Day 363 - Our Greatest Joy

A Sermon delivered at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy Daisy, TN*
OT Reading: Isaiah 11:1-10
NT Reading: Matthew 3:1-12

I have been thinking a lot lately about the people in the world who do such evil things that we suspect they are beyond hope. It is virtually impossible for us not to judge them; but what joy do I find in their judgment that rests with God. We know each of us holds the desires of sin within our soul and that is why Jesus came into the world to redeem and sanctify us in the refiner’s fire, to burn away that conviction of sin. That fire is our Christian zeal inspired by the Holy Spirit. It guides us to strive for righteousness and faith that sloughs from us into the fire the chaff of sin.

Last week I talked about the street preacher who has been haranguing everybody down at UTC. Today I read the diatribe of John the Baptist against the Sadducees and Pharisees and have this sermon with the title “ Our greatest Joy.”  You may wonder exactly what joy I fdind in judgment, have I changed my mind about the street preacher, or what am I thinking?

 I haven’t changed my mind. What I do realize is the perspective of John the Baptist, Isaiah and Jesus are quite related an there is joy in judgment.

This reading in Isaiah, like the one last week, is really a promise of joy.  Leopards sleeping with goats, wolves living with lambs, children able to put their hands in snake pits with no harm are really an amazing, if not preposterous images, not to mention all Isaiah’s talk about the promise of unmiversal peace and love of God by every nation. The greatest joy in the passage is the promise of justice in judgment. Verse 3 and 4 say that our new King will not judge by appearances or hearsay, but will bring justice that honors the faithful who find joy in obeying the Lord.

Isaiah of Amoz - the real prophet Isaiah wrote this part of Isaiah (we think) in a time of great fear and uncertainty. Assyria and Babylon, the tools of God, had defeated Israel and were knocking on the door of Judah. In spite of this imminent doom, Isaiah is spreading a positive message of hope that someday a King from David’s lineage will come to judge the world with God’s justice.

Last week we read another almost verbatim promise of Isaiah (from chapter 2) that promised universal worship in the Temple of Zion, or Jerusalem.  I noted that when Ezra and Nehemiah returned from Babylon to rebuilt the Temple but also brought dissention and pain. They refused to allow gentiles and even Hebrews who had married gentiles to worship unless they abandoned their gentile families. And so, this universal justice by God promised through Isaiah, like the promise of universal access to Zion, has yet to be fulfilled.

But the heart of the message permeating the book of Isaiah is “God will protect his people.” Verse 9 reads, “Just as the water fills the sea, the land will be filled with people who know and honor the Lord.”

An again, like last week, we have a New Testament reading that sounds far harsher than Isaiah. It throws cold water on our party. John the Baptist is roaming the wilderness outside the cities preaching and urging people to turn away from sin and to the Lord. The people respond to John and stream into the countryside so that John may baptize them in the Jordan River as a sign of their repentance. John gives special, negative attention only to the Sadducees and Pharisees who are coming to be baptized, perhaps because they are active instruments of Rome that suppress the people and degrade the Temple.  John sees the hypocrisy in their desire for baptism. He and Jesus use the same famous invective, they are a "brood of vipers," the snakes that shall not harm the children who place their hands in the snake’s pit as Isaiah says.

Now our street preacher, bless her heart, will point to John the Baptist and say, “See, this is the way we are supposed to preach the Word. We call out those sinners and condemn them for their sin.” But does she know the Sadducees and Pharisees have special place in the religious life of the Hebrews? They are the religious and lay leaders of the Temple whose duty is to intercede for the people and bring them closer to God.

John knows they lord their power over the people and curry favor with Rome.  John is calling on all Hebrews to repent but knows the Sadducees and Pharisees are trying to keep both sides of the bread buttered with this baptism thing, keep the people happy but serve Rome. We remember when Jesus asked the Sadducees whether John’s baptism was sent by God or man that they feared to answer. If they said by man, they anger the people against them who believe John was sent by God as a prophet and will be accused on not believing God. If they yes, they will be asked why don't you obey God, or they encourage violence against them by Rome for inciting and possible accusation of rebellion if they say he was sent by a God. So they say nothing. (Luke 20:1-7)

John actually repeats the promise of Isaiah with so much emphasis on the responsibility of the sinner that any the upbeat message is lost in words like, “repent because someone mightier than I is coming to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire,”… unless you remember when Jesus was talking about fire and baptism as began his travel from Galilee to Jerusalem in Luke (12:49-50).  Jesus lamented, “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” We talked about this passage as an example of Jewish hyperbole. But the truth in this statement about our own purification is very clear. Jesus knows his purpose is the salvation of humankind. He is ready and eager as God-incarnate, and perhaps as the human Jesus to get it done and over with. “How I wish it were already kindled?” Let’s reword it this way: “How much I love you all and how much your weakness to sin cuts my heart. My greatest joy is to bring you into my fold by purifying you with the Holy Spirit. I want it so badly I wish it were already done!”

