Advent 3 Year C 2024: Luke 3:7-18

When I was in high school, the show Futurama was becoming popular. In it, pizza delivery guy Philip J. Fry is accidentally cryogenically frozen in 1999 and is revived in 2999, where he picks up where he left off and works for interplanetary delivery service Planet Express. The owner of Planet Express, Professor Farnsworth, founded the company to fund his work as a mad scientist. Episodes of Futurama frequently involve Farnsworth entering the room to find the rest of the staff of Planet Express and declaring, “Good News, everyone!” But then his news is never actually good, like “Today you’ll be delivering a crate of subpoenas to Sicily 8, the Mob Planet”. The Futurama wiki lists 35 examples of the use of the catchphrase and notes, “his good news usually means a suicidal mission for the Planet Express crew.”

I’ve been reflecting, this week, on the complicated nature of good news. Last Sunday, my husband and I went to see Wicked - a show that my high school choir saw on Broadway in 2005 as part of our trip to New York. The first words of the show are “Good news! She’s dead!” in singing about the death of the Wicked Witch of the West. But then over the rest of the show, as her story unfolds, the audience is left with the question: how is this really good news?

Good news can often feel like a zero-sum game, especially when our good news comes at someone else’s expense, not because we’re actively working against them, but because it tends to be the way our society is set up. If you get the job, good news! For you. Not for the other applicants.

But it also points to some intrinsic good in us that the bigger the “news”, when it comes at someone else’s expense, the bigger our tendency to have an appropriate amount of empathy. Good news, the organ transplant candidate is finally getting a heart! She is both sick enough to qualify and not too sick to undergo the procedure. And she receives that heart, and her family is happy for this miracle of modern medicine, this good news, and. She and her family occupy the space where they are very aware that their good news most likely comes at the expense of another family getting the worst news. And as someone who has been the family getting the worst news, in my experience knowing that there is some good news for someone in the midst of my worst news, that there is light, even just a pinprick of light, in the midst of a darkness that can feel insurmountable, can be just enough good news that I don’t lose hope.

In today’s reading from Luke, the “good news” being proclaimed by John doesn’t exactly sound like good news. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

The first part, “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire”, I think I can reasonably convince you is good news without doing mental gymnastics. Fire was seen as a purifying force - and while it is, of course, potentially destructive, Luke’s audience would have understood fire in this context to be purifying and not fearsome. And furthermore, later in Acts, which was also written by Luke, we see positive images of fire when “tongues of fire” descend upon the apostles at Pentecost.

But the second part of John’s warning, about gathering in the wheat but burning the chaff with unquenchable fire, that part seems like it requires a fair bit of confidence to be good news. The images of threshing and then winnowing, or separating, grain are commonly used for judgment. But in other places in scripture where we see those images, particularly in Isaiah and Jeremiah, those images are not images of fear, but of hope. Hope for an oppressed people that God will, in the words of Mary earlier in the Gospel of Luke, “cast down the mighty, lift up the lowly, fill the hungry with good things, send the rich away” AND “remember his mercy”.

We saw a brutal example of retribution as “good news” last week, with the amount of glee exhibited in response to the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. The bitterness with which people asked if he got coverage for his wounds or if they were a preexisting condition. The way in which his alleged murderer is being treated as a folk hero. The vilification of the McDonald’s employees who called 911 on his behalf. We sometimes long for judgment so much that we forget it is not ours to give, leading to these kinds of reactions. Judgment is not ours to take into our own hands. And mercy is mercy because it is given to the undeserving.

We see in the Hebrew Bible, particularly in the psalms, the theme of longing for judgment. They long for judgment for two reasons: first, they are an oppressed people, praying for God to deliver them from their oppressors. Second, they know that God is mercy. We pray every week in the Rite I liturgy, “we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table, but thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy.” We, none of us, get what we deserve, thanks be to God. Mercy is mercy because it’s given to the undeserving.

If God shows mercy, we should too. And John tells us how to do so before his warning! He tells us how to be the wheat. To be less concerned about our pedigree. To give from the abundance of our gifts. To be satisfied when we have a fairly comfortable life - like the lives of the tax collectors and soldiers who he is addressing - and not always be trying to get more, especially not at the expense of others through threats or accusations or embezzlement.

And it can be difficult. It can be so hard to show mercy. It can get old feeling like the adult, the mature one, all the time. To focus on our own behavior when we see others acting like the tax collectors and soldiers. My mom tells a story of when my brother and I were children and were supposed to be doing something - probably brushing our teeth - and neither one of us did. And when we got scolded, my brother’s excuse was, “well, Claire made me play with her.” While I have no doubt that I was the ringleader, I didn’t make him. He could’ve done what he knew he was supposed to do and just let me get in trouble. But he chose not to. In the same vein, I have lost count of the number of times I’ve said to my older daughter, “don’t worry about what your sister is doing, you do what you know is right.”

In the New Testament, “euangelion”, translated as “gospel” or “good news” is used as a noun 76 times - which doesn’t include today’s lesson, where it is used as a verb “he was preaching the good news” is one word in Greek, and gives us an additional 54 usages. And while it is the “preaching” part of the word that makes it a verb, it reminds us to treat the good news as a verb - an action. To remember that we have this good news to share in the way in which we interact with the world, even when it doesn’t feel like the world deserves it. Because it doesn’t. We don’t. That’s one of the things that makes it good news - that we’ve done nothing to earn it and therefore cannot un-earn it. God’s grace, God’s mercy, is given to the undeserving. Thanks be to God. Amen.