Our Scripture reading this morning comes to us once again from the Gospel according to Matthew, this week, chapter three, verses one through 12. You can find that on page three of the New Testament section of your pew Bibles. Before we come to God's Word, let's pray together. God of the universe revealed to us in holy Scripture through the writings of the apostles. you have called us to prepare our hearts for your visitation. Ready us now in these moments to hear your word and then to respond as faithful servants, all to the glory of Christ in whose name we pray. Amen. Matthew 3, 1 through 12. In those days, John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea proclaiming, repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight. Now John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist and his food was locusts and wild honey. And then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him and all the region along the Jordan. They were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins. But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, you brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our ancestor. For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now, the ax is lying at the root of the trees. Every tree, therefore, that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. I will baptize you, He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will clear His threshing floor and will gather His wheat into the grainry, but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire." This is the Word of the Lord. John the Baptist is quite the guy. In the context of the disciples bumbling along in their ignorance and foolishness, the fierce determination and Spirit-given certainty of John, very refreshing. From the outset, John is a man with a mission from God. He's a man on a mission from God, a wild, unchained, politically incorrect firebrand who walks out of the wilderness heralding a message that pretty well amounts to a Molotov cocktail in the bone-dry desert of centuries-long waiting of the Jewish people. How can you not love John the Baptist? He's explosive. If we were really to stop and think about the picture of the man that Matthew paints for us, we might think a bit differently. In fact, in order to think about the way Matthew has painted John, let's pause to look at some actual paintings of John the Baptist. A studio of anonymous painters in Bern, Switzerland produced this painting of John the Baptist in around 1495. Now, as we know, Scripture tells us John emerged in the wilderness. His bizarre diet tells us that he lived an impoverished wilderness existence. This painting depicts him in the wilderness, poring over the pages of the Old Testament being shaped and formed by God's word for his mission. But take away the halo and the angels and think about what you're left with there. A hairy guy in a hairy shirt living, to put it mildly, to put it politely, a rather uncivilized life far from the refining influence of society. Here's a fresco of John the Baptist that's in a church in Grazanieca, Kosovo. It's a fresco from about 1235, an even hairier and wilder John the Baptist. This is a detail from a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer from 1503. Dürer's John is gnarly and unkempt, looks something like an old overgrown willow tree. Who knows what's living in there? This is the Spanish master El Greco's portrayal of John from around 1600. Now, while you're looking at that, hear again this. In those days, John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea proclaiming, repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him and all the region along the Jordan. Friends, John the Baptist was a rock star. and he was singing a hit tune. The thing is, these artists that we've just seen seem to me to have done a pretty good job of capturing the implications of all the accounts of John in all the Gospels. And if we're honest, we probably would not flock to see that guy. I mean, if you met this guy on the streets of Sioux Center, would you not be tempted to kind of you know, you wanna be discreet, you don't wanna offend anybody, but maybe cross the other side of the street and pass on the other side so as to avoid necessarily being near this guy? I mean, if that guy on the screens was here this morning, would we think it a really good idea to allow him to lead our children up to children in worship? Hey, kids, follow Mr. the Baptist upstairs. I'm thinking we'd probably fingerprint the guy and have the FBI do a background check. And then if he passed the background check, which, I mean, look at him, it's not really certain, is it? We would want him to have a shave and a shower and maybe some new clothes before we let him in anywhere near our kids. Would you feel entirely comfortable sitting next to him next Sunday evening following the children's program? Do you want this guy to dunk you in the Jordan River or anywhere else underwater? Yet the people, they flock to John in droves. John actually shows up not just in the Gospels, but even in his own right as a threat to the powers that be in the histories of the Jewish historian Josephus. This guy, the guy you see on your screens there, was a headline maker all of his own. Herod was so frightened of that guy, and his following and his incendiary nature of his proclamation to the tender, dry Jewish populace that Herod was afraid of killing him and he was afraid of leaving him live. John was a thorn in the ruling elite's side, dead or alive. And that all begs the question, well, why? Why did the masses of people go out to see that guy? The answer, expectations. Great expectations. When we see a guy that looks like that, our expectations are, to say the least, low. But when the Jewish people saw a guy that looked like that, their expectations were high. They had the eyes to see what John was because they had a story that shaped their expectations so that they could see. A guy from the boonies that looked like that, saying the kinds of things that he was saying, strange as it may seem to us, it rang true to them. But Jewish expectation goes back farther than John himself. It goes back to God, the universe, and everything. While the Jews knew that God rules sovereignly over all things, they knew that not everything was the way it was supposed to be. Not the way the ruling God wants it to be. Not the way the ruling God created it to be. They prayed constantly for the coming day when God's kingship, remember that moment in 2 Samuel 8, we reject God, we don't want him to be our God, give us a king like the other nations, but now they've been praying. They knew they got that wrong, right? They were praying for the day when God's kingship would be fully realized. Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down to make your name known to your adversaries so that the nations might tremble at your presence. And they did not pray as those who thought their prayer was a pipe dream. They prayed as those who expected a day to come when God's kingship would be fully realized in the world. They prayed that way because their prophets promised that such a day would, in fact, come. That God himself would act decisively to bring all nations and all peoples under submission to himself. And the Lord will, there's no question about it, the Lord will become king over all the earth, Zechariah said. So the Jewish people expected someone at some point in history to stand up and say these words that are just as earth-shaking now as they were then if you have the ears to hear. The kingdom of heaven has come near. Now the scholars are in surprising agreement on this. Frequently the scholars are not in agreement, but here they are. The kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven are interchangeable when you find them in the biblical text. They say and they mean essentially the same thing. So John is saying, when he speaks those words, he's saying the kingship of God in the world has arrived. It's coming here. the kingship of God, the kingship that will scatter the proud, that will bring down rulers from their thrones and that will lift up the lowly, the kingship that will fill the hungry with good things and send the rich empty away, the kingship that will turn all injustice into justice and judge sin and evil and put all things to rights, that kingship of that God has arrived in this world. Earth-shaking. Explosive, incendiary. And not only did they expect someone to stand up and say those words, they expected that the herald of repentance in preparation of God's coming would emerge in the wilderness. Everything important in Israel's history happened in the wilderness, not least of which was the first exodus, so it only makes sense that the new greater exodus foretold in Israel's stories would be kickstarted again by a firebrand prophet in the desert too. Behold, God said through Malachi, I will send you Elijah the prophet. This was long after the days of Elijah, right? Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers. What's that turning? It's repentance. Lest I come and strike the land with the decree of utter destruction. John the Baptist shows up in the wilderness dressed in Elijah's hairy coat and leather belt, speaking words of the coming day of the Lord, the King, and the fires of judgment. Expectations. Great, great expectations. If you had those stories and those great expectations, you might actually flock to see that guy too. And you might just, when it's all over, let Mr. the Baptist lead your kids up and lead them in children in worship. You might ask Ms. Sarah Shurchman to go with them. But, unless of course, you wanted to maintain the status quo. So, those who were comfortable with the status quo, the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council, the powers that be, the cultural elites, they sent a delegation out to see what John was up to. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were the two warring factions of the Jewish ruling council, something probably like the Democrats and the Republicans in Washington, D.C. Both of them had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Both had a vested interest in a bipartisan effort to oppose this threat from the wilderness named John. So Rembrandt's painting of this very passage of scripture captures it well. The Gaunt prophet there standing, boldly heralding the coming king, contrasted with the robust and richly attired Sadducee and Pharisee conspiring together there in the lower foreground. So the Pharisees and the Sadducees, they knew this story too. They knew, as well as those crowds who were sitting at John's feet, that of course God's new exodus would be kick-started in the wilderness by an Elijah-like prophet. But they thought they did not need what this particular manifestation of Elijah in the desert, hawking his repentance and his baptism, they thought they didn't need what he had to offer. They were under the illusion that their standing before the coming king was secure on other foundations, foundations that had nothing to do with repentance and baptism. We have Abraham as our father. We're God's people. We're God's chosen special people. We've always been, we always will be. Oh, we're members of the Christian Reformed Church. We have John Calvin as our father. We're God's people, God's special people. There are all kinds of sandy, crumbling foundations, tempting us to place false hopes on them. They're all shoddy foundations, and they're false hopes, though. In the end, we all need the good news that John was announcing. If we refuse John's announcement, if we place our hopes on some other foundation, we have somebody or something else as our father, no matter what it is, we will find ourselves standing in the company of the Pharisees and the Sadducees defending the status quo. So John is, of course, the Baptist, the baptizer. Baptism actually predates both Christianity and John within Israel's history. but it existed only as part of the initiatory rites a Gentile underwent during conversion into Judaism. A Jew by birth was never baptized. They didn't think they needed anything of the sort. They were already in by virtue of their Jewishness. Only Gentiles needed conversion and markers of conversion like baptism. So when John baptized Jewish people as part of their repentance, he was saying that the fact that they had Abraham as their father did nothing for them. The Jewish people were on the same sinking sand as the Gentiles. Like everyone, they had to repent from their sinful rebellion. They had to turn from their old life to meet the king whose reign had arrived. The King, who John tells us, would baptize them not just with water, marking out this preliminary repentance, but who would baptize them with the Holy Spirit that would cleanse them and transform them from within. Really, could the coming of God's holy reign be accompanied by any other word than repent? You cannot receive the King who will reign with justice and truth, with righteousness, if you remain in sinful, idolatrous rebellion. Repentance is absolutely necessary for everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, for we all, like sheep, have gone astray. And so the way of the Lord must be made straight. Kings, and there's a new metaphor, kings in the ancient Near East expected their roads to be prepared, made level and straight prior to their traveling on them. As New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg says of John's kingdom announcement, he says, people must repent and show the actions befitting repentance to be able to welcome the coming King properly. It doesn't matter if the King is a newborn baby lying in a barn. Or if the King is coming on the clouds in fully revealed glory and power, people must repent and show the actions befitting repentance to be able to welcome the coming King properly. To fail to repent