Sunday, December 7, 2025
Matthew 3:1-12
Stephen was the speaker at a small conference I once attended. He was a clean cut, average looking guy, middle aged at the time. He told this story about an earlier time in his life to set the stage for talking about how to draw new members to church. He told us his personal story of his entry to the church. Stephen didn’t grow up in the church and chose the faith as a young adult.
He said that in the 1960’s he married quite young and he and his wife ventured into that “living off of the land” trend of the time. They had a baby early in the marriage and when the child was still in arms, they moved to a small town in Alabama. They got a little house and set up a vegetable garden and studied herbology and canned for the winter and lived, for the most part, off of their 1/4 acre of land.
Stephen’s wife had a loom and he was working on his carpentry skills while finishing his PhD dissertation. They wore natural clothes made only from 100% cotton or wool and they both wore their hair really long. He also wore a full beard which accented his blue eyes and helped protect his fair skin.
After some time, the couple, who had never been to church, decided to check out the local Baptist church. They were swamped with welcome on their first Sunday. They enjoyed all the attention, enjoyed the service and happily stayed for coffee hour.
At coffee hour, a small group of ladies approached them with some suggestions of how to get involved in their church. You see, it was the third Sunday of Lent and they still didn’t have someone to play Jesus for their passion play on Palm Sunday. And, well Stephen looked just like Jesus to them with all that hair, beard and blue eyes. Not to mention the sandals.
And so, Stephen was type cast into the role of Jesus and on his fourth time ever going to church he found himself in white robes, riding an actual, real donkey down the aisle. He didn’t say if his wife and child played Mary and the baby Jesus.
After he told us this story years later, one of the comments he made was the old adage that “perhaps it’s not who you are but who you look like that matters.” This later short haired and clean shaven Stephen challenged us to spend some time pondering the ways we stereotype each other, especially newcomers.
I think in many ways we have stereotyped John the Baptist. We focus on what we imagine he looked like and all we see is a crazy, homeless guy who wears weird clothes and eats bug and talks loudly of radical ideas. We have trouble seeing him as the prophet who came to prepare the way of the Messiah.
One writer imagining this said that “if John the Baptist were a member of (my) family, he’d be that loud uncle you invite to holiday gatherings with the secret hope that he’ll decline.”
But if you got to know John, you’d quickly realize something important about the man: he was authentic. John was not radical for radical’s sake - he didn’t do these things for shock value or to garner attention from others. John lived differently than everyone else because, unlike everyone else, his single mission was made clear from the moment of his birth.
You remember the birth of John the Baptist, when his father Zechariah was struck dumb because he doubted Gabriel’s announcement that John would be born to his aging parents (Luke 1). You remember the part of the story when Mary visited John’s mother Elizabeth while both were expecting, Elizabeth much further along said that her child, John leapt in her womb upon encountering the Blessed Virgin Mary and then Mary sang the Magnificat. You remember the story of when Jesus was baptized by John and the voice from heaven came down pronouncing this Jesus as the messiah “of whom I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:13–17; Mark 1:9–11; Luke 3:21–23)
But when we read this passage about John the Baptist, we just see him as crazy.
Today’s world seems crazy and we’re apt to call everyone who doesn’t agree with us, “crazy”. I think that happens all the time and is a phenomenon that has grown in recent years.
The experience of the world as crazy comes from fear. But it is not so much that we are afraid of the violence we see in the news. I think we are more afraid of losing the human connections that have always guided us. We need leadership. We need guidance on the path to the truth which we seek, which we long for. And we need to learn to lead each other. To sanity. To get on this better path, we need to ponder why we see John the Baptist as crazy.
The gospel story, of how God became one of us in Jesus, has some really weird twists and turns like birthing a baby in a stable and the innocent King crucified as a criminal not to mention that coming back to life part. But the prophet who comes to foretell all of this, the greatest prophesy of all time, is living in the wild. He is hairy and dirty and wearing animal skins like some neanderthal and living on bugs and honey!
He seems crazy!
Why wouldn’t God send somebody posh and chic? Maybe someone more approachable.
But crowds of people flocked to the river to be baptized by John. I wonder how they took him? He seems scary and rough to us. Yet this is the the one who guided the seekers of truth and peace to come to the river, repent and get ready for Jesus. How did they come to trust him? How did they come to follow him?
