Sermon at St. Thomas

by Lynn Cunningham 12/04/05

Advent 2 Year B

Isaiah 40:1-11

2Peter 3:8-15a, 18

Mark 1:1-8

1. I read these opening words of Mark=s Gospel to show the way out, for being lost in the desert that life can sometimes be. Mark=s Gospel announces that the way out is through Jesus.

a. Come more deeply with me into these opening words....I begin with the image of desert in verse 3, because to me the whole passage revolves around the notion of desert.

2. Suppose,

a. Just suppose.... suppose...

b. That you are out fly fishing on the Wind River, and you are in your fishing gear, standing beside the river, and you sweep the fly rod back with a graceful arc, and the line curves around through the air, and just as the fly is about to sweep out over the water towards the perfect spot where you know the trout are, you catch out of the corner of your eye a glance, a glance of something sacred. Suppose the whole moment freezes in your mind. The line and fly freeze, the water holds still, and for a moment, just for a moment, you catch a glimpse, like glimpsing a trout swimming in water, a sense that the Holy One is watching with you. And the moment passes. The line sweeps on over the water. The fly splashes lightly on the surface, asking for the trout to rise to the bait. But the moment with the Holy One has passed and you are in a kind of desert without the Holy One.

3. Suppose, just suppose,

a. That you are walking far out into the badlands on one of these days when the snow squalls are blowing across the land, blinding snow flurries alternating with patches of blue sky and the sunlight highlighting distant hills and places, and suddenly you catch through the swirling snow, a glimpse of Boedeker Butte and the plateau above Twilight Creek twenty miles north of you. And the moment freezes in your mind because you catch a sense that the Holy One is there, present somewhere in the swirling snow and sunlight. But the moment with the Holy One passes and you are again in desert without the Holy One.

4. Suppose, just suppose,

a. You had a daughter, who has been away at college, and who came home for a visit, maybe for Thanksgiving, and you had not seen her for several months, because she was away for college.

b. And then when she walks in the door of your house, you are caught suddenly and unexpectedly by how really beautiful this daughter of yours has grown to be. And for a moment, just for a moment, you cannot believe, but for your seeing, just how beautiful a creature God makes of a woman person. But the moment passes.

5. Suppose, just suppose

a. You have moments like these in your everyday living, when you cross a kind of borderline in your seeing, your sensing, between the sacred and being there in ordinary time. Something eternal overshadows what you are seeing with your everyday mind. But the moments passed and you are lost without consciousness of the presence of the Holy.

6. Life apart from the sacred is a kind of desert.

7. There was a man, once, named John. We do not know anything about him, except what we read at the beginning of the Gospels.

8. Suppose, just suppose, that John the Baptist, was the kind of person who ran a successful business in town, was part of a big, extended family, attended all the interesting events in town. But suppose he was also a person who kept sensing that there was more to life, that Something Eternal was always overshadowing what he was seeing with his ever-day mind. And sensing this drove him a little crazy. John had a huge emptiness in himself that seemingly nothing could fill. He lived in an inward desert

9. Suppose, his wife dies. He sells his business. He gives all his money to the poor. He gets rid of his fancy city clothes, and takes to dressing only in buckskins. He gets rid of his warm Carhart winter parka, and wears only a Hudson Bay Blanket coat. He sells his modern rifles and fancy hand guns, and vows to use only a smooth bore flintlock musket, like the old mountain men had used a long time ago.

10. And suppose he went away to live off the land in the mountains somewhere, somewhere far off. Up on the Thorofare Plateau, maybe. Life was an inward desert, so why not go out into the real desert, for him.

a. So he did this because he was completely drawn to trying to find once and for all that eternal, sacred, Being that seemed to be calling to him from time to time in things he did and saw.

11. But a strange thing happens when he gets out, far away in the mountains, dressed only his buckskins, and his Hudson Bay blanket, and carrying his replica, flintlock, musket. He finds he is living, as if he were close to the Holy One even when he is alone in the wilderness, just as if it were like when he was at home in the town.

12. Even when he is out alone in the desert and the wilderness, undistracted by living in society, he is living only as if God were close to him. He is not in fact knowing the Holy One any better out there than he did in town.

13. Either way it si as if the Holy One were with him. Not really with him. He is living as if God were true.

14. Suppose, just suppose, that this man John, living an Aas if@ life, learns that another person has come into the country, a man named Jesus. Johns discovers that this man Jesus does not live >as if= God were present with him in his life. John learns that Jesus does not just live as if Something Eternal were always overshadowing what he was seeing with his every-day mind. Jesus is present in, and shows forth that Holy One in all that he does, and says, and is. Jesus does not live an Aas if@ kind of life. He is the Life.

