A Christmas Rant: You Better Watch Out!

As children, many of my generation grew up in a time when our mothers stayed at home while our father’s worked.  So it usually fell to our moms to watch us and care for us after school.  It was a great time, back when you could just wander your neighborhood, playing with friends or riding your bike to explore new ares of your block.  You could be on your own until dinner time.  Every once and a while though, the afternoon didn’t go so well.  Sometimes we would get in trouble, maybe a fight with a friend or an experimentation with scissors and hair.  When we were older, perhaps we went from  playing with our GI Joe’s to burning our GI Joe’s.  For all its innocence, it was a time when getting in trouble was always just around the corner.

 When that trouble came, our moms were not so happy.  Usually our misdeeds would happen late in the afternoon while dinner was being prepared.  After a long day of housework and now cooking, our moms had little patience and even less time for discipline.  Usually, our infractions led to us being sent to our room by a now frazzled mother.  That was bad enough, but what put fear in our hearts was when our mothers said those magic words, “Wait till your father gets home.”

That was the worst.  What was Dad going to do?  For some people, those words were just Mom’s way of putting off dealing with the problem and were usually followed by a perplexed Dad coming home and wondering what was going on.  In other households, those words still evoke terror, especially among those who grew up with physical abuse.   “Wait till your father gets home” was a just a euphemism for “Dad’s going to knock the crap out of you.”

Unfortunately, many of us think of God in that same way.  We turn God into the abusive father who is going to come home and kick the crap out of us.  When someone says, “God is coming” or “Jesus is coming back again,” we think, “Well that can’t be good.”  It sounds eerily like “wait till your father gets home” all over again. We have learned to associate the coming of God with destruction, violence, and revenge.  At the same time, we are told that this wrathful God coming into the world is good news.   “How can that be?” we wonder.

I think people usually fall into two schools of thought about that.  On the one hand, some people agree that a wrathful God coming into the world is indeed good news.  For them, this angry deity will destroy all those with whom they disagree. The doomed can be anyone from other Christian denominations, other religions, people who didn’t have just the right opinion about the cross, or didn’t belong to the right church, or even didn’t have the right opinion about the end of the world and who God was coming to destroy.  You can become part of the doomed just for not believing that some particular group of people are part of the doomed - even if it’s not you.  The exact plot varies.  Either God will destroy the earth all at once or take the Christians (or at least the “right” kind of Christians) to heaven while he destroys the rest of humanity.  By the way, if you pick the wrong choice between those two scenarios, you join the ranks of the doomed.

Some Christians get very happy about all this stuff.  It makes them very glad that God or Jesus will come back and violently destroy the people with whom they disagree.  They don’t just get happy.  They get very very excited.    They write books and make movies about it.  It becomes like religious porn for them.

In the other school of thought are those who hear that an angry God is returning and just dismiss it as primitive superstition.  I’m not just talking about atheists; I’m talking about people who would consider themselves Christian.  Since they (like me) find that first view so distasteful, unlike me they simply choose to ignore those parts of the Bible that speak of God’s wrath.  So God gets reduced to an ineffectual force of love in the universe - a cosmic Mr. Rogers.  They construct a God who is happy and smiling all the time, who never really stands for or against anything.  It is a God who for all we know is coming into the world all the time or could be here in the room with us right now and we would never know it because such a God has no real effect on anyone or anything.  But he exists.

Contrary to the first group, these Christians aren’t very excited at all by God coming into the world.  In fact, they aren’t very excited much about anything.  Since this affable God has little effect on the world or them, they are pretty much indistinguishable and nondescript from the surrounding culture.

John the Baptist warned his hearers that the Day of the Lord was arriving.  He taunted them that they were like snakes fleeing from a fire, from a wrath of God that was to come.  If what John was describing was simply a “Wait till your father gets home” warning about global destruction and divine violence against wrongdoers, either of the two responses I described earlier are understandable.  It would be perfectly appropriate to respond with glee over our adversary’s demise or dismiss such things as primitive religion.  But I don’t think that’s what John was talking about.

Sure John was ranting.  Sure he was preaching about what other prophets before him called the coming Day of the Lord.  However, we must put aside our disaster movie assumptions and look at what actually transpired after John preached his message.  As we’ll see in a couple of weeks, John clearly saw the Day of the Lord, the Kingdom of God, arriving in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.  Now think about this. The wicked of the world were not destroyed in Jesus’ lifetime.  As a matter of fact to an outside observer it appeared that the wicked had succeeded on Good Friday.  Neither was Jesus’ ministry one of divine judgment and violence.  So either John was wrong about Jesus, or we have been wrong about John and his message.  Out of a spirit of humility, I would suggest the latter.

I believe God gets angry, sometimes very angry, and if we look at the ministries of John the Baptist and of Jesus himself, we discover the things that make God angry.  Jesus did not spend his life ranting against people of other religions.  His teachings and parables are silent about the pagans, Hindus or Buddhists who lived in the world at his time.  He didn’t spend time preaching tirades against people’s sexual sins or financial scams but instead ate with prostitutes and tax collectors.  Jesus reserved his anger, not for the irreligious of the world nor the impious, but for the religious and the pious - and it wasn’t because they were Jewish.  It was because they were jerks.

