Sermon for the Wednesday in Advent I – Pr. Stirdivant
Make the Tree Good: “Cut the Bad Tree Down”
Matthew 3:1-12; Romans 11:1-24
“The axe is laid to the root of the trees,” warns John the Baptist. He is a preacher that doesn’t care what you think of him. He’s going to tell you the brutal honest truth, because he was sent as a preacher of repentance. Don’t take it personally; don’t get put off with his strange clothes and even stranger diet. He does indeed want to give you the good things of God, but not before the proper time. Forgiveness is rendered worthless if one should use it as an excuse to go out and sin some more.
He uses a good metaphor to communicate the true sense of urgency that we face—hurry, a tree is about to be cut down! You can’t undo that kind of final judgment. One moment you have a living organism, roots, trunk, branches, leaves, birds nesting, squirrels leaping across the foliage. The next moment you have a cord of firewood and a pile of chips sitting next to a sappy stump. That’s the image that John uses in his sermon as he urges repentance before it gets too late.
Jesus had talked about a tree, also. In one of His parables, a landowner ordered his garden-steward about a tree that was growing on his property. He said, I keep coming to this tree, looking for fruit, and I continually find none on it! Cut it down! Why should it take up the ground?
And the steward pleads for mercy, not for himself but for the unfruitful tree! Leave it alone for a while. I will take care of it myself. Let me fertilize it and give it some TLC, and let’s see if any fruit comes on next season. If it doesn’t produce then, well then I can make sure that it gets cut down.
Jesus didn’t tell that parable just to remind us to be patient in our gardening! Parables have an important spiritual meaning, and John the Baptist already had his finger on it. He was saying to anyone who would listen: Repent! This is now your time of grace! Your sins lay condemned before the almighty judgment of God’s law, but for now, maybe for just a little while, you have the promise of a Redeemer, one who has spoken up for you and has pleaded to the Father for mercy.
Our Savior graciously took it upon Himself to do everything that would ensure a crop of forgiveness to abound for you, to give you His Holy Spirit so that a God-pleasing harvest of good works would sprout from your life. So now is your opportunity to let that faith grow strong, for your love to abound.
It may sound like I am testing the limits of God’s justice by asking this, but what will happen if we don’t act on this moment of opportunity? What will happen if the axe would come down on the trunk and fell the tree? I’m not talking about what will happen to the damned on Judgment Day at the very end of the world, I’m talking about that unknowable time in someone’s life when time has run out, when their window of opportunity to repent closes on them and they head full speed into a hardened, utter rejection of grace.
The only reason I can talk to you about that spine-tingling possibility, is because the Apostle Paul preached on that in Romans 11. It actually happened that God’s ancient people were given an opportunity to come to Him in faith and believe in their true Messiah, Jesus Christ. They were not bent upon disobeying God, yet they said No to the offer of free grace and instead chose to rely upon themselves. The axe was laid at the root of the trees, as John had warned, and despite all the fertilizing of God’s Gospel Word and the care of faithful pastors, some refused to bear the fruit of repentance. Their trees were cut down. So what happened to them next? How did God continue to do His unchanging will?
We are venturing toward the outer limits, so be careful where you step. Before we go any further, don’t forget that our merciful Father does not want anyone to be lost forever but to repent and come back to Him in the knowledge of the truth. No one was ever doomed beforehand to eternal destruction, just as much as no one by their own reason or strength comes to the Lord for their own salvation. Those two extremes of falsehood have to be kept at equal arm’s-length from us. If you’re saved, God did it all for you. If you are condemned, it’s all your fault.
But before that final judgment day comes, the warning of “the axe is at the root of the trees,” has a companion coming along with it. That is a Gospel offer of grace, of repentance that not only includes a stopping of sin and a starting of righteousness; this wonderful gift includes faith in Christ. It enables you to hold on, like you couldn’t do on your own, hold on to the forgiveness that you have been given. To take hold of the promise of everlasting life that Jesus earned for you.
If you were cut down by the axe of God’s law’s punishment and condemnation, then He has graciously offered through the Gospel a “re-grafting” into a new tree, the tree of the Church. He wants you to be made one with Him, and so belong to His kingdom forever. Has God rejected His people? By no means! A remnant, a small branch of the tree, if you will, will be grafted back in and grow in the tree of the Holy Christian Church.
The same generous offer stands before you this Advent. It is an invitation that comes from that harsh-sounding preacher of repentance, John the Baptist. He is severe, and will not let you get away with your own version of God-pleasing works, and “I hope I’m good enough.” That’s simply not going to cut it.
Yet his words are also full of God’s kindness, so that the fear that you have is not a despair-ridden kind of fear, but a humble, faithful posture toward God, ready to receive His undeserved mercy, and live as a new creation, forgiven and made clean by the Blood of Christ.
The axe is at the root of the tree. Let the axe fall! Let it fall on the dead, diseased wood of your sinful human nature. Let none of your sinful nature live anymore within, because your Jesus comes to you. Chop down that anxiety within you that doubts the Lord’s Words. Prune away the anger that you harbor against someone who has wronged you. Your Savior has generously offered to graft you in to His healthy tree. The fruit you bear will be His fruit of love toward others, and your preparation for His final coming will be complete, thanks to His forgiveness.
In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.
