Mark 1:1-8
The Proclamation of John the Baptist
1 The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,’”
4 John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 6 Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7 He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. 8 I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
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I originally preached this sermon to a certain people in a certain time, but I believe that God's Word can and does transcend time and space, so perhaps it will touch you in some way as well. You can read the manuscript here or listen to the raw audio file (with infusions from the Spirit) at this link.
Good and gracious God, thank you for the unpredictability of your son, Christ Jesus. And thank you for the ways that you have called us to prepare for the turning and disruption of this world. Amen.
About three years ago, my husband and I were moving into our new home here in Jacksonville and we were also preparing for the birth of our first child. We moved in at the beginning of January, and we had about six months to get everything ready for the newborn baby. There is a phenomenon that people describe as “nesting” when someone is pregnant: they go around and organize, rearrange, clean, sometimes get rid of lots of things, and in general, make a big commotion in preparation for the baby. It’s some kind of instinct or evolutionary adaptation probably.
I don’t know what causes it, but luckily for my husband and my parents, who came down here from Ohio to help us, I was in a flurry of nesting. We painted almost every wall inside the house, we decorated every room, we set up a nursery, and we rolled out new area rugs. We bought boxes and bins and all sorts of things that promised us organization. If you’ve been in a house with people preparing for a child, I’m sure you can picture exactly what all of this was like. A little chaotic right now, but all with the promise of a sweet, little baby at the end. The end goal is to make sure the whole house, and ultimately the whole family, is prepared for the birth of the baby.
The passage we heard from Isaiah this morning reminds me of the sort of nesting that often happens before a baby is born. And in the beginning of the Gospel according to St Mark, we hear a paraphrase of this same passage:
A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
I like to call this cosmic nesting. The whole world is shifting and moving, cleaning and organizing, in order to prepare for the coming of Jesus. John the baptizer, we are told, was sent ahead of Jesus to prepare the way of the Lord. This was the beginning of the old news of Jesus Christ. That instead of being totally unprepared for the coming of Jesus, we were given the gift of a messenger who would show us what it means to prepare. The whole cosmos was shifting, but John also prepared the people by calling them to repent and baptizing them, preparing them for what Jesus would do and be when he arrived.
But, of course, we know that the people were not prepared. Not really.
But that’s the thing, right? It wouldn’t have really mattered who God sent to prepare the people for the coming of Jesus. They still wouldn’t have been fully prepared.
I remember reading every book I could get my hands on to prepare me for our first child. And they have books on everything, right? Feeding, sleeping, breathing, development, activities, illnesses, and medicines. I talked to all the moms I knew, I joined mom groups on Facebook and read blogs, I asked tons of questions and absorbed all of the information I possibly could. And I bought so much stuff that everyone said we would need and want for the new baby. It turns out that everyone website has a different list of the top 100 things you need for your first baby. And you better believe that in my last month of pregnancy, I thought we were ready. We had everything we could possibly need to bring this baby into the world. I knew how much he should eat and when, how much he should sleep and when, all the different doctors appointments he would need and I knew the different kinds of fussy, I had all the apps to track all the things on my phone.
By the time my due date rolled around, the house was prepared as well. We kept it nice and clean every day, just in case. We had a bag packed for the birth center, we had a car seat in the car. Whenever this baby arrived, we would be fully and totally prepared.
And yet…
God didn’t wait for the world to be prepared before God showed up in the person of Christ Jesus. St. Paul tells us that God is not slow about his promise, but is patient with us… so perhaps it is in God’s patience and grace that God recognized that we could never truly be prepared for the coming of Jesus. Despite the best efforts of John the baptizer, God’s people were not ready for God to show up in Bethlehem as a tiny baby, the newborn king. God’s people were certainly not ready for what his birth, life and death would mean for the entire world.
The night before our first child made his appearance into the world, I was in another flurry of nesting and was bleaching a giant bin of LEGOs in our bathtub. I was washing them and shifting them out when I went into labor. So my beautifully prepared, clean, and organized home suddenly had hundreds and hundreds of LEGOs all over our master bedroom floor, drying out. It was a little bit ridiculous.
I remember in the days and weeks after his birth, I was up late at night with a sleepless baby ordering things that we didn’t know we had needed… more diapers, different creams, another book. It had turned out that despite our best efforts, we still weren’t prepared for how this baby would turn our world upside down and inside out.
We will never truly be prepared for how Jesus would turn our world upside down and inside out.
And yet…
We are called to prepare anyway. We are called to stay awake and alert. We are called to wait for the coming of the Lord, to prepare the way as best we can.
And perhaps that’s the beauty and the grace and the good news of this season… that we will never be truly prepared. The world will never be truly ready for the coming justice and grace of God. But comes anyway. In the body of a vulnerable, unexpected baby, God comes to us. In the midst of the mess, the unpreparedness, the anxiety, the half-read parenting books, and the buckets of LEGOs, God doesn’t wait for us to be ready but comes to this messy wild world.
As we sit in the mess and ick of this season, a season we hoped and wished would look different than it does… a season that feels less like expectant hope and more of the same drudgery, we can rejoice in the knowledge that God is here with us now, in the midst of it, in the mess of it. And just when we least expect it, God will surprise us with something completely new again. Amen.
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