HOW TO DRAW A CHRISTMAS CROWD

							                   HOW TO DRAW A CHRISTMAS CROWD
                                     Matthew 3: 1-12
                                      Steve Lindsley
                                    December 9, 2007


        The signs of the season are all around us. Everywhere we turn, the red and
green have become more prevalent, the Christmas carols have gotten more frequent,
and the crowds ha ve gotten bigger. Crowds are kind of a necessary evil this time of
year. Which makes me wonder: what exactly draws a Christmas crowd these days?
        Well, you’ve got Santa at the mall – sitting in his throne-like chair, surrounded by
elves, some fake snow scattered about, and of course the digital camera setup ready to
snap pictures for $20 a pop. The closer one gets to the “big day,” the longer the line for
Santa becomes; children and parents all waiting to pay their respects to Old Saint Nick.
That’s a crowd.
        You can always find a good-sized crowd at the Mount Airy Christmas parade.
Last week I was walking up Main Street to meet the family and some friends in front of
the Thomas House for the parade. I was amazed at the number of cars and folks who
had already staked out their spot along the parade path, even a half-hour before the first
float. That was a pretty good Christmas crowd – although I must say, after watching the
parade go on for a solid hour and a half, I was inclined to wonder if the crowd in the
parade was bigger than the one watching it!
        Perhaps the biggest Christmas crowd of them all takes place long before
Christmas itself. I’m speaking of what we have come to know in our culture as “Black
Friday” – the Friday after Thanksgiving where the hardest of the hard-core rise at some
ridiculous hour to barge into stores and secure their bargains. According to one source
I found, the latest installment of this annual event brought out somewhere in the
neighborhood of 147 million people. Just to put that in perspective, that’s roughly the
equivalent of the entire populations of England, France and Spain combined.1 Now
that’s a Christmas crowd!
        None of this, though, should surprise us all that much. It’s easy to draw a
Christmas crowd when the payback are things like a one-on-one with the man in red
and white, or watching your friends on a float while acquiring a supply of candy that
would satisfy a small country, or securing the latest gizmos and gadgets at unbelievably
discounted prices. It’s easy to understand why you and I mark these things in our date
books, get the kids down early for naps, and set our alarms to go off at hours we’ve only
experienced previously as “PM.” We know why things like this draw huge crowds.
        The thing we don’t get is the kind of scene we find in our scripture today. We’re
not talking about Main Street or the comfy confines of a shopping mall. The “wilderness
of Judea” was the furthest thing from creature comforts – scorching hot in the day, frigid
cold at night; dry and dusty all the time. And it’s not Saint Nick or a helpful store
employee who greets us, but a thirty-something nomad named John. John the Baptist,
they called him. He’s standing out there, clothed in basically what amounted to a burlap
sack. His daily meals consist of things like grasshoppers and wild honey – pretty much
whatever he could find. Lord knows how long it had been since he had a bath or
brushed his teeth.


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         And not only that, but he’s got a bit of a mouth on him as well. With a booming
voice that surely projected across the plains of Palestine, ol’ John would rant and rave
about the world, what a messed-up place it was, and how someone was coming to fix it.
Prepare the way of the Lord, he’d shout at the top of his lungs, make his paths straight.
And that’s when he was being nice. Because when he got a little perturbed, he’d let
stuff fly that was far from flattering. Calling people a “brood of vipers” is not an ancient
way of saying “I love you.” John was a rugged nonconformist who had no qualms about
saying what was on his mind, no matter who it offended.
         It kind of reminds me of a guy I remember hanging out on the Wake Forest
campus my freshman year. He was an older fella, probably in his mid-40’s. He didn’t
look like a student, and he didn’t act like one either. He called himself some kind of
preacher. For a day or two in the spring, he stood out on the Quad, right in front of Wait
Chapel, and had lots to tell all of us. As I made my way from Davis dorm to Wingate
Hall underneath the Chapel for a math class, there he was in all of his glory, yelling and
pointing at us and taking great delight, it seemed, in telling us why we were going to
hell. Which I thought was interesting, because he knew none of us; and based on the
graphic content of what he suggested our sins were, he was making some pretty big
assumptions. I remember sitting down in that math class and everyone all abuzz about
the guy outside. And I felt sad, and even a tad embarrassed, claiming the same
Christianity he did.
         I often wonder what exactly that guy was trying to accomplish – that is, before the
campus police escorted him elsewhere. I mean, did he seriously want to “convert” us?
Or did he just want to tick us off? Either way, while he may have had a lot of passion
and could quote random scriptures at the drop of a hat, there was one thing he did not
have – and that was a crowd. No one gave him a moment of their time, other than
students passing by on their way to class and a few bold ones who stopped long
enough to respond with the same venom he was dishing out.
         For whatever reason, I think about this guy when I take time to imagine John the
Baptist – getting past the ease with which you and I tend to accept this renegade, this
radical into the Christmas story. The more we think about it, the more troublesome the
scene becomes for us. All signs seem to indicate that John was not a nice guy. He
was crass and abrasive and had zero problem with ruffling people’s feathers. But even
more than John being in the Christmas story, what really amazes me – floors me, in fact
– is that this guy somehow managed to draw a whale of a crowd:

 Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region
 along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their
                                        sins.

