Third Sunday of Advent

By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D ’13
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church

(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Dec.15, 2024)

Last week in Calvon's powerful sermon, he spoke about the word of God coming to John and about the word of God coming to us, and it did. And today, in our gospel passage from the Gospel of Luke, John has that word, and he starts to preach. He preaches to the people then, and he preaches to us. The word of God comes to us through John's preaching.

Now, most of you know I teach preaching here at Harvard. Some of you have been my students. If John were my student, I would say you typically don't want to start your sermon with, "You brood of vipers." And he doesn't stop. “The ax is at the root.” “The winnowing fork is in his hand, unquenchable fire.” The word of God is coming to us, and these are the words that the Gospel of Luke shares with us. And then the author of this gospel ends this passage, ax at the root, you brood of vipers. The author of the passage says, "With these and other exhortations, John preached the good news." What is good about this news?

Obviously, I'm going to try to say a couple of things that I think are good about it. At least one thing that's good about it is that in Luke's version of John, at least John is more specific. Mark also begins with the ministry of John. And there John just says, "Repent." That's all we know about John's message. John says, "Repent."

Here in Luke, John doesn't just say repent. John also says, "Bear fruit worthy of repentance." Act like you mean it. And people ask him, "Well, what does that mean? What sort of things?" And he tells them. He's specific. He tells them, he tells us, the word of God coming to us. He tells us what we ought to do if you have two coats and someone is cold: give them your coat. If you have enough food and someone is hungry, feed them. He's specific. He tells us what repentance looks like. And then these other folks come to speak to him as well. The tax collector comes, and Jesus says, "Take no more than what you are owed." And the soldier comes, and he says, "Do not by force extort money from people."

Now, for these two categories of folks, the tax collectors and the soldiers, it's important that John names them in particular. It's important that they come and they ask. It's important that we understand who these folks are to understand what John is getting at and what good news this passage may be giving to us today.

The tax collectors were collecting taxes for the empire for Rome, and they were Jewish. The Roman authorities had discovered that this tax-collecting process would go easier if Jewish people collected the taxes on behalf of the Romans, and so it was Jewish folks who were collecting tax for the empire, and they all often took a little bit for themselves because they had the force of empire behind their taxation.

The soldiers, too, the peacekeepers were Jewish. These are not Centurions. These are local soldiers, again, hired by the Romans to enforce imperial law. And because they had the weight of empire behind them, they took advantage of that power. These two categories of persons, tax collectors and soldiers were uniquely despised by John's people, by Jesus' people, because they were seen as betrayers.

So when they come to John and say, "What must we do?" The fact that he's talking to them at all, the fact that he gives them away is a sign of some good news. It's a sign of the wideness of God's mercy that salvation is available to all.

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Now, there are versions of this sermon where I could just sort of stop there and walk down the steps. The wideness of God's mercy available to all. And indeed, that will be a theme that I return to in this sermon, but I think there's something more to it. There's something even more radical and revolutionary, radical in every sense of that word to the root, basic, but also revolutionary in John calling out, naming and speaking to the tax collector and the soldier. Something to do with national identity and national betrayal. Something that John is doing and suggesting when he speaks to these people, because there's one of his teachings that I skipped when I covered everything that John says to the crowds, because he doesn't just say, "You brood of vipers," he doesn't just say, "Who warned you of the wrath that come." He says to them, "Do not say to yourselves we have Abraham as our ancestor. Do not think that your ancestry, that your identity will be the source of your salvation."

Now, I want to be careful here because this line has been used by Christians towards anti-Semitic ends throughout the history of our interpretation of this gospel. It has been read as if John were abandoning his Judaism, and that is not what he's doing. In fact, what I think he's doing, what I'm going to describe him as doing in the rest of the sermon, is reaching back to the prophetic message of the Hebrew scriptures to lift up something else and to preach it as good news to these people.

To tell you why I think that I'm going to have to delve a little bit more deeply into these first few chapters from Luke. Every gospel starts differently. They all begin the story of Jesus in a different way, and Luke begins in a very distinctive way. Luke begins this as a family story. He begins by talking about this priest, Zechariah, who's got a wife named Elizabeth, and he's very particular. He says, "By the way, Elizabeth was a descendant, direct descendant of Aaron." He gives her bona fides right away. And then Elizabeth becomes pregnant with John, who's speaking to us now. And Elizabeth has a relative, traditionally understood as a cousin named Mary, and Mary's husband is a direct descendant of David. Again, these ancestral bona fides. And it's Mary who gives birth to Jesus.

It's this family story and Luke is giving us the family history, even giving us some of the family tree. Aaron's involved here and so is David. There is ancestry involved, and then John stands up and says, "Do not claim ancestry. Do not claim your ancestry as the source of your salvation." And then it goes even further. Immediately after this exchange between John and the crowds, Luke gives Jesus' genealogy, his family tree.

