’s work to helping the poor.  She really connects the dots between being better people and doing something about economic systems and practices that keep people poor.  John the Baptist’s advice to the crowds who listened to him and wanted to know what they should do also connected the dots between being better and doing better.  Again, a refreshing blast of unflattering honesty: “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.”  To the tax collectors and the soldiers, he also gave practical guidance that had to do with not using their positions of power to oppress and rob others.  Repentance is more than having a proper attitude; bearing fruit worthy of repentance means you show the inner change by changing your outer behavior. 

            Amidst my files there is a story of a mechanic who took this teaching seriously.  He, like other mechanics he worked with, regularly inflated his customers’ bills.  But then he started going to a prayer group every week.  After going to the group for a while, and sharing how the scriptures and his relationship with Christ related to his everyday living, he found he could no longer cheat his customers.  This cost him—not only money, but the other mechanics gave his a hard time for not going along with the rest of them.  He got the support he needed to persevere from their sharing of faith and prayer, even when that everyday morality hardly seemed worth the price he was paying.  That support was, in words offered in Philippians, “the peace of God, surpassing all understanding, guarding his heart and mind.”

            In the mechanic’s case, he prayed his way to a new way of acting.  Repentance can go the other way as well.  We can act our way into a new way of thinking or a new way of seeing the world.  Sometimes, as Jesse Jackson once said, “It is easier to walk your way into a new way of thinking -- than to think your way into a new way of walking."   

            There is a medieval legend about a man who was decadent and irresponsible in many ways but who had enough grace in him to want to be good.  He went to a costume maker who gave him a costume to wear—complete with a halo wired to his head.  As the man walked down the street he was tempted to act and react in his normal, shiftless way—but then he remembered the halo on his head.  So he decided to act differently: He gave money to a beggar on the street.  He treated his wife well.  He refused to cut corners at work.  Eventually he returned the halo costume—but as he was leaving the costume shop he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror—and he saw a permanent halo glowing above his head!  It seems that he had become what he did—that his repentance had made possible God’s forgiveness and transformation in his life.  By turning around and beginning to behave in a new way this man found a permanent new direction for his life.

            Are you dissatisfied with the muddly puddle of your soul?  Rejoice, the Lord is near; rejoice and exult with all your heart, the Lord is in your midst.   Why not act as if Christ had taken up residence in your heart and mind? Acting as if it were so will make it ever clearer that it is so.  The Lord is near; ready to move into every chamber of our hearts that we will open.  We may open those doors to our hearts by acting generous when we don’t feel generous; by offering forgiveness when carrying a grudge seems like more fun; by practical acts of love appropriate to our own vocations.  Zephaniah urges the Israelites not to let their hands grow weak.  The NIV translates, “Do not let your hands hang limp.”  That’s colorful language, limp hands.  Hold up your hands and let them go limp.  That gesture goes with saying something like “I caaan’t be like Jesus.”   Swing your limp hands around a little and practice saying “I caaann’t!”  Whine it up. 

            Now imagine those same hands snapping to attention, aching to know what they can do.  Imagine them holding the wrinkly hand of a lonesome elder, or typing a letter to a legislator, or stirring up a pot of soup to feed a hungry crowd, or patting the back of a kid who desperately needs affirmation, or planting some trees, or building some houses, or signing a check to an organization that has some serious work to do with money formerly known as “yours.”  God is yearning to renew us with love; we will be renewed by the love we share regardless of whether we feel loving or whether we feel like a mess of snakes. 

            Rejoice, you brood of vipers.  The most joyful news of all is that God wants to save us, muddled as we are, wants to gather us up and bring us home, wants be as close to us as the beating of our own hearts.    What then, should we do?  How about saying yes to the love that calls us?  And then doing something about it?

[1] Day, Dorothy  “A Case for Utopia” published in Loaves and Fishes; quoted in Word and Witness, Volume 16, No. 2 (17), p. 3