Sunday

Isaiah 40:1-11 / Mark 1:1-8

            There are public events that change our lives, as when President Kennedy was shot or when the first African American president was elected.  There are also private, personal events that impact our lives.   They always have to do with relationships.  A death in the family.  A proposal of marriage.  Coming out.  The birth of a child.  Joining a church.       

            Mark’s gospel starts with the announcement of a public event that pulls us into a personal relationship, whether it’s to accept or reject what he says.  He simply writes: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  No if, ands, or buts.  No sissy frills.  These are shocking words.  They demand a response, pro or con.  Or make us ask, “What does he mean?”

            The shortest of the four gospels, Mark’s Jesus is straightforward and rugged—a man’s man.  In this month’s newsletter, I sent you an excerpt from the new book, What’s the Least I Can Believe and Still Be a Christian, which ends with the statement that how we see Jesus makes all the difference in our lives. To describe Jesus, Mark uses the word “immediately” 42 times.  For Mark, Jesus is an action hero.  This is important because Mark was the first gospel written, and most scholars agree that it is probably the most accurate picture of Jesus and his ministry, without much theological overlay to explain it.  Mark just puts it out there. 

            For example, there is no sentimental Christmas story.  The family and childhood of Jesus are of no importance to Mark.  All he cares about is the man and his mission.  So he starts, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, son of God. As is written in the prophet Isaiah: ‘I will send a messenger ahead of you who will cry out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way!’”

            In such a slimmed-down gospel, why does Mark bother with an Isaiah quotation to start us off? —Because, although the family of Jesus is not important to Mark, his cultural heritage is.  In this age of so-called “generic spirituality,” it’s worth saying that Jesus could not have emerged out of any other culture than Judaism.  In the history of the Church, any generation of Christians who forget that their birth-mother is Judaism—be it Nazi Germany or the Spanish Inquisition—get lost in unspeakable betrayals of who Jesus was and what his ongoing mission in the world is.          

            So right from the start of the very first gospel, we have this link to Judaism—to the ethics of Judaism and, most importantly, to the prophets of Judaism.  The last prophet in the Old Testament line is John, called the Baptizer.  He is a real, historical figure—in fact we have more non-biblical accounts of John in the historical records of the time than we have of Jesus.  John was more than a man, he was an event.  He was a movement leader.  Not just the Bible but Roman histories of the time tell us that the 99% poured out of Jerusalem and the towns and villages of Israel, trekking to the Jordan River to get baptized into his movement.  In fact, we can easily call his movement, “Occupy Judaism.”

            That’s because John the Baptizer led a protest movement against the Temple in Jerusalem and all that it stood for.  The synagogues in small towns and villages scattered across Israel were for education only; the “rabbi” was the local teacher.  But the only place in the country—in the world—where a Jew could make the animal sacrifices that would save his or her soul was at the Temple in Jerusalem.  The Temple was run by a hierarchy of priestly families.  To be a high priest in the Temple was an aristocratic position that one inherited.  One had to be a descendent of the House of Levi to qualify as a priest.  The priestly families lived off the labor of the 99% like parasites—the working people of Israel were required by law to pay a “temple tax” of 10 % of their income or harvest to support the Temple System…and the temple police enforced it.

            John was from an aristocratic family, the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, who both came from the priestly lineage of Levi.  John was expected to follow his father into the conventional priesthood as a respected member of the ruling class.  He was given the best education that money could buy.

            But instead of taking his place in the ruling class, John drops out.  He wanders around in the desert, in the wilderness east of the Jordan, trying to find himself.  He wears camel skins and lives on locusts and wild honey, living off the land so that he is beholding to no one: no employer, no landlord, no bank, and certainly no Temple.

            John has become a wild man.  When he does return to society, he does so just barely, on the edge of the Jordan River, the border of civilization.  John chooses to live on the margin of society, and from that fringe he proclaims his prophetic message, calling for personal and public change.  That’s why it’s called “prophetic,” because it’s on the edge; because it calls you and me to change our personal commitments; because it calls us to change our unjust social systems.

            In Advent, God calls each of us to become a wild woman or wild man.  Calls us to take the next step to break our dependence on unjust systems, even if we benefit from them. For if we depend upon unjust systems for our livelihoods, we are afraid to protest against their injustice.  So breaking our dependence upon unjust systems and institutions is a big part of “preparing the way” for the Reign of God (as opposed to the reign of empire) in our personal and public lives.

            What made matters worse after Rome conquered ancient Israel was that Rome taxed the people another 35% on top of the Temple Tax.  These taxes were not like our taxes today—they did not build roads and bridges, deliver the mail, educate the children of the community or regulate corporations to ensure clean air and pure drinking water.  No, 100% of Israel’s taxes went to Rome to pay for the soldiers that oppressed them and for free circuses and free bread for Roman citizens, who paid no taxes and did no work.  But in Israel, if you didn’t pay your taxes, the Romans killed you.  So the Jews paid half the income from their carpentry business or olive harvest in taxes.  They were not left with enough to pay their mortgages, so they lost their homes and their land.  That’s why there were so many people—thousands upon thousands at any given place—following Jesus around, listening to him preach, and banding into roaming communities.

            But for now, Jesus is still an obscure young man in search of himself.  It’s John who is grabbing the headlines.  John gets a following because the people have given up on organized religion, on the temple system.  They’ve figured out that the high priestly families are in cahoots with the Romans.  The unholy alliance between the Temple and Rome—between their church and state—was that as long as the priests controlled the minds of the people through religion and the Romans controlled the bodies of the people through armed force, then both the Temple and the Empire got to keep their money and stay in positions of power.  When the banks foreclosed on the people’s businesses and farms and kicked them out on the road, the priests did nothing because they’d lost all sense of the prophetic in their religion.  They’d just become part of the ruling class, part of the 1% that controlled the economy and therefore the people.

