(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Kind of Blue”, originally shared on December 3, 2025. It was the 387th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
“Kind of Blue”, the best-selling jazz album of all time, has a lot in
common with John the Baptist. Today, we’re going to find out why.
The other thing,
other than knowing that I would become a Lutheran pastor (something no one in
my family had ever been before), that I knew from my earliest memory, was that
I would be a drummer.
I started learning as soon as I could and, among many other settings, I
played in jazz bands all through college and seminary and beyond.
I come from a musical family and I found a personal affinity for jazz
from an early age. When most people my age that I knew were listening to Top 40
rock ‘n roll radio stations, which I listened to too, I was listening to jazz
wherever I could find it.
I had one of those little transistor radios with a little earplug when I
was around 12, in Wisconsin, and I’d listen to jazz under my bedcovers when I
was supposed to be asleep from a radio station in Chicago and, when the weather
was right, WBZ in Boston. Often, in those days, you could also find jazz on television
and in the movies.
I subscribed to Downbeat magazine. I bought records.
I was especially drawn to the music of what some would consider to be
the classical era of jazz: Straight-ahead, Bebop, Hardbop, Cool, and even what some
derisively referred to Chamber jazz, and later Crossover styles.
One of my favorite musicians from that era was Miles Davis, whose
sometime drummer and collaborator was Tony Williams, a major influence on me.
The tunes from one of his albums, “Kind of Blue”, with drummer Jimmy
Cobb, were ones that I played over and over, over the years.
And, as it turns out, I was not alone. “Kind of Blue” is the
best-selling jazz album of all time.
If I could only listen to one musical sound for all eternity, I would
pick any random tone from “Kind of Blue”.
Blue is also the color of Advent, the first season of the new Church
Year, the four-Sunday season that is the preparatory season for Christmas.
It is a season of great depth. The days are getting shorter and darker.
Something seems to draw us forward and inward at the same time. Yet, in this
darkness, there is light. Within our current uncertainties there is hope. In
the midst of death there is life. We’re getting ready for something.
“Advent” means “coming”. What’s coming? For what do we prepare? Jesus.
Jesus, the logos, or “order”, the Word, the one who brings
order out chaos. Chaos is Greek word for the natural state of the world
without God.
John says it in the first chapter of his Gospel, the entryway to
Christianity for so many, as “Kind of Blue” has been the entry to the world of
jazz for so many, and Advent is the point of entry for the new Church Year, in John
1:1-5,
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All
things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into
being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life
was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the
darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
And the very next thing that John talks about is John the
Baptist, the subject of this week’s main reading from the Gospels, Matthew
3:1-12, and the entry point for Jesus’ public ministry.
How do we prepare ourselves for what is coming? How do we prepare the
world? John the Baptist shows us how, beginning with Matthew 3:1-3,
3 In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness
of Judea, proclaiming, 2 “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has
come near.” 3 This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke
when he said,
“The voice of one crying out in
the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.’ ”
How do we prepare? One word: Repent. That is John’s calling to
us, and that is John’s calling to the world.
Christmas Day will
be here in a little more than three weeks. Did you just tighten up a little
bit? There is a lot to do. We’re getting ready, and almost all of our
preparations are totally beside the point.
Today, we’re getting
help on how to prepare for Christmas from a guy known as John the Baptist
because he was the guy that Jesus came to for baptism, along with many others.
It might be the best worst news ever, and we’re hearing it from a guy who was
pretty much homeless. And a little weird.
John was a relative
of Jesus. He and Jesus were almost the same age, so he was also around
30-years-old when he “appeared”. He preached out in the boonies and people from
all over, from all walks of life, came there to hear him.
His message was
simple, and it’s the only way to prepare for Christmas, “Repent, for the
kingdom of heaven has come near.”
Jesus had been born
and was now beginning his public ministry. The history of salvation was
coming to its end, the kingdom of heaven had drawn hear.
How would you get
ready if you know that God was coming? John tells us: Repent.
Jesus brought the
same message when he began his public ministry. Repent.
Jesus sent his 12 disciples out with the same
message. Repent.
It was the theme of the first Christian
sermon. It was the first word Paul used when describing the Good News. Repent.
It’s not a word we
use much anymore because it sounds like a manipulative “turn or burn” approach
that obscures the meaning of the Gospel, the good news.
And it’s widely
misunderstood as only saying, “I’m sorry.” That’s not what it means to
repent.
