December 4, 2011

Texts: Isaiah 40:1-11, Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13, 2 Peter 3:8-15a, Mark 1:1-8

Advent is absurd. It doesn’t make any sense, and it is the time where the message of Christ seems to make the least sense of all. Mark gives us no talk about the angel Gabriel coming to Mary, none of the lineage from which Jesus comes; he wastes no time and cuts to the chase. He blurts out the end of the story before he has even started: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The cat is out of the bag. From the start, Mark weaves the end and the beginning together in such a way that the voice crying in the wilderness points forward and back, back to the exile, to the time of Israel’s separation from God and God’s Word forward to God’s Advent among us in Christ.

John is absurd. In my opportunities to travel to the Holy Land and Egypt, I have met several camels. What they don’t tell you about camels is that they have to be amongst the stinkiest creatures on God’s earth. I rode one in Jericho, and I smelled like a combination of someone who hasn’t showered for several months and a wet dog for the rest of the day. I don’t know that I ever got the smell out of my clothes. To add insult to injury, he’s out in the middle of nowhere, conjuring images of Elijah, yelling, “Repent!” in a place where most people’s repentance was linked to the temple and the religious authority there.

John’s words, however, have this strange power and are disquieting to a people who want to do the right thing: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,” giving no idea of how this looks, how to do it, or what they mean. Long before John, the prophets had exhorted people to repentance, but they rarely indicated a relationship between repentance and salvation. The call to repentance was simply a call to repent, for the sake of repenting. So, John gives them a task as the lovers in the song Scarborough Fair give to each other: each rivaling each other in their impossibility. John’s words are threatening because we feel like we are supposed to do something and have no idea what it is. Worse yet, perhaps we have an idea of what it is to be called to repentance, to confess our sins, but find ourselves repeating history, asking for forgiveness, and then turning around and having the same struggles, the same challenges, the same fears, and the same sins.

John’s words hearken back to the exile, into which Isaiah speaks. What is it to hear the word “comfort,” when there is no comfort immediately available? Isaiah is split into 3 sections, and this section was likely written 200 years after the first version. At this time, “There had been no word from the Lord in nearly two hundred years as the book of Isaiah is arranged, during which the exiles had voiced their fear and grief.” They knew they blew it, and had no excuse for ditching the living God for the gods of the nations surrounding them. What was it then, I wonder, to hear the words of Isaiah? I imagine their thoughts as the words of the Lord came through his prophet Isaiah: Finally, God speaks to us in their darkness, and the word he says is comfort? I can’t imagine that would be particularly satisfying to these people experiencing the grief of separation: from their homes, and from their God. There were no guarantees here; no “comfort will come,” but just the word “comfort,” spoken into the here and now. And so the ironic Word also comes to us: comfort in the midst of our strife. Comfort in the midst of our hurt. Comfort in the midst of our brokenness. Comfort in the face of our sin. It seems like a bad joke, this speaking of comfort to a community in exile who doubted God’s providential hand would ever be with them again.

Isaiah promises the glory of the lord, but then reminded us that our constancy, and we ourselves, are just like the grass… and this reminder comes to a desert region where the grass doesn’t grow for 6 months out of the year… the grass that looks like it is dead and then, as though magic, springs to life when it rains. I wonder if this is indicative of God’s work: where everything seems dead, God imagines life. Where it seems there is no hope, God brings a word of peace. Perhaps this is the point: the glory of the Lord is not dependent upon us or our deservingness or our constancy. It comes in ways we don’t expect and it often seems unbidden; the ways in which God answers are prayers are rarely the answers we look for.

