Opening Act

Mark 1:1-8

December 8, 2024 • Mount Pleasant UMC

My son Christopher—who is here today so I can embarrass him—was next-to-impossible to wake up when he was in high school. And it was my primary responsibility to get him moving so he could make it to the bus on time. I remember trying everything I could think of. I’d open his door and call his name. I’d turn the overhead light on in his room. I’d shake him and pull the covers off of him. I think the only thing I didn’t do was get a bowl of water and splash it on his face—mostly because I would have had to clean it up after! I think I even googled “how to wake up a teenager.” But I get it. Sometimes it’s hard to wake up, especially on mornings like we have had lately. The covers are so comfy and warm and, for me, when Barney snuggles up next to me, I don’t want to move. I’m comfortable and I’d rather not wake up. And while that may be okay in our mornings (though if you’re working, your boss might have something to say about it), when that becomes our posture in our spiritual life, we can find ourselves in real trouble. Advent comes along every year and says to us, “Wake up! God is on the way!” (cf. Wright, Mark for Everyone, pg. 1).

This morning, we are continuing on our Advent journey called “God is On the Way.” Last week we focused on the truth that even in our own day we can still say “God is on the way” because Jesus is returning. We don’t know when or how it will happen, but we are promised that he will come again one day and make all things right. And it will likely be a surprise, just as his arrival the first time was. Not that they didn’t have warnings. Not that they weren’t told he was on the way. In fact, God sent a messenger ahead of Jesus specifically to prepare the way. The first voice we hear in the Gospel of Mark is not the voice of Jesus. It is the voice of his relative and, we might say, his “opening act,” the man we know as John the Baptist (Card, Mark: The Gospel of Passion, pg. 29).

Before we get to John, though, I want to say something about Mark and the book he wrote. I said last week he is writing to a group of Christians in Rome who are facing very difficult times. Emperor Nero burned down a good part of the city and then blamed the Christians, so many of them were being arrested and even killed. So Mark, when he writes to tell them the story of Jesus, doesn’t have time to waste. His Gospel, which was the first one written and is the shortest, is fast-moving and emotional. One author describes it as being written by “an enthusiastic young man who is almost out of breath” (Card 27).

Mark doesn’t tell us about the birth of Jesus. He jumps right into the story with these words: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God…” (1:1). There are two words to notice in that sentence. First: “the beginning.” That would have taken his Jewish readers all the way back to Genesis, which starts with these words: “In the beginning, God…” Mark is (very quickly) identifying Jesus with God himself and signaling that what you’re about to read in these pages is God’s way of starting over, a new way, a new beginning. And that ties very closely into the second word: “good news.” Usually that is translated as “gospel,” which we associate with church. But the word he uses was not a religious word in that day. Or not a Jewish word anyway. It was tied into the worship of the Roman emperor. When Roman citizens talked about the “gospel,” they were talking about good news surrounding the birth of a new emperor who was increasingly considered to be a god. But Mark takes this word—and he’s the only one who directly calls his book a “gospel”—and he applies it to Jesus, as if to say, “You think a new emperor brings good news? Well, let me tell you about some really good news, the true gospel!” “The beginning of the good news [gospel] about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God…” (1:1; cf. Card 27).

But before we meet Jesus in Mark’s story, we have to meet his opening act. Mark says John the Baptist “appeared in the wilderness” (1:4). Mark has no interest in telling us where John came from or how he grew up or even exactly what wilderness he was in (we have to go over to Luke’s Gospel to get all that information). In Mark’s telling, John just “appears” as the one whom the prophets centuries before had said would come to prepare the way for the Savior of the world. Scot McKnight describes what John is doing out there as “street theater” (Mark, pg. 15). That’s not meant in a derogatory way; it simply means that John does what he does at least in part to get attention. If people notice him, they will listen to his message. He wears a coat made of camel’s hair, and he has a leather belt around his waist. He’s dressed like an Old Testament prophet, and in many ways he is the last of them. He sort of bridges the gap between the Old Testament and the New: the last of the prophets and the first of a new kind of preacher.

His main diet, Mark says, was locusts and wild honey. The honey I could get behind. The locusts? Well…in an earlier appointment, we did a Vacation Bible School one year called “Bug Safari,” and the director there decided that if we made our mission goals, the staff would eat bugs. And of course they did so we did, and though they were chocolate covered they were still gross. I wouldn’t want to go on the John the Baptist diet. Locusts and wild honey. He’s strange. He’s weird. Dr. Fred Craddock described him this way: “He was not a beautiful candle burning softly in the sanctuary. He was a prairie fire, the very fire of God scorching the earth. He was no diplomat trying to make yes sound like no and no sound like yes to please everybody. He just said, ‘The Judge is coming and I’m here to serve subpoenas’” (qtd. in McKnight 16). That sounds about right.