That is what Jesus tells us… That is what John the Baptist points to when he says, “Someone is coming to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

You may also recall that I talked about the refiner’s fire. Artisans burned silver or copper-bearing metal ore to reduce them to the metal and remove the oxides and impurities so they are malleable. To use the refiner’s fire fundamentally means to purify.

I’m sure you have visited Copper Hill, TN. When I was a young boy my Dad once took us up to visit Ducktown Basin.  It was quite a sight.. I still recall all the barren red soil as far as you could see, There was not a tree in sight. Not only did they cut down every tree in sight to burn and purify the ore, when they fired the copper they released sulfur dioxide that formed sulfuric acid with rain. I imagine where ever the Lord does his purifying with all the burnt sin around must look like Ducktown Basin did then.

In the same way, the heart of the crop is the grain for the farmer. If one is to get grain to make flour, you have to get rid of the useless husk or chaff else you have a lot of useless fiber. The whole process of threshing is to purify the grain much like the firing process is way to purify the metal. The joy is being purified of sin.

Nonetheless, to our modern ears John the Baptist sounds harsh compared to Isaiah. The image of a purifying fire and John attacking of the Sadducees and Pharisees almost forces our modern mind to think of fire as punishment. We overlook the positive in verse 6 where John is calling the people to the wilderness in repentance seeking baptism.

John the Baptist probably got his ideas about baptism from his community of origin that created the Dead Sea Scrolls. You may have heard about the Dead Sea Scrolls. They were the Old Testament Scriptures preserved by the community of religious believers called Essenes. The Essenes lived a very rigorous and challenging religious life as penitent, professing Jews. Scholars believe John was a member of this community and his use of baptism was a sign of purification, fully in agreement with the way Essenes understood baptism.

This leads me to the point I want to make with the title of my sermon, “Our Greatest Joy.”

Isaiah talks of this new king in verse 3 saying, “His greatest joy will be to obey the Lord.” Isaiah talks about punishment and pain almost an afterthought. All the emphasis is on the promise of our greatest joy, that “God will take care of his people,” and, as “water fills the sea the land will be filled with people who know and honor him.”

Isaiah reserves judgment and punishment to those who do not follow the King. He calls them criminals. Not only do they not treat the poor and needy with justice, they do not treat everyone with fairness and justice.

We can find a similar message in John’s talk in Matthew. John says (v10-12), “Those who repent or bear good fruit gain justice.”

I started this sermon wondering about joy. Would it be a blessing to be able to know those who truly repent, those who gain God’s blessing, and those who are threatened with the axe at their root because they do not repent, as John says. I believe it would be a painful burden to know those who face such punishment for two reasons. The first reason is that we are not God.  I do not think we could suffer the knowledge of knowing who is fated to miss the Kingdom of God as the resident evil and who is not.

The second reason harkens to the image of the grain and the chaff. From Adam until now we all suffer from mortal sin. Each one of us carries the sin of false idols. We loathe some of our neighbor and love others. We know that kind of behavior if judged sends us to perdition. We love those who love us, not those who hate us… It is an old story.

As we have heard several times, Paul made our situation very clear. We know the right thing to do but we almost always do the wrong thing. We know how close we walk to the edge. It is the reason for our repentance.

The Good News is salvation comes to those who believe and have faith. If God has reckoned the faithful righteous, then the duty of our life really depends only on doing one thing, glorifying God. The only way we can glorify God is constantly to work to refine our self; to let the Holy Spirit rub the chaff of sin from us that is going to be burned in the fire that never goes out.

We call that process of refining our sanctification. It is the continuing, life-long process of every faithful Christian who works day-by-day to lose the old ways of sin and grow closer to God.

This is really the heart of our greatest joy. What better joy can we as we enter the Christmas Advent season than to know we are waiting for Christ with His message of the Kingdom of God?

That message is a double-edged sword. It is it a dire prediction of death only for those who reject faith. The negligent find the hard edge of judgment but those who believe know that the greatest joy is real, God will take care of his children.

I can paraphrase the greatest joy  both Isaiah and Matthew proclaim:

The King of the Kingdom of God will come from the line of David.

The king will judge us all fairly and honestly and we will know peace.

There will be as many of us as there are stars in the sky.

You ask, if we cannot make the blessing of righteous how may we achieve this blessing. As God did with Abraham, Jesus shall do with the faithful.

He shall reckon as righteous those who thirst for righteousness and bless them with salvation. They shall be purified by the fire of the Holy Spirit and shall suffer no harm in his house.

Are you on board this freedom train?

For the faithful, this is our greatest joy.  

Merry Christmas. 

Amen

*Note: All Scripture is New Revised Standard Version, and the links are to the Oremus Bible Browser. I often draw on resources found at the url for "The Text This Week: http://www.textweek.com. The author does a wonderful job ob connecting many resources and opinions on the lectionary text for the week. Ideas for the children's lesson can also be found at this link.