2nd Sunday in Advent, December 7, 2008 “Series B”
Grace be unto you and peace, from God our Father and from our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Let us pray: Dear Heavenly Father, during this season of Advent, as we begin to celebrate anew the good news of your saving grace in Jesus the Christ, open our hearts by the power of your Holy Spirit to your Word. Help us to hear with new ears what the Scriptures proclaim, and empower us to respond with renewed faith in your gift of redemption. This we ask in Christ’s holy name. Amen.
Advent, being the first season of the Church’s liturgical calendar, we begin anew to tell the Good News of God’s redemption in Jesus the Christ. This year, our lessons will be from “Series B”, which features the Gospel of Mark. Now Mark’s Gospel is considered, by most Biblical scholars, to be the first of the canonized stories of the life of Christ to be written. It also has the distinction of being the shortest.
As a result, Mark doesn’t waist any time getting to the heart of his message. Mark doesn’t begin with stories of our Lord’s ancestry, or painting for us a description of our Lord’s birth, or even trying to describe the significance of our Lord’s incarnation. Mark simply opens his Gospel with the words, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” In his opening sentence, he tells us that God has come among us to bring to fruition God’s promised redemption, his new covenant.
Mark then quotes from the prophet Isaiah, reminding his readers that God promised to send a messenger to prepare the way of the Lord, a voice of one crying out in the wilderness. And in just the fourth verse of his Gospel, in strides John the Baptizer, who, to our modern senses, appears to be some sort of pietistic weirdo.
Just picture the scene. Out along the Jordan River, in the midst of the barren Judean Mountains, stands this figure with his hair probably longer than mine, a beard that hasn’t been combed or brushed in days, dressed in animal skins, and eating locusts dipped in wild honey. And as he walked up and down the river, he shouted out in his gruff voice, Repent!, until the crowds gathered, and he began to preach.
According to Thomas Long, a Professor at Princeton Theological seminary, “The image that we have of John the Baptizer is shocking to us, because of its weirdness. And the image of John the Baptizer was shocking to the people who went out to hear him preach, but not for the same reason. The description of John the Baptizer is intended, not to excite the reader’s fascination with the bizarre, but to jolt them with a memory…
John is not an exotic; he is a living anachronism. His vestments are not outlandish; they are the clothing of the past… To be precise, John is dressed like the old prophet Elijah, no question about it, and the moment of his appearing is as sobering in its context as would be the arrival of Thomas Jefferson, waving a copy of the Declaration of Independence, in today’s Senate chamber.” End quote. [Shepherds and Bathrobes, CSS, 1987]
If I understand Dr. Long correctly, right from the beginning of his Gospel, Mark describes the role of John the Baptizer as one who stepped out of the pages of the Old Testament, into the pages of the New. His role was clearly defined by the history of a community striving to live in relationship with God. He was to prepare the way for God’s anointed, and the new kingdom God’s Son would establish. And the communal history of Israel saw the way of preparing for God’s new kingdom was through repentance.
Thus, according to Mark’s Gospel, the way to prepare for the coming of Jesus the Christ, the Son of God into our midst, and to enter into a new relationship with God, is to repent. But what does it mean to repent? Well, I’ve read many commentaries over the years on the significance of repentance, including several this past week. But I think that Pastor Blair is absolutely right. Sometimes you read something that just captures your attention, and needs to be preached.
And so, I would like to condense and summarize Dr. Long’s commentary.
Some people, for instance, think of repentance as something, which just naturally happens to us as we move through the journey of life. We travel along the road, our goals established, our values set, when out of
blue, we crash into a wall of some experience we can’t handle. A loved one dies, or we get rejected by the school of our choice, or we are laid off from work, or we have an illness that nearly takes our life. It happens in one form or another to everyone, and such experiences call for a changing of our goals, a reformation of our values, an alteration of the way we make decisions. And of course, this is a form of repentance.
Or there may be some who think of repentance as a profound, theological version of a New Year’s resolution. The old year passes to the new, and we feel the extra inches around our waist, or taste the bitter nicotine on our tongue, or think of the hurtful and spiteful things we have said to someone near to us, and we repent.
So we toss the butter pecan ice ream into the garbage, flush the tobacco down the commode, or stammer out a few long-overdue words of affection and affirmation. We seek to turn over a new leaf, wipe the slate clean, and begin a new phase in our life. This, too, is a form of repentance.
But the repentance that John preached involves more than a mid-course correction to our lives, or turning over a new leaf. The repentance that John preached calls for us to look behind before we dare to move ahead. It calls for us to encounter the past that we have lived, but not fully experienced, before we enter a future we do not yet comprehend.
I believe that John, wearing the clothing of an old prophet, embodies the history of God’s people, in order to proclaim that all that God has done before, which we did not fully understand, all that God has said in our memory, which we did not fully believe, has pointed to this moment, to the coming of the Messiah into our midst.
The repentance that John preached requires the work of the Holy Spirit to enable us to see ourselves in the midst of God’s ongoing plan for our redemption. And it can be described in this way:
Whenever we return to an old and well-worn passage in the Bible and do not force it to say what we expect it to say, but through the power of God’s Spirit allow it to encounter us anew, creating new and demanding possibilities for our lives, we have repented.
Whenever we relive some experience in our memory, and discover, in our remembrance, more evidence of the hand of God at work there, than we first thought – more signs of the grace of God than we ever knew were there before, we have repented. And if, through that experience, the Spirit of God moves us to find in ourselves the will to live a different, more faithful tomorrow because of what we have discerned, we have repented.
Whenever we return to the faith we have been given, to the Gospel we have heard so often, to the stories which have been told again and again, and through the power of God’s Spirit, find it not to be a retreat, but a renewal of our lives, we have repented.
Whenever we discover that all that God has done for us in our common yesterdays, has been pointing us anew to the Christ who comes to us in the present to forgive our sins and make possible a new life of faith, we have repented.
In essence, the repentance that John the Baptizer preached, is rooted in the ongoing grace of God, reaching out to us through the power of God’s Holy Spirit, helping us to overcome doubt and fear, by inviting us into a relationship with Jesus the Christ. May God’s Spirit so work within each of us, this Advent season, and throughout our lives.
Amen.
