Sermon - 2d Sunday of Advent (12/6/2020)

Is. 40:1-11; Ps. 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Pet. 3:8-15a; Mk. 1:1-8

“As it was written in [the prophets], John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

Everybody knows that John the Baptist fulfilled the task that Isaiah describes in the first reading today: Prepare the way of the Lord. And I know I have gotten myself in trouble more than once by asking impertinent questions, but I want to ask this one anyway: Why does the way of the Lord need to be prepared? Is not the God who created the universe already present everywhere? Certainly God has no need for us creatures to do anything to help God come to us. God does not need you or me or anybody else to do anything in order for God to find a way to us. God has the spiritual equivalent of 4-wheel drive, the ultimate offroad vehicle. God is not restricted to the highways that human beings pave for God – so why does John the Baptist, or really anyone, need to prepare the way of the Lord?

Now it’s true that we do need to prepare, or at least we think we need to prepare, for the coming of Christmas each December 25. There are gifts to be bought and decorations to put up and things to be cooked in order to be ready for Christmas, and so the assumption is made that somebody must have had to do the work to prepare for the first Christmas. And yet we know that all that preparation isn’t strictly necessary even for our modern Christmas celebration. As Dr. Seuss taught us, even if the Grinch comes and steals everything that we worked to prepare for Christmas, Christmas will come anyway. And no matter what Covid prevents us from doing this year, Christmas will come anyway, and it will be fine. And that is the way grace works. Whatever we do or don’t do, whatever roads we clear and whatever obstacles we put up, God will come anyway, because that’s who God is.

So then what was John the Baptizer doing? Well, Mark tells us that – as was written in the prophets – John appeared in the wilderness, announcing a baptism of repentance. And I think those two words – wilderness and repentance – tell us a lot about who John was and why his work is still important for us two thousand years after the Lord’s coming.

For a faithful reader of the Old Testament like Mark, the wilderness is of course where Israel wandered for forty years after being set free from slavery in Egypt. God took a people who were slaves making bricks for the vanity projects of the Pharoahs of Egypt, and led them through the wilderness to a Promised Land. And in between they stopped at Mount Sinai, in the middle of the wilderness, where God gave Moses the law, the teaching about how to live as a free people with justice and peace for one another, with welcome for the stranger and dignity for all, where all could serve the one true God and no one ever need be a slave again.

And what did Israel do in the wilderness for forty years?  Complain, mostly.  They kept wanting to go back to Egypt.  You know they had great leeks back there in Egypt.  Yes we were slaves but we at least had big juicy onions to eat.  Here in the wilderness it’s just manna every day, no taste, yuck.  When they weren’t homesick for the days of slavery in Egypt they tried to recreate Egypt – to worship a golden calf, to worship power and money the way the Egyptians used to do.  It happens to all of us, really – that day when you find yourself repeating the patterns of your childhood that you swore you would never do yourself, and you look at yourself in the mirror and say, I don’t believe it, I’ve become my mother. How did this happen?

And even though Israel could have gotten to the Promised Land in a matter of weeks if they had really wanted to – it’s not all that far – they procrastined in the wilderness for forty years because stepping into God’s promised future is scary.  Accepting the call to live as God’s free people with responsibility for ensuring justice and taking care of our neighbors is not easy, especially when you grew up around the fleshpots of Egypt.

And even when the people arrived in the Promised Land, the Scripture says that almost immediately they kept trying to recreate Egypt. From King Solomon, with his 700 wives plus his harem building the first Temple in Jerusalem with Hebrew slave laborers – as if he had become the Pharoah, except in Jerusalem – to the chief priests of the first century, running the Temple in collaboration with the Romans, making themselves rich while bleeding dry the poor farmers of Israel and the even poorer people of the villages who had lost their land, barely surviving as fishermen in Capernaum or carpenters in Nazareth. As if they had never left Egypt.

And in that world, John the Baptizer made the conscious decision to return to the wilderness.  To dress in camel’s hair rather than the civilized fashions of Egypt, to eat locusts and wild honey rather the juicy onions and leeks of Egypt.  To call to a people who were fleeing headlong back into Egypt:  Come out, turn around, you’re going the wrong way!  God’s good kingdom is still coming, indeed it’s practically at the door, but you’re running away from it back into slavery, back into injustice, back into every person for themselves, back into the comfortable habits of the past – and for what, some onions and leeks?  When God has prepared a rich table for you where everyone can have a place?  Turn around – which is what repentance means – turn around, and start heading in the right direction.

And people responded to John.  They left Jerusalem and Judea and joined John in the wilderness.  They decided to turn around, and then to be baptized in the River Jordan, crossing the River Jordan as their ancestors did when they finally left the wilderness and entered into the kingdom of God.  They turned around and chose to head away from Egypt and toward God’s promised future.

This is, I think, what it means that John the Baptist prepared the way of the Lord.  John did not prepare a path for God to come to us; God needs no such thing.  The “Way of the Lord” is kind of like Richmond Highway – which does not get its name because it belongs to Richmond or because Richmond comes to us on it, but because if you follow the road it will take you to Richmond – provided you are headed in the right direction.  The Way of the Lord is what takes us to the kind of life that God has in store for us, what Jesus would call the Kingdom of God – provided we are headed in the right direction.  John called to a people headed back to Egypt:  Turn around, go back through the wilderness, and travel in the right direction again.

We are, now, in something of a wilderness time, not exactly of our own choosing.  The prophets are telling us – Comfort!  We will be able to go back again soon – perhaps not as soon as we’d like, but soon.  But John the Baptist invites us to consider: back where? Which way? Back to Egypt? Or back to the kingdom of God?  When we are in the wilderness, our first impulse is to go back to what we knew – that was the constant temptation of our ancestors in faith.

And yet John the Baptist invites us to consider whether we who feel lost in the wilderness are being invited to a new place, somewhere we have never yet been, where God’s promised future can be a reality. The people who came to John the Baptist in the wilderness were looking for this, they were eager to turn around and head in a better direction.

This gospel passage invites us to consider: What is the new place where God is inviting you in this wilderness season?  What old habits do you not want to go back to, when this time in the wilderness is over?  What new opportunities is God placing before you, and before us as a congregation, in this season?  Because if we turn around and head in the right direction, we will see God when God comes, not only at Christmas, but every day of our lives.