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Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, the text for this morning comes from the Gospel reading. You may be seated. Consider your parish family, St. Paul. Consider the people who are sitting here with you and worshiping and receiving God’s gifts. More than half of you are not native Austinites. Horror of horrors. More than half of you did not grow up here at St. Paul. And close to half of you were not raised up in the church or were not baptized as an infant or confirmed as a youth, but rather as an adult. That’s a pretty diverse congregation, wouldn’t you say? It is quite unlike most rural congregations found in the Dakotas or Illinois or Wisconsin or Nebraska or Kansas.
And such a diverse group of people has God knit together not around the obvious sameness, but around the more powerful, less obvious sameness: the same faith. Enter John the Baptist. Now, there is a character worth noting. When he came sent from God, as the text said, he came to bear witness to the light. He did not draw people to his ascetic lifestyle. He did not say, “Y’all need to leave your house in the city. Come with me out into the desert where you can really live and serve God.” There are a lot of those people in the church who advocate a specific lifestyle rather than a faith, a specific way rather than the only way, truth and life.
And consider John the Baptizer’s dietary standard. Yeah, it was not the paleo diet. It was not the Atkins diet. It was not a vegan diet. It was completely unique. And he did not advocate that it is what is necessary for you because he did it. Not at all. He kept bearing witness to the light. And let’s talk about John the Baptizer’s clothing standards. There would have been a rush on the market of camel’s hair. There would have been a lot of camel to eat for supper in order to get the camel skins, in order to clothe the people so that everybody could look similar and be spiritual like John. No, the diversity that John brought out to himself, he brought out to himself in the wilderness; those people sent by the Pharisees, and he brought out to himself in the wilderness sinners. That diversity of people were brought out to hear.
And John did not advocate a diet, a clothing standard, or a lifestyle out in the wilderness, but advocated Christ, the light of the world. Interesting, because John did not lead them to a specific societal norm either. He did not say that those who follow the light have to be of Jewish background. He never said that those who follow the light have to be all sinners either. Totally unlike the Jews. He said all must repent and all must believe.
Now, there are a lot of reasons for John being where he was found. He was found out in the wilderness because his repentance was not an easy-going repentance for civilized sinners. No, his repentance was very much for savage sinners—sinners who would live a life that was markedly different on the outside from the rest of their peers. A life that you and I have been called to. No, not a life out into the wilderness, but a life in the wilderness. For this world is our wilderness; heaven is our home. And so God has called us through John’s preaching to live a life of repentance: that this world is not where we put all of our eggs.
That the things in this world are not what matters in life, but that light is what matters in life. Satan would have us think that this world is Disney World. “Don’t leave it because you’ll miss out on all the entertainment and fun.” Yes, indeed, that is Satan’s desire. But John’s preaching has called us out of this world—a Lutheran Christian sermon. And like the rest of our family, we have a need to repent. It is a lifestyle of repentance. It is a lifelong repentance.
And this world that John was calling the people to come into was not a Jewish world. It was a biblical world. We can argue all we want. Well, wait a minute. The Jews wrote the Bible, the Old Testament. Yes, but it was not a Jewish norm. The Pharisees were what Judaism has become. The impenitent in the wilderness were what Judaism had become. What John proclaimed was a Christianity that is not American either. You and I love our America. Some of us love our Texas more than our America sometimes. We love our country, and there is nothing wrong with that. But our Christianity is not American.
In fact, if you look around—and you have—you’ve heard, you’ve been exposed to American Christianity, and it’s markedly different. For the one thing that John proclaimed that sets up biblical Christianity in complete opposition to American Christianity, German Christianity, Scandinavian Christianity, Middle Eastern Christianity, African Christianity, Asian Christianity, what sets itself apart as different is that God chooses to work through and in his creation to bring about salvation. When God chose to enter this world, he did not enter this world as a spirit, but as flesh and bone. Born like Levi as a baby—helpless as Levi in his mother’s arms. And yet God, who sustained Mary’s life and Joseph’s life and your life and this world’s existence, chose to redeem the world through the means of flesh and blood.
Born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law. And what John was proclaiming, this biblical Christianity, which is not Jewish, he was in good favor with all the prophets who preceded him. From Moses all the way to the end. Because all preached that God always revealed himself through visible earthly means. How did he come to Moses? Burning bush. How did he lead the people of Israel? Pillar of cloud, pillar of fire. How did he bring healing for the serpents that bit the people? A bronze serpent on a staff. How did he show all of his people that they were his people? Circumcision. You can keep looking. You will find example after example.
This is the Christianity that John is proclaiming because he is proclaiming the Lamb of God in the flesh. Right? A little later on in John’s Gospel, he points to him and says, “Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world,” that flesh and blood joined with God can bring you the sacrifice of the perfect Lamb for your sins—not sins of civilized sinners, but sins of savage sinners, the kind that dwell in our parish, I presume. This biblical passage Christianity is truly otherworldly. That’s why John’s message was so radically different as he set off a part in the wilderness.
And yet his message was for all because that message spread from an entirely Middle Eastern culture to a more Eastern culture in India, present-day Iran when it first took off, into Europe. It was not tied to a culture. It was not tied to anything other than the common faith. That’s the beauty of this parish and of all Christianity. For we have in common with people in a totally different economic outlook than ours, a totally different upbringing than ours, a communistic government brought up or a dictatorship brought up, like in Haiti or in the former Soviet Union. Though they were brought up in a different governmental system, the same faith is proclaimed and the same faith is believed. That is what binds us together as a parish family.
That is what binds us together with the one holy Christian and apostolic church into which Levi was baptized as well as you. For in this desert wilderness, the only place that life is found is near water. And we are fed the bread from heaven. Along this path, in his very flesh and blood, as we move and are moved by God to our heavenly home. In the name of Jesus. Amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding. Keep your hearts and your minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting. Amen.
