Scriptures: Isaiah 40:1-11, Psalm 85: 1-2, 8-13,
2 Peter
3:8-15a, Mark 1:1-8
The Beginning of Good
News
You may have seen the local news accounts on TV, or perhaps you
were there yourselves: earlier this
week, persons protesting the grand jury verdicts acquitting the officers who
shot Michael Brown and Eric Garner held a die-in at 30th Street
station. After the die-in, they marched
to City Hall, when their protests disrupted the ceremonial lighting of the Christmas
tree. What the crowd gathered at City
Hall wanted and expected was a comforting, familiar community ritual, with twinkling
lights and sweetly-sung Christmas carols.
What they got, this year, was an unwelcome and disruptive message, even
amid the twinkling lights, that black lives are being lost at the hand of
police and that, even amid the twinkling lights, families and communities are
weeping and in pain.
Believe it or not, I think the writer of Mark’s Gospel would
have approved. Mark’s Gospel, thought to
have been the earliest of the four gospels to be written, is anything but warm
and fuzzy. Mark offers us no shepherds,
no wise men, no choirs of angels, no baby lying in the manger. [As an aside, for those who want to discuss
the familiar birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, stay after church for our
adult Bible study.] In Mark’s gospel, we
don’t even meet Jesus’ family until the 3rd chapter – almost a
quarter of the way through, well after Jesus has started his ministry - and the
first time we meet Jesus’ family, they think Jesus has gone insane. Basically Jesus’ family is chasing after
Jesus with the proverbial butterfly net and are trying to have him put in
restraints. Mark gives us none of the
comforting Hallmark greeting card imagery we associate with Christmas. Instead, Mark’s disruptive gospel begins by
introducing us to John the Baptist, the wild man in the wilderness, whose
appearance would have reminded his audience of the Old Testament prophet
Elijah. And like Elijah before him, John
the Baptist spoke unwelcome truth to entrenched power, and John’s bold words would
ultimately cost him his life. And, of
course, we know that Jesus’ life will follow a similar course – but with a
surprise at the end, which we’ll learn about on Easter.
At this time of year, we seek the comfort of Christmas
carols, but John the Baptist is more like an alarm clock, loud, screeching, impossible
to ignore and essential to hear. And,
like the screeching of an alarm clock, the message of John the Baptist is “WAKE
UP! WAKE UP! Someone greater than I is coming, who will
change everything! GET READY!” He told people not only to wake up, but to
repent and be baptized. You would think
that, with such an uncompromising message, he’d be out in the desert talking
mostly to himself, but instead, crowds of people traveled from the familiarity of
their homes far, far into the wilderness in order to listen to what John had to
say.
They came because they were dissatisfied with their
lives. And they had a lot to be
dissatisfied with. Israel had for many
years been a dusty, out of the way province of the Roman empire. The vast majority of the people were
impoverished. People were taxed heavily in order to support
Rome, and then taxed again to support the Temple and its religious hierarchy. Soldiers could conscript passersby – those the
soldiers caught “walking while Jewish” - to carry their gear for a mile –
that’s where Jesus’ saying that, “If you are forced to go one mile, to go the
second mile” comes from. And the chief
priests were in cahoots with Rome in giving Rome’s oppression of the people
divine sanction – so they brought no relief.
And, bonus points, if you objected to any of the above strongly enough,
you’d likely end up on a cross – Rome crucified lots and lots of folks in
Jerusalem, and Jesus is unique not for being crucified, but for being
resurrected.
In their dissatisfaction, the people went to John. In response, John told them to look at their
own lives, and to turn from their sinful ways.
Granted, they suffered greatly from forces beyond their control, but
John invited them to look at what part they were playing in their own
oppression. And in the waters of
baptism, John freed them up to begin anew, freed from the burden of sin they’d
been carrying, freed to live in a new way.
