Sermon for December 7, 2025
Advent 2 A
Matthew 3:1-12
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
This is a time of year when our thoughts often turn to hopes and dreams. Maybe you’re dreaming of a white Christmas – or hoping to head down south to escape winter’s chill. Maybe you’re dreaming of spending some quality time with family and friends during the holidays – or hoping that you or a loved one will heal or recover or find the help they need to be in better shape for the new year. Maybe you’re dreaming of the presents you’ll find under the Christmas tree – or simply hoping you’ll have the stamina and energy to just make it through everything you have to do this month.
Hopes and dreams can feed our souls – and also make us realize how far the world falls short of the ideals we aspire to. Either way, hopes and dreams are part of what make us human. Hope means that even when things are bad, and you don’t see them getting better – even so, you have faith that new life and new ways of being and new ways of doing things are still possible some day. Even the sin that corrupts the world, and that we participate in ourselves, does not have to have the last word.
“In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness…”; so begins today’s gospel reading. Which “days” is it talking about? It’s the days after Jesus had been born in Bethlehem and grown into adulthood in Nazareth, but before he officially began his public ministry.
Wait a minute! Hold on. Aren’t we in the season of Advent? Isn’t this the time when we’re preparing to celebrate the birth of Christ? Well, yes, it is – but it’s more than simply that, as wonderful and amazing as the birth of Christ is. Because the word “Advent” means “arrival” or “appearance”. Advent is the time of the church year when we are preparing our hearts for the appearance of Christ among us – however he might choose to appear. And we prepare ourselves to greet him – whether that’s in the joyous celebrations of his birth; or the humbling realization that he’s the one who’s been holding you together when you’ve been at your lowest; or the surprise of realizing that he is present in and among the poor and lowly and suffering because Jesus himself was poor and lowly and suffering. However it is that we greet his appearance among us, the message of John the Baptist is being fulfilled: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
Wait a minute! Repent? Isn’t that supposed to be what we do during Lent? Why is “repentance” sneaking into our Christmas celebrations? John the Baptist reminds us that repentance isn’t just for Lent; it’s more of a year-round thing. In fact, Martin Luther in the first of his famous 95 Theses which put the Protestant Reformation into motion, put it like this: “When our Lord said ‘repent’, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” Oh man! Really? Isn’t that getting a little too serious for the holiday season? Perhaps.
But first let’s look at what actually happened when John the Baptist began to preach his message: People started getting really excited! There he was, out in the desert, no food to offer his visitors but a spare diet of locusts and wild honey—and people were pouring out of the towns and countryside to hear what he was saying, and to see what he was doing. Why? Hopes and dreams. John the Baptist looked like and acted like one of the prophets of old, and especially like the great Elijah himself! And everybody knew the old story from scripture; that Elijah had never actually died, but was taken directly into heaven in a whirlwind by a chariot of fire. This made Elijah kind of like an ace relief pitcher, warming up in the bullpen, waiting to come into the 7th game of the World Series when the championship was on the line. For centuries, the people had been hoping and dreaming that one day God was going to send Elijah back among them, and when he did—even though things were bad, and didn’t seem to ever be getting any better—when Elijah returned, that’s when the new age God had promised was going to begin. This is what John the Baptist meant to the people. This is why they streamed out to find him by his little bend on the Jordan River, where it had trickled it’s way from the Galilee mountains and down through the desert on the way to the Dead Sea, near the spot where Joshua had once led the Hebrews into the Promised Land, and had begun their new age after escaping slavery in Egypt and wandering for 40 years in the wilderness. That’s why they listened to John, and confessed their sins, and received his baptism of repentance.
Repentance was good news! Because repentance literally means “a change of mindset”. And a change of mindset was the best gift they could possibly hope for. They lived in a country floundering under the heel of the brutal Roman Empire. They labored to simply scrape enough together to get through each day. They were ruled by leaders who burdened the people’s backs, while seeking glory for themselves or at least lining their own pockets. They saw good people being punished for doing the right thing, and bad people being rewarded for doing the wrong thing. And the people themselves, like people everywhere and anytime, had their own regrets from the past of things they’d done or left undone; they had their own shortcomings and failures in the present, unhealthy patterns they’d gotten stuck in, things from which they could not free themselves. A change of mindset was just what the doctor ordered! More than that, it was what God had promised to supply.
Even John the Baptist himself reveals the universal human need for repentance—he vilifies the Pharisees and Sadducees, who had come to be baptized because they’d been intrigued by his message, as a “brood of vipers” before even giving them a chance to say hello. It goes to show that even as great as John was, he was not the Messiah; his calling was to prepare people for the coming of the Messiah. With his own limitations and faults, he reveals that God can use anyone—even sinful human beings like ourselves, to accomplish his purposes; and that God is able to allow us to “bear fruit worthy of repentance”.
God is able to raise up the gifts of the Holy Spirit within us, so that we may love and serve God and our neighbors in our daily lives. God is able to activate the talents and interests God has given each of us, so that we may use them to glorify Jesus’ name. God is able to work within each of us, even when we’ve become like trees that no longer bear good fruit, and then God can chop down the deadwood of our lives and grow a new shoot out of the stump (like the prophet Isaiah once spoke [Isaiah 11]). With God, each season of life is a chance for a new beginning, and in each season of life God continues to have a purpose for all of us.
God is able to shake off the chaff that covers up your true self, and in burning the chaff away God leaves the valuable grain of wheat, the person whom God created you to be. And then God gathers all the grains of wheat, all of us together, to become bread to feed the hungry and give life to the world by sharing in the ministry of Christ.
God is able—because he sent Jesus Christ to be born into the world with all of its trouble and sins, and Jesus took all of the sins and troubles upon his own body on the cross, to forgive. Because of his forgiveness and grace for you, you don’t have to prove yourself worthy of God’s love. Opening your heart and soul to God’s love given in Christ is the “new mindset” of repentance, which lets you see and take hold of God’s own hopes and dreams, as sin and death are defeated through Christ’s death and resurrection, and God’s grace in the kingdom of heaven has the last word. Amen.