In the introduction to his book, “Crazy Christians. A Call to Follow Jesus,” Michael Curry opened with a quote from his high school days when he worked with Senator Robert Kennedy. In an oft quoted speech, Kennedy, who was actually quoting George Bernard Shaw, talked about dreaming.
Some men see things as they are and ask, why? I dream things that never were and ask, why not?
Why not?
Why not a world where no child will ever go to bed hungry again?
Why not a world in which poverty is truly history, a thing of the past?
Why not a world in which every person is treated and valued as a child of God?
Why not a world where we lay down our swords and shields, down by the riverside, to study war no more?
Why not a world reconciled to our God and to each other as children of God and brothers and sisters of one another?
Why not a world that looks less like the nightmare of our human devising and more like the dream of God’s creating?
Why not?
We who would be disciples of Jesus are people who have made a commitment to follow his teachings, his manner of life, and the loving and liberating reality of his Spirit in the direction of God’s great “why not,” in the direction of God’s dream. Of course, people in the days of Jesus thought he was crazy. And people who dare to live the way of Jesus in our own time will also be called crazy.
Michael Curry’s definition of “crazy” is the courage to step outside of the oppressive establishment, the destructive ways of the world and into a realm of trust and of quiet sanctity where we can truly listen to and hear the call of the Holy Spirit to do amazing and possible actions of change.
A colleague had a strange experience one Sunday morning. This story happened here in Bristol and I have told it often all across the country.
They had an 8:00 service at his church which had a sanctuary similar to this one except it had the choir stalls up here in front of the altar. One morning, at the 8:00 service their one adult acolyte had processed down the aisle in silence, set the cross in its place and returned to the back while the pastor started the prayers alone from behind the altar facing the congregation. There was no music at that service.
A few late comers always seem to straggle in about this time so he didn’t notice the stranger, the vagrant looking guy who was coming down the aisle. The ushers guessed he wanted to sit on the front pew, but he kept going, past the first pew, up the stairs, slowly, intentionally, through the empty choir stalls, toward the altar, toward the pastor.
It wasn’t until this fella was just a few feet away that the pastor even noticed him. He was praying in orans position and reading the prayers out of the altar book, like this, and when he looked up he came face to face with, well, “crazy.”
As the stranger approached the pastor at the altar he reached with his right hand across to his left hip at the waist band of his jeans.
When I heard this story I wanted to yell “hit the deck!” at this point. “Jump behind the altar or something! Seek safety!” But that didn’t occur to this pastor. He just kept praying the opening prayers.
The man did not pull out a weapon. Instead, he pulled up his t-shirt and showed the pastor a scar on his side. Much like the piercing of the side of our Lord on the cross, there on this stranger’s flesh was a clear scar from perhaps a stabbing or maybe a surgeon’s incision. The man said, “I just wanted to show you my scar.” And then he turned and left.
John the Baptist, the prophet, the seer, calls us to repent, to turn around and to get ready for the Prince of Peace who comes after him. We tend to laugh at John because we see oddness in this character. We see a crazy man living in the wilderness with wild hair. We imagine him as stinky and loud and scary and we laugh. We think of John as the announcer or the warm up band and pass over him to get to the good part of the story. The part about Jesus, our savior and the angels and the shepherds and the wise men.
Maybe we do this because we don’t really want to face our need for repentance. Maybe John seems too serious. Too scary. Too wild.
But John brought us the truth. We just need to adjust our attitudes toward listening to the scarred ones who seem crazy.
So friends, instead of focusing on the weirdness of John, instead of focusing on the sternness of this prophet who calls those church leaders a “brood of vipers,” instead of only talking about that repentance part, this year I want to invite you to think of the story of John a little bit differently. Instead of calling him crazy and ushering him out of the door, let’s invite him in and listen to him. In fact, let’s recognize the John in ourselves.
Let’s even emulate John.
Let’s become guides of the faith.
Let us too be prophets preparing the way of the Lord.
Even if it means getting misunderstood. Even if it means getting called crazy. Even if it means getting type cast. In this way we can enter into true repentance and open ourselves for redemption.
Amen.
The Rev. Dr. Kathy Kelly