Mark 1:1-8
Announcing the Good News
Welcome to week two of Advent. Where we are waiting. Again. I mean, still. We are still waiting. Sometimes it feels like all we ever do is wait. A bunch of us waited for the bus last night to get us home from the city. It was raining. It had been raining all day for our trip to the city. Ann and Garrett waited in line for an hour to get into the sneaker convention. While it was raining. Two weeks ago we had to wait for the plows - thank you, Gary - to get us unstuck after Wednesday’s snow storm. Everyone’s waiting in line for groceries and presents and decorations for Christmas. Or waiting for planes and trains and busses to get families together over the holidays. Waiting for Christmas vacation from school. Waiting for news from the hospital. Waiting for that one family member to sober up this year, waiting for a job application to go through, waiting for some good news about the police force and relations with the black community.
Israel, that nation named for wrestling with God, is familiar with waiting. After exile to Babylon, they may have gotten somewhat comfortable in their new location, marrying with the locals and starting up new lives in that place to which they had been stolen in war. But even before that, they were used to waiting while they traveled from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. They had waited for freedom while they lived under oppression, until the plagues of God had descended - fire, and hail, and blood, and locusts - and they could begin the journey to that promised land flowing with milk and honey.
When the prophet Isaiah speaks tenderly to Jerusalem, that her penalty is paid, she has received from the Lord double for her sins, and the Presence of the Lord will once again be revealed among them, the people of Israel have been scattered for a long time. In their absence, life limped on in that sort of mess you’d expect after being conquered by an outside power. Yet now the exiled and the remnant were to be reunited, and that terrible foe would fade like the grass, leaving only the Word of the Lord. Only that good word of new life and freedom, a fresh start.
Wouldn’t we like that word? Some fresh start, some great reunion, some clarity of vision and purpose in the middle of all of these holiday commercials and the noise of everything? We’ve been waiting, hoping, dreaming, for something better, something fulfilling, something restful and holy and healing.
With all of the clutter around us, all of the busy-ness, it seems there just isn’t time. Everything keeps getting in the way, good and wasteful alike. It would be nice to just clear the table, empty the schedule, silence the noise.
Which is where John the Baptizer meets us this morning. Last week we were in the end times, but today we gather at the start of things. “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Out in the wilderness, John preaches a baptism of repentance, and with all that God has done with us in wilderness places, with so many stories of God’s faithfulness in feeding us with manna and directing our journeying, it seems the wilderness is the best place to start again… again. Wilderness places can be confusing, confounding, ridiculous lost times and spaces where nothing seems certain. They are places of waiting. As we are waiting in this season of Advent. But our waiting is different now than it was then. We live on the other side of these stories even while we live inside of them.
Because John is out in the wilderness with us, leading us to repentance, to clearing up the clutter and making way for our God to be among us… and immediately, God is already here. Immediately. Everything in Mark happens ‘immediately,’ and this is the first thing. The first beginning of the Good News. It happens in the wilderness. And the voice cries out in the wilderness: “clear a path! Make God’s road direct!” Which, actually, is Mark’s favorite word. Not ‘direct,’ but a closer translation from the Greek is: “Make God’s road immediate!” It’s nearer than we imagined, closer than we thought possible. The path between God and God’s people is immediate. It’s not a path we forge. It’s not a naughty and nice list we keep score on to see how close God might get this time.
The Epistle reading just about sums it up. In this second letter to Peter, we hear that God is patient, that a thousand years are like a day, that God is waiting with us. In line at the grocery store. In those last few minutes before the school bell rings. At that bedside and in that doctor’s office. On that street where Eric Garner was strangled, and in that police station and with that jury. In the rain and outside the preschool. Everywhere you wait, God waits with you. Every time you call on God to be present, to protect, to comfort, to guide, God is immediately there already. Each time you turn around, repent, notice that life needs to be better, or at least different, God is already there with you. Immediately.
The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is just the beginning. Throughout the telling of this first chapter, we find that after his baptism, Jesus is immediately driven into the wilderness, he immediately calls and names disciples, immediately feeds and heals and teaches, immediately is arrested and crucified and risen. It doesn’t seem that God has much patience when it comes to closing that gap between us, to leveling the playing field so that all may be fed and nourished, welcoming and embracing and sending us back into the world from this Table.
So whether you find yourself in the wilderness today or at an oasis, God has already cleared a way to you, through all of your clutter, to be immediately with you, within you, beside you. Because that’s just what God does, regardless of what we put in the way. That’s just who God is, crucified and risen among us. Prepare ye the way of the Lord.
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