The long winter

Matthew 3:1-17

 It’s been a long winter.

I realize that isn’t true. By the standard of the weather, it has been a really excellent winter. But that’s not what I mean. I mean, I’m biased. Some of you have probably had awfully healthy winters so far. You probably also don’t have young kids. I was warned about this but didn’t fully appreciate how these germ-ridden children will not only make me terribly sick, but then stomp over me in my sickness, while I’m lying on the couch, and pull out all the glitter and acrylic paints and decide it is time to decorate the floors.

“You brood of vipers,” said John the Baptist—not about my daughter but maybe also about my daughter. “You brood of vipers. Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

One of the lessons I learned in seminary was that there is no need to preach the law at a people broken by it, who feel it in their bones already. This is why I believe preachers who stand up and proclaim judgment and fear and wrath at funerals don’t know what they’re doing. At times where we understand our frailty and our limitations, like funerals, the weight of the law is already on our backs; there is no need to pile it on. The law is already reminding us that many things are final and they can’t be undone. At a funeral, we don’t need the law, because it is the water in which we swim already. At funerals, we crave the Gospel.

It is the same for all of us in this long winter. I’m not sure we have much need for John the Baptist at the moment. Repent. Sure. But most of you don’t need to be called a brood of vipers. Just Natalie. The rest of you are OK. You don’t need to be called that, not because you aren’t sinners. You’re just as limited as you were in the cheeriest of times. Rather, in this long winter, you are more aware of it by nature. We know it every time a family member comes home sick, and we know it every time we hear that somebody we knew and cared about has died, and we know it when we want to go into town but the winds are howling and we can’t see to the end of the drive. Everything about this season reminds us we are fragile. Nobody is arguing with John the Baptist. We come to the waters looking for renewal time and again—anything to free us from this constant refrain of life’s limitations.

That’s the baptism John offers. Repentance. Sin. Repeat. For all our ordaining John with the title of “John the Baptist,” his baptism is actually pretty weak. It is more like confession. It is a consistent, repeated ritual of repentance, confession, and absolution, where God washes away sins only to have them pop up again in the morning. John’s baptism only required returning more often when the winter was long.

But in today’s reading, something begins to shift when this Jesus comes to the water. After Jesus, we can still do the John the Baptist thing. We do it still. We confess at start the service. We remember all the ways we are at fault. And, in this long winter, there are plenty of reminders of our mistakes. And we receive the word of forgiveness, but, in Jesus, it stands a much more solid ground. This grace that John couldn’t have known, we get to know, because the final word is not a tally of sins and repentance. The final word is not whether we have confessed it all up to our death. The final word is a God who loves us so much that he meets us in the heart of the long winter and calls us not sinner but child. Not judged but free. Not broken but redeemed.

Jesus’ life and ministry in the Gospel of Matthew begins with baptism from John. The story will wind from here through a variety of settings, some familiar to us and some less so, toward the cross and the empty tomb. Then, past the resurrection, the Gospel of Matthew ends back where Jesus’ ministry begins. This time with Jesus commissioning his disciples, saying, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28:19). In other words, take this baptism of John, this baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and instead make it into a means of grace. Take this baptism done many times because you are a repeat offender and make it a once-and-for-all drowning—a dying and rising, reflecting the death and resurrection Jesus undertook himself. In Jesus, this baptism is no longer a baptism about you—the person coming forward looking for forgiveness—it is now a baptism in the name of God, who has chosen you, apart from yourself.

We need this promise desperately in this long winter. For every person we lose, we crave even more the assurance that our worthiness is not dependent on ourselves, whose bodies are failing. We need Jesus to show us what love looks like—not triumph over our demons but grace to let the battle language go. We have no need to consider ourselves broods of vipers, but we have no need to think it of anybody else either. The grace of Jesus Christ allows us to forget all the language about spiritual warfare. We are not at war with anything any longer, least of all our sinful desires. We already know we are captive to sin, but more than that we know who sets us free, and it’s not us. In this long winter, we have only to remember to tell one another: You are free.

It may not feel like it, sick on your couch, but you are free.

It may not feel like it, attending more funerals than you can count, but you are free.

It may not feel like it, overwhelmed by the enormity of stress and the sadness of short days, but you are free.

The problem with the long winter is that it tells you a convincing partial truth. It tells you that you are limited, which is very true. But it suggests that that is all there is. That you will live until your limitations overtake you. That eventually you will meet a battle you can’t win.

It’s a truth but just a half-truth, because, though you are limited, Jesus came bearing a gift you could not give yourself. You are saved by grace, so that when the winter is at its longest, it is just a foretaste of God’s kingdom waiting with eternity on the other side. God’s grace is sufficient to beat this long winter and every long winter. For you. For me. For all of us who need that reminder in these days.