Mark 1:1-8
Advent
2
December
10, 2017
William G. Carter
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the
Son of God.
As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am
sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of
one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his
paths straight.”’
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness,
proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And
people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were
going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing
their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt
around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, ‘The
one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop
down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you
with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’
If
we want to have a spiritual Christmas, we will inevitably run into John the
Baptist. This strange prophet makes his annual December appearance. He never
gets his picture on a Christmas card, and if he did, the message would be, “For
our house to yours: you brood of vipers, repent from the wrath to come.” John is
direct. He is rude, even to the point of being offensive. Word is that his
father had been a Jerusalem priest, but John is standing outside the bounds of
the Jerusalem temple. And he is speaking up.
He
seems an odd caricature, a prophet right out of the pages of the Old Testament.
There hadn’t been any Jewish prophets for five hundred years. The landscape had
been quiet. If God had been speaking, it wasn’t in a Voice loud enough for
anybody to hear. Suddenly, there is the voice of thunder: let there be John! He
appears. The inference is that he comes directly from God, if not biologically,
certainly spiritually.
To
reinforce the shock of his arrival, the Bible describes his appearance. John
dresses like a wild man and smells like a camel. He’s covered in animal skins
and he eats bugs.
Yet
don’t ever be distracted by his appearance. John is a messenger. The purpose of
his life is to point down the road, to alert us to Someone who is coming,
Someone who makes him look small and insignificant. He’s talking about Jesus,
of course. John asks, “Are you ready for him to come? Are you really ready for
him to come?”
That’s
the Advent question. We can answer quickly and say, “Yes, of course we want him
to come.” We’re tired of a godless December. There is the constant bombardment
of noise, with favorite carols played so frequently that they sound like
jackhammers. The mailbox is full of catalogs we’ve never heard of, hawking
products that we didn’t know we wanted. The appeals for donations are
overwhelming, souring us on some of the very causes that we normally cherish.
Yes, we’re ready for Him to come.
And
John stands up on a rock, “You think you’re ready? You really think you’re
ready?” With that, he hollers at the top of his lungs, “I splash you with
water, but the One who is coming will set you on fire.”
Well
now, wait a second, nobody said anything about fire. Fire is pure energy. It’s
dangerous. Fire consumes. It burns down houses. Fire purifies. Everything
burned away. Fire is such a powerful symbol. Do we really want God to come like
fire?
It’s
a good question. A lot of people want something much tamer in their religion.
It’s OK to have an experience of God’s all-consuming glory, but if we could,
let’s keep it to an hour and sing only happy songs that we already know. And it’s
OK to have our conscience tweaked and our hearts appealed, but please don’t
make any real demands on us.
The
poet Annie Dillard was raised a Presbyterian in Pittsburgh (in America, that’s
like Presbyterian Central), but when she was a teenager, she made an
appointment with the pastor at Shadyside Church to say she was dropping out. The
whole thing seemed to focus on conformity: fit in with the crowd, be
respectable, couch your truthful speech in innocuous inanities, and above all,
don’t ever go overboard with your religion. Annie had enough of what she
perceived as a culturally sanctioned substitute for religion.
Her
pastor said, “Oh, you’ll be back someday.” Annie wasn’t so sure.
Years
later, after she won a Pulitzer Prize in literature, Annie reflected on what it
would be like to truly encounter God. It seemed such a contrast to the over-domesticated
approach to religion that usually masquerades as faith. So here’s what she says
in one of her books:
The higher Christian
churches -- where, if anywhere, I belong -- come at God with an unwarranted air
of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were
doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have
dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words
which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed.
In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a
strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were
to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe,
genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect in any minute. This is
the beginning of wisdom.[1]
“I
baptize you with water,” says John the Baptist, “but he – the One who is coming
– will baptize you with the fire of God’s Spirit.” The true God comes to repair
and redeem the world, which is a way of saying the world can’t stay the way it
is. We can’t remain the way we are. There will be a disruption of the status
quo and a restoration of what God has intended all along.
Are
we really ready for that? And if we are, how will anybody know? As John will
say in another text, we have bear fruits worthy of repentance. That is, it’s
not enough to simply say that a difference is necessary. We have to act like we
are changed. We must produce the kind of behavior that shows our renewed
allegiance to God.
Every
day, it seems the morning news brings another sordid account of how all kinds
of people have gone off the rails. I don’t need to tell you what you already know.
People do unspeakable things to one another. There are lawsuits filed every
day, some of them justified, some of them not. There are crooks getting away
with their crimes, and some of them even get their pensions restored.
We
don’t like to deal with uncomfortable truth, especially about ourselves,
especially about the things that have been done to others, and the things that
have been done to us.
Perhaps
the most unsettling news is the continuing revelation of public figures who
cannot keep their hands to themselves. Many of them are men with a whole lot of
power and money, and these are merely the ones who make the news. It is as if John
the Baptist is calling us to a time of reckoning, and it’s far from over. For
far too long, some people in our society have plundered others, assuming they
had the right to do whatever that wanted. Now the awkward truth is begun to be revealed
and named. This year, Time magazine’s Person of the Year is the whistle blower.
As
a woman in my own family said recently, “It happened to me. I never said
anything because I just thought that’s the way men are, and I didn’t think it
would do any good to speak up.” I assured her it’s always the right time to
speak up, even when it’s difficult, even when it’s controversial, even when it’s
going to stir up controversy. For it’s not only wrong to hurt another person;
it’s equally wrong to believe you are not worthy of speaking up about the hurt
that has been done to you.
Listen,
this is uncomfortable. I know. And as a pastor, I want to push the conversation
to a higher level. Here is what matters most: Who has the maturity to tell the
truth? Who has the moral courage to do
something constructive about it? And who is able to ask honestly for
forgiveness -- and who is Christ-like enough to grant it?
I’m
not pointing the finger at anybody, because there is no superiority in my soul.
And neither do I think we should callously point the finger at some outsider, particularly
a public figure we don’t like. It’s a lot more constructive to take a good long
look in the mirror, acknowledge what we have done, ask God for mercy, and then
go about rebuilding whatever relationships we can.
Today
John the Baptist holds up the mirror. He invites us all to take a long look. He
doesn’t do it because he’s mean. He holds up the mirror because he has been
sent by God to prepare us for the Christ who is coming. And he asks us if we
are ready for him – if we are really ready.
And
he does it, because all of us are the beloved daughters and sons of God, all of
us, without exclusion. There is a dignity to be claimed which will not allow us
to be perpetrators or victims. God is come to set us free – and the way that
God does this is by giving us the courage to tell the truth, the truth about
ourselves – and the truth about God. It is indeed the truth that will set us
free.
In one of his poignant reflections about
human life, the great mystic Thomas Merton has this to say:
All sin starts
from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own
egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else
in the universe is ordered. Thus I use my life in desires for pleasures and
thirsts for experiences, for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this
false self and construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I
wind experiences around myself and clothe myself with pleasures and glory like
bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and the world, as if I
were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible
covered its surface.
In other words, a lot of the time we are
faking it. We pretend we are something we are not. And life goes askew when we only
for ourselves, either to maintain our false sense of power or to give in to the
wounds of our victimhood. But here is the truth, said Father Merton: “The
secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God.”[2]
This is the same God who says, “I love
you. And I love your neighbor as much as I love you. And I want all of you to
live in the justice of my peace, and to prepare your souls for the day when I
am completely among you.”
The day is at hand, my friends, to come
home to God. The day is near. Live as those who belong to the day.
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