What does it mean to make our paths straight when even we do not know where they are leading? Perhaps some of you have had clear pictures of where your lives were going and were able to make it happen, but, in my relatively short-lived experience, my path is anything but straight and I find myself incapable of making it straight because I believe each step along our paths has played a part in bringing me where God wants me to be. Who would have thought, a year ago, that we would be here, as we are today at St. Peter? Evidently Isaiah didn’t remember the story of Moses and the Israelites crossing the Sinai Peninsula. I mean, it’s pretty big, but 40 years wandering through a region that should take less than 4 months to cross is a little excessive. And besides, there aren’t many highways in the desert. The roads that are there are plagued by bandits who will rob you blind, beat you up, and leave you there for dead. The desert highways are not a place you want to be. And yet, in the desert, in the midst of darkness and despair, is the very place God chooses to dwell.

So crazy John appears in the wilderness, which is “the symbol of the time when God was preparing the people for entry into the promised land,” bringing images from Isaiah and the Exodus, remembering the stories of the past in order to illuminate the story of the present. The place of the wilderness is rarely a place where humans are at their best. In the Exodus, one chapter after they have received their freedom from Egypt, they begin to complain that Moses has brought them out to kill them of hunger and thirst; their fears that God will not provide for them in their complaints against Moses. The wilderness is the place where we ask God, “Are you really there? Will you really save me?” The wilderness conjures images of the exile, in which the kingdoms of Judah and Israel are removed from the land God promised them without an indication - at first - that they will be restored. The wilderness is the place where we see how empty our lives are without God. The shadows grow taller, and the sounds of the breeze rustling the trees make us jump for fear that something is out to get us. And yet, “The wilderness is the place where God chooses to appear.”

God is absurd. He chooses to appear where we don’t expect him. When everything is crashing down around us, these are the very moments that God is with us, coming into our lives, bringing his Advent, his promises through Christ. It is when we realize how broken we really are that the light of Christ shines through us. It is the absurdity of God redeeming us and delighting in us, as the Psalmist says in Psalm 18, though we are not particularly redeemable or delightful. The Bible is often viewed as a rule book, the prophets are often viewed as soothsayers, and the righteous anger of God as something we can avoid by being “good.” These things might be true, but they’re only half-true. God’s anger is, indeed, righteous, but God’s love and mercy are nothing short of revolutionary. This is a love story that takes the way the world works and turnes it on its head.

God’s Word takes people whose constancy are like the grass, whose faithfulness lasts only as long as their blessings, who are mortal and frail and lost, who cannot see past their own brokenness, and says, “You are mine.” It is absurd. What is even more absurd is that we wait year after year for the birth of a baby that happened 2000 years ago. It is the Advent, the time of waiting for the Event that has already happened yet happens continually. It is the longing of our spirits for the God who is unwilling to imagine a future without us. It doesn’t make any sense, but it makes all the difference in the world. God, in the Advent of Christ, has inspired us to look at the world with upside down eyes. We look for our Savior in the midst of our pain, our God in the midst of our brokenness, and the Spirit of wisdom and might in the face of our frailty. The whole world looks different. We meet Christ in our relationships with the least of these: when two or three sinners are gathered in his name, there Christ is present.

Most of you are likely familiar with Luther’s words of advice to Philip Melanchthon, the person who wrote most of the Augsburg Confession for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Germany, which formed the basis of our theology as Lutherans, “Sin boldly.” But the second line of the quote makes the first line make more sense: it reads, “Sin boldly, but trust in God more boldly still.” It is this bold trust that inspires us to look at the world differently, to imagine possibilities in the face of disappointment, to imagine life in the face of death, to imagine salvation in the face of sin.

God’s love is absurd; it speaks comfort into our discomfort. It makes straight the paths which seem crooked to us. It takes our frailty and our weakness and utilizes them as our strength, as our ability to cling to Christ and his righteousness rather than our own. It looks at the world with upside down eyes, it looks at a crazy prophet who eats bugs and wears stinky clothes and utilizes him to prepare the way for a King. It blurts out the end of the story before it has even begun because the end of the story makes sense out of its beginning, shocking us and making us laugh at the joy of the absurdity of this God who is so foolish he would become a fool for us.