Why did those people anger Jesus so much?  For a clue we need to return to John’s rant.  John told his religious listeners not to rely on their past or their pedigree.  In his Jewish context, that meant not claiming, “Hey I’m a descendant of Abraham that means I’m good with God.”  John said that kind of spiritual smugness and self-assurance is precisely what angers God. 

To us, that may seem obvious.  While we may be proud to be Italian, Irish, African-American, or Korean, few of us assume our ethnicity is our ticket to heaven. Yet we are just as guilty of spiritual smugness as John’s audience.  What got under John’s camel hair-covered skin was the attitude among some that they didn’t really need God for anything.  As far as their spiritual life was concerned, they were all set, for this life and the next.  We sometimes sing that old hymn “Blessed Assurance”.  Well this is a kind of Cursed Assurance.  Assurance that comes, not from God but from our own sense of ego, pride and the myth of independence.

John tells the people gathered by the Jordan RIver, and us today that our relationship with God is not rooted in our past.  It’s rooted in our present and in our future.  John is inviting people to be baptized while at the same time telling them this ritual act, as important as it is, won’t save you.  Neither will your family’s religiosity, going to church, confirmation, joining a church, saying the Sinner’s prayer or raising your hand at a revival meeting. 

What truly saves us, what truly makes us whole again and restores us with God, he says, is repentance.  When we hear the word repentance we may think of  some of some little guy on a street corner with a sandwich board that says, “Repent! The end is near!”  Actually, that cliched image is pretty much on the mark.  But “Repent! The end is near!” doesn’t mean tell God you’re sorry before he destroys the world.  The end is near, but it’s not the end of the world.  It’s the end of the old you and the old me.  And repenting isn’t merely apologizing to God.  It means to make U-Turn in life.  If you’ve been walking away from God to do a 180 and start heading toward God.

Mark Scandrette is an author and poet from California.  Recently, Pam and I appeared in a video with him which I edited for a new faith community formation network.  In that video Mark says that following Jesus is a journey that will wreck you and save you at the same time.  For me, his words echo the words of Old Testament prophets who spoke of the great and terrible day of the Lord.  Many of us walk into church expecting to worship, to be fed, maybe be comforted or even have our social needs met.  Some of us may even enter a church to be saved.  But how many of us, enter church to be wrecked?  Especially at Christmas time.

John preached that God has a lot of wrecking to do in the world.  Not of skyscrapers and cities.  That’s Al-Queida who thinks that.  Through Jesus, God wants to wreck our lives - at least wreck our lives as they are now. God wants to wreck our priorities.  God wants to wreck our prejudices and hatreds.  God wants to wreck the sin in our life. God wants to wreck our status quo, who we love, who we ignore and what we spend.  God may even want to wreck our Christmas - at least the self-indulgent consumerism that passes for Christmas.

Like someone wielding an ax at a fruitless tree, God is looking at the fruitless trees of our lives and is ready to cut them down.  A lot of us claim to have changed our lives.  We may even have big elaborate testimonies about how God changed us.  But if we have really have changed, or repented, John says our lives should be producing good fruit.  What kind of fruit is that?  The Letter to the Galatians says the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.  If our lives have turned around toward God, that’s what our lives should be producing.

 That’s a far cry from happily anticipating God’s violence on our enemies on one hand, or passively accepting the world as it is on the other.  Sometimes we Christians are so caught up in being right, or biblical, or orthodox, that we forget to be loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.  If we are truly a repentant and transformed people, we should be bearing good fruit.

At this time of year we call Advent, we anticipate God’s coming into the world in Jesus Christ.  God sent Jesus into the world to make the world right and to make us right. Frankly, that should scare us a little because your life and my life are not what they should be.  Making things right can feel good, but it can also be painful and difficult.

There are things in this world that make God mad; violence, injustice and unrighteousness.  But a God who joins in with more violence becomes part of the problem not the solution.  That is not the God whose coming we celebrate this Advent season.

We can use this season to turn around those parts of us that are heading away from God, and start reorienting them back toward God.  We can use this season to turn around those parts of the culture that are heading away from God, and start reorienting them back toward God.  We can even do that with the season itself.  The results we will see will be miraculous.  

As I told our Confirmation class a few nights ago, the word Advent comes from the same word from which get the word adventure.  Let’s use this season of Advent to be adventurous.  Adventurous in turning our whole selves back toward God.  Adventurous in our worship, in our spending, in our giving and in our loving.  Adventurous in anticipation of the great and terrible Day of the Lord.

Comments

[Bob Scott]

Great sermon. Sorry I had to miss it Sunday but thanks for posting it. It's interesting -- and right in line with your point -- that the term "Day of the Lord" was apparently coined by the people of Israel to talk about a joyful time when God would appear and destroy their enemies (sounds familiar). But the first time the term appears in the Bible is when the prophet Amos warns the people that they should most definitely NOT be looking forward to it. The people are corrupt, he tells them, because they are neglecting the poor. On the Day of the Lord they themselves are going to get the worst of it. Unless, of course, they repent....