He had one line, and he had practiced it all week: Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy that shall be for all the people. He had the words down, the gestures ready, the oversized bathrobe tightly tied. The little angel was sure he would nail his part in the church Christmas pageant. But just before taking his cue, he made the near-fatal mistake of peeking out from behind the curtain off stage. The fellowship hall was packed: he did the math, quickly doubling the faces by counting two eyes to each head that would be looking back at him. He made it onto the stage all right, but when his moment came — you guessed it — he froze in his flip-flops. He shuffled his feet, looked down at them, and suddenly a faint light of remembrance flickered in his head. He looked up at the audience beaming and proudly proclaimed, Boy, have I got some news for you! [Thanks to Charles Johnson for this, The Advent Call to Speak, sermon to Second Baptist Church, Lubbock, Texas, Dec. 17, 2000.]

Well, that’s close. Boy, have I got some news for you, John said. God is coming. He’s got an axe in his hand and fire in his eyes. He’s ready to chop off all the unproductive at the root and burn all the imposters like chaff that hang around the wheat as if they’re the real thing.

That would be John the Baptist’s version of Christmas tidings. Talk about Scrooge! You’d think we had enough of John last week, wouldn’t you? I mean, we’re getting close to Christmas, and it’s time to start feeling the cheer, isn’t it? Isn’t this the rose candle Sunday? A little pink joy in the purple penitence? You come to church to get some good news, right? And then you get John?

Oddly enough, Luke comes to the end of this hellfire-and-brimstone sermon of John and summarizes by saying, So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people. Huh? Good news? About like hearing the doctor announce the lab report: Good news, the tumor turned out to be malignant! And yet what we get from John, unpolished though he may be as a preacher, is the unvarnished truth.

John was not ambitious to be the pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church. He lacked the sophistication. He never donned a white alb, with green vestments, and mounted the high pulpit of the glorious Gothic-style Duke Chapel the way I did a few months ago. When you preach in places like there and here, you mind your words. You try to tell the truth, you really do, but you use the “catch more flies with honey than vinegar” approach. John was full of spit and vinegar himself, and he would rather eat flies than just catch them. But John does want a merry Christmas for his hearers. He tells them how to get ready for the coming God, so that it will be songs of good cheer and not crying in their beer.

You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? John’s just getting warmed up, coddling his audience with a few jokes at the start. Right. He gets their attention right off, calling them snakes in the grass. These people were coming out to hear him preach. They were lining up for baptism, just the way he wanted, and the man doesn’t know success when he sees it. If he were really a Baptist preacher, he’d have counted heads as he put them under and bragged on Monday at the associational pastors’ conference about how many he’d dunked the day before. But John isn’t satisfied with ritual that doesn’t break the skin. Anyone can get baptized. The question is whether the Spirit soaks the soul, not the water the body.

Bear fruits worthy of repentance, he demands. On the surface this sounds a lot like getting saved by works and not by grace. Can’t wait for Jesus to correct John. Can’t wait for Paul to correct the Pharisees. Can’t wait for Luther to correct the Papists. Can’t wait for the Baptists to correct God! Well, you know what I mean — we want to make sure salvation is by grace alone. But John’s fruit language is not the same thing as works. You can be a bad man and do a little good now and then, but you cannot be a diseased tree on the inside of the bark and still produce delicious fruit. John is tearing the bark right off our souls and exposing them for what they are. He wants to get right down to the pulp of who we are. And he doesn’t want us relying on any false categories, like being children of Abraham or children of Baptists, any more than a palm tree that didn’t make good coconuts could feel safe just because it is still a palm tree after all. To bear fruits in keeping with repentance is not to act in such a way that you prove you are worthy of God’s grace but to prove that you have already received it. Fruits prove repentance the way daylight proves the sun or intimacy proves love.

One Advent our church in Mobile hosted the Mobile College rendition of Amahl and the Night Visitor. I greeted people afterward and thanked some of the night visitors for coming. One lady spoke for her two friends: We are not Baptists; we are Catholics. “Fellow Christians, though,” I replied in good ecumenical form. Well, Catholics, at least, she said with a grin. We’re trying to be Christians.

