Preachers: Here’s a challenging take for Sunday’s text.

Advent 3C: Luke 3:7-18

“Do not begin 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.”

Luke 3:8b

This line from John the Baptizer in the Gospel of Luke is striking. And the principle argument — that if the Hebrew people aren’t up to the task of doing what God wants, then God is up for finding better people — seems pretty obvious.

What’s striking is not that John says it this way. It’s what this means given who he’s talking to.

John is challenging a people who have a complex and integrated view of their people. There is no separation of church and state. They are an ethnic group and a religion. It is all tied together. In other words, they accept the unity of ethnicity, culture, religion, and politics under a single tribal identity.

So then John says to them: Don’t begin to tell yourselves that your identity is the thing because God can replace you.

Being an insider on the right team isn’t worth squat if you’re not up to the task of acting like it.

This is a frightening idea to a people whose identity is built around God’s support because of that identity. People who believe God loves them because they are insiders on the “right” team.

A belief that would have them believe that being on the right team means they technically can do no wrong. By definition. Their identity makes it right.

Now think about us in our time.

This is hard enough in the abstract. But today we are wrestling with a rise in the Christian Identity Movement. An attempt to integrate ethnic, cultural, religious, and political identity into a single cultural identity. To claim that very same sense of right through their identity.

Think also about the broader White Power Movement, of which the Christian Identity Movement is a part. A movement with adherents who would use violence to gain control over the country.

And a central teaching of the White Power Movement is something called replacement theory: that white people will not only lose power, but will be systematically replaced by “inferior” (minority) groups through birth and immigration. A theory that is being mainstreamed on Tucker Carlson’s cable show.

“Replacement Theory” has long existed in white power and eugenicist circles and has occasionally jumped into the mainstream.

The connection between these is uncanny.

We know that polite society says we shouldn’t discuss these things because they are “too political”. But it is dangerous to not do so.

And given the reading, it seems like it is also an attempt to avoid dealing with the heart of the gospel text.

John gives us a message of repentance that is not easy.

And it is really scary to those who fear disruption of the status quo, of loss of power, or those who hope for the restoration of their culturally-identified in-group.

But for most of us? It is a whole different story.

This really does sound like good news. Because we don’t want God to only support insiders for being insiders when the insiders are being total jerks.

We want God to be generous. To accept us when we have screwed up. And our tradition has long supported the idea that whole bunches of people who seem absolutely terrible get God’s grace too.

What we want is for God to reject acts of evil — even when it comes from inside the house. Especially when it comes from inside the house!

Those who would make identity the hallmark of good are at odds with a gospel which proclaims that doing good is the hallmark of good.