Mark 1:1-8 "The Place to Start" Scott Hoezee

(Note: This morning's sermon is an adaptation of Fred Craddock's well-known sermon, "Have You Ever Heard John Preach?" as published in A Chorus of Witnesses: Model Sermons for Today's Preacher, Plantinga and Long, eds. Eerdmans, 1994, pp. 34-43. I freely acknowledge my debt to Rev. Craddock!)

Last Sunday morning we began Advent 2002 by going to near the end of Mark's gospel. Today we continue our Advent by going to the beginning of this same gospel. Last week we focused on the other Advent that this season celebrates by thinking about Jesus' second coming in glory at the end of history. But we also said that we don't need to live to see the very end in order to experience a kind of apocalypse even now. If we know how near the kingdom is to us every moment of every day, then we will lead our lives in kingdom ways already now. Every moment, we said, is a moment when the rooster may crow and the full truth of Jesus' kingdom may come bursting in upon our lives. The question is whether or not we are ready for such an advent burst of energy; whether or not we are serious enough about our faith to be comfortable with the kingdom's nearness.

Speaking of being serious, today we welcome into our Advent John the Baptist--a man who was, if nothing else, a very serious fellow. In fact, John is maybe a touch too serious for our taste. For ages now John the Baptist has been a fixture in the church's official observation of the Advent season. There are three cycles of the Common Lectionary but each one contains a reading that focuses on John. John the Baptist, the church has long declared, belongs in Advent; he is somehow necessary if we are to get Advent right. Yet in ways subtle and obvious, most Christians politely refuse to let John come through the door.

John the Baptist does not appear in those manger scenes you see on people's front lawns. Once in a while someone will slip a Santa Claus into a front-yard display, but not John. I've also never yet seen John appear on a Christmas card. He is not mentioned in traditional Christmas carols, and the song "On Jordan's Bank the Baptist's Cry" seldom makes anyone's Top Ten list of favorite songs to sing in Advent. We don't have John the Baptist ornaments for the Christmas tree nor does he appear on those Advent calendars children use to mark the approach of Christmas. This season is too full of angels, shepherds, magi, sheep, cattle, and the like for us to have any room left for John. Maybe we'll give him a seat in the back row even as we fill the front rows with all the regular characters of the season. But even so, John had best be quiet back there lest he spoil our good cheer.

Of course, that's just the problem: John is never quiet. Have you ever heard John preach? He isn't quiet. He was a spectacle both to behold and to hear in his day. But he surely made a splash. He was the most famous preacher of his generation, more famous than his quieter, meeker cousin Jesus. Even thirty years after Jesus' death and resurrection, the apostles kept bumping into clutches of people on three continents who were devoted followers of John, not Jesus. In the Book of Acts we read the story about a very eloquent preacher from North Africa named Apollos. But in his first sermon he kept talking about only John the Baptist and his baptism. So the apostle Paul had to bring him up to speed a bit as to who the real Messiah was. But Apollos was OK once he was straightened out on that little point.

But the power John the Baptist had over people's imaginations was incredible. Have you ever heard John preach? Those who did could never forget it. In fact, most scholars think that the Gospel according to the apostle John was the last gospel to be written. The fourth gospel may have been composed as much as 50 years after Jesus' resurrection. Most of us know what a soaring opening chapter the Gospel of John has: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God." It's stirring and lyric. Yet twice in that chapter, the apostle John interrupts his own song to insert the parenthetical qualifier, "Now remember, folks, I'm not singing about John the Baptist here! This Word of God is Jesus, not John!" And you assume that the only reason he had to make that so clear was because even a half-century later there were still some folks lingering around who thought maybe John the Baptist was the Christ.

We don't want to make that mistake, of course, but neither should we overcompensate by blotting John out of the picture altogether. Mark, for instance, takes no interest whatsoever in the story of Jesus' birth. Mark was probably the very first gospel ever to get written down, and it skips clean over what we would call the Christmas story. Instead, Mark wants us to get right down to business and so in his opening verse he says, "Here is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." And what is that "beginning" according to Mark? It's John the Baptist. We have to start here, Mark says, if we are going to get off on the right gospel foot. In the end, you've got to wind up at the feet of Jesus, acclaiming him alone as Christ and God. But to get there, you've got to visit John first. Have you ever heard John preach? Mark says you have to.

