This Sunday's Gospel text came from the first chapter of Mark:
1 The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, 2 as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
“I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way”—
3 “a voice of one calling in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.’”
4 And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. 6 John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7 And this was his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8 I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
Click through to read thoughts on the first words of Mark's Gospel!
This week we concentrated not so much on the substance of the text as its function. This Gospel is all about announcements. Mark announces the words of Isaiah which announce the coming of John the Baptizer who announces the impending visit of Jesus Christ. This fits so nicely with Advent, the season of preparation and looking forward. Each of these announcements paves the way for the next. Ultimately they culminate in the ending event, the coming of Christ. Whether we're looking at the babe in the manger arriving at Christmas or the Son of Man coming on clouds at the end of all things, our vision of Jesus is framed by the announcements which precede him and the air of expectation and curiosity they create.
Put another way: absent the announcement hope cannot possibly exist. Hope is an indispensable root of faith. Do the math on that one and you'll find heralding far more important than we usually assume.
God has given each of us a voice. Some communicate verbally, others through action, others through support of causes, others through sharing personal talents. Expressing your God-given gifts isn't hard. It's not even a stretch, as that's what they're meant for. Why, then, do we find it so hard to do? John and Mark and Isaiah prepared the way boldly. Our efforts are timid, limp by comparison.
We don't always realize the importance of preparing God's way. We tend to forget how long the process of knowing God is. We forget the contributions, big and small, that those around us have made in our journey. The Theology on Tap folks were discussing early church experiences last Saturday night and to a person they were able to differentiate between their initial exposure to God/church and how they feel today. Along every step of their evolution they were accompanied by parents, teachers, pastors, friends, spouses, children, sometimes strangers who prepared the way for the next step with a word or lesson or act of grace. They've probably forgotten a thousand small moments that led to their current relationship with God. Almost all of them shared a couple big moments, contributions they hadn't forgotten. What if the people who had helped them along the way hadn't found it important to do so? I'm not saying every one of them realize they were assisting someone build a relationship with God. Most of them were probably acting out of instinct or a deeply-held philosophy/theology that even they couldn't articulate fully. But at least they bothered. If they had not done so those amazing theologians gathered around the Parkins' living room would have never reached that point. Whether we realize it the things we say and do every day either prepare the way for the Lord or don't. And if they don't--either through intention or neglect--for what exactly are we preparing people?
We also limit the ways in which we prepare, sticking to the things with which we're most comfortable instead of what our neighbors need. We could easily see someone being prepared by a great sermon but we don't see them being prepared by our great split pea soup. In the right moment and time the soup may be a more powerful witness than the sermon. But somehow it doesn't seem as "godly". We confine the holy to the boundaries of the church, assuming that if we act nice for an hour while we're in the building we've achieved our Minimum Holiness Quotient for the week. The problem is, if the stuff outside the church isn't holy then the stuff inside the church seems to matter less. If we limit the definition of "holy" to an altar or room or building then how can we possibly prepare people to meet God anywhere else? This is where you get the old refrain where evangelism meaning getting people into the church instead of getting God's love and grace out. If people don't meet God's love and grace outside the church, why in the world would they ever step inside of it?
Most of all, though, we're infected with our culture's disease which says wonderful, nice people:
A. Don't make waves, and...
B. Aren't very powerful.
The first holds by definition. We equate wonderful and nice with being liked and getting along with everybody. There's nothing wrong with that, except that in this age of polarity and pluralism being liked and getting along usually means being quiet, at least in public. You pretty much know as soon as you say something you risk offending someone, even if that something seems quite helpful and necessary. Therefore "nice" and "wonderful" aren't defined as being bold and helpful, but being mousy and mostly silent.
Obviously this robs niceness and wonderfulness of all their power. Who knows what nice is (or gracious is or loving is) when it never speaks? How can one know what way is good when it's never prepared or marked? A tragic side effect of the silence is ceding power to all of the bad stereotypes of the faith. The people who do speak in public are ones who don't care about being nice or wonderful as much as very loud and very right. Our lack of dedication to preparation--bowing to culture instead of scripture--has allowed those voices to rule the day. Even now, clearly seeing that wonderful and gracious are far more faithful than cranky, rule-bound, and judgmental, the latter instinctively seem more powerful to us than the former. They're also embedded far deeper in the average person's definition of "Christian" than any message of grace. That's just sad.
One nationally-known speaker and minority-group member has dubbed this the "NALT" phenomenon. Whenever someone steps up and harangues his particular minority in the name of the Judgmental and Holy Christian God he says he gets tons of e-mails and whispered asides from other Christians saying, "We're not all like that." (Or NALT for short...) "Good!" he says, "But why in the world are you telling me, only after I've been attacked, and in a whisper at that? Why aren't you saying it in front of everybody all the time, including those folks you're claiming you're 'not all like'?"
Translated, he might as well be asking, "Why aren't you preparing the way? Those other Christians seem to have no problem steamrolling their way across it!"
As painful as it is to admit, he's right. Guilty as charged. We're nice. We're wonderful. So is our God. But we're the only ones who know that because we don't take up the way-preparing call of John the Baptist, we don't realize--let alone make use of--the power God has given each one of us, and in some ways we don't want to be bothered with this task. The problem is, the world needs us to be about this task. The world needs us to take "nice and wonderful" of our churches and start showing them every day in word and deed. The world needs to know a faith it will never even see if the way is not prepared. John the Baptist is not going to come and do this for us. His work is the foundation of our preparation but we need to build a structure on top of that foundation that is unique to this time and place, responding to the needs of the people God sends us in this community. Absent that, even the best foundation just looks like a big hole in the ground.
It's time to prepare, not just prepare our church or prepare our hearts or prepare our Christmas decorations but to prepare the world for the Good News of Jesus Christ by showing them love, grace, faith, warmth, wonder, justice, kindness, and the open arms we enjoy every Sunday. It's time to get the word out, to spill our actions far beyond the boundaries of the church, to make known that something INCREDIBLE is going on here that transcends all of us...that the world is about to turn in a way we can't believe and for a good purpose that we could never achieve on our own and nobody will want to miss a moment of it.
How will you prepare the way in this time? It's worth more than a passing thought.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
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