            Enter John, standing on the far side of the literal border of Israel, the Jordan River, yelling across to the people, “Prepare the way!  The end of all this corruption is near!  Change your lives and become part of the Occupy Judaism Movement!”

            We hear this story every year during Advent.  We’re so used to it that we don’t really listen anymore.  Or we hear it in some sort of Sunday School way that acts like blinders that keep us from seeing what was going on.  After John baptizes Jesus, the 1% will chop off John’s head and present it to King Herod on a platter, not because John was preaching that people should say their prayers, return their library books on time, and be nice to each other.  If John had preached that “Prepare the Way” means personal piety, he would have lived to a ripe old age and died of natural causes.  But he wasn’t preaching personal piety.  He was preaching, “Occupy Religion!”

            What John was doing was so simple that it was radical—so simple that it was subversive.  When John preaches that all you need to do to be saved is to wash off the old ways in the Jordan River and believe in the new Way that’s coming, what he’s really saying is, “You don’t need the Temple any more.  You don’t need to let the priests tell you what to do.  You don’t need to pay the temple tax and sacrifice animals to be saved and go to heaven.  All you need to do is shuck all that, wash off those old ways in the river, and commit yourself to the New Way that’s coming!”  It was a cultural revolution.

            But if you’re sitting here getting nervous because it sounds like I’m preaching social justice and you don’t want any part of that because it requires confrontation, take heart.  Tune back in.  “Comfort, comfort, my people,” as Isaiah said.  Because the bottom line is that John the Baptizer is not the one that we call the Christ.  The traditional Christian way of saying this is that John was the last Old Testament prophet.  He was just setting the stage for this New Beginning that we’re all waiting for in Advent.  There’s going to be a New Beginning, a New Mission for those of us who personally choose to follow Jesus.

                And, of course, after the Baby Jesus arrives on Christmas Eve, we’ll have the rest of the year—Epiphany, Lent and Easter as well as Ordinary Time—to learn all about what made Jesus unique and why we ended up calling him (and not John) the Christ or Messiah.  But for now, as we’re waiting this Advent, we need to sit for a while with the reality that Jesus was Jewish and that the Christ could not possibly have come out of any other culture, out of any other understanding of reality than Judaism.  Even though Mark wants to slim-down his gospel to the bare essentials, and he literally throws out the baby with the nativity story, he does save the bath water, which is the prophetic tradition within Judaism.  He begins his story of Jesus by quoting the Prophet Isaiah, and tells us that John fulfills the prophecy of one coming as a messenger beforehand and crying out, “Prepare the Way!” in the wilderness.

            This is not the wilderness of Green Peace.  It’s not a national park.  The wilderness that Isaiah, John the Baptizer, Mark and, we believe, God are crying out against is the wilderness of Wall Street, the wilderness of climate change, the wilderness of sweatshops and child labor and racial hatred and taking away the rights of women to determine their own lives, and all the rest.  This wilderness is the mess we have made of our own society through empire-building, whether it’s global empires or corporate empires or personal empires.  And the prophetic tradition within Judaism is calling us to straighten those things out, to lift up the low places and level down the high places, to prepare the way through equity.  “Then,” Isaiah prophesies, “then will the glory of our God be revealed, and all people shall see it together.” 

            I don’t want to give away the rest of Mark’s story—this is only the beginning, after all—but here’s a clue.  After he is baptized by John, Jesus will go his own way.  And his own way is different enough from John’s way that, when John is in prison awaiting his execution, he sends messengers to Jesus asking, “Are you really the one we’ve been waiting for, or should we expect someone else” [Lk.7:20]?  In other words, “Where’s the revolution?”  Jesus sends the messengers back to John, saying, “Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor” [v.22].  It turns out that John was thinking in the old way of armed revolution.  But Jesus represents a new way, a new beginning with a new mission that was (and is) a non-violent revolution of healing and reconciliation—a revolution of love.

            But don’t think that this gets us off the hook.  That this means we can retreat back into our personal piety and not take a side in the struggle for justice and peace.  Woe to those church-goers who say that all the gospel means is that “it’s nice to be nice.”  For us to say simply, “It’s nice to be nice,” is not good news to the poor, it’s not helping the spiritually blind to see, it’s not Occupying Religion as we try to do in the UCC in our effort to make religion not something that oppresses, but something that liberates.  The gospel involves looking beyond our self-interest.  It means going beyond charity and working for systemic change.  It means going beyond our laziness and figuring out what’s right and wrong, good and evil, and taking a stand.  It means turning our backs on the old ways that oppress and committing ourselves—our whole selves—to the New Way.  And what’s new about following Jesus is that we work for justice by doing love.

            Perhaps nobody summed up the gospel better than Peter Chrysologus in a famous sermon he delivered in Ravenna Italy in 425 AD, as the Germanic hordes were invading and the Roman Empire was crumbling.  Although he’s one of the few people ever honored with the title, “Doctor of the Church,” we don’t know his real last name—Chryso Logus is a nickname his congregation gave him that means “Golden Words.”  He preached as Rome was falling:

            God saw the world falling into ruin because of fear and called it back with love.  God

            invited the world by grace, preserved it by love, and embraced it with compassion.

            That’s a very Christian way of seeing things.  Still, we must never forget that the birth-mother of our faith is the social justice tradition of the Jewish prophets and that Jesus chose to be baptized by John, thus enfolding John’s mission into his own, which is to make religion work as a liberating force for the 99%.  So, as followers of Jesus, our mission is to offer the public world a new beginning by personally changing it through loving direct action.

      Pastor Dan Geslin

6th Avenue UCC

Advent 2, 2011