Repentance means
life transformation. It means to change one’s thinking. It means to turn
around. It means receiving the gift of new birth, of becoming a new Creation,
of turning toward the new life God gives through faith in Jesus Christ. It
means becoming a new self.
It doesn’t mean to
make God the most important part of your life. It means to make God your life.
Have you ever made
popcorn?
My mom used to make
it by pouring the hard popcorn kernels into a pan, then covering the kernels
with oil, then covering the pan and putting it on the stove. Now we pull out a
package and put it into a microwave oven. Some microwaves come with a “Popcorn”
preset.
Popcorn turns inside out under heat. Heat
causes the moisture in the hard kernel to expand and then explode, transforming
the kernel into something that can bring nourishment.
The Holy Spirit is the fire that transforms
the hardened hearts of human beings.
Author and theologian Leonard Sweet
describes the popping process as completely transforming the kernel’s purpose.
What was hard becomes soft. What appeared lifeless explodes into something that
can feed people. Something that is dead to us becomes something that gives life
by turning inside out.
That is what it means to repent.
Our relationship with God is broken. Our
rebellion against God continues to bring evil into the world, as it has since
the beginning.
We are naturally separated from God by our
Sin (with a capital “S”). Repentance is God’s gift that leads to the
reconciliation with God made possible by Jesus’ death on the cross. It is the
beginning of the Good News!
And we who are Christians, who are at the
same time saints and sinners, we all need to repent. Regularly.
That is our best preparation to celebrate
the first coming, or advent, of Jesus at Christmas and to be ready for his
second coming to judge the world.
John is not subtle when he speaks to the
crowds that have come out to hear him.
Most people don’t like to hear that they are
wrong, and John really piled it on. But people were drawn to him. They had been
longing for God’s promised Messiah, the deliverer, for 1,000 years, since the
time of King David. Yet their rebellion had continued. The one nation of 12 tribes split
into two, Israel and Judah. Israel had been conquered and assimilated by the
Assyrians in 722 B.C. Judah was conquered by the Babylonians and taken into
captivity in 586 B.C. The Babylonians were conquered by the Persians, the
Persians were conquered by the Greeks, and the Greeks were conquered by the
Romans, who were still occupying Israel when Jesus was physically present on
earth.
God had not spoken through the prophets for 300
years, and a prophet was supposed to appear to prepare for the coming of
the Messiah. Could it be John the Baptist? Yes!
That’s why the next verses in our text from
Matthew carry so much weight, speaking about John the Baptist in Matthew
3:3-6
3This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah
spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare
the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” 4Now John wore
clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was
locusts and wild honey. 5Then the people of Jerusalem and all
Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, 6and
they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
My dad had a nice
camel hair sport coat. It looked good on him.
That was not what
is meant about John’s appearance. John wore roadkill, skin from the carcass of
what he found in the desert. He foraged for what edible things were available
in the wilderness to help him survive.
Can you imagine
what it was like for John’s mother when she gathered with the other women at
the public well to draw water? When she was asked how John was doing? I wonder
if she dropped her head and said, “He’s living in the desert, wearing skin from
dead camels. He’s eating bugs! We’re so worried!”
Yet people were
coming out to hear him speak! Was he the prophet for whom they had been
waiting for 50 generations? Were they the generation that would see the
Messiah! They were getting ready! They were confessing their sins!
But John wasn’t
currying their favor. He wasn’t doing any marketing at all.
If fact when what
we would call today the “influencers” came out, he said this to them, in Matthew
3:7-8,
7But when he saw many
Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of
vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8Bear
fruit worthy of repentance.
That shocked
everybody!
It’s not enough to say we have repented. Repentance
means a new direction and movement toward a new life in God! Paul describes the
fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5:22-23,
22 By
contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
generosity, faithfulness, 23 gentleness,
and self-control. There is no law against such things.
That’s what the Christian life looks like!
And yet, we fail to be the people we have
been created to be, equipped to be, and sent to be: the people who we are in
Jesus Christ. We are saints and sinners.
I often think of Pastor Ingqvist, the
pastor in Garrison Keillor’s mythical Minnesota town, Lake Wobegon, who began
an Advent sermon with a proposal. “This Christmas, I propose that we resist the
temptations of our world to make Christmas about the things we can buy. Let’s
make it less about the gifts we give and more about the gift God has given us
in Jesus Christ.” And just then his gaze fell to the row in front of the pulpit
where his five children were mouthing words at him. “No! Dad, no! No!”.
We all get sucked into the preparing-for-Christmas machine and come out
of it slightly more processed by the world and the worse for wear, pledging to
do better next time.
