December 7, 2025 - Second Sunday of Advent: John Was Wrong

December 7, 2025  Second Sunday in Advent
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Mark 1:1-8
“John was Wrong”
Douglas T. King  

John was wrong.  John was wrong.  John was wrong.  Now, I love John the Baptist.  I respect John the Baptist.  He is fiercer than I am.  He is more faithful than I am.  He is a chosen prophet of God.  If there were some laddered hierarchy of people who have sought to serve the Lord (and thank God there isn’t) I would not even be able to look up high enough to see John gnawing on his lunch of locusts.  But he was wrong.  

God bless him he did get so much right.  In the Gospel of Matthew he was right to call out the religious leaders of his day as hypocrites (in defense of religious leaders of every generation, it is awfully hard not to be).  He was right to announce that one much greater than he was on the way.  He was right to tell us that we would be offered a baptism of the Holy Spirit.

But he was also wrong.  When he proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, he was wrong.  The   grammatical intent is a bit fuzzy.  But if he had in his fevered, faithful mind some temporal and causal relationship between repentance and forgiveness, he was wrong.  If you repent, then you will be forgiven.  It sounds good.  It is a generous yet reasonable proposition.  It is certainly what we hope to receive from each other.  If I slept in this morning and did not show up for worship and Melissa had to climb into the pulpit with five minutes notice and fill in for me there would be an uncomfortable conversation at some point.  I would come in with my head hung low and apologize for messing up.  I would hope that in response to my repentance she would offer me forgiveness, and if she did I would be grateful for her graciousness.  

But if John the Baptist is under some illusion that the one who is to come, Jesus the Christ, is coming with some sort of similar offer for us, he is wrong.  We repent not to be forgiven but because we have already been forgiven.

Of course I am being a little facetiously hard on John.  He was called to prepare for the messiah’s arrival.  This is neither a small nor a straightforward task.  John is a prophet, called and inspired by God but he is also a mortal man with limited understanding of things divine.  When he looked around the world about to receive the messiah into its midst I am sure he was saddened and even appalled at what a mess we had made of things.  What else could he do but send up a warning flare?  He started screaming at us.  Hey people, God is on the way and we better shape up!  We cannot let the divine walk around down here and see what a sorry bunch of unrepentant sinners we are!”  

If we are about to receive this amazing, immeasurable gift of God’s saving presence among us we better be ready with a gift of our own.  A life of true repentance would be the best thing we could offer.  

This time of year there is a certain amount of reciprocal gift anxiety.  It is wonderful that in this season we exchange tangible tokens of affection for each other.  But there is always that risk.  I think you know the one I am talking about.  When you casually exchange gifts with that new friend of yours and you give them a five-dollar gift certificate to Kaldi’s and their gift to you comes in a light blue box from Tiffany.

There is an episode of the situation comedy “The Big Bang Theory” in which the nerdy and poorly socially adjusted character, Sheldon Cooper, is in a panic over reciprocal gift anxiety.  In preparation for receiving a gift from his neighbor, Penny, he goes to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, or some such store, and purchases absolutely every size gift basket they carry.  His strategy is that first he will open the gift she gives him and then go to his room to retrieve a reciprocal gift that is an appropriate match to what he has received.  Penny ends up giving him a napkin used by Leonard Nimoy who played Spock on Star Trek.  Upon receiving this priceless nerd gift he nearly has a breakdown.  He runs to his room in a fevered frenzy and keeps dragging out gift basket after gift basket until they are piled up all over the room, in the hopes of somehow providing an equivalent gift.

This Penny and Sheldon interaction reveals an important element in the timing of all of this.  Just as Sheldon has received Penny’s gift before he has given her anything, so we have already received God’s grace.  We do not repent to receive forgiveness, we repent in grateful response to already being forgiven.

Sheldon Cooper and John the Baptist are in a similar fevered place.  They see this amazing gift and are doing their frenzied best to respond in some appropriately reciprocal way.  Of course the stakes are very different.  Sheldon is anxious over some fan memento he has received, while John is worked up over the fate of our collective existence which he believes is yet to be determined.  In Sheldon’s case he does not want to feel like he owes anybody anything.  And John’s concern is not dissimilar.  

For time immemorial, humanity has sought to have our relationship with the divine be transactional.  If we sacrifice these animals to God perhaps we will be blessed with a fertile crop.  If we pray some extra prayers maybe God will bless us with prosperity.  If God is going to show up in human form to reconcile us and offer us eternal life we sure as heck better have some gift wrapped and ready to offer before God arrives.

But here is the reality, there is no amount of repenting we can do to earn this gift brought to us in Jesus Christ.  We can stack up the gift baskets from here to the arch and we will not even make a dent in our attempt to reciprocate.  Jesus Christ is coming to forgive our every shortcoming and mistake; to wipe clean our every regretful action; to heal our every wound and mend every place within us that is torn; to love us unconditionally; to fix all that is broken within us as individuals and as a society; to welcome us into the very arms of God and promise us eternal life.  

We call Advent a season of preparation but how can we prepare for that?  We are deeply blessed that our relationship with God is not one of reciprocity.  In the book of Romans Paul tells us that “God proves God’s love for us in that while we were sinners Christ died for us.”  Paul does not say that Jesus is born and then dies for repentant sinners.  He dies for every last run of the mill sinner, including you and me.  God does not wait to receive some gift basket of repentance before showing up in our midst.  God just shows up and joins us on the journey of our lives.  God walks beside us and loves us in all our imperfection.
 
The scandal of this season is that we don’t deserve any of it.  We have yet to do anything to earn it. We will never do enough to earn it.  You don’t deserve it.  I certainly don’t deserve it.  Although the choir will argue with me about this, even David doesn’t deserve it.  God taking human form, sharing in our suffering, and offering us unconditional love?  There is nothing we can do to deserve that or prepare for it in any quid pro quo sort of way.
 
John, you can yell at us all you like, and Lord knows we need it, to call us out and push us to repent.  But there is nothing we can do to adequately prepare to receive the grace being offered to us.

As I read the news every evening I am heartbroken over the brokenness to be found in our world.  Just like in John’s time, we are so completely unprepared to welcome the Prince of Peace.  And we are so desperately in need of the arrival of the Prince of Peace.  I thank God Christ is on the way.  

So what can we do in this Advent season?  I suggest we take a lesson from the very youngest of our children.  The very littlest ones do not quite yet get this idea that somehow Santa is rewarding them with presents because they are good.  They just find themselves in utter awe, delight, and wide-eyed wonder by what is brought before them.  In this season let us recognize the enormity of the gift given to us, priceless beyond the means of any payment on our part.  Let this joyful revelation find a home within us that we too might be filled with awe, delight, and wide-eyed wonder.  And let us respond with lives of gratitude; lives of joyful repentance; lives of service to others; lives that participate in healing all that divides us.  

We are in the process of once again receiving a gift beyond measure, the Prince of Peace.  Whether we are ready or not, he is coming.  

Thanks be to God for that.  Amen.