But John is not easy to listen to. We are maybe about as reluctant to hear John preach as we would be to take in the fire-and-brimstone sermon of some sweaty revival preacher who bellows away from atop a park bench on Monroe Mall while business folks scurry away as fast as they can. In fact, in John's case the first thing you'd have to overcome is your reaction to the very appearance of the man. He was dressed in about nothing, except for some rough-hewn little tunic of camel's hair, cinched around his desperately thin waist by a leather strap. The man had never cut his hair or beard. He didn't have just long hair, he had hair down to his knees. This was not some nicely cropped little pony tail like you might see on the head of an entertainment mogul in Hollywood. John had never cut his hair. And as far as his diet went, well, let's just say that no one ever accepted John's invitation to lunch. "I'll take a rain check on that, John. I, um, had grasshoppers for breakfast!"

John was an oddball, but also a live wire. And all four gospels tell us that the people came out to hear him. They trekked across hot desert sands to watch this funny fellow hop up and down, call people names, and just generally urge everyone to turn their lives around in preparation for some mysterious Great One who was surely coming and coming soon. Have you ever heard John preach? Riveting stuff. The ax is laid to the root of the tree, brood of vipers, baptism by fire, his winnowing fork is in his hand. It got people's attention.

It shook people up, too. Luke tells us that there were times when John worked up to such a frenzied, fevered pitch, that everyone from mothers with small children to strapping Roman centurions would cry out, "Good grief, John! What shall we do?" In reply, John essentially said, "Well, it's not rocket science, my friends. It's really very simple. You have two winter coats? Then give one away to the man who has none. If you're a tax collector, just be honest for pity sake and don't charge more than is due. If you're a soldier, stop shaking people down for protection money and just do your job honestly and above board." Be good, John said. Be nice. Be honest. Do your jobs well. Share what you have. On one level it sounds about as obvious as what you could read in that book Everything I Ever Needed to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten. Yet somehow contained in all this everyday advice was the secret to being prepared to enter the kingdom of God as changed people.

Have you ever heard John preach? Persuasive stuff. Frightening, too, though, because it's amazing how hard it can be really to follow through on what John said. Be honest. Ah, but it's so much easier to slide through life on the grease provided by white lies and little prevarications of all kinds. Be nice. Ah, but you don't know about my co-workers. They're too nasty for me to bother with being nice when I'm around them. Share what you have. Ah, but let's not get crazy here. Some people lack the basics because they're lazy, and that's not my problem to fix, is it?

Well, you can imagine what John would say. He was not a man given to nuance or shades of gray. John saw himself as the bearer of the bright light of God's coming kingdom. Mostly, though, we'd rather live our lives illuminated by no more than the dim light provided by the moral equivalent of a 25-watt bulb. In the shadows allowed by the dim light of this world, we all come off looking pretty good. In that bad light you cannot much see, nor do you need therefore much to fret, this or that blemish on your character. But then John comes along with the blazing floodlight of God and he forces the moment of truth on us. And if we start whining and finger-pointing, John slaps his dirty hand right flat across our mouths. "It's the government's fault. It's the church's fault. I didn't get a good education. I've never gotten a break. My parents didn't raise me right. My spouse doesn't understand me. I'm a victim of circumstance. How come nobody ever feels sorry for me?"

And John just tells us to put a lid on it. Have you ever heard John preach? Makes you mad. "Stop your belly-aching," he yells. "This is between you and God, and in that conversation there's just one question to answer: have you repented? Have you shown God you're sorry for the messes you've made, and have you therefore resolved to try harder to bring some glory to God's name?" John shakes us up. John reminds us of the place to which the road paved by good intentions leads and asks us to start producing some fruit consistent with repentance. That's tough. So often it is the case that in our minds we serve God, but in reality it's a tough go. We are all of us crucified between the sky of our intentions and the earth of what we actually do. On Sunday we say, "This week I'm going to do such-and-such a good thing." But then the week slips by and we don't do it. "This week I am not going to do that shameful thing again," but then Monday afternoon around 2:30 we do it anyway.

Have you ever heard John preach? He levels the playing field. He tells us that we all need the same thing. It's not just the crack addict who wakes up on a urine-soaked mattress at 3:00am with a can of stale beer and an ashtray full of cigarette butts next to him who needs the Lord. Maybe that poor sap does need the Lord, but so do you! John doesn't care who you are. You can be the decathlon champion at the Olympics blubbering through the national anthem with a gold medal swaying from your neck or the wheelchair-bound person whose legs don't work anymore. Both people need the same thing. It doesn't matter if your investment portfolio is chugging along nicely or whether you're the kind of person for whom, if the paycheck is delayed a day, so is dinner that night. You both need the same thing. It doesn't matter if you once bowed your head to have a doctoral hood slipped around your neck or if you're 53 years-old and enrolled in a literacy class. You both need the same thing. And John knows that. John says that. John cuts to the heart and tells you to repent, to check and double-check that you love the Lord and then to check and double-check that that love is not just so much pious prattle but that this love makes a difference.

