Luke 3

His followers realized there was no quick exit from the discomfort of his words.

His followers realized there was no quick exit from the discomfort of his words.

Our baptismal covenant is a beginning, not an ending.

When we resist the powers that oppress this world, we are baptized through fire.

Advent is also about our own coming and going, the ways we embody the reconstructive ways of the Lord.

The first step of repentance is telling the truth about ourselves.

To be wild is to be free, unbought and unbossed by the structures of power.

John the Baptist's world and ours

It's a great question to ask people. But not this person.

John is set ablaze. What about all the other characters in the Gospels?

About that baptism by fire

“If we can’t afford two boxes,” my grandmother said, “we can’t afford one.”

John the Baptist’s proclamation for a world of Tiberiuses and Trumps

It's Advent, and accusations against prominent men are shaking things up like a highway construction project in the wilderness.

When our collective symbols and stories no longer make sense in our reality, we question who we are. After exile and liberation, the ancient Israelites were so devastated that images of overwhelming waters and fire speak to them.

God loves everything that God made, and God loves you especially, and the only way you can avoid that love is by deliberately removing yourself from it. That is how I want to preach this Gospel on Advent 3. John the Baptist tells us that we can, in fact, separate ourselves from love, and describes some of the ways how.

In response to John’s insistence that the ax is at the root of the tree, poised to cut down trees that don’t bear good fruit, three groups ask, “If that’s so, how then shall we live?”

Luke's Gospel gives us some wondrous glimpses into the life of John the Baptist. We have the compelling story of how his father, Zechariah, heard he'd soon be a daddy, disbelieved that revelation, and spent the entire pregnancy unable to speak.

But when he is finally able to speak, he speaks!

The tension between the joy of the first three readings and the judgment of the Baptizer’s proclamation is theologically instructive. It presses us to hold the two together.