Many Christians wonder why we have to deal with Advent, the
season of waiting. Why the slow coming
of the light as we light the advent candles, one more candle each week than the
last, until at Christmas Eve we finally light the Christ candle. Why the mournful hymns like “O Come, O Come
Emanuel?” Why can’t we just fast-forward
to “Joy to the World?” The reason we
need Advent is that Advent reminds us that Christ’s coming is not just an extra
zest to add to our usual routine, not just the heavenly cherry on top of our
banquet of earthly delights. Rather,
when we say that Jesus came to save, it means exactly what it says - that Jesus
came, not just to tweak our lives to make them a little more satisfying, not
just to bless our own efforts at self-fulfillment, but to save, to rescue,
those in deep pain and deep despair. This
is why Jesus said that it is the sick, not the well, who are in need of a
physician. That’s why Jesus spent most
of his time, not with the movers and shakers, but with the moved and the
shaken, why Jesus got along best, not with the priests and Pharisees, but with
the prostitutes and others utterly pressed into the dust by their society, by the
powers that were. When we say that Jesus
is the light of the world, that light is not just like an extra light bulb in a
brightly-lit shopping mall display, but like a candle in a pitch-black room. And so
if we deny the existence of the darkness – in our society and in our own lives
– we likewise deny Jesus, the light of the world, the opportunity to pierce that
darkness.
I began this sermon by mentioning those protesting the grand
jury verdicts acquitting those police officers who gunned down Michael Brown
and Eric Garner. Part of the darkness of
our society, part of the darkness that the protestors at the Christmas tree
lighting were pointing out, part of the darkness that Advent recognizes and
part of the darkness Jesus came to dispel, is that our views of events are so
deeply divided along lines of race, class, socio-economic status, gender,
sexual orientation. It’s not only racial
– actions that persons of one gender may interpret as “just being sociable” can
be seen as intrusive and threatening by persons of the other; actions that
heterosexuals may interpret as “just teasing” can be experienced as devastating
by non-heterosexuals. Where we sit – our
social location – often determines where we stand, what we see, and what we
hear. One of the most difficult
challenges of discipleship is to see and hear things through the eyes and ears
of others, our sisters and brothers who are different from us. Many of us who are white see those who were
killed, and imagine ourselves being menaced and threatened by similar
characters. Many blacks, by contrast,
see those who were killed, and imagine themselves at the wrong end of a police
officer’s gun. Many of us who are white
cannot imagine ourselves in that position, and therefore may have trouble
empathizing with those who do. Some of
us may have had the odd skirmish with the law – a traffic ticket, for example –
and while we may have been angry at the officer for pulling us over – or angry
at ourselves for not paying attention to the speed limit – it may be hard for
us to imagine such an encounter ending with a trip to the hospital, or the
morgue.
Along those lines, I’d like to talk about a long-ago
incident of extremely foolish behavior on my part, something that happened
about 30 years ago – and I’ll preface my story with a very loud “don’t try this
at home.” Please, please don’t try this
at home…..I’m about to tell you something I did as a dumb stupid 25 year old,
not to my knowledge illegal, but certainly highly unadvisable. I’ve mentioned in previous sermons that I’m
not the most patient person behind the wheel of a car – and that’s at age 53,
after I’ve mellowed considerably. You
can imagine what I was like behind the wheel of a car 30 years ago. Some friends and I – all from the suburbs –
had driven into the city and gone to a comedy club. Along with the laughs, we’d all had a drink
or two, including me – at two beers, I was well under the legal limit of
intoxication, but perhaps a bit less uptight and buttoned down than usual. I was driving my friends, who lived on the
mean streets of Wayne, Pennsylvania, out on the Main Line, where even 30 years
ago the homes were valued at over a million dollars, home; it was late, and I
was starting to get tired. I just wanted to drop them off, get back to my
3rd floor walkup apartment in a considerably less luxurious part of
Chester County, and call it a night. As
I was driving in Wayne on a dark side street, I had just stopped at a stop
sign, then driven through the intersection, and about halfway up the block was
a car, dark color, motor running, lights off, right in the middle of the
street. I tapped on the horn. No response.
I whonked on the horn, really leaned on it. Still no response. I just laid into the horn a third time –
WHOOOOONK - and when there was still no response, I rolled down the window and
at the top of my lungs I yelled, “If you don’t move that piece of crap, I’m
gonna move it for you.” And that time I
got a response, as the car’s red and blue lights started flashing, and I hear a
siren go “bloop…..”….turns out the car stopped in front of me was an unmarked
police car. Ooops! As my friends in the back seat started trying
to slide down and hide themselves underneath my seat, the car turned on its
headlights and tail lights – and, amazingly, pulled over to the curb and
stopped again, and turned out its lights.
