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SERMON - December 4, 2011

Rev. Kevin E. Johnston

"In the Ordinary and Symbolic"

The Message

Advent II

Mark 1:1-8

The good news of Jesus Christ—the Message!—begins here, following to the letter the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.
Watch closely: I'm sending my preacher ahead of you, who makes the road smooth for you.
Thunder in the desert! Prepare for God's arrival! Make the road smooth and straight!

John the Baptizer appeared in the wild, preaching a baptism of life-change that leads to forgiveness of sins. People thronged to him from Judea and Jerusalem and, as they confessed their sins, were baptized by him in the Jordan River into a changed life. John wore a camelhair habit, tied at the waist with a leather belt. He ate locusts and wild field honey.

As he preached he said, "The real action comes next: The star in this drama, to whom I'm a mere stagehand, will change your life. I'm baptizing you here in the river, turning your old life in for a kingdom life. His baptism—a holy baptism by the Holy Spirit—will change you from the inside out."

Well, today we continue our journey into the season of Advent that began last Sunday, heralding the start of another new church year. We're on a journey of waiting, preparing, seeing, and understanding.

Poet Ann Weems writes that

The church is Advent.
The unwrapping of God's greatest gift is near.
Advent- coming.
God will take away the tinsel and decorate our human hearts in hope,
so that Christians can sit laughing in the rain,
knowing that the [Eternal] is going to shine in upon their being.
For no matter how long the darkness, God will send the Light.
In spite of cursing and violence and the massacring of human dignity,
we will dance in the streets of Bethlehem, for [that One] will be born!¹

We know that this year's season did not begin with a celebration of something that had happened, such as stories of a birth or a resurrection. Instead it started with a strange ordinariness - even emptiness perhaps. The designers of what is called the Revised Common Lectionary, that many Christian faith communities and ministry people follow – at least for the most part – delved into the collection of stories by the teller of tales we call Mark. And there they found, and grabbed, a particular form of narrative.

It's one that many interpreters often regard as apocalyptic – something related to a future major turning point – a warning about what is often called "the end times". And the collaborators dropped this so-called end times story right at the beginning of the season and the year. It's a dire warning to stay awake, and keep alert.

So, why would they do that? I mean, doesn't the Christmas story begin with mysterious, otherworldly beings dropping in on a betrothed couple – each one getting their own visit, by the way – telling them they're going to have a baby out of wedlock? Isn't it about a journey to a place from the past, along with visiting angels, and shepherds, and a star to show them "the way"?

Well, theologically it could be due to the fact that many scholars as well as Christian leaders claim Jesus was an apocalyptic thinker. But I have many problems and challenges with that, as do many Christians – both scholarly and otherwise. It holds no water, this "way" of seeing.

Yet, storywise, perhaps they did this because otherwise we might miss what actually is - the signs of the presentness of an incognito God in the midst of ordinary life.

Now, if we follow the community of Mark's line of thought, we find a couple of early clues as what this is all about – a human messiah, and some crazy, whacked out guy named John. The hope for a Jewish human messiah was given new impetus around the time of the Jesus-figure's birth. But it wasn't because of his birth. The birth stories were not concocted until after Mark's treatise was written. No, the impetus came from the death of the ruthless Herod the Great.

And from what we can figure out, storyteller Mark, writing at least some 40 years after this Jesus died, and after the fall of Jerusalem, saw that he was indeed 'messiah'. Even a political one. But he was not a nationalistic zealot messiah.

You see, Mark's vision of 'messiah' was about creating a commonwealth of people who were seeking "harmony with themselves, with the whole human species, and with the total social and natural environment

Even the word 'gospel' or 'good news' has about it the older Roman political sense of 'victory in battle', although later on it also became influenced by Greek sensibilities, tending to refer to life stories of heroic figures.

So combining 'messiah' and 'good news' perhaps it might be said that "Mark sees the Jesus story as laying the foundations for a new humanitarian attitude of people toward people, and of society towards its members"

From all we do and do not know – which sometimes is not much – the one called John the baptiser, or 'dipper', simply just appears, it seems, out of nowhere. Now, tradition has it that he spent some 14 years in the desert wilderness. And when he emerged, he came as a somewhat wild, austere man, dressed in animal skins, and eating kosher locusts, washing them down with gulps of wild honey.

And for many, including Mark, and later, the community of Luke, John was a prophet. But not just any ordinary prophet. He was seen and interpreted as the 'reincarnation' of the prophet Elijah.

