For
the Psalm: Canticle 9 (Ecce, Deus); Zephaniah 3: 14–20; Luke 3: 7–18
This
is the homily given at St. John’s, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania by Fr. Gene Tucker
on Sunday, December 16, 2018.
“IF YOU WANT
TO LIVE, THERE’LL HAVE TO BE SOME CHANGES”
(Homily text: Luke 3: 7–18)
“Jess,
if you want to live, there’ll have to be some changes.” So said the doctor
early on a Sunday morning to my father, who’d spent the night in a hospital,
fighting for his life. He had had a massive heart attack, and his heart had
stopped, only to be restarted through the diligent efforts of the doctors,
nurses and staff. They’d succeed in getting his heart to beat, only to have it
stop again. Back and forth, over the space of three hours, this drama played
out. Finally, they succeeded.
You
see, my father’s life was firmly in the grip of two different addictions, which
were slowly destroying his life (which is why he had the heart attack that
precipitated the crisis in the first place). Those two addictions were also
making life miserable for my mother, who’d prayed that God would intervene in
some mighty way to redeem my father from his wayward ways. Her prayers worked,
in God’s good time.
“If
we want to live – truly live as God intends for us to live – then there’ll have
to be some changes…”
John
the Baptist’s message to the tax collectors, the soldiers and the onlookers who
had just come for baptism, could be characterized this way: If you want to live as God wants you to live,
then there’ll have to be some changes in your life and in your behaviors.
St,
Luke is the only one of the Gospel writers to pass along this interchange
between John the Baptist and his audience. We find this conversion nowhere
else.
Luke
includes these three groups for a specific reason, I believe. He addresses
three common behaviors at the time of the Baptist’s ministry, behaviors that
were common in the ancient world:
Failure to care for others: This is the first concern expressed: “Those
who have two cloaks (tunics), must share with someone who has none, and whoever
has food is to do likewise.” At the time of John the Baptist’s ministry – and
then with Jesus’ ministry, the common belief was that if a person was poor or
was in some other sort of need or distress, then it must be true that that
person is a terrible sinner who was being punished by God in some way or
another.
Robbery:
The second admonition goes to the tax collectors under the Roman occupation.
The commonplace practice was for a tax collector to be appointed by the Romans.
They were told how much to collect. But they were also allowed to take more
money than the tax that was owed, keeping the excess for themselves. It’s
obvious that such a system is fertile ground for abuse. Recall Jesus’
interchange with the chief tax collector Zacchaeus in Luke 19: 1 – 10. After
his encounter with Jesus, Zacchaeus tells the Lord that he will repay anyone he
had defrauded four times over.
Extortion:
The third group addressed are soldiers. In that day and time, it was common for
soldiers to use the threat of force to extort money from people. After all,
there were no consequences for such behavior from the soldiers’ superiors or
from the governing authorities. The victims of such scheme had no rights. But
it amounts to extortion and the threat – or use – of violence to take from
others.
If
we want to live, truly live, then there’ll have to be some changes in our
behaviors.
Of
the three groups’ behaviors that are addressed in today’s Gospel text, it is
the first one that will – most likely – affect us: We are most prone to fail to
care for those around us who are in need. Perhaps we even consider their lot to
be some sort of divine punishment, something they’ve brought upon themselves, so
therefore, it’s possible to slip into an attitude where we believe that they
deserve our disdain, but not our help.
Perhaps
our attitudes and our behaviors would change if we were to take the time to
remember how good God has been to us.
We
might begin with the process of baptism itself: Baptism is God’s great gift to
us, for it signifies God’s good will toward us, a good will that we cannot and
do not deserve. As we accept this gift and enter into the water, we die to our
old lives, and emerge to a new life in a new life just as Jesus did when He
rose from the grave on Easter Sunday morning. In that event, God tells us that
everything is going to be different from that day forward.
So
it must be for us. We emerge from the waters of baptism, marked as Christ’s own
forever. We emerge to be a new and changed people.
But
God’s goodness doesn’t stop at baptism. We would do well to remember and to
give thanks for God’s continuing goodness and mercy. We surely don’t deserve
any of these things, but God sends them our way, nonetheless.
Just
as we have been given to freely, let us also give to
others freely as an expression of God’s love for us.
AMEN.
