The third Sunday in Advent is known as Gaudete Sunday. Gaudete! Rejoice always, as the letter to the Philippians commands. Rejoice, you brood of vipers! With these and many other exhortations, John proclaimed the good news.

The people came to John looking for a way into the kingdom of heaven, looking for a way out of oppression, looking for a saviour. They asked him, So what should we do? 

We’ve talked about this before. Nearly ten years ago I preached right here: Take his advice to the tax collectors and soldiers: don’t exploit people. Don’t extort money. Do the right thing, even if others around you seem to be profiting from doing wrong. …. It’s how we know the world should work, how we know we should act, if we could only keep our heads, our consciences, God’s commandments, even in a cultural context that has a tendency to excuse a sliding scale of corruption. It’s as though a border patrol agent asked him, “What should we do?”, and he told them to treat asylum seekers as children of God, or a drug company CEO, and he told them to put healthy people ahead of inflated profits.

How is it that we are still talking about the same problems ten years later, or two thousand years after we allegedly repented of our addiction to violence and greed, our idolatry of money and power? And let’s not even think about the first time we talked through this gospel together, in the wake of devastating gun violence and grief. Has nothing changed? 

And yet, John believes in us. He believes that we can change. He exhorts us to bear fruits worthy of repentance, worthy of our baptism. He knows that we need help beyond water and words to do it; he also knows that Christ is coming, that the Holy Spirit has the power to transform our spirits as fire melts the hardest steel and splits the heart of stone. John is a prophet: he sees more than the surface, and he believes that this is good news.

Sometimes, rejoicing is resistance against a world that steals joy from children and sells it. Sometimes we look around and we wonder whether things will ever change. We have heard from Dr King that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, and we wonder how long, how long will it take? One of our local representatives, Shontel Brown, said a couple of years ago that the arc will take some bending from our end, that we need to pull on it. I can’t help thinking of the forge and the anvil, and the heat, light, and cooperative creativity it takes to bend the barrel of a gun into something less lethal, more life-giving. But it is possible.

John the baptizer would not have poured water on all of those people if he didn’t think that some difference could be made, that it wasn’t worth making a commitment, a covenant to do good, to give thanks, to rejoice in God and act as though God were in charge of our lives and our world, rather than waiting passively and helplessly, hopelessly for the Second Coming. Sometimes, rejoicing is resistance; repentance is rejoicing; believing, with John, that we can change, and that Christ can and will change us. Do you think that we have changed at all, in the past twelve years together?

John believes that we can change, and he begins not with what not to do, but with generosity. Share what you have, he says, don’t hold back from one another. Paul picks up the theme in his letter to the Philippians: 

First, give thanks. He goes on to write, Look for what is good, look for what is honourable, what is peaceable, what is just and right and true – keep on doing those things which you know show God’s love. For the God of peace is with you.

Keep on doing those things which you know show God’s love: Love God, love your neighbour, change the world, to borrow a tagline from the Diocese of Ohio. 

And, as the prophet Zephaniah says, it is God, in the end, who will rejoice over you: 

The Lord, your God, 
will rejoice over you with gladness,
will renew you with God’s love.

Rejoice.