In teasing this out a bit, Episcopal Bishop and theologian John Shelby Spong comments that

When [Mark] introduces John the Baptist for the first time it is clear that John has already been interpreted as the Old Testament figure of Elijah, who, in the expectations of the Jews, had to precede the coming of the messiah. John is clothed... in the raiment of Elijah, camel's hair and a girdle around his waist. He is placed in the desert where Elijah was said to dwell. He was given the diet of locusts and wild honey that the Hebrew Scriptures said was the diet that Elijah ate.

 

For us, John is primarily remembered for his baptisms, and for his preaching 'life-change' and 'forgiveness of sins'. But not in the way modern day fundamentalists claim.

The late New Zealander Ian Cairns observed that

proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins means inviting the hearers-readers to make tangible if symbolic expression of their willingness to embrace a new way of looking at things, and commit themselves to a new vision of 'commonwealth'…"

 

So in understanding John's role in all this, perhaps we need to hear and understand just how important the prophets and the desert wilderness was in Israel's foundational stories. It was the place, in the time of Moses, where the Israelites believed they had met God. And it was where they learned about their role as a holy people. The desert wilderness was a place of testing, a place of preparation, and a place of vulnerability where a person was stripped of all pretensions and found out what he or she was really like. It was also a place of appalling danger and deprivation.

Hence, storyteller Mark links his John to the Jewish past. An important past. But he is also seen to be a present-day forerunner of the future

Again, Spong, in his book, Liberating the Gospels², writes that

John was thus created or, perhaps more accurately, shaped to be the Elijah type messenger and forerunner. John became the life that the Christians believed was foretold (in the Hebrew scriptures).

 

But maybe Mark has something else in mind as well – something more than John just being a prophet. And perhaps that "something more" is about giving 'honour'. Everything Mark wrote about John seems to bolster his status as a prophet. So therefore, it would also included his honour. When Mark has John say: "The real action comes next: The star in this drama, to whom I'm a mere stagehand, will change your life", he might also be saying that This someone who is more powerful, more worthy, deserves our honour more than I do."

Thus, in the hands of Mark the storyteller, John the baptiser is both a prophet in his own right, and one who becomes the precursor, or forerunner to another more honourable prophet called Jesus.

And in linking the two, could it be said that

"Just as John's baptism symbolized the willingness to commit oneself to the vision of 'commonwealth', so Jesus by his teaching and example, and by the inspiring impact of his personality, will make available the dynamic for the commitment[?]… For Mark and his community, the ministry of Jesus makes this enduring dynamic accessible is a new way[?]"

 

If so, what might this say about Advent this year? Could we be invited to look for the clues of this incognito, community-building God all around us? Maybe we might want to stay awake, and be alert?

Reflecting on "Messiah", Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams remarks,

He will come like last leaf's fall one night
when the November wind has flayed the trees to the bone,
and earth wakes choking on the mould, the soft shroud's folding.
He will come like frost one morning
when the shrinking earth opens to mist,
to find itself arrested in the net of alien, sword-set beauty.
He will come like dark one evening
when the bursting red December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield the star-snowed fields of sky.
He will come, will come, will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking, as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like a child.³

Again, in the poetry of Ann Weems,

Look for the Messiah where you will, but you'll find him where you live.
He will not be separated and kept apart from those who cry to him.
He will be found in the midst of the daily, routine, ordinary stuff of life.
… wherever you're living, look for him.
[And] in the ordinary niches of that living, look for the holy,
that the holy might be found in you.⁴

Is it possible that Advent is a time to be surprised by the ordinary, and be empowered by the symbolic, as we re-imagine the world? Might it be a time to discover the God-given moments in our ordinary daily events – in the click-clack of two branches knocking together in the wind? In the realisation that rain is not a singular thing, but made up of billions of individual drops of water, each with its own destination and timing? Or in the flares of a friend's passion to shape justice with a new vision of 'commonwealth'?

May we have the wisdom to see and honour, understand and celebrate, this Advent. And may we have many Advent flashes of sacred moments, sensing the presentness of God in the ordinary and the symbolic.

May it be so.

Other resource material was found at and/or adapted from http://www.rexaehuntprogressive.com/sermon_collection/year_b_sermon_collection/
year_b_sermons_advent/ordinaryadvent2b4122011.html

 

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