Get Ready!

By Bishop Brian Maas

But when [John the Baptizer] saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Matthew 3:7)

Good old John—forever winning friends and influencing people. Someone has said John’s insult would better bet translated, “you sons-of-snakes!” These highly religious types spend so much of their days ensuring they don’t let the wrong people into their groups, their worship, their community, their salvation. John won’t have any of it. They are truly offspring of serpents—of THE serpent, as are we all from time to time.

Remember THE serpent? The one who in the Garden said to Eve, “eat this, and you’ll be like God, knowing Good and Evil.” She and Adam lived in a creation in which everything was created Good (even Very Good) and nothing was evil. There was no division; neither good/evil, nor right/wrong, nor in/out, not even naked/clothed. It was all good. But then the serpent did his sales job and Eve and Adam ate, and the rest is history—human history, our history, the history of perpetual division and the unbelievable, murderous lengths we’ll go to in order to preserve it.

John calls them out, these holier-than-thou dividers-of-people. “Get ready!” he says. “Don’t pretend you’ve got all kinds of time left to change your community-dividing, people-excluding, wall-building ways! GET READY!” He goes on to say, “even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees.” The lumberjack has taken a coffee break, maybe gone for lunch—but no longer than that, or he’d have put the ax away. He just set it down. He’ll be back soon. And then the vengeance will come. “Bear fruit worthy of repentance,” so that you won’t be dead wood, ready for the fire.

Bear fruit, you who took from the Tree and began in that instant to sow the division (and suffering and death) that never end. Repent—turn things around and start producing fruit instead; fruit that will lead to reunion and healing and life.

Every Advent season, we hear John’s persistent (okay—cranky) call to Get Ready. Almost without thinking, we translate that to, “get ready for Christmas,” but it’s so much more than that. John’s cries, Advent’s themes, call us not to get ready for Christmas (though in moderation, there’s nothing wrong with that). Rather, they call us to get ready for Christ—for Jesus, the strange fruit of the worst tree, the one in whose body division becomes resolution; in whom God and humanity are inseparably joined, through whom every barrier is destroyed, by whom death is united to and swallowed up by life.

We can’t get ready for Christ—or for the celebration of his birth—by continuing to practice division, by believing it is our right to identify anyone who is not welcome, or by living as daughters- or sons-of-snakes. We GET READY when we bear fruits worthy of repentance—fruits worthy of change. We GET READY when we stop worrying about who might get in and start worrying instead about who’s not yet here. We GET READY when we understand that the gifts of Christmas aren’t just the infant Jesus, but the homeless birth, the marginalized shepherds, the soon-to-be-refugee parents, and the boundless participation God invites through them; an invitation so holy that even the angels can’t shut up about it.

Friends, this isn’t crankiness, it isn’t just persistence. It’s downright angelic. It’s a wild and woolly prophet so charged by the Good News of God’s grace that he doesn’t have the patience or the time to do more than kick people into gear. And even now that Good News is as charged, that grace is as powerful as ever it was. Believe it. Accept it.

Invite others to know it.

GET READY!