The Advent Axe – Cutting Down to Raise Up - 3rd Advent Sunday sermon

The Advent Axe – Cutting Down to Raise Up

Text: Luke 3:3-20
Third Sunday of Advent (Gaudete – Rejoice!)

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

John the Baptist is not what you’d call an “Advent calendar” kind of guy. You won’t find him behind a little cardboard door holding a frosted cookie. No. He’s the wilderness prophet, wearing camel’s hair robe, eating locusts and wild honey, and his message isn’t “Have a holly jolly Christmas.” It’s: “You brood of vipers! The axe is laid to the root!” This is our Advent herald. And today, the Spirit wants us to listen—not to the cozy, twinkling blinking holiday we’ve imagined—but to this wilderness voice, because this voice prepares the way for real joy.

John’s message is simple, urgent, and it comes in two movements.

First, he proclaims a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. He’s quoting Isaiah: “Prepare the way of the Lord! Every valley shall be filled, every mountain made low.” Now, if you think that’s just a pretty metaphor for spiritual introspection… listen again. In Isaiah’s day, when a king traveled, his workers would go ahead and physically fix the roads—flattening hills, filling potholes—so the king could come in glory.

John is saying: The King is coming. And the road he’s traveling isn’t a highway in your heart. It’s the road between you and your neighbor. The valleys? Those are the ditches of poverty, of hunger, of loneliness that we drive past. The mountains? Those are the systems of greed, the structures of pride, the inequalities we’ve built. The crooked paths? That’s our convenient ethics, our little dishonesties, our “everybody does it.” Prepare that road, John says. Because the King is coming right through your neighborhood, your workplace, your social media feed, your family tensions. He’s coming where life is real.

And the crowds get it. They feel the sting, the conviction. They ask the most sincere religious question in the world: “What then should we do?”

Here’s the beautiful, unsettling thing: John doesn’t tell them to come to a prayer meeting. He doesn’t say, “Have a spiritual experience.” He says: If you have two coats, give one to someone who has none. Share your food. To the tax collectors—the collaborators, the swindlers—he doesn’t say, “Quit your job.” He says, “Do your job honestly. No more skimming.” To the soldiers—the men with power—he says, “Don’t bully. Don’t extort. Be content.”

In other words: Your repentance, your faith, needs sleeves. It needs hands and feet. It needs to show up where injustice lives and greed works and people are hungry. Faith bears fruit in the soil of everyday life, or it isn’t faith at all. This is Advent housecleaning—not of our attics, but of our lives.

But if John’s message stopped there, we’d just be left with a to-do list. A divine ethical demand. And that’s crushing. Because we know our hearts. We know we hoard more than we share. We bend the truth. We benefit from crooked systems. We see the valley of our neighbor’s need… and we walk around it.

That’s why John points past himself. “I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I is coming… He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

Here’s the gospel, the good news in the wilderness: Jesus is the one with the axe. Yes, the axe is laid to the root. And yes, that’s terrifying. The root of our selfishness, our pride, our sin—it has to be cut. But listen: We are not the lumberjacks. We are the trees. We cannot cut our own roots. The work of judgment, the work of true repentance—the real cutting—is his work. And he does it not to destroy us, but to save us.

He comes with fire—to burn away the chaff of our pretense, our false identities, our “brood of vipers” hypocrisy. And he comes with the Holy Spirit—to ignite in us a new life, a new warmth, a new power to love.

He is the mightier one who does what John the Baptist could never do: He takes the axe blow himself. On the cross, the root of sin and death is cut down in his flesh. And from that felled tree flows forgiveness, life, a new creation. His baptism is a flood of grace that drowns the old viper in us and raises up a new child of God.

So, what does this mean for us today, this third Sunday of Advent, this Sunday of Rejoice?

It means our joy is this: The preparation of the road is not your burden to complete. It is your privilege to join. The King is coming—indeed, he has come, he is here, he is coming again. And he brings a fire that purifies and a Spirit that empowers.

You, who feel the weight of the “what then should I do?”—come to the mightier one. Let his axe of grace cut down the guilt that paralyzes you. Let his fire burn up the fear that hoards your coat and your compassion. Let his Spirit fill you—today—with a peculiar Advent courage: the courage to see the valleys and mountains around you not as problems to avoid, but as the very road where your King is arriving.

So go from this place, baptized in his Spirit. Carry the axe of his word—not to condemn, but to level injustice where you can. Carry his fire—not to burn bridges, but to warm the lonely. Carry his joy—because the one who is mightier than Herod, mightier than guilt, mightier than death, is your Savior. And he is making all things new.

Rejoice! The axe is grace. The fire is love. The road is being prepared. And the King is at hand.

Amen.