The Sunday School’s annual pageant wonderfully illustrates the old saw “less is more.”  Star balloons tied to the little wrists of little cherubs; donkey ears, saint halos, angel wings, shepherd’s crooks. When they serve as props for our children the whole wonderful panoply has a remarkably uncanny ability to announce the power and hope and joy of Christmas. Who needs a fully costumed cast?

There is one character missing from the pageant though. Mrs. Harwood didn’t forget him. He’s never been in a pageant but plays a role in the advent of Jesus and his ministry. Their mothers were cousins which makes them second cousins. Nor will you find his likeness on a Hallmark card. The look on this man’s face could destroy the entire greeting card industry. It’s not by accident that he forces his way into Advent every year. He never gets an invitation. I suspect we hope he’ll get the message. Not show up. Leave us to our mistletoe and wassail.

Yes, I am talking about John the Baptist. This time of year, he drives the wrong way down the one way street of our self-indulgent culture. And he’s driving a big, new, shiny steamroller. Head lights blinding. Engine revving. Shifting gears, picking up speed.  First gear. John risks disturbing us and tells it like it is. “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” An unprecedented, curious salutation. Even among prophets. The men and women journeying to the wilderness to hear John were not wicked folks. They were regular worshippers: soldiers, bankers, merchants. And like our middle class malaise the folks pursuing John were unhappy not because of the failure of the system so much as its success. It is often those who, by the standards of the day, have “made it” who make the plaintive cry “is that all there is? Isn’t there more to life than this?”

And they sensed some impending doom. In Jesus’ day the fragile truce between the Roman occupation government and the religious leadership was about to collapse. People could feel it in the air. Like the sense we have that our economic boom may not last. So they were leaning on their identity as children of Abraham to save them. Bring them through whatever deluge might break forth. When John preaches his soul-searching message they instinctively respond. They know something isn’t right but they’re not sure what. So they cling to their Jewish heritage, the fact that they are God’s people, to exempt them from suffering.

But John knows we are masters at self-deception. Evil, says William Sloane Coffin, is a soul hiding from itself. And if the primary motive of evil is disguise, we should not be surprised, says Coffin, to find evil people in religious organizations. What better way to disguise one’s evil from oneself and from others than to wrap it up in piety? Become a visible believer. Show up at a revival. Tout your ancestors in the faith. But John squashes their argument. Faith cannot be passed from one generation to the next like a silver tea service or grandfather clock.

Picking up speed, John shifts into second gear. The message he preaches doesn’t take us away from the world, it places us back in the thick of things. I am not talking about technical skill so much as relational skill; doing the right thing in our relationships with others. There is another definition of evil. John Wesley said, “the doctrine of the devil is to do good when you feel like it.” But children need shoes in August. The homeless are cold in January. People are hungry in April. William Blake said: “he who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, the hypocrite, the flatterer.”

John says bear fruit that befits repentance. You see many of us want the good life but what is the good life? For some it means material success, marital stability, and a license to pursue the pleasures of this world. But that’s the treadmill John’s listeners were on. “I am not greedy,” one Ivy League graduate said, “I just want all I can get. Legally, of course.” One New Yorker cartoon pictures a Mayflower pilgrim saying to another upon arriving in Plymouth Harbor, “religious freedom is my immediate goal, but my long-range plan is to go into real estate.”  What does it mean to bear fruit that befits repentance? One colleague makes her son go to church because it has been for her a path to follow and light to see by. Most of the people I know, she says, are people with a deep sense of spirituality. People in community, who practice their faith… follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle. They are on the streets, or inside praying, writing letters, at shelters serving dinner.

“Whoever has two coats share with anyone who has one…whoever has food do likewise. Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you…do not extort, be satisfied with your wages.” Here we see the profound social implications of John’s message. In America we celebrate individualism and autonomy. The old African saying it takes village to raise a child was once true in America. But we have gotten away from that. Our loss of accountability and responsibility at first appeared to be the benefit of autonomy, but turns out to be, together with autonomy, a liability. John rolls right over the – if or when it feels good do it – approach to church and marriage and school and work. Rather he says find ways to make your families and churches and workplaces and neighborhoods places where people know they are loved and can depend on one another.

Finally, third gear. John crushes our false expectations for salvation from human saviors. Good as he was John was not the one. Yes, what he said was relevant and powerful and needed. But one is coming greater than I, he said, who will baptize you with fire and the Spirit. You see God wants all of us, all of our heart and mind and strength – like the Bible says and our new vision statement quotes. Nor is God content until we give such devotion and commitment. Each one of us here today is a work in progress. Not one of us in this room is ready for complete and total commitment to God. Something in us holds us back, is frightened by the idea of turning over one more stronghold of our lives over which we would prefer to be in control. Because if we gave that to God to make new we would change.

What would it take to let go, to become totally new even in those areas of our lives we are afraid to relinquish? John the Baptist says it will take the fire and Spirit of Christ. When John Wesley was converted from a ritualized going-through-the-motions-Anglican faith to a passion for serving the poorest of the poor he said that in that moment his heart was strangely warmed. The philosopher/mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote famously about his own conversion from half-past ten in the evening until half an hour after midnight in the year 1654: Fire, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob. Not of the philosophers and the learned. Certitude. Certitude. Emotion. Joy. Joy. Joy. Tears of Joy…my God…let me not be separated from thee forever.” Or the disciples on the road to Emmaus, walking with a stranger, knew that the stranger was Risen Christ because, they said, when he was with them, their hearts burned within them.

Thomas Merton said it like this: As a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun into a little burning knot of heat that can set fire to a dry leaf or a piece of paper, so the mystery of Christ in the Gospel concentrates the rays of God’s light and fire to a point that sets fire in the heart of a person.” What does a life on fire for God, for justice and freedom look like?  Chances are it will not look like John’s life – an austere survivalist reclusive existence. Rather it will appear, at least on the surface, much like the life you are now living. It will be a life that finds inspiration in the ordinary round of each day. A life that treats each moment like a single moment in time instead of a prelude to some distant moment. It affects the way you raise your children, what kind of neighbor you are, whether you regard the little interruptions at work as annoyances or opportunities. When we lose a sense of passion for life it is because we are numb to the particulars of each moment.

In one sense you need do little else other than stop, reflect, pray and be still. God’s light and fire magnified through the stories of Advent will set your heart to burning. And the breath of God will blow upon the spark and ignite your passion for life. Christmas can easily deteriorate into a six-week festival of consumption at the end of which we suffer the indigestion of knowing we have met neither our own needs nor those of anybody else. But John says pay attention to what really matters. Which, I’ve been saying can be an unsettling exercise. That’s why you won’t find him on greeting cards or in Christmas pageants. So maybe it’s time to review again pageant scripts we have been using over the years.

Amen.