My husband prides himself on keeping an endless stash of “cocktail tidbits” -- you know, interesting trivia that you pull out at a party when the conversation gets slow. As you might imagine, I’ve heard most of them several hundred times. Today let me share with you one of his favorites, which he read in the book Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. Here it is: Did you know that every seed inside of every apple has a different genetic code? Every apple seed, if planted in the ground and nourished with water and sunlight, will grow into a tree that produces a unique kind of apple, one that may or may not have much in common with the apple from which the seed came.
What this means is that, when a particularly tasty kind of apple is discovered -- like red delicious, gala, or honeycrisp -- the only way to grow another tree that produces that particular variety of apple, is to take a graft from the original tree and plant it in the ground. So every red delicious apple you’ve ever eaten can trace its lineage back to the very first tree to produce red delicious fruit. All apples of the same variety share a common original ancestral tree.
Of course, ancestry isn’t just important for apples. Most of us humans think it’s pretty important too. If we know our ancestors -- our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents -- that means we know things about ourselves; we figure out where our blue eyes came from, or our curly hair, or our musical or artistic talent. As we like to say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. A friend of mine married a man who was adopted as an infant and never knew his birth parents. Shortly after the birth of their first child, she overheard her husband talking to their son. “You are the only person in the world I know who looks like me,” he said. There is something comforting in being able to trace particular traits back to a person in our families; it helps us feel grounded in our identity.
Well, it seems that John the Baptist didn’t care too much about human ancestry. In fact, he believes that clinging too tightly to your family can cause problems when it comes to your relationship with God. When John began preaching to the crowds who came to be baptized and to hear his fiery sermons, he let them know, in no uncertain terms, that they had work to do -- the hard work of repentance, of owning up to the ways they had fallen short in their faithfulness to God. And he warns them that even though they can trace their ancestry all the way back to Abraham they still have to repent. According to John the Baptist, people will not be judged by who their ancestors are but by what kind of fruit their lives produce.
John the Baptist was one of the original fire and brimstone preachers, following in the footsteps of the Old Testament prophets like Amos, Hosea and Isaiah who announced that the full weight of God’s wrath was going to fall on those who didn’t follow God’s ways of justice and kindness and humility.
The remarkable thing is, when John finishes telling the crowds that their ancestry doesn’t earn them a “get out of judgment free” card, the people don’t run away in fear. They don’t call the authorities to haul him off to jail for disturbing the peace -- or for disturbing their peace of mind -- and they don’t stick their fingers in their ears and pretend they can’t hear. Instead, they ask him a simple question: “What should we do?”
And to our surprise, instead of raining down more fire and brimstone, John offers the people a refreshingly simple answer. Well, answers, actually, because he has specific instructions depending on who asks the question. To the common people who make up the majority of the crowd, John says, in a word: “Share.” To the tax collectors, he says: “Be honest.” To the soldiers, he says: “Don’t bully.” For all his apocalyptic imagery of fiery judgment, his advice is remarkably straightforward. As one commentator put it, “this feels more like the stuff of kindergarten than the Apocalypse.” (1)
I can’t help but wonder if the people in the crowd, and the tax collectors, and the soldiers were all just a little bit disappointed when John gave them their instructions. John had been announcing impending judgment and doom, complete with stones coming to life and axes chopping down trees and all-consuming fires. When the crowds asked him what they should do, they were probably expecting some major life changes. As he held them under the waters of baptism, don’t you think they expected to emerge with their lives completely transformed?
Isn’t that what we hope for at this time of year -- that our lives and our world will be completely transformed by Christmas? Every year during Advent as we cling to our faith that Christ’s birth brings hope and love and grace into this world in spite of the darkness all around us, don’t we secretly hope that this year, Christmas will change everything? That God’s love and grace will come into the world and really do something: stop wars, heal the sick, fix our families, give everyone food and shelter and jobs and healthcare? Deep down, isn’t that what we all really want for Christmas?