The officer never got out. I’d
imagine he must have looked in the rear view mirror, seen a bunch of clean-cut,
well-dressed, harmless looking twenty-somethings, and figured it wasn’t worth
making a scene. In any case, I rolled up
my window, drove past the unmarked vehicle, dropped my friends off, and went
home, with no lasting consequences beyond having a funny story to tell in a
sermon some thirty years later. And yes,
I must have had a guardian angel or two in the car with me that night.
Let’s replay my story with me and my friends being black –
we’d driven into the city, gone to a comedy club, had a couple beers each, and
I’m dropping my friends off in the suburbs.
I come across a car stopped in the middle of the street, running, with
its lights out, and make the mistake of mouthing off to the driver, who turns
out to be a police officer….who looks in the rear view mirror, and notices that
my friends and I don’t fit the neighborhood profile, don’t look like most of
the folks who live on that block, maybe to that officer don’t look all that
harmless. So the officer figures that, at the very least, he
should check us out. And so, instead of
pulling his unmarked car over to the curb and letting us go on our way, he
steps out of the car, walks up to my car and asks for license and
registration. Perhaps he asks my friends and I to step out
of the car. Perhaps, smelling beer on my
breath – I’d had two earlier that evening, remember - he asks me to walk a
straight line. A reasonable enough
request, except I have recurring problems with dizziness, especially when change
positions, such as when I first stand up after having been sitting for a while,
and so it’s entirely possible I would have stumbled and lost my balance. And
perhaps things would have gone downhill from there. If the officer is upset enough, perhaps I
don’t go home that night. If I panic and
do something to cause the officer to reach for his gun, perhaps I don’t go home
ever. And, if that happens, the police department
could always release a video of me yelling out the window, and justify the
shooting on the basis of my inappropriate behavior, saying I was behaving in a
threatening manner. As the event
actually occurred, even though I did something monumentally stupid, the officer
gave my friends and me the benefit of the doubt. Had we been black, we still might have gotten
the benefit of the doubt – or not. And
the consequences of “not” could have been quite detrimental, could have sent my
life careening off in an altogether different direction, or perhaps ended it
altogether.
I go through all that, just as an example that, like me, if
we did deep enough into the recesses of our memories, I think most of us have
done stupid stuff, maybe even stupid borderline illegal stuff, stupid stuff
that, under only slightly different circumstances, could have had us run afoul
of the police, stuff that, if caught on a snippet of video and played over and
over on prime time TV, would give people a misleading impression of who we
are. Fortunately, most of us will take
those memories to the grave, with none the wiser. It’s safe to say that no human being, created
in God’s image, of any race, deserves to have the value of their life negated
because they shoved a clerk, or shoplifted cigars, or sold loose cigarettes, or
played with a toy gun, or because these or other inappropriate actions were
caught on film. In today’s reading from Mark’s gospel, John
the Baptist invites us not to point the finger at “those people” – however
defined – but rather to look at the three fingers pointing back at us, ponder
our own complicity in the evil we see around us, and to repent, to turn and
begin anew, to begin changing the world by changing ourselves.
In a few minutes, we will be sharing in the sacrament of
Holy Communion. As we share, may we
remember that the table at which we gather is a small part of a much larger
table that extends around the world, a table at which sinners and saints of
every description gather. In the waters
of our baptism and as we share bread and wine at the table of the Lord, Christ
has broken down every dividing wall, so that, as St Paul wrote, there is
neither Jew nor Greek, free nor slave, male or female. It’s a foretaste of that heavenly banquet
table where many will come from the north and the south and the east and the
west and sit together, where Officer Darrell Wilson and Michael Brown, Eric
Garner and Officer Daniel Pantaleo, where George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin
will sit at table together and eat and drink in Christ’s presence, surrounded and
enveloped by Christ’s encompassing love.
May our lives today reflect that love, inviting our neighbors, those neighbors
we love and those neighbors we can’t stand, to taste and see that the Lord is
good. May we live such transparent lives
that, in all we say and do, our neighbors can see only the crucified and risen
Christ. Amen.
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