We probably wouldn’t allow John to preach in our churches today. He’s too extreme, too different. We come to church expecting a Jesus who is nice, who is kind, who is moderate and generally agrees with what we’ve already decided is true. We want him to affirm us, to make us comfortable and give us an easy life. That’s the Jesus we want, the one who is like a pilot on the intercom telling us to get comfortable for what they hope will be an uneventful flight. We don’t really need someone to prepare us for that Jesus. He’s safe, he’s known. But then John comes along and says, “Buckle up! We’re in for some rough weather, and if you’re not prepared, it could go very badly for you!” (cf. Willimon, Heaven and Earth, pgs. 49-50). John attracts crowds by his behavior and he doesn’t care what they think of him because his message and his life is not about him. His message is about Jesus; that’s who he points toward and that’s who he wants to prepare us for.

There are three words Mark gives us that sum up how John prepared the way, three things he calls his listeners to do before Jesus arrives on the scene. He wants their hearts and lives prepared to receive what Jesus is coming to bring, and to do that required three things. Mark says John appeared “preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (1:4). Here are the three words, and then we will look at each of them individually: baptism, repentance and forgiveness. That’s a strange order to our ears, because we’d put baptism at the end of that list. After someone has repented and been forgiven, then, we say, they can choose baptism. Except baptism is not something we do; it’s something that is done to us. It’s something God does to us, calling us to follow Jesus maybe before we are even aware of who he is. When we treat it as something we do, we’re straying dangerously close to earning our salvation, to making it something we do to earn points with God. No, baptism is a gift, not something we do to earn anything. Baptism means a lot of things, mostly tied up in the symbol of water. When I try to explain what baptism is, I usually go back to something I heard Bishop Will Willimon say years ago. Baptism means what water means. Water is new birth; we spend the first nine months of our lives in water and only come out into this world when that water “breaks.” Water means refreshment and fun. Water means life; we can’t survive without water. And water means death; a teaspoon of water in the wrong place can bring instant death. Baptism means all of those things, but it does not mean that we have arrived. It’s simply a symbol that we are receptive and ready for Jesus to show up and work in our lives (cf. Willimon 50-51). So baptism is the first word.

And the second word is repentance, which is weird because, again, we usually think that comes before baptism. Because we’re generally self-centered, we think we are the one who turns toward God in Christ and we say, “Here I am, God! Aren’t you lucky to have me?” But do you know what Jesus says? “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them…” (John 6:44). It’s not about you, and it’s not about me. When we turn toward Jesus we’re surprised to find he has already turned toward us. It’s not “get your life together and then you can get baptized and come to Jesus.” Not at all. It’s “come to Jesus and let him straighten your life out because he’s the only one who can.” If we wait to come to Jesus until we get everything together, we’ll never come to Jesus. The way Mark describes it is this: we open ourselves to Jesus in baptism, and then the real work begins. The word that is translated “repentance” is metanoia, which sounds a lot like our word “metamorphosis.” That’s because they’re similar. Repentance isn’t about saying, “I’m sorry.” That may be where it begins, but repentance really means a total change in life and heart. Ultimately that’s something only Jesus can do in us when we allow him to.

Twelve step groups like our own Celebrate Recovery get this better than most church people, because ultimately repentance is an “I can’t” experience. I can’t be better on my own. I can’t give up my sin on my own. Groups like CR and Alcoholics Anonymous and the like know this truth; they are made up of what Philip Yancey calls “radical honesty” and “radical dependence” (What’s So Amazing About Grace?, pgs. 276-277). Every person who speaks at such meetings has to acknowledge what it is they are working on repenting of. In contrast, when we come to church meetings or to worship and people ask, “How are you?” And we say, “Fine.” Lying in church! John wouldn’t have it. He came preaching repentance, reminding high-minded religious folks in the wilderness that they couldn’t do it on their own. And when we admit we can’t, it’s a a first step toward finding we can with God (cf. Willimon 54-55).

Which leads to Mark’s third word in describing John’s opening act: forgiveness. The word that is most often used in the New Testament to indicate forgiveness also means remission, like a disease that has been pushed back or beaten. You hear it most often these days describing a cancer patient: “She’s in remission.” That’s a powerful image of forgiveness in so many ways because what is the object of forgiveness? It’s sin, it’s brokenness, it’s the things we do that destroy or at least damage relationships between God and us and between us and other people. Sin is a sickness, and it will destroy us if it is left unchecked. In fact, Paul said sin will lead to death; he writes to the Ephesians, “You were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live…” (cf. Ephesians 2:1-2). The disease of sin brings death—if not literal death then certainly spiritual death. And like cancer, it’s a sickness that never completely leaves us. The best we can hope for is “remission,” forgiveness. So Paul goes on to say, “Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:4-5).

