December 9, 2012 | 4:00 p.m. | Second Sunday of Advent

“Jazz at Four” Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 3:1–6

The story I’m going to open with tonight is from the Victor Hugo novel Les Miserables. Most of us remember a couple of songs from the musical or the climax of the plot at the barricade, but something happens at the beginning of the story that opens the entire plot, and it sheds some light on the story about John the Baptist that we heard tonight.

Jean Valjean has been released from prison, where he spent many years for the petty theft of a loaf of bread. Released with nothing but the clothes on his back, branded as a criminal, he finds a place to spend the night through the goodness of a bishop who welcomes him into his cottage. Late at night, Valjean awakens, and in the home of the priest is a valuable set of silver. Tempted and desperate, believing himself to be the criminal prison told him that he was, the impoverished man takes the silver, sneaks it into his bag, and sets off into the night.

Marked as a criminal, unclean and unshaven, Jean Valjean is stopped by the police as he sneaks through the night. He has been profiled by the law, and the police are right. Discovering the stolen silver in his bag, they drag the him back to the parish house and awaken the bishop. Answering the door, the priest appears unsurprised, and he takes the only silver left in the house, and handing it to the thief, the priest sets the man free when he declares in the presence of the police, “Jean Valjean, you have forgotten your candlesticks.”

Then

“the bishop approached him and said, in a low voice, ‘Do not forget, ever, that you have promised me to use this silver to become an honest man.’ Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of any such promise, stood dumbfounded. The bishop had stressed these words as he spoke them. He continued solemnly, ‘Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul I am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God!’”

That act of pure grace is the moment that changes Jean Valjean’s life. His perception that he could be nothing but a criminal is transformed by the good news that he is free. The gift transforms him. He starts an honest life, opens a business, adopts the orphaned daughter of a prostitute, and becomes a man of great generosity and integrity, a model of the idea that change is possible—and that is really the message of Hugo’s book.

The word for this is redemption. Valjean has been redeemed; he has changed his life. And the change came about not in the time when he was punished for his crime, but when he was given the gift of forgiveness and was invited to start over. Because Valjean is redeemed, his life becomes a model of a similar word: repentance. Repentance, which means turning away from times in our lives when we have not been our best selves and turning toward something better. Repentance is not essentially about guilt; it is about a desire to live a better life.

In today’s scripture lesson, we meet John the Baptist, who is talking about repentance. I told you the story of Jean Valjean before telling you this one so that you will notice something: John the Baptist lives a different kind of life, and he is calling other people to change their lives, to turn aside, to repent. But importantly, John is not being punished, nor is he seeking to punish anyone else. He has been given a gift: he hears the word of God; he hears good news, and then he goes out to speak to other people about forgiveness—and about repentance. Listen to part of the reading again: “The word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” The word of God comes; the word has to do with forgiveness given; and John is compelled to talk about repentance.

John Calvin, the father of Presbyterian thought, wrote about this passage; he noted, “John does not say, ‘Repent, ye, and in this way the kingdom of heaven will afterwards be at hand’; he first brings forward the grace of God, and then exhorts men to repent. Hence it is evident, that the foundation of repentance is the mercy of God, by which he restores the lost.”

A more modern theologian, Gerharde Forde, said it another way: This is not an if-then; it’s a because-therefore. Repentance is not about changing our lives because of the fear of what may or may not happen. It is not about thinking “if I don’t change, then God will not love me.” It is about knowing that because we have been offered God’s forgiveness already, therefore we can think of nothing more than becoming more of what God wants us to be.

The difficulty with this kind of thinking is that it is so incredibly contrary to the way we have been conditioned to think. Most of our experiences with work or school or relationships are based on getting what we deserve. We are graded and evaluated, promoted or fired, loved by other people or left alone, and most of the time it is because of our performance or our failure to perform.

The dominant metaphor of our culture is the if-then approach to living; it even creeps into our preparations for Christmas. John Vest told me this week about a horrible innovation in childrearing that appeared this year called an “Elf on a Shelf.” This little character, this helper of Santa Claus, is to be placed in a child’s room and moved around from place to place as a reminder to your child that “you better be good if you want any presents because you are being watched, and if you mess up, there will be no presents.” Is this the best we can do to teach our children how to live rightly?

We live in a world where the loudest stories in our news are of the Eliot Spitzers and Ina Drews and David Petraeuses of the world. For most of us, life isn’t like that; maybe we haven’t made such public mistakes or fallen quite so far, but the stories run week after week because they are gripping to us because of what is shared: the fear of the if-then world in which we live, the one that promises to find out your mistakes and punish you, the one that threatens that you may not have a fresh start.

That is why it is so vitally important for us to remember that this is not the way that God has laid out for us. God does not choose to motivate us to change through an if-then method of frightening us because of our sins. God works through a because-therefore mentality, forgiving us and setting us free so that we can be the people we always hoped we would be. The foundation of repentance is the mercy of God. That’s how God seeks and saves the lost.

The idea that God does not want to hold our sins over our heads may seem naïve or disconnected from real life, so I want to make one more point about today’s reading. I often feel badly when there are a lot of lengthy, unfamiliar names for our readers in worship to deal with in the scripture lesson: at the beginning of today’s reading, Clyde had no fewer than seven of them. But I didn’t spare Clyde any of that trouble by shortening the reading and cutting out those first few verses because there is something very important going on in the introduction to today’s lesson:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the world of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. (Luke 3:1–2)

Tom Long, who preached on this same passage earlier today, suggested that this is like saying, “In the second term of Barack Obama, when Mitt Romney had been the Republican nominee and Hilary Clinton was Secretary of State; when Rahm Emmanuel was Mayor of Chicago, and Calum MacLeod Executive Associate Pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church, on the afternoon when Edwin Estevez was liturgist, the Lucy Smith Quartet played Dave Brubeck and Clyde Yancy read scripture, and Carl Ehmann sat in the second row, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah, and he preached repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

Luke includes these names to remind you that God’s way of repentance happened among real people who lived in a real place. God’s way of repentance is not a hypothetical that never really happens; it is not a fairy tale about which we should think, “Well, isn’t that nice, but in the real world it’s all about payback.” John, the son of Zechariah, went out into the wilderness with the word of God in his heart, sharing with others a word of repentance and the forgiveness of sins. He expected his people to share it with others, and he expects the same of us.

If you are lucky, as I have been, you have had people in your life who have shared such a message with you. Perhaps it was a parent or a boss or a friend; perhaps it was a complete stranger. Many of us—though it doesn’t happen all the time—have had someone who knew we had not been perfect forgive us and inspire us to change our lives for the better. If you have had this happen to you, be thankful. If you have not, trust me when I tell you that it has happened to me and to others I have known, and do me a favor: go out into the world and in some way, whether large or small, extend that grace to someone else so that they will have the opportunity to repent, to turn away from something negative in their lives and toward something better that awaits them.

To be able to say to another “Jean Valjean, you have forgotten your candlesticks” is to show the repentance God opens to us. This repentance is how God seeks and saves the lost. And it is how we prepare ourselves for the coming of Christ. Amen.