15. Now if you were John the Baptist, or if you were starting in on writing Mark=s Gospel, how would you introduce such a person, this Jesus, to readers who did not know him? How would you do it?

16. And imagine you had to do this introduction with mere written words and stories, stories, taken from the memories of persons who had known this Jesus in the flesh a hundred years before. How would you do that?

17. You too have had those moments when you were out fly fishing on the Wind, and the moment of the fishing line had frozen in your mind with the presence of the Holy One. You too have been out walking in the desert in the storm and the had the moment of the sacred break through in on you. You too have seen how incredibly beautiful, and sometimes incredibly ugly human beings can be: you have sensed that they, we, are truly God=s creation, God=s own creatures. And maybe for you, the moments came while quilting, or cooking, or shopping, or fixing the car, or carrying out the trash. There were those moments. But always the sense of being in a desert returned after the moments had passed.

18. Perhaps you too have lived as if there were a God in your life, but longed to know a person to whom the Holy One is fully present, not just as if God were there.

19. How would you express in your life the presence of such a person as Jesus?

20. How does Mark, the writer of Mark=s Gospel accomplish this?

21. He does it with images.

22. Desert is the key image for Mark here. You cannot live in the desert, as our Hebrew and Christian ancestors did, and as we ourselves in Dubois do: You cannot live in the desert and not be overwhelmed at times by the power of the emptiness of the landscape that the desert contains.

23. Wandering in the desert for 40 years is the central story of how God came into the lives of the Israelite people in the Book of Exodus.

24. Mark starts with the emptiness of the desert. John the Baptist has been living in the desert. The desert is an exquisitely appropriate expression of the emptiness of your life and mine without God in it. In the desert the people, and you and me, live Aas if@,

a. Aas if@ we knew we might be going to some promise land. As if we knew where we are going.

25. Mark begins his gospel story in the desert, and asks his readers to imagine all the things that the desert is and stands for.

26. And Mark starts by calling his account of Jesus, a Aeuangelion@, a message of good news. We say now a gospel.

27. What makes this good news, being in a desert, living a life as if it were sacred? Where is the good news in a desert world?

28. There is good news because there is a person who knows the path out of this desert existence, this barrenness, this living life Aas if@. Someone knows which way to head. Someone knows which way is home. Deserts are beautiful in their own way, but you need a way out of them because they are also barren and deadly and deserted of human community.

29. Mark says the good news is that there is in fact a a way, a path, a straight path, out of the desert lostness, out of the wandering that the people are in, out of the wandering that John the Baptist was in.

30. In the Torah, the Hebrew sacred writings, Yahweh leads the people of Israel across the desert. Yahweh shows the people a way out fo the desert, and out of the lostness and barrenness and strife of their own lives. Only Yahweh can lead the people. Mark in these opening words recapitulates, retells, the story of Yahweh leading the people on a sacred journey through desert country to the promised land. A sacred journey through inward desert and outward desert.

31. An inward journey towards fullness of life by following the sacred way laid out in the Torah, and an outward journey through the literal wilderness of the Sinai desert.

32. Mark asks his readers to call to mind how God in that Exodus time before, led God=s people out of desert.

33. John the Baptist too has been wandering in the desert, living not on normal human food, but on locusts and honey, and wandering, I suppose, in his own private, inner desert.

34. John has been inspired to call people who live in the area to repent, to turn from alienation from the Holy One. He wants to baptize them, to wash them of sin with physical water. John has perhaps got clear enough in his own mind about what is not sacred. John in his mind has held at bay perhaps the worst of his own demons, his own false images of what is really sacred. By doing this clearing out, John has reached the point where he is the first one in Mark=s gospel to be able to recognize how incredibly present to God this person Jesus really is.

35. So, Mark in these opening verses puts the great prophet of Israel, Isaiah, and John the Baptist, a prophet in his own time, in parallel, side by side in his account, and he puts their messages side by side. Both Isaiah and John can see a way out of the lostness, and barrenness of desert living, living without the real presence of God. John for his local people, like Isaiah for the Israelite people, points to the path of the sacred, in a new and powerful way. John points to the way that Jesus reveals in his own life.

36. Mark uses the images of >way= or >path= over and over again in these opening words. >Sacred path=, >way in the desert=, God=s messenger >leading the way=. And then John says, in effect, the way for the people out of their desert of spiritual lostness is baptism by the Holy Spirit, a baptism that only Jesus brings.

37. The good news, then, lies in the way out of the desert through Jesus. Whatever lostness, whatever barrenness, whatever desert, inner or outer. Good news lies in turning from living only Aas if@ there were a Holy One, to following Jesus= sacred Way out of desert.

38. What is this sacred Way of Jesus? Stay tuned in the weeks to come as we follow Mark=s Gospel through the coming year.

39. Amen.