is to leave that road unprepared, bumpy and winding. And if we don't repent and turn to meet the coming King, whether Gentile or Jew, John tells us, We will be baptized with the unquenchable fire of the King's judgment. The King has come. The time is now. Repent. As we hear this passage in the days leading up to Christmas, it strikes me that we need to hear it in two ways. First, we ourselves need to hear it as if we were John's audience. as those who need to regularly hear anew this herald-proclaiming, this earth-shaking and person-shaking kingdom message. We need to hear His call to repent and to receive our King. And secondly, we need to hear John's kingdom announcement as those who are part of God's people, the church, who have been given a John the Baptist role to play in the world. We're not only the audience needing to hear the message of God's kingdom and repentance, but we are also those who proclaim the good news of God's kingdom, and that called repentance. And that implies a few things, I think. As John's audience, we need to hear the good news of Christmas in its fullness, in its earth-shaking and person-shaking fullness. We cannot reduce the message of Christmas to a palatable, cozy, comfortable story of a cute baby who is born in a barn with cute animals that reinforces, that essentially reinforces the status quo. Our status quo, the world's status quo. The baby laying in the manger is the king who will leave nothing as it is. That's the good news of the gospel. The king who turns the world on its head and replaces injustice with justice, replaces ugliness with beauty, chaos with order, falsity with truth, sin with righteousness, that king, the one we celebrate in the manger, that king has come. The baby lying in the manger is the king who dismantles our old sinful selves and puts us back together again in his likeness and in his fullness. The baby lying in the manger is the king who leaves nothing as it was. So if our journey to Bethlehem and our arrival at the manger does not rattle us and stir in us status quo defying expectations, great expectations for God's justice and peace to break forth in the world, we might need to ask ourselves what exactly it is that we're celebrating at Christmas. This means, of course, as John's audience, we need to hear His word of repentance. Repentance, like nothing else, says, I'm sick of the status quo. And we are always the first place to look, like inside of our own selves, individually and corporately as a church. We are the first place to look as we long for God's gracious, upending work to break forth in the world. So before the swampy, a status quo defending parts of Jerusalem and Rome and Washington D.C. and Wall Street and Hollywood get drained, the swampiness of our own hearts needs to be drained, our hearts. So we need to hear John's word of repentance that always accompanies the gospel of God's kingdom in Jesus. And then, we need to remember that we are, as God's church, as God's baptized people, the Holy Spirit indwelling us, we are called to be, in a sense, John the Baptist in the world, called and empowered to herald the gospel of God's kingdom in Jesus Christ and the need for repentance. We're called to be voices crying aloud in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. This task is given to the whole church, both corporately and individually, not just to missionaries, not just to ministers of the Word. We are all mission agents of God. We're all, because we live in the world but we're not of the world, we're all cross-cultural missionaries. This final painting I'm going to show you is Giovanni Di Paolo's depiction of John heading out of the refinement and culture of society and into the wilderness. Actually, you see John two different times in this painting. Once leaving the city at the lower left of the screen, and again, that's John up there entering the rocky gates of the wilderness, so at the top in the middle. John's departure from Jewish society was both a critique of the status quo, and it was a strategic withdrawal from the culture so that he would not be shaped and formed into the likeness of the culture. He headed to the desert to be shaped and formed by God and God's word, and he emerged a fresh, distinctive voice crying in the wilderness. So the church and her individual members are called to similarly strategically and partially withdraw from society in some ways. Notice all of those qualifications I'm placing on this. Not for purposes of isolation, but so that we will not be catechized and shaped into the world's likeness. I'm going to paint with some broad brush strokes here, but far too much of what is justified as cultural engagement within evangelical and Reformed churches is nothing more than cultural consumption. And far too much of what the church says to the world and what the church says to herself is nothing more than the world's message spoken back to it, the world's message spoken back to it, the message of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, rather than the Word of God spoken by the Holy Spirit, by the Heilige Geist. So the church and her members must go into the wilderness, perhaps not literally, but somehow metaphorically, to encounter God and God's Word, to be catechized and shaped into Christ's likeness by God's Word, in order then to be able to speak God's Word to herself, to the church itself, and to the city of man. So John's withdrawal was obviously not a complete withdrawal or he wouldn't have been a threat to the cultural elites. He didn't just disappear out there. In fact, there could be a third John in Giovanni di Pio's painting. The John coming back from the wilderness to the city gates to announce God's word to the people of the city. So John's withdrawal was partial, it was strategic, and it enabled him to focus on God's word, and it made him and his message the threat that it was, and that he was. So the church's withdrawal must similarly not be a complete withdrawal that would render us unthreatening to our ruling regime's God-defying status quo, but a withdrawal that would enable the church and her individual members to truly and critically engage and challenge our culture, and announce to the world and to the church's own self something from God to announce to the world nothing less than the earth-shaking, person-shaking gospel of King Jesus. Repent. The kingship of God has arrived. That's the good news. That's what we're called to proclaim. Friends, may we, in these days heading toward Christmas, may we be a people shaped and formed by the very Word of God that we meet in the wilderness, a voice calling us to repentance. And may we, with the thundering voice of God's church in and for God's world, call forth the good news. of the gospel, repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near. Prepare the way for the Lord and for his new exodus on behalf of all people. God's anointed king has come. He is coming again. Amen.