Gloria Dei Lutheran Church

Matthew 3:1–12 + Isaiah 11:1–10

Beloved in Christ,

At the beginning of the sermon, an image appears on the screen of K-Pop Demon Hunters.

These are the K-Pop Demon Hunters: Rumi, Mira, and Zoey. This Korean animated film, released last June, became the most-watched Netflix movie ever, set box office records when the sing-along version appeared, and put four songs on Billboard’s Top 10.

Korean Pop, K-Pop has become a worldwide language that is joyful, global, full of kinetic energy. Its choreography become dance challenges. Its fans inhabit our youth room and likely most Sunday school rooms. After learning about the movie, I called my brother, whose son is from Korea. “Have you heard about this movie?” He laughed like I was some dinosaur who just emerged from the swamp.

The movie opens with instructions for these young women:

The world will know you as pop stars, but you will be much more than that. You will be Hunters. Demons have always haunted our world—stealing souls and channeling strength back to their king—until heroes arose with voices strong enough to drive back the darkness. But Hunters are more than warriors. Our music ignites the soul and brings people together.[1]

Their band, Huntrix, battles a rival boy band made of demons. The complication is that Rumi, their lead singer, carries demon blood herself—fighting not just external monsters but a shame growing inside her. In the end, shame isn’t defeated by force. It’s undone by a radiance that refuses violence. “Darkness breaks not when it is crushed, but when light refuses to dim.”[2]

John the Baptist said in another story: I’m not the light. I’m pointing to the light. BUT he WAS the big show. John was one of the first century’s demon hunters. People streamed out to hear him. He had the costume down, visually unforgettable, channeling prophets who were ancient even in Jesus’ day. Camel hair. Leather belt. Locusts and wild honey. A spectacle on the edge of the empire.

But John wasn’t entertainment. He was a witness that something was happening that would change the game. Everyone in Jerusalem and Judea were in caught in a world that was slowly destroying them from within. All the symbols that gave them meaning; that made them a nation, were being systematically torn down. Religious leadership had aligned with Roman power. Being the chosen people got twisted into being exceptional, better that the rest. Systems were rigged for extraction. Fear and violence kept people compliant. The whole region ran on anxiety. Rome made sure of it. Fear serves those who dominate.

“You brood of vipers!”

It sounds like pure judgment. But John isn’t condemning people.  He’s naming the venom—the toxins society injects into the soul, the fear people inherit and then pass along, the systems that coil around communities until neighbors become threats. Rome’s manipulation seeps into the bloodstream until people forget who they are.

Repent, he says. Greek: Metanoia. Not shame. Not groveling. Not self-hatred. Repent means turning. Reorienting. Choosing a new story.

“You don’t have to live with this poison anymore,” John says. “The power of that story is already over. Someone is coming who will BE God’s story—redemption, healing, justice, peace. I’m not worthy, even to carry his sandals, which he will not need because the very earth beneath our feet is known by God as holy ground. One whose baptism will cleanse like fire nourishing soil, whose winnowing fork will remove the chaff—the parts of us and our world that don’t feed life.

He will be the way we touch Isaiah’s vision and know that it’s true.

Wolves resting with lambs. Children leading creatures once feared. New life rising from dead stumps. Not predator vs. prey. Not the powerful devouring the weak. But a creation where fear no longer writes the script.

Last night, we were immersed in this song of Isaiah at Augsburg University’s Advent vespers. Speaking with one of the campus pastors after the service, we learned that, while we sang, ICE raided a dorm on the campus, hauling a student away, the rest of the students traumatized by the sight of weapons which seemed pointed at them, too. All on top of the rhetoric of our president toward Somali people in Minnesota that continues strategically to inject poison—reviving stereotypes, weaponizing fear, turning neighbors into targets, who are always people of color or different in some way. If you know Somali people, seek them out. Stand with them. Become the voice crying in a wilderness of fear.

Our Advent wreath is remade each week to represent a different messenger. Today’s wreath is John’s—wild desert woven into evergreen. Grasses from the riverside. Sea holly and thistles—sharp, beautiful, ready to drop seeds. Like all divine signs, you have to look closely. Come up after worship and see. God braids the fragile and the fierce together into something that can carry fire.

“Let your light so shine before others…”

I know peace feels elusive. So many are terrified, anxious, grieving, or simply hanging on. This week, a powerful voice in my wilderness life called me to attend to the women who are trying to stop the flow of venom, frantically trying to chop down the weeds that are entangling their children and partners, bearing most of the emotional load, even in church, all the while getting everyone where they need to go and what they need to eat, making sure they have what they need to survive in the predator world that they intuitively know is killing us, and have the best Christmas ever. My friend pointed me to an article on depleted mom syndrome—bearing so much on a battery that’s nearly empty.

Peace isn’t the absence of struggle. It is the presence of something stronger: gentleness that refuses fear’s shape, clarity that resists manipulation, bravery that refuses hatred. Peace returns like a shoot from stump: stubborn, surprising, alive. Woven into our lives by the God who shows up for us, not against us.

In the final scenes of K-Pop Demon Hunters, Rumi—brilliant and beloved—discovers the most dangerous monster isn’t out in the city. It lives within her: a shape made of fear she never named, shame she never voiced, anger she kept sealed away. The more she runs, the larger it grows. When she fights it like the others, it only strengthens.

Everything changes when she finally stops running. She stands before the creature, now a trembling, shadowed version of herself—but doesn’t strike. She reaches.

“I see you,” she says. “You don’t have to be afraid anymore.

The monster dissolves—not destroyed, but undone—because she met it with truth and tenderness. That moment is repentance. That moment is Advent. The birth of a new world inside an old one.

John calls us into that same brave work: to face the wilderness within—habits that harm, fears that shrink us, resentments we carry—not with shame, but with the courage to say: “I see this. It doesn’t have to rule me. God is doing something new.”

While broods of vipers inject venom, we distribute the antidote: the blood of Christ, race injected into the stream of life, moving through our bodies, our communities, our stories. Healing, flowing, cleansing, raising us into a song worthy of repentance.

Maybe that’s the name of our new K-Pop band here at Gloria Dei: Brood of Vipers. But what flows through our song isn’t poison—it’s the future. The glory of God. A spectacle. An image. A poem. A vision that proves more powerful than rifles in the night.

From Maya Angelou:

We, Angels and Mortals, Believers and Non-Believers,
Look heavenward and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at our world and speak the word aloud.
Peace. We look at each other, then into ourselves
And we say without shyness or apology or hesitation.

Peace, My Brother.
Peace, My Sister.
Peace. My Soul.[3]

[1] https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/kpop-demon-hunters-transcript/.

[2] This classic quote can’t be attributed to anyone specifically, but these themes have been associated with the move.

[3] Maya Angelou, Amazing Peace,