Another (longer) sermon . . .

December 8, 2013
St. Christopher's Episcopal Church, Springfield, VA
Year A, 2nd Sunday of Advent, Matthew 3:1-12

            Flannery O’Connor, the great 20^th century American fiction writer, who also happened to be a devout Roman Catholic, knew something about Pharisees, and also knew a little about the kingdom of God. In her short story “Revelation,” set mostly in a doctor’s waiting room in the Jim Crow South, Mrs. Turpin, a truly nasty and racist “good Christian” woman, gives thanks that she is not like the others in that room—not trashy or ugly, or black.

            And while I imagine O’Connor based this story on the Pharisee who thanks God that he is not like the tax collector in Luke’s gospel, there are good parallels here to today’s gospel lesson.

            Mrs. Turpin has her so-called “revelation,” which I’ll get to in a bit, after a particularly homely young woman attacks her in the waiting room. This girl, back home from school up North, in a crazed fit can no longer take Mrs. Turpin’s running commentary on everything that is wrong with those who are lesser in Mrs. Turpin’s eyes. Mrs. Turpin is not all bad, though, especially not in her own estimation. She does, after all, do a lot for her church and is an upstanding citizen, who, with her husband, owns her own home and small farm.

            But this young woman can’t take it anymore. And so she lunges at and throttles Mrs. Turpin and calls her a “wart hog from hell.” And much more than the physical attack, it is what this girl says that causes Mrs. Turpin to take a good long look at herself.

            I can’t help but hope that John the Baptist’s name-calling—“you brood of vipers”—caused the Pharisees and Sadducees in our gospel lesson also to take a good long look at themselves.

            In the gospel lesson we just heard, John the Baptist, is doing his crazy John the Baptist thing, with the camel’s hair and the locusts and all of that. And in Matthew’s gospel he bursts onto the scene, proclaiming that the kingdom of heaven has come near and that all should repent—that is, turn toward God.

            And throngs of people are coming out to be baptized by him. Scholars don’t know for sure where this tradition of baptism came from, but people nevertheless were going out to be baptized. And not only that, they were also confessing their sins.        

            That so many people were going out to John is understandable in light of the fact that the Israelites had been waiting for several centuries for Elijah to return to announce the Messiah. And as Matthew presents him, John is very much an Elijah figure.

            So John is doing his crazy John the Baptist thing and along come the Pharisees and Sadducees, John’s own Mrs. Turpins. And just as a reminder, the Pharisees of course were that sect that wanted to expand on and extend that expanded law into all areas of life for all Jewish people. They very much believed in living by the letter of the law. A lot of law. And the Sadducees, who were traditionally hostile to the Pharisees—but let’s give our gospel writer some poetic license here—didn’t go in for the expanded law of the Pharisees but certainly strictly maintained the Torah and were dedicated Temple worshipers.

            And it’s important that we remember that John, himself a Jew, is not bashing Jews. He was baptizing lots and lots of Jewish people. So John the Baptist’s condemnation of the Pharisees and Sadducees has nothing to do with their Jewishness but everything to do with their striving for status, and not living according to the law they professed. It has to do with their treatment of those they perceived to be of a lower status. And it has to do with their using the law, which he is also not bashing, as a tool against those they perceived as lesser.

            In short, they were not bearing good fruit.

            Theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas writes that John’s somewhat puzzling and very harsh treatment of the Pharisees and Sadducees “anticipates Jesus’s biting critique of how these so-called authorities fail to lead lives congruent with their advocacy of God’s law.”[1]

            And so John is pretty hard on them, calling them, a “brood of vipers,” literally, “sons of snakes.” And he refuses to baptize them—and it’s not clear whether they were actually seeking baptism or just coming out to inspect what was going on. But he refuses to baptize them and then, he says a lot of things about fruit and fire.

            Fruit and fire—and this is important. This is a theme that Jesus himself will take up in Matthew’s gospel more than once. And, as you probably know, in Matthew’s gospel good fruit is ultimately tied, later in chapter 25, to feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, tending the sick, visiting the imprisoned. Good fruit is about caring for the least among us.

            The Pharisees and Sadducees are vipers—slithering, poisonous snakes—because they have lived in a way that has not borne good fruit, to mix metaphors. And now presumably these trees that have not borne good fruit are being cut down and thrown into the fire. And if two metaphors weren’t enough, our gospel writer has John say that one greater is coming and that one is gonna separate the wheat from the chaff. That one is gonna throw the chaff into the fire.

            Talk about a hot mess. It all seems like pretty terrible news for the Pharisees and Sadducees. And pretty bad news for me and you, who—let’s face it—probably bear just as much bad fruit as good on any given day. And let’s not forget Mrs. Turpin. This is terrible news for her, it would seem.

            In O’Connor’s story, Mrs. Turpin is mortified by the young woman’s attack on her. She cannot believe that she, an upstanding white middle-class Christian woman, is a “wart hog from hell.” But the crazed young woman no doubt speaks truth in some way.

            I am not advocating name-calling. But the kingdom of God has come near for Mrs. Turpin. And the kingdom of God is near for us; God is calling us through Matthew’s gospel to bear fruit worthy of repentance. In this season of Advent as we await the birth of the Christ child, we might, like Mrs. Turpin, take some time to reflect on the fruit that we have borne, that we bear in our day-to-day lives. We might take some time to repent, to turn back to God, and confess our sins, so that we might bear good fruit.

            Stanley Hauerwas says that all of this that John the Baptist is proclaiming causes Christians to “rightly read and hear” this “with apprehension and guilt. But guilt,” he says, “is seldom a useful position to assume for a faithful response to God’s word. Far more important is that we respond, as John demands, to the one who has come to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.”[2]

            Fire, again. In the middle of the trees that are being cut down and burned up and the chaff that will be burned, John tells us that Jesus baptizes with the Holy Spirit and fire.

            And that’s where Mrs. Turpin comes back in. As she ponders the words of the young woman after she is back home, Mrs. Turpin has a vision, and it is a clear and real vision of the kingdom of God. As she looks up into the red-streaked sunset, she sees herself marching along to heaven. But to her surprise she is in the very last group of those making their way to heaven. She is marching behind the hordes of people for whom she has had so much disdain, on account of whom she has borne so very much bad fruit. She is marching behind, as O’Connor tells it, “freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.”[3] She is marching behind them and in her very real and clear vision of this heavenly procession, she can see her “shocked and altered” face as even her “virtues are being burned away.”[4] As even her “virtues are being burned away.”

            Mrs. Turpin is in the heavenly procession not because she is a good Christian, but because God loves her—or if she were real, because God would love her—just as he loves you and me. Immeasurably. Without bound. Without qualification. Enough to want us to produce good fruit. Enough to burn away those parts of us that produce bad fruit.

            We are all part Pharisee. We are all part Mrs. Turpin. And sometimes bearing good fruit is hard when those parts of ourselves take over, when we lose sight of just how much God loves us. But we can rest assured that God loves us anyway. That God loves us enough to burn away, in the end, all that is unfruitful within us.

            So in this season of Advent, let us repent, let us turn back to God, and confess our sins in the knowledge that the unquenchable fire of God’s love through Jesus Christ will in the end consume all the Pharisee and all the Mrs. Turpin within us. Let us repent, let us turn back to God, and confess our sins, so that in the meantime, in the here-and-now time, we might produce the fruit that God so desires of us and for us.

            Amen.

             

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[1] Hauerwas, Stanly, Matthew (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 46.

[2] Ibid., 47

[3] O’Connor, Flannery, “Revelation” in The Complete Short Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 508.

[4] Ibid.