         How many people you think we’re talking about here? It’s a reasonable question.
I doubt it came close to the 147 million Black Friday shoppers a few weeks back, but
still, you have to figure it must’ve been a pretty decent group of folks to be noted in
scripture like this. Besides, even if we’re talking about a thousand or so, it’s still a
thousand more than we’d expect to come and listen to the likes of Renegade John.
         I don’t know, I’m just i ntrigued by this crowd: why do you think they came? Why
do you think a guy like John, with all his unpleasantness, still managed to “reel them



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in?” It’s hard for us to get our hands around. And maybe that’s because there are
some things about this scene that you and I, in our 21st century world, are not as quick
to recognize – insulated from them not only by thousands of years of history but a totally
different lot in life. Today we don’t see the quandary, the difficulty those Israelites faced
in their day and time. We don’t feel the wrath of the Roman Empire barreling down on
our shoulders, like an oppressive yoke that won’t go away. We can’t get our hands
around what it meant to live perpetually as a member of the lower class, never breaking
through the cycle of poverty. And most of all, we don’t understand the as-yet unfulfilled
promise of a Messiah who supposedly would deliver God’s people from their bondage.
        Perhaps those people who sat at John’s smelly feet two thousand years ago
were weary – weary of the way their lives were being lived; and so they welcomed with
open arms the call for radical change. Perhaps they were elated to know that there
really was a God who held them, and everyone, accountable for their conduct. Perhaps
they found a certain reassurance from this nomad that the world in which they lived was
not amoral; that morality was not reduced to a single command of “Thou shalt not get
caught.” With every word that passed from his lips, John declared a God who cared for
folks while also demanding accountability from them. And in a strange sort of way to be
confronted by such a holy God, even when that God is speaking through a
grasshopper-eating itinerant, even then it provided a strange sense of relief. Because
at the very least it was comforting for those threatened by what seemed like a
meaningless, haphazard world. Which I guess is why it’s always been called “good
news.” And good news – even news like this – seems to always have a way of
attracting a crowd.
        I wonder if you and I long for the same sort of thing in our own day and time.
What do you think? Do we have the same passion, the same yearning for news like
this? Or do we tire too easily of it? Sometimes it seems that way. It’s all too easy for
us to get wrapped up in our own lives, our own responsibilities. We like things that we
can count on; that we know will always be the way they are. We take great comfort in
our routines, and we’re not terribly fond of change. And while good news is certainly
good and bad news should be avoided at all cost, what we really prefer is no news –
because that means it’s the tried and true, no rocking the boat of life, getting us just
from one day to the very next.
        And then John the Baptist bursts onto the scene, and shocks us with his persona
and his message. Our senses are jolted from their dull slumber, and at first we’re
offended. But the more we listen, the more we find that something deep within us is
awakened. It stirs inside us, and we’re not sure what to make of it. Maybe it even
frightens us a little, because even early on we sense the inevitability of where it is
heading, and where it will take us if we go along for the ride.
        It takes us to a place where we long for the dull monotony of life to be replaced
by a bur ning passion for something different. Where we desire to see a broken world
mended; all mountains made low and all valleys raised up. Where we yearn for God,
like John, to come crashing into our lives and tell us not what we want to hear, but what
we need to hear. Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
        Do you see now why the crowds came? Do you see why they couldn’t keep
away from there, away from John, even if they tried? And do you see why, if we had
been there too, it would’ve been a wfully hard for us to walk away from the Good News



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and continue with our monotonous lives? So what brings us here this morning, to this
crowd in the sanctuary of First Presbyterian Church? Is it because we are assured that
things will stay the same, that nothing will change? Or are we brought here because
things are on the very cusp of radically changing, and we cannot wait another moment
for it to happen?
         I wonder sometimes if you and I find those moments when we are weary of our
regular lives; everything always so ordinary. We are tired of a world where we just get
through the day rather than celebrate it, where we work harder and play less, where we
are victims of our busy schedules and routines. And we are also tired of a world where
a single dad can’t afford to buy food for his four kids, where millions of people die every
day from diseases that are preventable, and where our leaders rule more by fear than
by promise. We long to come face to face with the extraordinary; with a God who is
alive and vibrant and cares enough to be born to us, to walk with us, to live with us, and
even to die with us.
         Maybe that, more than anything, is what brings us to this second Sunday in
Advent, but in a larger sense to this place every Sunday and every time we gather
together as God’s people. Because this world of ours is ready for some good news –
even if John the Baptist is the one sharing it. And unlike so much in our society today,
so much that is fake and fleeting and void of hope, this news is real and will last forever.
So let us proclaim the good news of the coming of God into our midst. Because that,
my friends, that is how you draw a Christmas crowd. Thanks be to God. AMEN.




1
    http://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/stories/2007/11/26/daily4.html, visited on 12.1.2007.




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