Transcribed from the Sermon preached December 5, 2004

Scripture Readings:  Matthew 3:1-12, Isaiah 11: 1-10

It is amazing all the preparation that goes into having a baby. Nowadays we start as soon as the woman discovers she is pregnant. The news literally changes your orientation for life. Especially the first child. . It really gives us a future orientation. For you are not just thinking about the birth, you are thinking about the life of this new baby as well. It can be very joyous because you now have a clear purpose and meaning.

We had a miscarriage before Nick was born. The miscarriage happened relatively early, at just less than three months, but it was surprising how devastating it was. It was much harder for Feliciana than for me because the baby was developing inside her body. But I was shocked more by the end of my dream than the physical aspect of the event. The news of my wife’s pregnancy had given me hope and purpose. I rearranged my whole vision of the future and then all of a sudden it was over.

About a year later Feliciana became pregnant with Nicholas. Off again we went with our dreams and plans. We took Lamaze classes and practiced breathing. The church threw us a baby shower and we stocked up on the hundreds of baby items that we Americans think we need. We started reading books like "Parenting for Dummies." Of course, we went to the doctor a bunch of times. Feliciana took vitamins and ate tons of food, she got ultra sounds and blood tests, and she got plenty of advice from both grandmas. It was at this point in my life where I decided my parents' advice might not so useless after all. In some sense, the awesomeness of the future brought me back together with my tradition and family. Preparing for a new person requires a lot, but more than anything, it reorients how we think about the future, about how we dream. It gives us a new kind of hope and meaning.

This morning John helps us prepare for the coming of the Messiah. John was someone who managed to create something radical and new, baptism, but he tied it and himself to traditional cultural myth. The writers of the Gospels understand that if Jesus is going to be seen as more than just another good human being who was killed by the powerful, they would have to show his connection to the meaningful people and symbols in Israelite history. One of the great errors of the liberal church is underestimating both the power of myth and the ability of myth to convey powerful truth. Someone once said, "A dream is a private myth. A myth is a collective dream." To some degree, when we leave our myths, we lose our dreams. Without dreams a people will perish.

John is a character you might expect to find in a place like Berkeley or Bolder. I once met a yoga instructor from Bolder who told me of a Buddhist monk friend who lived out of a storage facility. In protest for the excessive housing prices and materialism of American Culture, he decided to live out of a rented storage space. He invited this yoga instructor over for lunch so that she could see it. He served beans and salad and bread. After they had eaten, he asked her how she liked the meal. She said she had indeed enjoyed it. That is when he told her he had obtained all of the ingredients from the garbage. His clothes and furniture had also been thrown out by others.

John is something like our Bolder Buddhist. If he lived today, the rulers would probably not cut his head off as Herod did. They would have had him diagnosed with some horrible sounding mental illness, taken to a mental hospital and put on drugs. Not that he was necessarily full blown crazy; he simply danced to a different beat than his society at large. "It is nice to have a well adjusted life," said Martin Luther King Jr., "but there are some things to which men and women of good will should be maladjusted." John had a solid grasp of God and the traditional myth of the Israelite people. God had a solid grasp on him.

King Herod had rebuilt the temple as Isaiah and other prophets had dreamed. He had also built cities and seven forts, including a massive mountain/ palace/ fortress he named Herodious. There was plenty of splendor in Israel, but not much righteousness or justice.

Sacrifices of atonement were mandated by law of scripture and controlled by the temple priesthood, and the purchase of animals for sacrifice was expensive and difficult for the poor. John offered a new ritual of atonement in baptism in the waters of the Jordan…for free. John chose the place where the Israelites crossed the Jordan to enter the Promised Land. This crossing and this river were also reminders of the crossing of the Red Sea with Moses, as God liberated the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. He dresses like the prophet Elijah and quotes the prophet Isaiah. Keep in mind Herod has just made a big hole someplace to add 200 feet to a mountain for his palace/ fort.

John quotes Isaiah 40, "Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him." Isaiah goes on, "Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low, the rough ground shall be made level, the rugged places plain." Is John talking about the smoothing over and leveling off of Herod’s work?