Well, if that is what we want, then we will be as sorely disappointed as John’s first hearers must have been when he told them what to do to bear good fruit and avoid God’s wrath. “Share. Be honest. Don’t bully.” In other words, don’t expect some kind of huge, miraculous change. When he baptized those crowds of people, John didn’t send them off into a brand new setting to start their lies of faith anew, even though that might have been easier. Instead, he sent them right back where they came from with a deceptively simple assignment: return to your work, your life, your family, but once there bear good fruit: live every day like your faith, your identity, really matters.
After all, baptism, both then and now, is all about identity. When we are baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, something changes, but it’s not something we see, and in fact, it’s something we often forget. Baptism doesn’t change who we are, it changes Whose we are, which in turn changes how we act.
In baptism, we get re-rooted, just like a branch of an apple tree that gets removed and planted in new soil to bear good fruit. In our baptism our primary identity shifts. We become no longer just a member of our particular human family; we become a child of God. Of course, we are still related to all the people on our family tree, but in baptism we affirm that our most important relationship is with God.
But I suspect we all still have the question that John’s crowd had so long ago: “What then should we do?” It sounds like it’s going to be so complicated, but it’s not. “Share. Be honest. Don’t bully.” Return to the life that you have -- the job that may compromise your morals; the family that is never as perfect as all the other families seem; the fears and frustrations and anxieties that persist in spite of all your efforts to bury them away. They will be the same, but you can respond to them differently.
*****
My friend Caroline lives and works in New York City. She’s lived there for more than ten years now and she’s gotten used to many of the challenges of life in a big city, but not long ago something happened that she was totally unprepared for. A panhandler, started showing up in the same place every day on Caroline’s walk to work. Now she had a policy that she didn’t give money to panhandlers. But this guy was crafty. He saw that she was young, well-dressed, with sympathetic eyes. And he didn’t just stand there looking pitiful -- he looked her in the eye and talked to her. “Come on, can’t you spare some change?” She blushed, but kept walking.The next day, he did it again. “Gimme some money, please lady,” he begged. She gritted her teeth and walked on. The third day he used his attention to detail. Caroline always wears a gold cross around her neck and this day, he called her on it. “You’re a Christian, aren’t you? Help me out, then!” That night, Caroline lay in bed, thinking about the man. She was determined that the next day, if she saw him, she would not make eye contact, but just keep going.
The next day, when she saw him, Caroline panicked. She bolted for the nearest door into a large office building. She was already caught up in a swell of people entering the door when she realized it was a revolving door. Stuck in the inside of the door, she couldn’t get out as the door moved through the inside of the building and the next thing she knew she stumbled back out onto the sidewalk. When she looked up, there was the man, standing right in front of her, a smile on his face and his hand held out.
Baptism, Christmas, any of the major events and celebrations in our lives of faith are like revolving doors. We enter a new space, we undergo a transformation, but then we come right back out where we started. Yet we are not the same as before, we are inspired -- literally, with the Holy Spirit -- and we are re-born into our former lives with a new identity.
Today John the Baptist reminds us that when we return to the ordinary circumstances of life, we have countless opportunities to live into our identity as children of God, opportunities to simply be faithful, to show that we are God’s people.
At the end of today’s speech from John the Baptist, Luke writes that John “proclaimed the good news to the people.” And it is good news, even to those of us caught in this Advent time between Christ’s birth and Christ’s return. John’s instructions to use the ordinary circumstances of our daily lives to show our true identity echoes the good news of the incarnation: that in the birth of Jesus God did not change everything, God redeemed everything. God came into the world to be Emmanuel, God with us, to be one of us, and in doing so God made human life and this world precious and sacred.
Today may we remember our baptism and recommit ourselves to the simple yet powerful task of living out our faith wherever we may be. And as we do, may we bring to the world the miracle of Emmanuel, God-with-us. Amen.
Endnotes:
1. David Lose in his Working Preacher commentary on Luke 3:7-18; online here.
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