Bearing Fruit

        Every year at about this time a figure appears. One look at him tells us he doesn’t fit in. He doesn’t wear one of those red elf hats so popular among the joggers in the Jingle Bell Run, or even one of those specialty sweaters with the Christmas tree ornaments dangling off them. He wears a rough coat of camel’s hair that smells as though it hasn’t been long separated from its original owner. Around his narrow waist is a leather belt, and he has a way of looking past you, as though he’s focusing on something you can’t see. He’s not the kind of fellow you’d invite to your pre-Christmas open house, even if this year you are serving locusts and wild honey.

        His name is John, and he’s often called "the Baptist," although he bears little resemblance to that fellow running for President in the Republican primary.

        He comes around every year right about this time, and we don’t see him much again until Lent. By then we’re more in the mood for his message, which is, as most of us already know, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." A message like that just doesn’t seem to fit the "holiday spirit."

        I’m not sure John ever fit in, even in his prime, down by the Jordan, the warm water lapping against his ankles, the mud squishing up between his toes. Even then his message was not welcomed by everyone.

        Take the movers and shakers, for instance. Pilate in his mansion, the priests in their temple, the soldiers in their garrison – what use would they have for John’s message? Pilate was too busy trying to run his tiny corner of Caesar’s kingdom to worry much about God’s. The priests had their liturgical duties to keep them busy: chants to practice, budgets to balance, choirs to organize. The soldiers had their hands full sniffing out rebels and preserving the Pax Romana. I doubt many of them were streaming out to the Jordan to hear John preach that fire and brimstone stuff.

        Who did come, then? Maybe it was the folks who believed in the God John preached about – the God of justice, the God of righteousness, the God with the winnowing fork and the unquenchable fire. The God of vengeance.

        There was so much about their world that was wrong and needed set right. There were bullies who needed to be put in their place, and not all of them were Romans. There were women divorced by their husbands, forced to live on the streets, selling their bodies to earn their next meal. There were lepers outside the walls and beggars by the temple gate. There were hungry children and parents desperate to feed them.

        And now John comes along, dressed like the prophet he is, and cries, "Repent! The kingdom of heaven has come near." God is just about to set all these wrongs right. The guilty will be punished. The innocent will be released. If you’re used to getting the short end of the stick, that sounds like pretty good news.

        So they poured out from the city and the countryside to hear him, Matthew says. They got religion good and proper. And just so God would know for sure whom to chunk in the thrashing machine and whom to pass over, they were baptized by John in the river, confessing their sins.

        That fire and brimstone brand of theology always has a certain following, even amongst the suburban gin-and-tonic set. It’s nice to think that the bad guys will get their comeuppance someday, so long as we get to define "bad guy."

        Charles Schulz, the cartoonist who created Peanuts, died back in 2000. Not long ago Terri Gross of National Public Radio played an interview she had with him in 1990. She asked him about his childhood and his life-long battle with depression. You could tell she was working an angle. Aren’t the trials and tribulations of Charlie Brown really his attempt to exorcise the ghosts of an unhappy childhood?

        Charles Schultz maintained that that was not the case at all. He had quite a happy childhood. Well, he admitted, there are bullies in every child’s life. Some of them can be quite cruel. There was one boy in particular he remembers, who caused him no end of anguish. And then, without raising his voice, in the same soft-spoken tone, he said, "I think, if I ever see him again, I’ll kill him."

        Terri Gross laughed. I’m not sure Charles Schultz was joking.

        There’s something quite appealing about the prospect of God roasting on a skewer the kid in the sixth grade who stole your lunch money when you were just a third grader and made you cry in front of your twin sister and a bunch of other girls. (Now I’m being too autobiographical).

        Yes, John has a point. God should sort out the mess the world has gotten into. And if John is right about the kingdom being close at hand, and its Messiah about to arrive at any moment, surely it’s folks like us, upstanding, moral folk, who should comprise the welcoming committee. So let’s all go down to the river and join his movement.

        But when we get there, we’re in for a surprise. The ones in the river ahead of us are the very ones we thought God was coming to punish. Charles Schultz’s tormentor -- he’s there. Also mine. (He’s still wearing that leather biker’s jacket the very sight of which used to make me break out in a cold sweat.) The terrorists and the child molesters, the purveyors of racism and sexism -- they’re all there, ahead of us.

        John looks up from baptizing a particularly hard case and sees us getting in the back of the line. He freezes. "You brood of vipers," he says. We look around. He’s talking to us. "Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance."

        Well, I never . . . the nerve of this guy. Who does he think he is? Fruit worthy of repentance indeed. Don’t we do our civic duty? Don’t we give to the Christmas Connection every year? Don’t we pay our church pledge on time (well, almost on time)? Where does he come off singling us out? We say a prayer of confession every week. It’s printed right there in our bulletin. That’s more than you can say about most of the riffraff John’s been baptizing, "confessing their sins."

        But John’s not talking to them right now. He’s talking to us. That’s what makes him a prophet of God. (It’s also what makes him so annoying.) He wants – no, commands us – to look at ourselves. Not the folks on welfare, not the neighbors we left sleeping in their beds when we came to church this morning, not even the person next to us on the pew.

        Who warned you? Who tipped you off that God’s Messiah is on the way? That printed prayer of confession might not be enough for the likes of you. Even if it is, let’s see some results. "Bear fruit worthy of repentance."

        What do you suppose John has in mind by "fruit worthy of repentance?" Since he’s a prophet, that’s not hard to answer. Just look at how the widows, the orphans, the children, the poor – those on the margin – are faring. Their welfare has always been the gage of a people’s readiness to receive the Messiah.

        So how do we fare this morning? According to the Children’s Defense Fund, we’re less prepared to meet the Messiah now than we were a year ago, for the gap between the rich and the poor in this nation is growing wider, not narrower, and the "least of these," the children, are the hardest hit of all. In America today:

    Amongst the top 25 industrialized nations of the world, the United States is:

                First     in Gross Domestic Product,
                            in the number of millionaires and billionaires,
                            in health technology,
                            in defense expenditures,
                            in military exports, and

                17^th     in low birthweight babies
                18^th     in infant mortality
                Last     in protecting our children from gun violence.

        Recently the President vetoed an appropriations bill that would have expanded medical care for children in this nation – kids whose parents aren’t poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford private insurance. The President says we can’t afford to cover more children. It’s fiscally irresponsible. We can spend two billion dollars a week on the war in Iraq, but we can’t afford medical care for children who need it.

        "Fruit worthy of repentance." No wonder John seems so out of place this time of year.

        Our only hope is that, as much as John is right about what God expects of us, he is wrong about what to expect of God’s Messiah. Maybe he will not come, at least for now, with winnowing fork and torch. Maybe, for now, he will come as one of those children born to a teen-age mother.

        Maybe, instead of "God Against Us," the Messiah will come as "God With Us." His judgment of us will be no less harsh than John expects, and no more than we deserve. The difference is, he himself will stand at the receiving end of that judgment.

        Or maybe John is right. Maybe the child of Bethlehem is God’s judgment on all of us.

        Pray God it is not too late to bear fruit that befits repentance.