Sermons from the Pulpit
Preached to the Congregational Church in Exeter, U. C. C., on the third Sunday of Advent, December 17, 2000, by Michael L. C. Henderson, pastor.Zephaniah 3:14-20; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18You brood of vipers!
-Luke 3:7
Gaudete Sunday. There they go again - talking Latin at us, and other such like dead, irrelevant, esoteric stuff. Who on earth do these ministers think they are?
I'll tell you who they think they are. They think they are the ones whom God has chosen to be the custodians, indeed the guardians, of an ancient, ancient tradition, a whole other way of looking at the world, a whole other way of making sense of human nature and human experience. They revel in their alleged irrelevance. They have read their own obituaries in the journals of modernity so often that they laugh at them.
We are mired in the past, we clergy, and we are always trying to seduce you into joining us in that swamp, always trying to get you to believe that we can show you the way to the Holy Grail. It may be far-fetched, but it's enough to get us through the bleak midwinter. Especially when you consider that our ordination also confers upon us the rare privilege of standing up in front of you and calling you a brood of vipers, and if this offends you, we can assure you that those are not our words, that is the Word of God.
Do you know what a viper is? It's a venomous snake, or by figurative extension, it's a treacherous or malignant person. And a brood of vipers is a whole swarm of treacherous and malignant hatchlings, a progeny, a spawn, a pit filled with the offspring of snakes.
This Gospel even claims that in the mouth of John, that Word of God is good news, and so you should gaudete, you should rejoice over it. You may well ask what is so doggone good about it, other than the satisfaction it gives to the preacher. But the answer is staring you right in the face. Mary read it to us, for example, in the prophecy of Zephaniah: The Lord is in your midst. You shall fear disaster no more. The Lord has taken away the judgments against you. The Lord will gather you and bring you home.
We do not treasure the past for the past's own sake. We are not antiquarians. We treasure it as revelation of the lovingkindness and trustworthiness of God. God has been with God's people to guide them even when they resisted all guidance other than their own. God has been with them to redeem them whenever they have behaved like a brood of vipers. That is the story that underlies all Bible stories, and it's the reason why we call them Holy Scriptures.
So combining Jesus and Paul, we can say: Rejoice in the Lord always, you brood of vipers! Again I say, rejoice! Do not worry about anything, you brood of vipers! The peace of God will keep your hearts and your minds in Chris Jesus, you brood of vipers!
This truly does surpass all understanding, doesn't it? And that is precisely the point where the ancient tradition parts company with the contemporary way of thinking. We live in a culture which takes it to be self-evident that if you say a thing surpasses all understanding, that is the same thing as saying it is rubbish. But John and the Gospel and its proclaimers take the attitude that if a thing surpasses all human understanding, that certainly doesn't make it false. It might mean it is mysterious and wonderful and true.
The good news is that goodness does not depend on us. If it did depend on us, that would not be good news, because we are a brood of vipers. But God is able from stones to raise up children of Abraham, and God is able from snakepits to raise up outposts of the Kingdom.
There is always more water ahead, another Red Sea, another Jordan River, another wild Baptizer, a new spiritual drenching soaking sinking dunking drowning washing crossing for anyone who stumbles out into the wilderness in search of something that's missing. Another homecoming. Another gathering up of those who are lost. Another place where God is waiting eagerly to ambush us with that redeeming grace in which God appears to take such huge pleasure. And it doesn't matter if we don't know what we're looking for or why we're looking for it; it doesn't matter if our motives are mixed. It doesn't matter whether we are drawn to the Baptizer by hope or driven to him by fear. All that matters is that we are open to discovery of a truth about ourselves that we have been assiduously avoiding.
So of course it is not good news that we are a brood of vipers. It is not news at all. We already knew it and were just not eager to face it. The good news is that we are God's brood of vipers, God's own beloved and infinitely precious vipers.
The Holy One of Israel came into that snakepit, came into our midst. That is what the Hebrew Scriptures promised and delivered, again and again. That is what God did in Jesus of Nazareth, whose first Advent in Bethlehem of Judea we remember and re-enact so tenderly year after year. And that is what the Scripture promises that God will do again in glory to complete the victory over all that is not as it should be, we can only speculate and wonder when and how.
The past is prologue. God will finish what God has started. The powers of the world are living on borrowed time. And we live in that borrowed time too, the time between that start and that finish. We live in the meantime. Meantime is between time, as you know, but don't overlook the double meaning, because God loves a good pun or even a bad one. Meantime is also cruel time, mean-spirited time.
"What then should we do?" is the question on the lips of all whose lives have been guided by greed and selfish ambition, power and violence, and all the other vipers in the brood. And the Baptizer's answer, and Paul's, and the Gospel's, is clear and simple: You don't have to be as mean as the times you live in. So don't do it!
At long last we have a President, who, like the Congress and the Judiciary and the media and you and me and all the other drivers on Water Street and Portsmouth Avenue, may or may not be less mean than the absolutely stunning meanness of these times. We all know that those who cross us in any way are evil and they are out to get us, and we respond accordingly. Insult begets insult, injury begets injury, grudge begets grudge, banality begets banality, despair begets despair. We all think we've been robbed and are out to get the perpetrator. The other day I saw a car with a vanity plate which bore the letter N, the letter I, the number 4, the letter N, and the letter I. N-I-4-N-I. An eye for an eye. Demonstrating a truly amazing grasp of the word of God and proclaiming the good news to anyone caught behind him in traffic.
Rejoice, Paul wrote. Rejoice in the Lord, because the Lord is not mean. Not in the times, which are. Paul was in prison when he wrote that, and he wrote it to a congregation that was facing persecution, but so what? God will finish what God has started. That is the enduring truth you live by, you do not live by the transient truths of mean times. So you can afford the risk, which is a huge risk, of letting the whole world see your gentleness.
We can't wait for the people with the most power, money, glamour, or fame to do the right thing. Why on earth would they be the trend-setters of the Kingdom? You don't see them stumbling out into the wilderness where John can tell them what they are. No, it begins with us. Us vipers. God's own vipers.