The Sermon

The Sermon

Sunday December 3, 2006
The Advent of Mark: Sacred Beginnings
Jeremiah 33:14-16 St. Mark 1:1-4 St. Mark 1:1

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Are you ready for Christmas?

Shopping, decorating, wrapping, card sending, and baking are they the things that you think of when you hear that question?

Are you ready for Christmas?

Well I hope you’re not because you shouldn’t be.

And if you think you are, you probably aren’t.

I’m not sure anyone ever has been, is or will be ready for Christmas.

The only way that you can be ready for Christmas is if Christmas is a self-contained event that occurred in a distant corner of the Roman Empire 2000 years ago. But it isn’t, Christmas is . . . well, we’ll get to that before long, but for now realize that you can’t be ready, you shouldn’t be ready, for all that Christmas is on this 1st Sunday of Advent, so let me change the question: Are you ready to get ready?

Are you ready to get ready?

That’s a good question for today and if the answer is not “yes” at the moment, I hope it will be by the time we are done this morning.

And I am counting on St. Mark to get us ready to get ready.

A colleague asked me what I was doing with Advent and Christmas this year and I replied that I was preaching the Advent and Christmas lessons of Mark’s gospel.

There was a pause and a look and a question: “You do know that Mark doesn’t have a Christmas story, don’t you?” Well if you were wondering the same thing, the answer is you are right, of course.

Matthew has the story of the magi and the star and the camels, Luke gives us the stable and the angels and the birth, even John has a Christmas story in the poetic assurance that “in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God and the word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.”

But Mark starts out 30 years beyond the birth in Bethlehem, he starts out with John the Baptist and by the time the first chapter is over we have the baptism of Christ, the recruitment of disciples, a bunch of healings and a lesson concerning the necessity of down time and of prayer!

But no Christmas story, no verses that seem right for this Advent time, this season when we are preparing to celebrate the fact that Christ came into human form, this season when we are looking around for the signs that he is with us in our daily routines and this season when we rest ourselves in the assurance that at the end of time – both the end this world’s time and the end of our individual times in this world – he will, as he promised, come and take us to the place he has prepared.

Mark has no interest in any of that.

As we will see in the coming weeks, Mark’s gospel is the sparsest of the four. Not only does the first chapter have a bunch of stuff going on, every chapter is full of action and activities. Mark is the journalist among the four and he is content to let Jesus words and actions speak for themselves without interpretation and descriptive prose. In fact if you have ever wondered how to go about reading the Bible on your own, I always point people to Mark as a place to start because it will fix the essentials of the life of Jesus as the starting point for your encounter with scripture.

But there is no Advent pregnancy here, no angelic visitations, no silent night, no Christmas birth.

There is nothing.

Except.

Mark dumps us down immediately in the middle of life and maybe that is where we are meant to start in our Advent journey this year, and Mark does it with a few key words that we may need more as begin this Advent season than we ever have before. The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

And as long as we are starting in the middle of life, I want to start in the middle of that verse: the good news.

The familiar word is Gospel, and that means good news.

So if we are going to get ready to get ready to rightly celebrate this Advent we need to begin by expecting and hearing and sharing good news.

There is enough bad news out there, isn’t there?

The death toll of the current war is creeping toward the 3,000 mark and doubts and misgivings are all around us.

The deaths from starvation, disease and human inhumanity in Africa are adding up to staggering numbers.

We can’t seem to get through a month without some horrible story of hostages and guns and death.

Stories of individual tragedies within our community abound as tumors grow and hearts are weakened and jobs are threatened and marriages come undone and friendships wither and drift . . . I don’t have to go on, do I?

I don’t want to insult anyone with this, but if you have a shortage of bad news in your life, I’m not sure you are paying attention, the darkness in the world grows deep and it is chilling to the soul.

And it is into that chilling darkness that good news comes.

That’s what we are finding in Jeremiah’s prophecy this morning.

There was a mood of apprehension and fear and sorrow in Israel, warfare surrounded them and for ten years they had watched as their borders became weaker and more and more of them had been taken prisoner and moved into exile and soon that would become an overwhelming reality and Jerusalem would fall.

And Jeremiah, who could be one of the most abrasive of the prophets, suddenly shifts into a tone of compassion as he assures them that, while their leaders may have betrayed them, and while their enemies surround them, their God would never abandon them.

And it didn’t matter where they were or how many miles apart they were, for their salvation would not depend upon Jerusalem, but upon the God who makes and keeps all of his promises – even when we have failed to keep ours.

That good news, proclaimed by Jeremiah almost 600 years before the birth of Christ, is the same good news that Luke, Matthew and John would write about at length and it is the same good news that Mark was content to acknowledge and then build upon, the Good News of God’s salvation and God’s righteousness, the Good News that we know as a person, Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God, the Incarnated One.

Where God’s people are, Good News is there for those who both seek it and spread it.

In the far reaches of the Persian Empire, in the barren corners of the Roman Empire, in hard places of America and in the killing grounds of Iraq, God’s good news needs to be found and spoken and heard and shared.