Grace. Forgiveness is a gift, just like repentance and baptism. It’s a gift offered to everyone, a healing gift, but you have to receive it. You have to accept it. On Christmas morning, there will likely be gifts wrapped and placed under trees in all of our houses, and there will the traditional time when gifts are handed out and unwrapped and a month’s worth of preparation will be over in about five minutes. But anyway, can you imagine if you offered a gift to someone in your family and they said, “No thanks”? Can you imagine refusing to unwrap a gift that has your name on it? Or, more to the point, let’s say a doctor tells you he has the cure to the disease, whatever it is, that is affecting you. He says, “I have the cure, all you have to do is accept it.” No thanks, doc, I’ll just keep on being sick. Would anyone say that? I can’t imagine that, can you? And yet that’s what we see in our world—our broken, angry, separated world. Sin tears up relationships and destroys people and yet we refuse the cure because it demands too much of us. It demands we turn our lives over to someone else. John came preaching and offering forgiveness, remission from the disease of sin, and still today, two thousand years later, we refuse to receive it.

So John came as the opening act, preaching about Jesus, and for a time, people responded. There was something in this wild man’s message that drew people out from Jerusalem into the desert. Mark says, “All the people of Jerusalem went out to him” (1:5), which might be a bit of an exaggeration, but it does sound like many wealthy and influential people came to see what was going on. Matthew’s Gospel tells us the Pharisees and Sadducees, two groups who often did not get along, both came out to see John (Matthew 3:7). But some did. Some, Mark says, confessed their sins and were baptized. Some responded to the message and allowed themselves to be prepared for the one who was coming soon. That was, after all, John’s main mission. I sometimes think we shouldn’t call him John the Baptist, because while he did baptize, that wasn’t his primary purpose. He was there to prepare the way, to get people ready so that when Jesus showed up, the people were ready to receive the gift he was bringing. Listen again to John’s sermon as Mark reports it: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit” (1:7-8). Stooping down and untying the sandals, by the way, was the work of a servant. John says Jesus is so important he isn’t even worthy to be his servant, and yet Jesus turned that image on its head when he not only untied the sandals of his disciples but he also washed their feet (cf. Card 30-31). Even John would have been surprised by that.

We’re two weeks into Advent. Are you ready for Jesus to show up? Don’t be so quick to answer, because while we want the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” we sing about in the carols, that’s not the Jesus who is coming. Jesus doesn’t want to fit into our world; he wants to rock our world (cf. Willimon 57). 18th century French author Voltaire once said, “In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.” As I said earlier, without even realizing it, we create in our minds a God who is safe, comfortable and nice. We distill God down into a set of doctrines and beliefs, none of which actually challenge what we already believe, and none of which seem to conflict with our already-settled political stances. If God is safe, he won’t mess with us. If we know everything about God, he won’t challenge us. “The god that we [have] made in our own image [has] nothing to say that [disturbs] or [jolts] us, or [calls] our actions into question” (Willimon 67).

The problem with that god is that he cannot save us. He cannot bring healing. He cannot bring our sin problem into remission. That god will accept you just as you are but never challenge you to be who he wants you to be. That god will love you, never judge you and certainly not insist that you need to be born again into a new life. That god is not the one who sent John to call people to baptism, repentance and forgiveness. And that god is not the one who took on flesh, taught us how to live and endured the worst death we could put him through (cf. Willimon 67). The question John puts before us this Advent is this: are we ready for the real Jesus to show up? Are we ready to be surprised by him and made new by him? God is on the way—are we ready?

The word for this second week of Advent, as you heard earlier, is “peace,” and while John’s message may seem more confrontational than peaceful, the one he is preparing the way for is called the Prince of Peace (cf. Isaiah 9:6). John’s mission is to get people ready so they can experience the peace that Jesus will bring—peace between God and humanity and peace between people. This past fall, we talked about the Jewish idea of shalom, which is often translated “peace” but really means “wholeness, healing,” life the way God intended it to be. That’s why John calls people to baptism, repentance and forgiveness—so they can know the peace that the savior will bring. We are not worthy to untie his sandals yet he washes our feet and he brings “the peace of God, which transcends all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). Do you know his peace? There’s no better time than today to experience it because God is on the way. Let’s pray.