Have you ever heard John preach? It is properly clarifying. It re-aligns everything the way ultimate moments of truth always do. Recently we witnessed a great tragedy in our area when a young man died in a car wreck. Some of you knew him personally and it wounded you. But it also shook up everything. One day nothing seemed to matter but football. The next day it was hard to remember why just a game could ever have meant much compared to this awful event. You see it sometimes on the news: somebody's house burns down taking with it a lifetime of precious heirlooms, family photo albums, all those videotapes of birthday parties, and so very many other treasures. But when the reporter sticks a microphone under the father's nose, all he can say is, "It doesn't matter. The main thing is that we all got our safely." And he means it. Things happen, sensibilities get re-aligned, and ultimate issues suddenly loom large--the main things of life sometimes get lost in the shuffle of doing laundry, getting groceries, dropping the kids off at soccer practice. But at other times those ultimate issues loom on the horizon of our hearts in ways we can't miss.

This is the beginning of the gospel, Mark says. It all starts here, if it starts up in your life at all, that is. The gospel begins not with the cry of a baby in a manger, not when shepherds hear the angels sing, and certainly not when the stockings are hung by the fireplace with care or any other such cozy holiday image as we usually think of them. The gospel begins, Mark says, with John. The gospel begins out in the desert, out in that place that, throughout the entire Bible, is associated with death, chaos, and danger. The wilderness is not the place to go if you're looking for a good time. The wilderness is not safe. But the prophet Isaiah once predicted, and the man John the Baptist later fulfilled, the promise that it would be precisely in the desert, in the place of death, where God would build a highway to new life. You go into the desert to die, the gospel says. But in baptism, you not only drown, you rise back to new life.

Have you ever heard John preach? It's the most refreshing thing in the world! It's new birth, gospel-style. It's a fresh start. It's good news. It's like going to the doctor convinced you've got a tumor the size of a basketball pressing on your abdomen only to be told it's just gas. Take some Rolaids and go home. A new start. Good news! It's like getting called into the boss's office convinced a pink slip was coming only to get promoted to be the head of a whole new department in the firm. A turn-around, a reversal of fortune, good news. You get on the phone and gush, "Honey, you won't believe this but . . ." and then you go on to make her believe it anyway because it's true.

John offered that. A new start. A fresh beginning. The Messiah is coming, John says. He's coming soon and he's going to dip you right into the life-giving waters of no less than the very Holy Spirit of God. But don't get me wrong: none of this means that everything will become instantly hunky-dorey in your life. For instance, if you are celebrating Christmas this year without a certain loved one who died since Christmas last came and went, that's going to hurt. The gospel doesn't say it shouldn't hurt, but only that through the hurt shines the light of Christ. For now at least, even the gospel can't fix everything. Relationships fracture. People up and die on us before we get the chance to say we're sorry. It hurts. John the Baptist knows that. The One for whom John prepared the way knows that, too. Jesus doesn't leave the room in disgust if you find yourself weeping in front of the Christmas tree--as though your sorrow is ruining Jesus' holiday cheer. Instead, Jesus catches a salty tear or two on the tip of his finger and quietly whispers, "I know. I know. That's why I came in the first place."

John helps us to see and remember that. John takes a buzz-saw to the tinsel and glitter of it all, but he's not finally wrecking anything but building something more lasting, more real, more full of the gospel. John is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It starts here or it starts nowhere. Because if it starts here, the gospel will have some longevity to it. If it starts here, the gospel can endure long after we put the decorations away on January 1. If it starts here, the gospel will have depth to it even if we find ourselves merely going through the motions this month because of how sad we feel on the inside. If we start out right, we may finish right, too. And then in between the start and the finish, our lives will bear the gospel fruit of repentance, showing that we really do get it.

Have you ever heard John preach? If you haven't, you should. Because the gospel tells us that the only way to get to Bethlehem is to travel through the desert first. Well, that's not really true. You can get to Bethlehem without going through the desert. But if so, then once you get there, you won't find Jesus. Amen.