Christopher Thomas
Second Sunday of Advent, Year B – 12/06/2020
Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God…
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is not, in fact, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, at least according to Mark, is John.
John, you know him. I feel sure you’ve seen him. I know I have.
You know the one I’m talking about. John. He used to stand under the canopy of Foley’s Department Store on Main Street in Houston, Texas.
“Repent!”
“The end is near!”
“For you know not the hour or the day that our Lord will make his return!”
“Prepare the way of the Lord!”
He’s the one I would studiously avoid making eye contact with as I arrived to work each day. We were all sure the guy was nuts. You’d have to be nuts to be an itinerate street preacher in downtown Houston. I remember being grateful when the Christmas display windows went in. They gave me something else to focus on, to avoid connecting with, to avoid hearing, to avoid, well, John.
How can we be so busy getting ready for Jesus, so busy “adventing” Immanuel, God among us, that we miss John? John is, after all, the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. That itinerate street preacher, in the wilderness, in the bizarre hair suit, with the matted hair, smelly from lack of bathing for who knows how long, belly full of locusts and honey. We don’t know Jesus without first knowing John.
“Johns” pop out in the most usual of wilderness settings. Wilderness places where we have lost our way, known or unknown, things done or left undone. There are times we wander into wilderness of our own volition, and yet there are times we are carried off into the captivity of wilderness by situations and circumstances that seem completely out of our control.
Who is in control? Is it me, or you, or God? How did we end up in this wilderness?
How or why are questions of little import – we are there, lonely, afraid, dazed, and confused, in the wilderness.
When suddenly a queer person launches from behind a rock, breaks into our sin-sick condition, the banality of every single day of this advent life, and yells,
“Repent!”
“For the end is near!”
The beginning and the end are collapsing into one, he warns, in the imminent arrival of God, in the form of Jesus Christ. Time, the alpha and the omega, become one when the Word (capital W, Logos) becomes flesh, and dwells among us!
“But John, I don’t have time for this, not now.” Christmas is coming. I have cards to write and mail. I have gifts to buy and wrap and (this year especially) ship. There’s the office Christmas party. I have to plan and prepare and clean and get ready, because it’s what’s expected, when one is in this wilderness, the wilderness of Advent. That’s what we do, isn’t it? We fill our “time” with lots of anxiety-producing stuff so that we can avoid the real work that we need to do, that we must do, the work that John the baptizer harkens us to each and every second Sunday of Advent.
What is that work that John so diligently calls us to that isn’t about shopping and wrapping and mailing and cooking and cleaning?
Repent and confess.
Repentance and confession, and to a great extent, sin, are about relationship, to each other, and to God.
Confession and repentance are two words that make most of us really uncomfortable, because they involve a trip inward, a deep dive into self-reflection, introspection. Where do I sit in relation to my Creator and to the rest of God’s creation around me? Who do I think that I am, and who do I say that God is, and who do I say that you are, as a wonderful child of God? How do I act, yes, sometimes sinfully, that invalidates these claims? These are all orienting confessions that involve my taking stock of me and my self-location. I am not God; God is God, and I am not; and therefore everything that that necessarily implies. Confession IS good for the soul, they say.
“Repent!”
In the most literal sense, turn around. Reorient. Cast your gaze in a different direction. It’s a most fascinating command, especially for those of us suffering from this vast expanse of “wilderness time.” What might you see back there, when you turn around?
My Advent anxiety tells me that it may be the boogeyman of time, out to get me. There won’t be enough, time, for everything that has to get done, before…
Before what? Before Jesus shows up?
Of all the things you might ignore, relationships, confession, repentance, whatever, “…do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord, one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”
God is giving us all the time we need to do this confession and repentance work. It must be important, it must be THE preparation thing, because God’s patient for no one, not one of us to perish, but for all to come to repentance, for all to make that turn. What is it about repentance that defies and decries the collapse of time, the beginning into the end, the now into the not yet?
Why is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, this crazy guy yelling “Repent” under the canopy of Foley’s Department Store in downtown Houston? Why isn’t the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ? Why does Mark, who’s writing for an audience of demoralized exiles 70 years after Jesus sending us back centuries to Isaiah, another prophet to an exiled people, to reveal the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ?
Mark must’ve known the wilderness we would find ourselves in today. He must have! Mark knew we would need that turn today just as surely as they did 2000 years ago and well before that.
Because when we make that radical turn toward God, with confession and repentance come the assurance of God’s merciful, generous, grace-filled absolution. Time and space and place collapse fully into absolution. “Almighty God have mercy on us, forgive us all our sins, through our Savior Jesus Christ, strengthen us in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit keep us in eternal life, Amen!” Absolution! We become one, again, with our creator God, if only for an instant!
That’s why we need to go back through, day in and day out, week in and week out, Advent in and Advent out, the confession and repentance process. The work that it calls us to do, getting right in our relationships with each other and with God, bring us to the sweet, sweet place of absolution that we never take for granted, but love and cherish to the very end!
“Comfort ye my people,
saith your God.
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem,
and cry unto her
that her warfare is accomplished,
that her iniquity is pardoned.”
That, my friends, IS the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God!
Amen!