Now, I'm going to go into the weeds a little bit here, but I'm going to ask you to follow me because I think this is really important. Luke is not the only gospel author who gives Jesus' family tree, who outlines Jesus's ancestry. Matthew starts the same way. In fact, Matthew begins his whole gospel with the ancestry. And when Matthew gives his ancestry, he starts with Abraham, and he says, "Abraham begat Isaac, who begat Jacob, who begat Judah." Sometimes known as the begats, right? And he says, begat, begat begat, begat, begat for generations upon generations upon generations until finally, he arrives at Jesus. What is at stake for Matthew in the genealogy is saying Jesus' ancestor is Abraham from a direct line. Begat, begat, begat.

Luke gives the genealogy also, but he does it differently. He starts with Jesus and moves backwards. He says, "This Jesus was son of Joseph, and Joseph was the son of Heli, and Heli was the son of Methath and son of and son of and son of. And he gets to Abraham and then he keeps going past Abraham and going and going until he gets to the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.

There is one person in the Gospel of Luke who is named as the son of God, and it's not Jesus; it's Adam. There's a different kind of trajectory going on here. In Matthew, it is winnowing down Abraham down to this one, Jesus. Luke starts at Jesus and goes backwards. And instead of winnowing, widens, until we arrive at all of our common ancestor, Adam, who is the one God made.

What Luke is suggesting in this unique way in pursuing the genealogy differently and saying that Adam is the one God loves, Adam is the son of God, what Luke is saying is that we are all God's children. That this is not about ancestors, ancestry, it's not about nation or tribe or ethnicity. That is not going to be the source of our salvation. John is asking his listeners to reach beyond, break through the divisions of lineage and language and even of religion that divide them. And if John doesn't do it, Jesus does, especially around religion. Jesus is the one who speaks fondly of Samaritans in the Gospel of Luke, who commends the faith of centurions in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus is the one who, in the Gospel of Luke, his mother and brothers come to him, and Jesus turns and says, "You know who my mother and brothers are? Anyone who shares a cloak. Anyone who shares food. Anyone who does the word of God, that one is as much my mother and brother, is as much related to me as anyone else."

What Luke is suggesting radically again is that blood relation is not the reason to love one another. God's love for us and for each other. That's the reason. And God loves every descendant of Adam. God loves everybody. Not just your family or your nation, but also your neighbor and your stranger, also your enemy and your betrayer, also your tax collector and your soldier. God even loves your brood of vipers. All of them. All of them, Luke reminds us. All of them belong to God. We are bound to one another by this shared ancestry most of all, by God's love as the source of all we are and may be, and our obligations to one another should be built upon that love rather than upon any of the other exclusionary categories that we'd like to celebrate.

God's love is the source of all things. God's love binds us all together. This is an old message. It is older than the ministry of Jesus. John is saying this before Jesus begins his ministry and he is taking it from the prophetic tradition of his religion and Jesus's religion. And John also says, "Repent." And we Christians who hear this word today, we must confess that we have received this message badly. We have gotten it so basically and badly wrong pretty much since the beginning. Our habit has been to create divisions rather than to erase them. You can look at the early anti-Semitism of the church fathers. I think of the Crusades in the Middle Ages or European colonialism. And it's not over. We don't need to look very far to see the rise of Christian nationalism today, which is just another example of the same.

We Christians put so much energy into naming who remains condemned outside the ambit of God's love; when John is telling us, Jesus is telling us, no one does. That's the good news. No one does. We have done wrong. We must repent. We must bear fruit worthy of repentance. And now I, like those tax collectors or soldiers, I want to come to John and say, "What does that look like? What do we do? Tell us how to act like we mean it."

This is my last sermon with you until next term. Calvon will preach on Christmas Eve, and I'm excited to hear it, and in 10 days I hope you all will celebrate a lovely Christmas. I hope that you are with those you love most: family, friends, companions. If you're in a church, if you're in this church or you're listening along to this church, you will hear Luke's version of the Christmas story, of the birth story. And I think Luke's version of that birth story may be the answer to my question. How do we act like we mean it? What is bearing fruit worthy of repentance look like? Because this is what happens in Luke's version of the story.

Some shepherds go to a strange child, a strange child born of poor, displaced parents, and they see this child, and they kneel down before him and pay homage to him as if he were the most precious child, as if he were the child of God, which of course he was. They have no good reason to do this. He means nothing to them. These are Galileans, strangers. They're not from their people. These strangers are not from their place. They don't have any responsibility for them. They are perfect strangers. They only have one reason to do this thing, which they do. It's because the word of God came to them and told them and they believed.

The mechanism today is different, but the word of God has come to us also. Just as Calvon said it would last week. And it has told us the same thing. Except today instead of saying that one child in that one stable long ago is precious, that that one child deserves our love and attention. Today, we hear that every child is precious, that every child deserves our love and attention wherever they are born, to whomever they are born, whomever they claim as their ancestor, whether they be neighbor, stranger, or enemy. Each of them is a child of God and deserves love as such. Each of them deserves our praise and our protection. The stay, the word of God has come to us just as Calvon said it would last week, just as it has each year for 2,000 years and counting. This year, at long last, I pray that we will respond with love and justice as well as with rejoicing.

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