I Believe: Hope for Tomorrow
Isaiah 40:1-11, Mark 1:1-15
November 29, 2020
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here https://youtu.be/DswlOSgglNA
If you want to get to Bethlehem, you have to start with John the Baptist. The gospel writers all tell the story of Jesus in their own ways, but everyone of them seems to think that there is no way to get to Bethlehem without a detour to the Jordan River where John is baptizing. Even Mark who doesn’t say anything about Bethlehem or Jesus’ birth, starts with John the Baptist. So every year, on our way to the baby born in Bethlehem, we start with the adult John the Baptizer preparing the way for the grown-up Jesus.
We begin the church year today, we begin our journey to the manger, but this is not our first time. We know the whole story. Beginnings make us think about endings. Do you remember how Mark’s gospel ends? After finding the empty tomb, Mark says, the women “said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.”
It was such an unsatisfactory ending that two different endings were added by later editors. But before they were added, there was the message from the angel at the tomb who said to the women “Go tell his disciples that Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him.”
Jesus has gone ahead to Galilee. Galilee is where it all began. The place where he taught the crowds, healed the sick and called his disciples. It was predominantly poor, not a center of power, but a place where ordinary people lived and struggled to survive.
Mark’s gospel ends abruptly, in fear and silence, or maybe mystery and wonder. The end sends us back to the beginning -- the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God. Perhaps Mark is suggesting that the story doesn’t end with resurrection, but cycles around and around, and moves forward through time up to now.
Mark’s gospel begins out in the middle of nowhere. Not in church, not in the capital city, not in the middle of the business district. It is not a place where God is expected. Mark’s gospel ends with silence and fear. Instead of a tidy conclusion or tying up of loose ends, Mark offers radical disorientation.[1]
This may be a good word for us now, in the tenth month of a world-wide pandemic. A good word for the beginning of an Advent season and a story which we think we know already, a good word for a time in which so many of our certainties are being questioned.
Mark wrote his gospel close to 70 AD. It was a time of war, brought on by revolt against Rome. Jerusalem was under siege. Israel’s citizens were divided. Some thought God was raising up leaders who would throw off the oppressors. Others claimed that submission to Rome’s authority would was the only way to peace and security. Between the news of heavy-handed soldiers and fear of extremist guerillas, everyone was anxious. The price of oil, olive oil that is, was skyrocketing. Tensions were high in villages where Jews and Gentiles lived side by side. Families fractured along political lines. [2]
Into that context, Mark proclaims “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God.” Mark begins with John, but John is deeply connected to the past. Just as Mark’s beginning reverberates to the future, it also brings echoes from the past. John goes to the Jordan, which is a reminder from long-ago when the people crossed that river as they entered the promised land. He calls the people out into the wilderness, which might remind them of the wilderness of Sinai where God provided manna and quail and water and guidance for 40 years. Or it might bring to mind the desert highway on which God led their ancestors home from exile.
John is adapting, anticipating the new in the midst of the old. He trusts that God will redeem humanity from suffering, evil and injustice because of the ways God has done so in the past.
Out in the middle of nowhere, John preaches a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Repentance means change. Change of mind, change of heart, change of behavior. It is a radical turning. Humans normally avoid this kind of thing. It usually involves giving up things we like, things in which we find pleasure or comfort or security. Repentance has become an uncomfortable word, often associated with guilt or shame. But crowds were going out to John, out to the middle of nowhere. They were seriously willing to change their routine in order to get in on the good news.
They might have hunkered down, simply tried to grit their teeth and hang on for however long Roman occupation endured, but instead these crowds were anticipating the arrival of the Messiah, preparing themselves for what would come next. John tells them the hard truth – like it or not, change is going to come.
Some of us are hunkering down, just enduring the break in our routine because of pandemic. The last months have revealed many things we might not wish to look at – racial and economic disparities, lack of access to health care, dehumanizing immigration policies, the consequences of not trusting science, the effects of party loyalty over the common good. I wonder if we can see the disruption in our lives, not as a time to be endured, but as a call to repentance, an invitation to change.
I wonder if we can hope for more than returning to normal, but instead prepare ourselves for a shifted landscape in which God is active in new ways to redeem us from suffering, evil and injustice. I wonder.
John the Baptist appears in the wilderness, wearing the clothes and eating the diet of a wild man. We might picture him like a street preacher with a megaphone. We might hear him shouting, maybe in the accent of a TV evangelist.
But that is not exactly how Mark introduces him. Mark focuses our attention on the time of Isaiah, six hundred years earlier. There were similarities with John’s time – It was Babylon, instead of Rome, who devastated Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. But it was still the people of Israel who were longing for peace in their homeland as they suffered under enemy hands. The people who said “by the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.”
Mark compares John the Baptist to the prophet Isaiah. He quotes from Isaiah 40 which begins “Comfort, O comfort my people,” says God. “Speak tenderly.”
What if John is not shouting at all? What if John is speaking tenderly? What if we heard John’s message, not as scolding, not as yelling? What if we heard it as gentle truth-telling, as tender comfort? What if his message is one of hope and joy that something wonderful is about to happen?
God’s movement is often abrupt and unsettling. It can be radically disorienting, coming as a whisper rather than a shout. Sometimes really good news comes only with a honest, hard look at the landscape of our lives. And sometimes that truth is tender and comforting.
Speak tenderly, God says to Isaiah. Be gentle with people in pain. Listen to each other, especially when you are in the midst of trauma. Comfort, comfort my people, says God.
The story is told that during the Blitz in World War II Britain, when the city was strafed and bombed, many children were evacuated to the country, but some remained in London and many of those were orphans. Some were sheltered in a Jesuit order of brothers, who noticed the children had trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, night after night. When the children were being put to bed one night, one of the brothers guessed the children’s problem was that they were anxious because of uncertainty in their lives, and gave each child a small piece of bread, saying something like this – “Hold on to your piece of bread while you are sleeping. Remember when you woke up this morning, we fed you and took care of you. When you wake up tomorrow, and we will be here for you. Let the bread remind you of this. Good night, children.” And the children slept.[3]
Friends, take comfort. God took care of us when we woke this morning and God-with-us, Emmanuel will be present when we wake tomorrow.
The good news of Jesus which we have been sharing for centuries encompasses life and death, suffering and joy, despair and hope. It is a story that enters ordinary life at moments when we are lost and when we are found. It embraces honest lament and songs of joy. It is a story told by fearful people and faithful people – and often, we are the same people.
Frederick Buechner says it this way, “Then at last we see what hope is and where it comes from, hope as the driving power and outermost edge of faith. Hope stands up to its knees in the past and keeps its eyes on the future. There has never been a time past when God wasn't with us as the strength beyond our strength, the wisdom beyond our wisdom, as whatever it is in our hearts--whether we believe in God or not--that keeps us human enough at least to get by despite everything in our lives that tends to wither the heart and make us less than human. To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift. . . . because we remember, we have this high and holy hope, that what Christ has done, Christ will continue to do, that what God has begun in us and our world, God will in unimaginable ways bring to fullness and fruition.”[4]
Beloved ones, we begin again, the start of the church year, the journey to a manger. We begin again, standing up to our knees in the past, with our eyes on the future, waiting tenderly, with hope. Amen.
[1] Karoline Lewis, Beginnings and Endings, at https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-advent-2/commentary-on-mark-11-8
[2] Christopher R. Hutson in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 1, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, general editors, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2008) p. 44.
[3] Dennis Linn, Sheila Linn, Matthew Linn Sleeping With Bread: Holding What Gives You Life (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 1
[4] Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember, (New York: HarperCollins, 1984) pp.11-12.