Bear Fruit Worthy of Repentance — December 7, 2025, Third Sunday of Advent

Bear Fruit Worthy of Repentance

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Matthew 3:1-12

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.’ ”

Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to him, and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins. But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I, and I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

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One of the most beautiful illustrations of repentance—I first encountered in Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood—she attributes it to “the rabbis,” which is a little too vague for me, but I’ve never been able to track down a more precise source. Anyway, the story she tells is that God holds us each by a string. When we sin, the string is cut. But when we repent, we find God has come and tied a knot in the string. Many sins? Many knots. But of course, the cutting and tying shortens the string, making us closer and closer to God each time we repent. In the church, we’ve created a ritual, a liturgy, for repentance: confession. Writing about confession, Luther says, “Confession consists of two parts. One is that we confess our sins. The other is that we receive the absolution, that is, forgiveness, from the pastor as from [God’s own self] and by no means doubt but firmly believe that our sins are thereby forgiven before God in heaven.” To make this point clear, you’ll see in the hymnal that we call this confession and forgiveness, lest we forget the second part. At its heart, confession and forgiveness—repentance—is a revolutionary act where our honesty about ourselves and our need for God’s grace is met by God’s honesty about us and our world as it is, and as it yet will be, by the grace of God.

Out in the wilderness, John is chomping on bugs and risking bee stings for honey, and also, apparently, preaching some really interesting sermons. Because everyone—absolutely everyone—comes out to hear them. And they begin: repent. And lots of people are, apparently convinced. 

Even the Pharisees and Sadducees—religious law consultants, LLC—they show up, too. And John is positively giddy about this development, writing a new sermon and everything. And, I have to admit, I tend to gloss right over the specialty sermon. Probably because I want to believe that if I showed up that day, I’d be ready with my swimming suit and snorkel gear—ready to swan dive in the Jordan River just as soon as John says Amen. I gloss over them I’m sure that I would’ve gotten all the gold stars for being the best disciple. Because I think ah! this part, at least, doesn’t apply to meeeee! 

But, then again… I might be tempted from time to time to see my life choices as the right ones. Tempted to justify the times when I’m self-centered, self-serving, selfish. Tempted gloss over my own negligence, the things left undone, the things neglected as, somehow, okay because I was too busy being righteous somewhere else. That’s the temptation of legalism—to neglect to do the right thing for others because I’m—technically—doing the right thing, the legal thing, over here. 

So, John tells the Pharisees and Sadducees to “bear fruit worthy of repentance.” And, I think I’ve long assumed that he’s talking about the Fruits of the Spirit, like St. Paul in Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Because, surely the Pharisees have that on lock down, especially the last one. But, now, I’m not sure that’s right. Repentance means “to turn around” or to “change one’s purpose.” What is fruit worthy of that? 

My hunch is that the Pharisee and the Sadducees, in the quest to be just so good in themselves—so right—they miss the opportunities to do good for others. And, sometimes, they miss the opportunity to do good, because they are petrified of doing the wrong thing, of being seen in the wrong place, with the wrong kind of people. They may be legally spotless, but they remained curved inward, as St. Augustine describes sin. They’re not honest—ahem—we’re not honest with ourselves. We’re often so busy self-justifying we can’t participate in the justice-ifying God is doing in the world. True repentance turns us outward toward our neighbor, where we see the kin-dom come near. 

So, when John says, “bear fruit worthy of repentance,” it sounds to me a lot like Luther: “Sin boldly.” To risk being, perhaps, not technically right, but being whatever that is in the direction of our neighbor, in the direction of what is in their best interest, in the direction of justice, in the direction of what God is doing in the world. This is a repentance that, when we are honest with ourselves about ourselves, we look up to see that God has met us our honesty about the way the world is with an inspiring honesty about the world yet can be.

Now, I want to take a quick step back, because, while I think that most of us, at some time in our life, need to know about the gift of confession, as it is traditionally understood. And many of us need to know about how God offers us this opportunity to be completely honest about ourselves and our choices and even the tangled up places we find ourselves in the world. There are also many of us who are not given the opportunity to be honest with and about ourselves because we have been told we are sinful, we are wrong, we are bad. If this is you, this is what I want you to notice. John starts his sermon saying, “Repent, for the kin-dom of heaven has come near.” 

Has come. For grammar nerds, that verb is in the perfect tense, meaning it is a completed action with ongoing results, ever ongoing results. This means, first and foremost, that before our repentance, God is already reaching out to us, God is already forgiving us. God isn’t sitting with Santa’s naughty or nice list; God isn’t preparing our report card. God is reaching out to us. 

So, repentance doesn’t start with a list of rules, it doesn’t start with some yardstick to measure ourselves against. Repentance starts with God’s presence in the world. Repentance starts with God’s already-work of right-side-upping the world. 

When we confess our sins, we actually begin with God’s own honesty about the way the world is and God’s own honesty about the way God is making it. Is anyone in Christ? NEW CREATION! Repentance isn’t us making a list of all our short comings. Repentance is what happens when we bear witness to the kin-dom, at hand, and we ask, how can we change course to be a part of that? 

The Church believes this is revolutionary work. In his book about community, Life Together, Bonhoeffer notes that “sin wants us to be alone.” But confession, is “a breakthrough into community,” because we no longer have to bear this burden alone. Admittedly, in its own act of confession, the church itself must ask itself, where have we demanded repentance, where have we harmed those who lives are a testament to the kin-dom, come near? 

You see, repentance—confession and forgiveness—calls to an end old ways of being in the world, calls to an end shame, and guilt, and self-justification, in favor of the justification of God, which makes possible the new creation: guided no longer by this rigid avoidance of sin, we’re free in Christ to serve one another, free in Christ to take risks for the kin-dom, knowing that forgiveness is ours, absolution is always already available to us.

Beloved, when we are honest with ourselves about our missteps and blunders, our out-and-out failures and cruelties, our neglect and disregard for neighbor and neighborhood—which is what happens when we confess our sins, what we find is that God has already drawn near. That to me is this goose-bumps causing reality of confession, God is just waiting for the opportunity to forgive, to offer salvation and justification, to draw us further and further into the kin-dom. It’s like God is always saying, “Yes, I’ve noticed that, too,” and then extends her hand to us, inviting us to be a part of making it right.

Amen.