St. John’s Lutheran Church
10 December 2023 + Advent 2b
Mark 1:1-8
Rev. Josh Evans
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God … starts … in the wilderness.
Not in a stately palace, fit for a king. Not in Rome, the seat of imperial power. Not even in a house where everything is all together and all the to-do boxes on the holiday planning list are checked off and not at all running behind.
Instead, the beginning of the good news of Jesus, the Son of God, starts in the wilderness.
Exotic and enticing as it might sound to our modern ears, this wilderness is harsh.
Far from a place where people, overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle of city life, choose to retreat for rest and renewal …
… this wilderness is the place where people who had exhausted all other options found themselves. These are people who were deemed ‘broken’ or ‘unclean,’ cut off from society and marginalized, oppressed by abusive systems of power, so much so that they had no choice but to seek ‘refuge’ in the wilderness.
In this wilderness is the beginning of the good news of Jesus, the Son of God.
It hardly strikes me as coincidental that this is where Mark – the earliest of the gospel writers – chooses to begin his story. A good chunk of the first two-thirds of our Bible – the Hebrew Scriptures, or ‘Old Testament’ – spends a great deal of time in the wilderness: banished from Eden, journeying toward freedom out of Egypt, exiled from home in Babylon.
Mark speaks to a people intimately acquainted with wilderness – still experiencing the wilderness of Roman occupation.
In this wilderness, as in the exilic wilderness of their ancestors in Isaiah, a voice – this time, the voice of John the baptizer – cries out. And, perhaps where we might expect a word of comfort for his fellow wilderness dwellers, this voice proclaims “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”
That’s an awfully uncomfortable word, isn’t it? Sin. In popular understanding, sin describes those things we do that are contrary to God’s law – an understanding that has unfortunately been weaponized by the church against people who don’t fit a particular mold or set of expectations for what it means to be ‘Christian.’ It’s hard to dislodge that understanding …
… but I want to suggest another, shared by a friend of mine from one of her seminary professors (Gail O’Day):
“Sin is the purposeful fracturing of relationship with God and with one another.”
In this understanding, sin resists relationship and causes disconnection. It is separation from one another and from God.
Sounds an awful lot like the isolation of wilderness, doesn’t it?
John the baptizer speaks to the reality of sin – of disconnection, broken relationships, separation, and being lost – a reality his hearers know all too well.
There is power in naming that reality because it helps us to confess and admit our need for deliverance – for reconnection, restoration, and being found.
For those first hearers flocking to John in the wilderness, there was nothing left. The terrain wasn’t forgiving, and God’s people had become starkly aware of their own powerlessness. There was no choice but to watch and wait …
… until God shows up.
Not in a stately palace, nor in the seat of power. But in the wilderness.
Liturgical scholar and theologian Jill Crainshaw puts it this way in the form of poem:
God’s Word came
To the wilderness.
Through an unfamiliar voice
In an uncertain place.
God’s Word came
To the wilderness.
Not to Emperor Tiberius
Or Pontius Pilate
Or Herod
Or regional rulers
Or even priests–
God’s Word came
To an unknown wilderness wanderer
A path-clearer and way-maker
A rabble-rousing outsider.
God’s Word came
To the wilderness.
Through an unfamiliar voice
In an uncertain place.
God’s Word came
To the wilderness.
God’s Word comes today
Through brave voices speaking
In hard places
Wilderness people
Tumbleweed people
God’s Word comes today
To our wilderness places
Hopes and fears of all the years
Meeting in us;
Through our voices.
O Come, O Come Emmanuel.
***
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, starts in the wilderness.
And the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the deliverer of the exiled, comes to us today in our wilderness …
… wherever we are, however lost or broken we find ourselves, whatever doubts and worries and fears weigh on us.
The beginning of the good news.
In the wilderness.