No Justice, No Peace

The Rev. Sara Warfield

Scripture: Matthew 3:1-12

Someone needs to tell John the Baptist that Christmas is coming. Houses are being lit up, lines are forming for Santas all over the country, store speakers and radios are gushing forth Feliz Navidad, All I Want for Christmas is You, and everything in between. Does John not have eyes to see, ears to hear? Doesn’t he know he’s supposed to be bringing tidings of comfort and joy at this time of year?

To be honest, John the Baptist doesn’t seem like the type to honor social etiquette, let alone seasonal customs. We’re told that he lived in the wilderness and “wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.” Matthew imagines him as a current day Elijah, an ascetic whose practice of self-denial opened up his faith, and, most importantly, a prophet calling the world to “prepare the way of the Lord, to make his paths straight.”

And how do we prepare, according to John the Baptist? No, not by decorating a Christmas tree or buying gifts or making a massive batch of cookies, but by repenting—for the Kingdom of Heaven has come near.

The Greek word for “repentance” here is metanoia, from meta, “change, and noia, “mind”; today we would say, “change of heart” or “change of life.” Preparing for the coming of Jesus demands that we be ready and willing to make major change.

That’s why John the Baptist scorns the Sadducees and Pharisees when they come to be baptized.

But before we get to that, an aside: the Pharisees and, to a much lesser extent, the Sadducees get a very bad rap in the New Testament, especially in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But they were simply what we might call different denominations of Judaism. Now these will be very imperfect comparisons, but we can think of the Sadducees as similar to Roman Catholics, placing a high value on rituals and temple practice and the formal priesthood. For a long time they were deeply enmeshed in the work of the Jewish state and its politics—much like the Roman Catholic Church was in Europe before the Reformation.

The Pharisees we might describe as more Protestant, again this is an imperfect comparison. They believed in their own version of a “priesthood of all believers” as opposed to the formal and sometimes distant priesthood of the Temple, and came to understand their scriptures in a more literal, more legalistic way.

In other words, both were simply different sects of the Jewish faith, much like Christianity has Pentecostals and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Episcopalians.

But at the time of John the Baptist, some leaders from both the Sadducees and the Pharisees were getting a little nervous about him. They’d been hearing all about the man living in the wilderness and the crowds of people who were coming to him to be cleansed by, changed by his baptism. Who was getting pretty popular in Judea—maybe a little too popular for their taste. They were maybe feeling like they needed to scout out the situation under cover in the guise of a few people who also wanted to be baptized.

So they came to him, but John saw straight through them. “You brood of vipers,” he lashes out at them. “You came here to inspect, not to be changed; you came here to gawk, not to repent.” Then he tells them, “if you’re not willing to be changed by this baptism, you’re certainly not going to be ready for the one who’s coming after me to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.”John looked them up and down and didn’t see a readiness and willingness to change in the Sadducees and Pharisees.

I wonder, if he looked you or me up and down, what would he see in each of us? Are we using these weeks of Advent to ready ourselves for change? Are we lighting the candle of peace this week seeking real peace?

—

Five and a half years ago, we heard chants reverberating across our country after the murder of George Floyd. We saw hundreds of thousands of people gather in cities big and small all shouting the same thing: “No justice, no peace.” Some people heard it as a threat, but I think it’s simply a statement of fact, that there is no real peace without justice. There may be placation. There may be a tacit agreement not to talk about hard things, not to talk about things that challenge long held beliefs. An agreement to keep silent for the sake of everyone’s comfort. But avoiding conflict and upset for the sake of maintaining comfort is not real peace. The absence of tension is not real peace. The absence of difference is not real peace.

Real peace happens when people can embody how God made them fully without fear—and when people aren’t afraid of those who are different from them, who they may not understand. Real peace happens when people are held accountable for the harm they do, when they help to repair the damage they do, and when those who are harmed no longer have to walk in this world as victims but as participants in their own healing.

Real peace happens when repentance happens, when lives and hearts change. Real peace happens when we take responsibility for not only ourselves, but for one another. It’s when we own the suffering in our world and vow to change our hearts and lives—to create justice—in order to alleviate that suffering.

This is what John the Baptist means when he talks about Jesus coming to separate the wheat from the chaff. As the Salt commentary tells us, “Every grain of wheat has a husk, and farmers (even today) use wind to separate these husks — collectively known as ‘chaff’ — from the grain, the goal being, of course, to save every grain, not to separate the good grain from the bad grain.” Jesus comes with a winnowing fork to separate us, the grains of wheat, from the husks that prevent us from creating justice, from making real peace in this world.

For our part, this is the work of repentance. Identifying the husks in our lives and choosing to change our hearts and lives in order to winnow them out.

—

I’m pretty disappointed that our Ice Watch Training was postponed today. I’m lifting up Liz, who was going to be our trainer from the Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition, in my prayers as she recovers from what seems to be a quite terrible flu.

Because right now an injustice is being inflicted on many of our neighbors. By now, you all know what’s happening. Masked Immigration and Customs agents are stalking Home Depots, going into hospitals, and planting themselves in particular neighborhoods to detain people who they suspect are in this country without documentation.

They’ve claimed to be going after immigrants who have committed crimes, which, again, accountability for harm done is an act of justice. But serving justice does not authorize cruelty. It doesn’t authorize tearing a mother from her children when she’s dropping them off at school. It doesn’t authorize locking people in inhumane conditions for an indefinite period of time.

Not to mention that many people who are here legally, even citizens, have been arrested and detained without any reason except for how they look or sound—which is, in fact, the opposite of justice.

There can be no real peace when such cruelty is being inflicted on any of us. That cruelty is the chaff that must be winnowed out of our country, out of our neighbors who wear those masks, out of our own hearts when we overlook people’s humanity because of their immigration status.

The only way we create real peace is to call for justice. Which is what the ICE Watch Training was going to help us learn how to do. And I really hope we’re able to reschedule it.

I imagine the prospect of attending this training and doing this work made some of us uncomfortable. The thought of being out in public observing government agents maybe feels scary. It’s hard to speak truth to power, it’s uncomfortable to boldly act in love in the face of cruelty. But that is the work of repentance, of changing our hearts and lives to alleviate suffering, to create justice.

It’s only when we’re engaged in that kind of work that we can light our candle of peace with any integrity, that we can truly prepare the way for the One who brings real peace. Amen.