John gets very popular and people come from all around. He calls people to repentance and then baptizes them. I imagine he starts to take business away from the temple, and his preaching comes down hard on Herod and his cohorts. Some of the Pharisees and Sadducees came out to see him and he lets them have it. "You Brood of Vipers, who told you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think that you can say to yourselves, "We have Abraham as our father. I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham."

"I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire."

This is heated stuff. Their claim to salvation is their bloodline. They are God’s chosen people. They have helped rebuild the great temple. But John says they cannot hide their sin behind that. They have written themselves into the religious and political establishment but that doesn’t mean squat.

Tell me that doesn’t have some application for today! We can’t hide behind the name of Jesus anymore than the Pharisees and Sadducees could hide behind being God’s chosen. God can raise up Christians from these stones.

Bob McConnell sent me an email that told the story of a woman who thought the rapture was happening and jumped from her car expecting to be taken to heaven but instead fell to her death. Apparently, the woman was driving down the road and saw several people floating into the sky. Then when she saw Jesus by the side of the road she decided the rapture was in progress. As it turned out, a guy with a beard was on his way to a toga party with several blow-up dolls when the dolls flew out of the back of his pickup. He stopped his car and went after them just as the woman drove by.

I think many Christians think they have salvation all wrapped up just because they believe in Jesus. To some degree, this is true. We believe we are saved by the grace of God and not by our works. I hope this lady is in heaven. But grace should empower us to live truly loving and righteous lives. There is much historical evidence that affirms one of our greatest national myths: the United States is the New Jerusalem, the new light on a hill for the world. Yet we are not necessarily God’s chosen people any more than Herod’s Israel was. And today, I’m afraid, we are more likely analogous to superpowers Babylon or Rome. Abraham Lincoln said, "America is at most, an almost chosen people."

Be assured that any religious groups promoting preemptive attack and conquest, or unrestrained, irresponsible consumption and materialism will be cut off from God and chopped down like a tree. "With righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the Earth."

Still we cannot fathom ourselves as anything other than God’s people. We have mountainous myths we just can’t seem to get past. The myth of "Manifest Destiny" is etched into our collective consciousness as if we were the liberated slaves conquering the native tribes of Palestine. And we elect a president who affirms our great frontier myth. The myth that confirms freedom, virility, ruggedness and individualism. Our leader as cowboy, the "frontier Adam," to quote Neil Postman in Amuzing Ourselves to Death, "An archetypal Hero whose absolute rootlessness and his essential innocence, his lack of moral dilemma, suggest a purity of spirit in the context of surrounding evil."

To prepare the way for the Lord we must treat our national and biblical myths seriously. We dismiss the Bible and faith to our own peril, and indeed the peril of the world and Creation. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this so well, and became like John, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, connecting cultural and spiritual myth with current issues of justice. "We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation because the goal of America is freedom. I've been to the mountaintop. I've seen the Promised Land. And we as a people will get to the Promised Land."

But here is the thing, even as Martin Luther King and John and Jesus and the disciples who wrote the Gospels were conscious of their use of tradition and myth, they still believed those myths communicated truth about life and the Creator, about the past and future. It is not the talk about the myth, or the manipulation of the myth that finally counts, but the myths themselves and our real faith in the God of Peace. Nothing I have said is even remotely close to as important as the scripture we read. May we never allow the busyness of our lives to take the poetry and mystery from our faith and dreams. My words are not even worthy to be in the same sermon with the words of Jesus. I am not worthy to tie his sandals.

I think it is quite possible that if the progressive church can once again find roots for its work in God, in authentic worship in Scriptures, commitment to community and prayer, God will begin to produce fruit from our branch. I can feel new shoots trying to grow out now. Little leaves. Angels singing of new birth.

"There must always be a religious element in the hope of a just society," says, Reinhold Niebuhr. "Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair and attempt the impossible; for the vision of a just society is an impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible. The truest visions of religion are illusions, which may be partly realized by being resolutely believed. For what religion believes to be true is not wholly true but ought to be true; and may become true if its truth is not doubted."