Mark 1:1-8
Our question of the day is: What does Advent mean to you in this strange and difficult year? I invite us to reflect on this first before we consider today’s story from the gospel of Mark. To read our community’s reflections, go to the live stream worship feed from December 6, 2020.
For me, entering the church season of Advent feels, finally, like we’ve landed in the right place. I feel like we’ve been in Advent ever since March 15, and now, we’re finally, officially, in the right season. I think it’s because Advent is a season of hope and anticipation and not a season of fulfillment...which is partly how I’ve experienced this pandemic time.
Our Advent hope is that Jesus is a ‘comin’.
Mark’s gospel opens thus: the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. We know, from the first moment, that everything ahead of us will be about Jesus. Mark’s gospel and all of the gospels, Matthew, Luke, and John, are about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. When we consider the basic structure of the Bible, our sacred text, we see two parts: the part before Jesus, the Old Testament, and the part after Jesus, the New Testament. While all Christians believe God shows up in the world in Jesus, Lutherans in particular focus on the gospels, the good news of Jesus, as the very center of the Christian witness. We are Jesus people. But in Mark’s opening story, Jesus is nowhere to be found.
But Jesus is a ‘comin’.
Mark begins his good news Jesus story by recalling the words of the prophet Isaiah from the Old Testament, a promise that God would send a messenger ahead of the messiah, someone to pave the way for God’s entrance into the world. Who is this messenger? It is none other than the locust and honey-eating camel’s hair and leather belt-wearing John the Baptist. A fiery preacher, a charismatic leader, an effective baptizer by the metric of pure numbers. For people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem go out to him, confess their sins, and are baptized in the River Jordan. But instead of reveling in his own glory, John points to someone else who will come after him, someone far more worthy, far more powerful, someone endowed with the Holy Spirit.
Jesus is a ‘comin’.
John appears in the wilderness of ancient Israel, a desert place, a dangerous place, a place of wild animals and thieves. John appears in the wilderness to urge repentance, to baptize, to announce the coming of One greater than he. John appears not in local synagogues, not in the temple in Jerusalem, not even in city squares. John appears in the wilderness to make a way for the coming of God. Couldn’t John’s ministry have been done more effectively elsewhere? Apparently not. By God’s design, the first place, the only place John the Baptist announces God’s coming into the world is the wilderness.
Jesus is a ‘comin’--first to the wilderness.
John the Baptist draws people into the wilderness to announce God’s coming, to call them into repentance, to baptize them in the River Jordan. People from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem gather with him at the banks of the river. Likely all Jewish, likely men and women and their children, whole households together. In a day and age of great social and economic disparity, just a small fraction of the population claim social privilege, so the masses gathered on the banks of the Jordan are surely common people, carpenters and fishermen, people of many trades, people familiar with great hardship. In the heyday of the Roman Empire, John’s wilderness crowd is an occupied people living under the tyranny of Rome. Instead of drawing the noble and the rich, instead of attracting religious leaders, John announces the coming of God to those marginalized and ignored, people hungry enough for good news they are willing to enter the wilderness to hear it.
Jesus is a ‘comin’.
In the season of Advent, we are eager for the beauty, the joy, the sparkle of Christmas. But the spartan, gritty, even dangerous circumstances of the real-life Advent of Christ are strikingly dissimilar. To be clear, I’m with you. I listen to 1940s sentimental Christmas music on repeat on YouTube. I’ll be home for Christmas... It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas... I’m dreaming of a white Christmas… But the way God sets up the great reveal, the way God says: “I’m a ‘comin’” is an Advent story more similar to a dystopian science fiction novel than a heart-warming book you read in an armchair with a cup of cocoa watching snow fall next to a roaring fire. Which makes this Advent story of John the Baptist the perfect story for Advent 2020. An Advent more dystopian in nature than the heart-warming, cocoa-drinking kind. Because this year’s Advent and Christmas seasons feel different, with warnings from scientists, doctors, and leaders about the even greater possible surge in Covid-19 deaths through the holidays. The cozy feelings of Christmas and all the associated events are cut sadly short by the grim news and the gloomy predictions. Like the ancient Jews who gathered on the banks of the River Jordan, we cannot know exactly what the future will hold. Maybe we are scared or anxious. Maybe we are simply uncertain. Maybe we find ourselves in the wilderness with John the Baptist eager to hear good news of any kind.
And that good news is the same for us as it was for the ancient people: Jesus is a ‘comin’. Not in the sparkly, beautiful, joyous way that perhaps we would prefer but in ways gritty and spartan and real. When John announced the coming of Jesus, the people didn’t really know what that meant, but they knew it was hopeful.
In the process of my sermon writing, I wanted to conclude my sermon with a hopeful promise, to tie up the loose ends of this dystopian Advent. But real-life Advent is all anticipation and hope, not fulfillment. Even more, Advent is not about what was but about what will come. Yes, Jesus came 2,000 years ago, but we know: Jesus is still a ‘comin’ one day and forever. Amen.