Sermon for the Third Sunday of Advent, December 1, 2021        Text: Luke 3:7-18

          I was leading a class in the Lutheran Confessional Writings. We were discussing the centerpiece of our understanding of the Gospel, Article IV of the Augsburg Confession. Concerning Justification: “It is taught among us that we cannot obtain forgiveness of sin and righteousness before God through our merit, work, or satisfactions, but that we receive forgiveness of sin and become righteous before God out of grace for Christ’s sake through faith when we believe that Christ has suffered for us and that for his sake our sin is forgiven and righteousness and eternal life are given to us. For God will regard and reckon this faith as righteousness in his sight, as St. Paul says in Romans 3[:21-26] and 4[:5].”

          The students caught on fast — this was very good news indeed, and it posed such a sharp contrast to the common view of salvation by good behavior. They got Luther’s point that forgiveness freely given was the only way to bring relief to the troubled conscience. They knew as well as their 16th-century forebears what it’s like to live with guilt, to feel trapped by the failures you can’t fix, the wrongs you have done and cannot undo, the help you failed to give. The burden is crushing when the shadows of the past eclipse the possibilities of the future, and still you have to put one foot in front of the other, without being able to really move forward. Too often people’s lives get defined by their shortcomings, but when you put that in perspective — after all, everyone sins and falls short of the glory of God — then you can experience it not as a dead end but a point of passage. A forgiven sinner is a different creature, always in motion from grace to grace, always imperfect yet alive with hope. The more they talked about it, the more the students felt the power of this forgiveness, especially those who had grown up under a strictly enforced code of righteous behavior — all those do’s and don’t’s that tripped them up and caused them shame. They were gob-smacked by grace and practically giddy.

        With one notable exception. An international student sat silent in the back of the room. His glasses were tinted so it was always hard to read his expression. Finally he spoke up and took exception to his classmates exuberant embrace of the idea that salvation is not about what we do. Being told you don’t have to do anything may be good news to people in your culture, he said, but in his African homeland that would be a non-starter, if you wanted to win others to the Gospel. Christianity was only one option; there were numerous Moslems and practitioners of indigenous religions seeking to make converts. The people in his community were looking for concrete guidance as to how they should live their lives, what they should do in times of trouble, how they should remedy the hurts they inflicted and endured. If your chief selling point was that you don’t have to do anything, well, they would turn to one of the other alternatives that met their need for action. What do I need to do to be a Christian; how do I become this new thing, they will ask. You answer, “Nothing” and nothing is what you will get, the student said.   

          John the Baptist hardly seems hospitable. “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” are his words of welcome. But the people aren’t slithering away from him, disappearing the way a snake does when it senses danger. John is regarded as the last in the long line of Israel’s prophets, but unlike, say, Jeremiah, he does not face a hostile audience. They do not refuse to hear him; indeed, they want to hear more. “And the crowds asked him, ‘What then should we do?’” Given the heated    words of his opening — the brood of vipers, the wrath to come, the ax at the root of the tree and the consuming fire — his response is strikingly undramatic. John prescribes everyday good neighborliness. As the New Testament scholar David Lose puts it, “This feels more like the stuff of Kindergarten than Apocalypse.”

          John tells the poor to share even what little they have. He charges the tax collectors, who in those days put the screws on their neighbors and skimmed their personal profit off the top, to take only what is fair. He admonishes the soldiers, who in this case would have been mercenaries who earned most of their wages by extortion and threat, to stop the violence and make do with their legitimate wages. Professor Lose concludes, “Reduced to everyday language, these are the rules of the playground: share, be fair, don’t bully.”

          The end times will turn the world upside down, but here in the in-between times, the transformation begins with acts of simple common decency. And those first fruits of repentance are within reach for everyone of us. Knowing that God has called us, that his mercy is our daily bread, the obvious question is, “What then should we do?” My student in that class long years ago was right; to answer “nothing” misses the point. We don’t have to win God’s favor; rather, our challenge is how to make good use of the grace God freely gives us. So, now that you don’t have to do anything, what will you do for the sake of the world God loves? Amen.