The Inversion of Power and the Good Life

Third Sunday of Advent, Year C
15 December 2024

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Isaiah 12:2-6
Philippians 4:4-7
Luke 3:7-18

2025 marks 500 years since Conrad Grebel, Georg Blaurock, and Felix Manz took the then courageous act of “re-baptizing” each other, the expression of a new understanding of their faith.¹ Lutherans do not engage in this practice for what we believe are good reasons. We spoke about this maybe a year ago.
However, the act was courageous because state and church sought homogeneity in theology and practice and those regarded as heretics had to fear for their life. Martin Luther faced the same threats, for different reasons. It was also courageous because in doing so the three showed that the practice of one’s faith is not a private but a public act.
Grebel, Blaurock, and Manz re-baptized each other because that they believed that to be baptized is the logical consequence of one’s conversion, an act of confession and expression of one’s commitment to the Gospel. We who do not speak much about conversion can learn from Anabaptists. John the Baptist preached conversion, not the conversion of infidels but the conversion of religious people like us.

I am not sure what happened to Grebel, Blaurock, and Manz, but we know that subsequently to their baptism and the formation of Anabaptism as a movement, its followers were persecuted, a persecution to which tragically the writings of Martin Luther contributed.
To confess a faith for which you will be persecuted shows courage and commitment. Anabaptists have no confessional writings like Lutherans have in the Augsburg Confession, Reformed Christians in the Heidelberg Catechism, or Anglicans in the 39 Articles. But if you wanted to know what Anabaptists regarded as the core of the Christian faith, they would answer, the Sermon on the Mount. Consequently, Anabaptists are known for their commitment to peace, to God’s shalom.

In a little book with the title Blessed are the Peacemakers,² Wendell Berry tells the story of the 16^th century Dutch Anabaptist Dirk Willems.
“In 1569 in Holland, a Mennonite named Dirk Willems, under capital sentence as a heretic, was fleeing from arrest, pursued by a ‘thief-catcher.’ As they ran across a frozen body of water, the thief-catcher broke through the ice. Without help, he would have drowned. What did Dirk Willems do then?
Was the thief-catcher an enemy merely to be hated, or was he a neighbor to be loved as one loves oneself? Was he an enemy whom one must love in order to be a child of God? Was he ‘one of the least of these my brethren’?
What Dirk Willems did was turn back, put out his hands to his pursuer and save his life. The thief-catcher, who then of course wanted to let his rescuer go, was forced to arrest him. Dirk Willems was brought to trial, sentenced and burned to death by a ‘lingering fire.’

Berry concludes, “I, and I suppose you, would like to be a child of God even at the cost of so much pain. But would we, in similar circumstances, turn back to offer the charity of Christ to an enemy? (…) I don’t think we ought to be too sure. We should remember that ‘Christian’ generals and heads of state have routinely thanked God for the deaths of their enemies, and that the persecutors of 1569 undoubtedly thanked God for the capture and death of the ‘heretic’ Dirk Willems.”

It is an extraordinarily powerful story. It is powerful because of the inversion of power. In the act of charity toward his enemy Willems rejects power to punish or kill, and accepts power to help, to heal, and save. In this act of self-emtying Willems becomes Christ-like. How did Willems come to this place? Dirk Willems asked and answered the same question that John the Baptist’s audience asks in today’s reading: What shall we do?

Three times (vs. 10. 12. 14) the people ask John, “What shall we do?” We can also ask what is it that constitutes a good life.

John the Baptist gives clear answers. Share your abundance, he says, and do not abuse your power.
Conversely, we moderns have come to believe that the mastery of life consists not in the kind of self-emptying Dirk Willems practiced in imitation of Christ, but in conquering nature, conquering lands and people, and in the accumulation of things we do not need.

When John says that the life that pleases God is the life that does not thrive on power to seize and accumulate but that surrenders to God, John helps us respond to our modern crisis.

The modern crisis is that diminishing resources on a finite planet mean that our standard of living cannot continue to increase but must decrease if there is to be enough for all.
It means that the power that industrial economies can leverage in the world is not to be used to our advantage to get more for less while we create environmental disasters elsewhere.
It means, at least for the followers of Christ, not to hate our enemies but to love them as Christ loves us.

And so we see that the good life means a willingness to sacrifice, for sacrifice is the way of Christ. And it means, against our acquisitive culture, to remember that the world and all that is in it is the Lord’s.

The question of what we should do interested Luther only peripherally (because for him doing was the problem), yet John and Jesus had a lot to say about the kind of life that those who love God are to live.

The interesting thing about the call to repentance, the Greek word is metanoia, is that its goal is not so much that we be sorry, even though this is how we have come to understand repentance, but that its aim is that those who repent change.

And that is because feeling sorry is mostly a private affair. Yet most things that remain private don’t have impact beyond our private lives. Metanaoia, the call to repentance, aims at changing direction, feeling sorry is only secondary.

In 2018 Canada Day was a Sunday and I did not think it would be wise to cancel worship for the parade. More importantly, I was not interested in being in a parade where all the community would see is that we all get along (as important as that is) and then draw the conclusion that because we all get along, all religions are the same. What I am interested in was getting to know our neighbours and our neighbours getting to know us, because you cannot love whom you do not know.

This getting to know each other that we may love each other includes learning about the faith of others, in the process of which we gain deeper understanding of our own faith.
The danger of interfaith love-ins is that they are not interested in the particulars of any faith, including one’s own, instead they reduce all religious faith to the principle of love, which it fails because it never bothers to get to know the other.

This is not to say that God is not love only that Christians believe that the love of God is revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The love that is revealed in this way has a particular shape, it is suffering love, it is non-retaliatory love, it is love that is embodied. It is not an abstract principle or a idea. The abstract principle, says theologian Stanley Hauerwas, leads to statements like “I believe that Jesus is Lord, but that is just my personal opinion.”³ That is a private faith, and in that it is a faith that does not resemble the faith of Dirk Willems, of any of the martyrs, or of the life of Christ, for their witness was public.

John speaks to religious people like us. People who are on their way to church, who want stability but know – perhaps better than we do – that there are crises in the world they cannot ignore and that believing that Jesus is Lord is not a matter of personal opinion.

John tells them and us, that the Good News of God in Christ Jesus is unsettling, that it breaks with old certainties, and that it requires change. That is why John comes to us during Advent. The Good News John brings us is that to love God is not a private affair but sends ripples into the world.

John also shows us what a life looks like whose primary certainty is God. It is a life that because it is grounded in God is able to imagine another life, another world, and imagine the change the Good News represents and requires. It is a life borne of the sacrificial love of Christ, and therefore able to love sacrificially.

It knows that the love of God has a name and a shape, and that it is embodied by saints and martyrs, one of them Dirk Willems.

It knows that the love of God is not private but is revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, whose love is sacrificial, embodied, and here for us to taste and see.

Amen.