The end is the beginning.
As John is out in the wilderness,
dressed, eating, and living as a wild man
people flocking to him.
Matthew tells us that the people of Jerusalem
and all the people of Judea
are going out to him.
John the Baptizer isn’t addressing those
whom Paul describes to Timothy
as having itchy ears.
He’s not telling them
what they want to hear.
John the Baptizer is telling them
what they need to hear.
“Repent,
for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
All the people of Jerusalem and Judea
are going to John the Baptizer
and confessing their sins to him.
This is a people
who know God’s bidding in 2 Chronicles
“If my people,
who are called by my name,
will humble themselves and pray
and seek my face
and turn from their wicked ways,
then I will hear from heaven,
and I will forgive their sin
and will heal their land.”
Living under Roman occupation,
these are people who long
to have their land healed.
John’s work as a prophet
is as the work of a prophet ever has been:
to call to repentance
and to assure pardon
as God is ever ready
to forgive those
who seek it.
As John calls the people to
“Repent,
for the kingdom of heaven has come near,”
he has even stronger words
about God’s coming judgment:
“Even now
the ax is lying at the root of the trees…
His winnowing fork is in his hand,
and he will clear his threshing floor.”
If you’ve come to us from another tradition
or seen more broadly marketed versions of Advent
you may wonder
why we don’t talk about the Advent candles’
meanings:
“Hope, Peace, Joy, Love.”
Those are, shall we say,
newer versions
of how the Advent wreath is used
and it’s usually
focused on counting down
to Jesus’ birth.
Today Isaiah offers us
a vision of the true peace
that only comes from God —
“The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid
The calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together,
and the lion shall eat straw
like the ox.”
The end is the beginning,
and our gospel text much more fully
sits in the older versions of Advent
looking at the last four things:
Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell.
“Repent,
for the kingdom of heaven has come near!”
“Even now
the ax is lying at the root of the trees…
His winnowing fork is in his hand,
and he will clear his threshing floor.”
Talking about God’s judgment
can make us uncomfortable
because so much of that talk
is about deciding who is in and who is out
who is going to hell forever.
Nevertheless,
as we talk about Advent —
the end of time
that is the beginning
of God’s fullest reign of peace –
judgment can’t be ignored.
Notice that those who are coming to John
those Matthew calls all the people
of Jerusalem and Judea
are coming and making their confession.
They’re repenting of their sins
not simply coming to the water
to be baptized.
As an oppressed people on the margins
in the farthest stretches
of a Roman Empire that’s already falling
they long for God’s judgment!
Anna Case-Winters says,
“Looking at judgment in another light,
there is a sense in which
it is not to be dreaded
but rather to be hoped for.
Divine judgment
when it comes
will be a ‘setting right.’
It has been said that without judgment
there is no justice.
People who are the victims of injustice
long for their day in court.”
“Divine judgment
when it comes
will be a ‘setting right.’”
To keep ourselves
from getting on high horses
we can try to adopt the mantra
that I try to live:
“I look forward
to my own purgation.”
The Church invites us every week
and especially every Advent and every Lent
to throng to God
like all the people of Jerusalem and Judea.
God’s grace is available to us
through nothing we’ve done
but solely out of God’s love for us.
As John prepares Judea for Jesus’ first arrival,
we are called to prepare the way of the Lord
by repenting,
for the kingdom of heaven
has come near.
This call on our part
includes calling for accountability
and things to be made right.
Preparing the way of the Lord
so that all people may know
the salvation of our God
includes calling for accountability
for those responsible
for 22 boat strikes in the Caribbean
that have killed over 80 people.
That means calling for accountability
for those responsible for the deaths
of two men —
unarmed, incommunicado, and adrift —
on a table-sized piece of floating wreckage
for more than 40 minutes
before they were eventually killed.
Johnny Cash is right when he says,
“Till Armageddon, no shalam, no shalom”
but that doesn’t mean
that we don’t try.
The end is the beginning,
and we have the vision from Isaiah
of what the kingdom of heaven at hand
looks like.
Talking about God’s judgment —
because how many of us
have said it is being leveled against us! —
is uncomfortable.
Yet when we read coverage
like the Atlantic shared on Friday
how can we not call out
“Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus!”?
The judgment of God
isn’t casting people into the outer darkness.
Even as John warns the Pharisees, Sadducees, and crowds
about trees and chaff being thrown into fires
there’s no need to take that literally.
What is unjust in the world,
the ways we all fail at loving God and our neighbor,
will be done away with.
Those impurities will be cleansed
so that we get that shalam and shalom,
where the cow and the bear graze
and the lion and the ox
eat straw.
“Divine judgment
when it comes
will be a ‘setting right.’”
“Even now
the ax is lying at the root of the trees…
His winnowing fork is in his hand,
and he will clear his threshing floor.”
“Repent,
for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
The end is the beginning. Amen.