When that happens, all we can do is to remember that we are God’s
redeemed, and that our preparations for Christmas are not always the best, but
that the calls to holy living from John the Baptist and Paul may seem like the
worst news we can get, but are in fact the best news of all: Christ is born,
Christ is Risen, Christ will come again.
We are saved by faith, through God’s unearned love for us simply given.
That faith comes as a gift, one that we are reminded of at
Christmas.
We prepare by abandoning all pretense that we are getting only what we
have earned.
What is the result of claiming some presumed status before God? We hear
it as out reading continues it in Matthew 3:9-10,
9Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We
have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to
raise up children to Abraham. 10Even now the ax is lying at the
root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut
down and thrown into the fire.
I once heard a
story about the development of the Christian Church in Indonesia. The seeds of
the Church were planted by missionaries, but it had grown into an independent
church, with its own schools and seminaries. It was financially independent and
had developed its own cultural identity.
During the
pre-Christian era, Indonesians were identified as having the religion of their
parents by birth. God stood above the parents, and the children below them.
But when the
Indonesian church composed its statement of faith, they included the words, “We
believe that God has no grandchildren.” That is, that we are not Christians
because our parents are Christians. We are Christians because we have received
the gift of reconciliation through faith. We been reconciled to God through
Jesus’ death on the cross. Each of us. Each of us has had the relationship with
God for which we were Created, restored. Our attitudes and actions are the
fruit are produced from that relationship with the one true living God. God has
only children.
Why is this the
worst best news? Because our cultural association with the word “repent” makes
this text from Matthew seems harsh, but in fact it is the key to life, “for
the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
John’s relationship
to the coming new reality in Jesus Christ is made clear in the concluding
verses from today’s text, in Matthew 3:11-12,
11“I baptize you with water for repentance,
but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to
carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12His
winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will
gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable
fire.”
We are not who we were created to be, but we
are no longer the people we used to be. We have been redeemed by Jesus Christ
at the cross. How do we get ready for Christmas?
The day after Thanksgiving is called “Black
Friday” because people spend so much that day that merchants hope that their
finances will turn from being “in the red” to “in the black”. They hope to be
profitable this year, and some will likely offer Black Friday-like deals all
the way up to Christmas. Nevertheless, some people were shopping around the
clock on Thanksgiving night through Black Friday. Are they prepared? Not at
all.
We prepare for a different Christmas.
We prepare our hearts to make Him room. We
prepare by living the redeemed life that is our gift from God, begun in the
manger and fulfilled on the cross. We prepare for the inbreaking Reign of God,
the already here but not yet perfected Reign of God. We long for its perfection
and for our eternal salvation in the new heaven and the new earth that is to
come. The Kingdom of God has come near. We see it in Jesus Christ, and we stay
ready for his coming again.
We prepare for it in Advent with the color blue,
but only “kind of blue”. We aren’t “blue” and we don’t sing the blues.
Our culture celebrates a Christ-less
Christmas. Even the word “Christmas” is disappearing. Some churches will
precede their Christmas services with a “Blue Christmas” service for people who
are sad or lonely or especially burdened when they compare the Christmas of
their present with the Christmases of their past. I don’t know why.
Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to
me that sorrow is exactly why Jesus was born. Having a separate service for the
sorrowful denies the power of Christmas. In fact, it is a repudiation of it.
The color of
Advent in many of our churches is blue, but only “kind of blue”. Some
churches will have dinners, or half-hearted service projects they will beg people
to take part in, they’ll do stewardship programs and fundraising, they will
decorate the church that no one new sees, and appeal to the church’s traditions
that young people see no need to support.
But there is
more.
Advent blue is the color of hope. It is the
color we see when we look up in the light. It is a royal color. It is the color
of the new life that follows repentance.
Advent blue prepares us. We sing victory
songs, one victory that is already in the manger and one victory that is to
come at the Judgement.
Advent is a season of preparation.
We prepare this Advent season, between the
two Advents, by sharing the best worst news; the beginning has come, and the
end is coming, but we have been fully prepared by the love and the grace of God
on the cross.
Do you know someone
who sits in darkness this Advent. You have good news for them, as the prophet
Isaiah says of the coming mighty acts of God, In Isaiah 9:2,
2 The people who
walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of
deep darkness—
on them light has shined.
From now until our
celebration of Christmas, join John the Baptist and be preparing people you
know for the coming of Jesus.
No comments:
Post a Comment