You Brood of Vipers!

Gospel Reflection Matthew 3:1-12

Last year in January, I went to Ghost Ranch as part of my DMin program, a Presbyterian retreat center in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. It’s one of those places so dark you can see the Milky Way. All around were the mesas — the steep hills with the flat tops and the arroyos, the dry riverbeds. We were there in the winter, a kinder season, but in the middle of the summer, with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees, with little water anywhere, you could easily die if you got lost. Inspired by this place, Presbyterian pastor Belden Lane writes a book about these desolate places, arguing that Christians don’t always need gentleness and light, fluffy clouds and blue skies. No, he says. These fierce and harsh landscapes heal us, as they mirror the brokenness that we all find within ourselves and within our world. 

In Lane’s book, I saw myself, especially in the seasons of difficulty, when I can barely keep my head above water, when the fierceness of the struggle feels like it’s one step away from killing me. I also saw West Michigan in these winter months, where we live without much sun, the cold keeping us inside and the ice slippery and hazardous, like the wilds of New Mexico. None of us would want to be lost in the middle of winter in the dark in the woods. But like the fierce landscapes of New Mexico that Lane describes, it’s this fierceness and desolation that actually offers solace, unexpected solace, but solace nonetheless. 

Sometimes we want only gentleness, but a little vim and vigor and even fierceness goes a long way. 

I think these fierce landscapes — New Mexico in the summer and Michigan in the winter — are like the words of John the Baptizer. He loved and lived the fierce. Eating locusts isn’t exactly a comfort-filled life, nor is getting beheaded by the monarch, Herod. John lived a rough life, yelling at everyone about how they were like broods of vipers, and the coming wrath. You’ve got to do something! You’ve got to change and you need to do it right now. There isn’t time to continue on in your old ways, none of y’all. And there’s no excuses. Get yourself in gear and choose the better way before it's too late.

John is in fine form here. He’s passionate, angry, and he says what he thinks — not very West Mi, eh? You too can get cut down like a tree because that axe is right here and if all you’re doing is making chaff and there’s no fruit, you might as well just get burned up. There’s nothing else y’all are good for. 

Y’all know about the goats, the herd of 53 that ate their way through the invasive bittersweet right by us, maaa’ing and eating all of those seeds so that they can’t reseed and thus hopefully die soon, but that’s just the beginning. There are piles and piles of vines, piled up so that we can get rid of them. Once we get our burning permit we’re going to have a fire, right in the middle of the snow. It’s going to burn all of the excess, all of those weedy vines will be gone, all of those seeds the goats didn’t find, well, they’ll be toast. That’s what you do with the detritus and the chaff. Burn baby burn! 

Sometimes we want vim and vigor, but a little reminder of what the world could be like, is necessary.  

Isaiah’s prophecy is the other part of this message of John the baptizer. Isaiah’s already given his “you brood of vipers” speech earlier. Woe is you who call evil good! Woe to you! That came first. Before everything else, we needed it named. We need to know what is actually happening, to see it with our own eyes, to hear the judgment of those vipers, those people who aren’t working for justice and peace, who seek to destroy rather than to heal, who call evil good, who oppress the poor, who with smooth and silky words create a world that serves them, while those at the bottom struggle for their very lives. 

But think on this for a minute. We wouldn’t think that we need a savior if everything is going smoothly. But when things aren’t going, well. That’s when we start worrying, start praying, start begging God for something else.

“The world” then wasn’t “full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters covered the sea.” It was full of war and violence, corrupt leaders who dissed the poor and it was really obvious that the spirit of the Lord wasn’t resting on the king. 

Into this chaos comes the beautiful prophecy of Isaiah. 

During their high school years, my children attended a Classical Christian School, one where the average student was way more conservative than we were and I loved that school. I will not go on and on about it today, but I will tell you about the moment when I decided that it was the place for them. It was an old fitness center, but students had painted the classrooms. The 4th grade classroom, for example, was like a medieval castle, and in the 5th grade classroom a student would be surrounded with the signers of the Declaration of Independence. But in the entryway, there was a huge painting of Guernica by Picasso, his response to the Spanish Civil War and the unjust killing of civilians for sport. On the other side? The Peaceable Kingdom, where the lion lies down with the lamb, the Indigenous together with the settler, the little child leading them all, a place where nothing was hurting or destroying on God’s earth. 

It’s so beautiful that it hurts, so hopeful that if that world were right in front of me, I might just step into it, forgoing the here and now. But that’s not the way this works, is it? Instead, it’s on us, it’s on us hear and be changed by the fierce words of John the Baptizer, to use this season to prepare, to forsake our sins, our personal sins of greed and forgetting the rest of the world, of selfishness and despair, of busyness and laziness. It’s the time to forsake our collective sins of caring nothing of the common good, of division, derision, and hate, of dehumanizing the other and eschewing the foreigner and the poor. 

We Episcopalians usually wait until Lent to weep and bemoan our sins. Truthfully neither are we the type to preach a fire and brimstone sermon followed by an altar call with eight verses of Just as I am while the guilt sinks in. I don’t think I’ve ever preached a fire and brimstone sermon. But it’s Advent, and we’re asking for grace to listen. We’re asking for grace to forsake our sins. 

”…the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” This doesn’t actually sound like a good time, but what if we held this up to the light of God, to the possibility of the Peaceable Kingdom, and to the time with God will be all in all? Because I think we forget how good it feels to clean house, to confess our sins, to repent, and then to choose a different way. It’s a solace in a fierce landscape. A gift. It’s almost fun, maybe not the getting caught in sin part, but repentance? It’s a laying down of burdens, a freedom. Such deep joy! 

Now, I’m not asking us to get ticky about sin, obsessed with the wrong things we do, thinking about them more than the beautiful ways that we inhabit this world, loving our neighbors as ourselves and changing the world a little at a time. As humans, it’s not right for us to be perfect; that’s God’s job. Also, we have the Eucharist, the gift that God gives that helps with strength, helping us to keep us from sin. We don’t do this work alone. God is with us. But the work of repairing relationships, the work of cleaning out those things that keep us from God so that more light can get in, the work of seeking the good and filling our life up with good, this work is part of preparing for the great feast of Christmas. This work comes freedom and so much joy. 

This is why all those people came to see John, that fierce man in the wilderness. That’s why even the Pharisees and Sadducees wanted to hear the truth that they were broods of vipers. Because there’s so much hope here. There’s hope that they’ll be able to hear the truth, God’s truth in the tongue of the prophet John the baptizer. And then, that they’ll be able to hear it so deeply that the only option is to change, to turn away, to repair, and with their very bodies live the Peaceable kingdom. 

The new world is coming. It’s just off the horizon. Can you see it? It’s time to get ready.