Sometimes I’d like to hear that language out of us. Well, Baptists, at least, but we’re trying to be Christians. We tend to come down on grace so strongly that we are in danger of using it the way some Jews were using Abraham for their identity. Sometimes when people come to see me inquiring about church membership, they tell me, Oh, I’ve been a Baptist all my life. Cradle roll on up. Just then I hear John the Baptist whisper to me: “Ask him, ‘So how are you doing about becoming a Christian?’”

John reaches down and grabs some rocks from the Jordan riverbed. God is able to raise up children from these stones. It comes off better in the Aramaic he spoke: From these ’abnayya God will make benayya. You can’t rely on good breeding. Well-bred racehorses can still come in last if they love the starting gate more than the finish line.

What then should we do? the people ask. John doesn’t mince words. He doesn’t tell them to let their conscience be their guides. He doesn’t say it doesn’t matter what they do as long as they are sincere and mean well. He gets specific. He tells everyone in the crowd: If you’ve got two coats, give one to one who has none. If you have food, share it with those who are hungry.

Last week the sermon ended with these words: If we would see the salvation of God, we must learn to look out for God by looking out for one another. Here we see how to do that. We look out for the coming God by looking around at those in need and looking out for them.

When Robert Hughes wrote to the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins asking for advice on how he as a skeptic might learn to believe, Hopkins wrote back two words: Give alms. There’s something about the doing of what is right by others that allows us to see the good news and believe it ourselves. Flannery O’Connor similarly said, in response to request for reasons to believe, that charity is beyond reason, [but] God can be known through charity. [Cited in Christian Century (Oct. 18, 2003): 6.] And the reason for that is that charity, love, generosity, grace, giving — whatever synonyms you choose — is the essential nature of God. When we do deeds that reflect the character of God, the character of God begins to settle in us.

When my daughter, Cameron, was 5, her mother asked her after Wednesday night Mission Friends what she had learned in there. We learned about Lottie Moon, she said. Now any present, or even, like us, former Southern Baptists, knows that little Lottie is the closest thing to a woman saint Baptists have had. She was Mother Teresa before Mother Teresa. She loved the Chinese people she served as a missionary more than her own life. Kim played along. And who was Lottie Moon? “Oh, she was this missionary lady who did a very bad thing,” Cameron replied. A bad thing? Kim asked, now puzzled. “Yes, Every day she made breakfast and lunch and dinner for her friends who were hungry, because she loved them very much. But then there wasn’t enough food left for her to eat, too, so she died.”

If that’s a bad thing, we could all do with doing a few more bad things in name of love, huh? In Baptist churches all over these days, we are taking up Christmas missions offerings. I miss having Lottie’s name associated with our global missions offering, but the Southern Baptists have franchised her, and she can now only raise money for them. Just what Lottie would have wanted, don’t you know?! The point is, even now we can do what John is demanding. Before we Christmas shop for all the people around us who need nothing we are out there buying them, we can give generously to those around us who need anything we can give to them. The gospel will make sense to the peoples of the world when they sense that we are people with a gospel worth believing in.

John gets even more specific. When the tax collectors came to him and asked what they could do, he told them to collect no more than they were owed and stop making a business out bleeding the poor dry. When soldiers ask what they can do, he says, be satisfied with your wages and don’t use your uniform to your own advantage. In other words, John prescribed fruits worthy of repentance that corresponded to the actual life each person lived. I don’t know what actual life you live, but you know.

Two friends opened a butcher shop together and prospered. An evangelist came to town and one of the partners went and got saved. He tried his best to persuade his friend to trust in Christ. Why won’t you become a Christian, Charlie, he asked. Listen, Lester, the other butcher replied, if I get religion, too, who’s going to weigh the meat? [Homiletics (December 2003): 61.]

The butcher gets it. But do we?

Lucy asks Charlie Brown, Do you think the world will come to an end in our time? Lucy: “I try not to think about such things.” Well, says Charlie, Now that I’ve brought it to your attention, what do you think? Lucy: “When things that I try not to think about are brought to my attention, I try not to think about them.” [Cited by Roger J. Gench in Lectionary Homiletics (Oct/Nov 2003): 66.]

So, now that I’ve brought it to your attention, what do you think? We don’t want to think about such things at Christmas time. But John stubbornly screams at us to pay attention and look around. If we look around and look out for those in need, though, we will surely get a good look at the coming God when the time comes.