The Kingdom of God is Like...A Knee Replacement - Matthew 3:1-12

One afternoon in college, as my friend Drew and I walked to our favorite coffee shop on Printer’s Row in Chicago, we were met by two Gideon evangelists. The organization, best known for placing Bibles in hotel rooms, was having a convention, and on the agenda was saving souls. The evangelists asked us a straightforward question: had we been saved? Drew and I knew well the response they wanted, some version of being born again, but we were smart aleck philosophy majors who were waking up to the historic traditions of the church. We responded with the answer that would have satisfied most people in Christian history: we’d been baptized. This, however, wouldn’t do it for the Gideons. To their minds there were many people who’d been baptized, but weren’t saved. After some back and forth, we finally told them that we were students at Wheaton College. Studying at Billy Graham’s alma mater was satisfying enough, and the two men let us go on our way, assured that we were at least mostly among the faithful.

Despite the inadequacies of the interaction on both sides, the issue at the heart of this sidewalk theology debate is an important one. It is the question of identity, of who stands inside the circle of God’s healing, or to put it another way, what counts for salvation. Thankfully, our Gospel reading today offers us some help in answering this question through another impromptu debate on theology, this time at the side of a river.

On one side we have the Pharisees. These were good and faithful Jewish teachers, members of a strict sect who longed for the people of Israel to live into the fullness of Torah. For them, the salvation of God meant the restoration of David’s kingdom, and a re-establishment of the ethnic people of Israel in the land. Through a messiah, they believed God would kick out the Romans. But for that to happen, the Jewish people had to adhere to strict codes of purity, being careful to rid themselves of anyone considered unclean by the most meticulous readings of the Law. Violations such as breaking the Sabbath or eating with unclean hands could keep God from bringing salvation, and so they needed to enforce these laws in every village and household.

On the other side, we have John the Baptist, the prophet who ate locust and honey in the wilderness. Despite his outsider style, John had quite the following. People from the surrounding villages would come to hear this riverside preacher, and more than a few took him up on his call for repentance—a commitment they symbolized through being immersed in the Jordan River. For John, following the long line of prophets before him, the way to become a child of God had nothing to do with who your parents were or keeping the details of an exclusive cultural practice. Instead, God’s children were those who followed in God’s pattern of life, a life marked by mercy, love, and justice.

God, John preached, was the one who made people his children. It was an act of grace that God could even confer on stones as much as people. Claiming that your ancestor was Abraham, through genetics or genealogy, wouldn’t do you much good in John’s book. Which means that no one can lean on any identity outside of the one formed by a life rooted in living out the practical implications of God’s grace. John called this reality “bearing fruits worthy of repentance.”

Repentance is a scary theological word. If I see a street preacher holding a sign saying, “Repent!” I’m likely to switch to the opposite sidewalk. If a church had “repent” on its marquee, I’d be hesitant to go in. But that word’s use and abuse through the ages obscures the surprising and inviting reality of the concept in the New Testament. The word translated as “repent” is the Greek term, metanoia. Most literally, it means a change of mind, but this is mind in the broadest sense. I like the way the Common English Bible translates the word: change your heart and life.

What John is calling us toward in repentance is a way of life that reflects and lives into the reality of God’s grace. John is telling us that the way into God’s life, the family of God, is through the practice of God’s ways through the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. John came for the first moment of this turning, but it is through Jesus that this final work is empowered.

Jesus was fond of taking examples from the everyday world around him to help people understand the kingdom of God. So maybe we can try one from ours. The kingdom of God is like…a knee replacement.

Our habits of life in the modern Western world are not all that kind to our knees. By years of doing a lot of what we’re doing right now, sitting, our knees become stiff and painful. If we want to not experience that pain, we have to repent: we have change our lives because the way our world forms us to live isn’t good for our health.

For some, that change comes in a radical form. The old knee has to be removed and replaced with a new one. From what I hear, it can feel miraculous. The knee pain is gone instantly. This is like the movement of God’s grace. God is pouring grace on us, calling us toward health, and God will do divine surgery if necessary, in order to bring us toward wholeness.

But as we all know, no one just walks out of the hospital and bounds down the stairs like a 20-year-old. Instead, that knee replacement is just the first step of a process that continues for months, if not years. The knees are fixed, but we have to live into a whole new way of life before they can fully function. Physical therapy is required, daily exercises are needed. Otherwise, new titanium won’t help our situation at all.

And so it is with our identity as God’s children. We need the work of repentance, of changing our hearts and lives, so that we can move into the gifts that God’s grace has conferred on us. Salvation comes from the same word as “salve.” God has brought healing to all of us, freely available as a gift. But it is through repentance, doing our holy therapy and spiritual exercises, that we can actually put that healing to work and live into the restoration God’s grace has given us. God’s healing doesn’t just make us like new. Instead, God’s healing gives us what we need to live into newness.

Have you been saved? Whether asked by a Gideon on a street corner or a Pharisee in a face-off with John the Baptist, I think our answer should always be an easy “yes.” God’s grace is pouring out toward us with a power that can even turn stones into saints. Having accepted that, “yes,” that freely offered healing, the question then becomes: how will we live into it? John tells it to us plainly: we have to change our hearts and lives. God’s healing isn’t a moment like a surgery, but a way of life. If we want to live into the real good that it can do for us, then we don’t need to just sit around admiring our shiny new knees. We need to get up, work through the painful therapies of healing, and begin to live into the new life that God’s grace has given us. It’s a life that, with a little work, will allow us to dance and climb mountains. Joy and wonder await us. But now it’s time to do our exercises. Amen.