Creekside Church Sermon of December 14, 1997 "The Bad Good News " Luke 3:7-18	Rev. David Bibbee
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Sometimes good news has a down side. Take for example this piece I found called "Good News and Bad News for Pastors":

Good news: The women's association voted to send you a get-well card.
Bad news: It passed 31 to 30.

Good news: The church board accepted your position description the way you wrote it.
Bad news: They formed a search committee to find someone capable of filling it.

Good news: You finally found a choir director who approaches things your way.
Bad news: The choir quit.

Good news: Mrs. Jones is wild about your sermons.
Bad news: Mrs. Jones is also wild about professional wrestling and the Texas chain saw massacre.

Good news: Church attendance rose dramatically the last three weeks.
Bad news: You were on vacation.

Sometimes good news can be bad, but we latch onto it just the same because so much of the news we get these days is the bad kind. It is why we are ready all the more for the Christmas message. "Behold I bring you good news of great joy... to you is born a savior." In Jesus we have the gift of gospel...the good news. But upon first hearing it doesn't often seem all that good. We understand this a little more each Advent when we have to go through John the Baptist to get to Jesus.

John is at the Jordan preparing Jesus' way, preaching repentance and baptism. His first recorded words are, "You brood of vipers!" It is clear he never took a public relations course, nor read "How to win friends and influence people". "Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" Forget flattery. He was a student of the "let them have it with both barrels" school of preaching. "Repent! Clean up your act! He's coming! And he's got a winnowing fork in his hand!" And Luke says, "With many other exhortations, he preached good news to the people."

Good news? Wrath is on the way? The axe is about to chop the root? He's separating you like wheat from chaff and the chaff will burn with unquenchable fire? If this is good news I'd just as soon not stick around for the bad. Sometimes good news can be bad, but we must also remember that what sounds bad, can be good.

Sometimes it takes strong words to get us to look honestly at ourselves. It takes fire to thaw the deep freeze of our pride, greed, manipulation, and self-deception; that lets you continue believing that all is well in the little world you have made of yourself. Repentance loosens the grip of a world that's got it all wrong which makes us get it all wrong, too. John's message isn't the wild raving of a man with nothing better to do than spit fire at those who deserve the worst. He opens the promise of God who desires to give his best.

What sounds like bad news has good news at the heart of it. You may be self-serving, lethargic, and apathetic; the mess you have made for yourself are not merry melodies, but when called by name to repent, it implies good news...you are capable of more. You can be different. You can change. You can see God in a new way, as God is, not as you feared. You at last can come out of hiding.

Let me tell you about Walter. When he was twelve years old he could only imagine God as wrathful; one to hide from at his coming. In those days his father was president of a Lutheran college. This college had an ice hockey rink in which the faculty children would play football in the spring. It was a great place to play, except that the hard winters drove stones to the surface. The boys played in stocking feet, and the stones would bruise, so each time they stepped on one, they tossed it over the wall. Walt always tossed his stones at the flood lights high on the poles.

One day he threw and missed as always, then came the voice, "Wally!" It was his father. The president. Dressed up as always in a black suit, clerical collar, black glasses, and thick black eyebrows which he twisted on the ends like ravens wings. "What are you doing?" "Winging stones." "At six thousand watt light bulbs of great expense," his father said. "But I never hit them." "Don't ever throw stones at the lights again," was the commandment. But Walter knew the undependability of his arm. He always missed. It was a tradition. One week later...it was the last stone of the season. He winged it. The second it left his hand he knew that for the first time he had thrown the perfect shot. Down with the stone came twinkling glass. His brother and friends gaped at him. He aimed a violent finger at them and said, "None of you ever breathe a word of this!"

Walter went into hiding. He hid a piece of himself from his father. But as time went on, he knew it was more than just a piece he was hiding. At the supper table his sisters and brothers spoke openly with their father about the days events, but Walter couldn't. He would ask his son a question and Walter would think of strategies. His father had an affectionate nickname for Walter..."Ah-vee." Whenever he said it he would hug him. But Walter new he wasn't Ah-vee anymore. The affection would cease if he knew what sort of son he really was. "Ah-vee" burned his ears. Shamed him crimson. "Don't call me that anymore," Walter said.

He was caught between loneliness and corporal punishment; between love and judgment day. His hiding place was hell. He had run there. His plans sent him the wrong way...not away from unquenchable fire, but into the heart of it. Finally he could no longer stand the isolation. He decided to tell his father. The next day he entered the holiness of the administration building. His footsteps echoed in the hallway till he stood before the huge door with his father's name on it. He tapped the door, like little roach kicks.

"Come in,". He peeked his head in the door. "Wally! What do you want?" His father sat behind the huge coffin-shaped desk, twisting his eyebrow with thumb and forefinger. "What is it son?" "Well, I...I..." "You?" "I...well, you know those six thousand watt light bulbs at the rink? Well, I...I broke one." "Did you climb a pole and bump it accidentally?" "No." "Then what did you do?" "I threw a stone." Slowly his father rose from the desk, rounded the far side and came toward him. Judgment cometh. The order of things would be righted in punishment. But Walter was unprepared for what happened next. He would not have cried if his father spanked him. Instead he knelt at his son's side and hugged him, and Walter began to cry and couldn't stop.

He hadn't expected love. He hadn't deserved forgiveness. The fire of his father's love reduced him to a little mess...a child again. But how he loved his father, then. How God-like his father's love. He thought, "If his father could forgive the light bulb, would not God forgive him more? If his father met him personally, why should God not be personal as well? So Walter concludes his story with a question: "Why then would I want to hide from him, and why would I now be afraid? Why wouldn't I grow more excited at the prospect of his coming?"

At first, the Baptist's fiery, wrathful rhetoric sounds like bad news. Judgment is hard to hear, especially when it's deserved. But with God, judgment isn't for judgment's sake. The goal is grace. It takes enormous energy to keep up appearances, to guard secrets, to cover the truth. There is only one outcome to years of concealment, and it is never good.

"He's coming! Quit deceiving yourselves. Quit lying. Come clean. Come out of hiding." Come out, come out, wherever you are. Who you'll get is not John. You'll get someone greater than John. Someone who hears our confession and responds with fire...the fire of the Father's love. What at first seemed like bad news is in fact good, a gift to melt us, turn us around, fill us, and get us out of hiding and maybe use us, yes, even us for something which in hiding we could never have imagined.

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