Cat Goodrich
First Presbyterian Church, Birmingham, AL
December 3, 2017
The First Sunday in Advent
MAKE WAY
Mark 1:1-8
Advent begins with a lone voice crying out in the wilderness:
PREPARE THE WAY OF THE LORD!
Mark’s gospel starts abruptly, which is fitting because almost everything else in the gospel happens that way, too. Mark’s Jesus moves with fierce urgency, jumping from one thing to the next immediately, with little description and no delay. The whole gospel resounds with a call to wake up, so we won’t miss him. Mark moves so quickly, in fact, that he skips over baby Jesus completely and starts with John, a sweaty toothed madman in the desert, baptizing crowds of people and hollering about a holy man who is to come – not just holier than thou, holier than all of us. And we’d better get ready, John says. Get right with God so we can prepare the way for him.
John is painted as an incarnation of the prophet Elijah, with a hairshirt and a fistful of locusts and honey dripping from his chin. John looks back to the prophets of old and points to the horizon and says soon. Repent for the day of the Lord is coming soon.
(read the text Mark 1:1-8)
Biblical scholar Karoline Lewis says that prophets are truth tellers. “They’re not fortune tellers,” she says, they can only predict “what is to come if that future makes sense because of or due to present behavior. They analyze the now for the sake of moving toward a different future.”[1]
Thinking about prophets as truth tellers, one lone voice has been stuck in my mind the past few weeks. It’s the voice of a woman in a turquoise dress sitting at a table, speaking slowly, calmly into the microphone. She faces a row of older white men, and she doesn’t have anything in front of her except her printed testimony and a glass of water. Her voice is clear, but a little shaky. She stumbles over her words at times as she describes how judge Clarence Thomas made unwanted advances and offensive comments to her when they worked together. I’m thinking, of course, of Anita Hill, who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 during the hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. And she was among the first to speak openly about sexual harassment.
Anita Hill’s testimony was not successful in preventing Justice Thomas from being confirmed – though his was the closest confirmation vote in history. After she made her statement, the members of the committee and the press dragged her through the dirt, second guessing her motives and flatly refusing to believe her. She eventually lost a tenured position endowed in her name at Oklahoma University, where she taught at the time. We can never know what really happened between the two of them, only they can know that. But to see Ms. Hill, a lone, young, black woman with cameras flashing all around her, with the all male, all white senators on the Judiciary committee looming over her – the imbalance of power is palpable. They didn’t want to hear what she had to say, or maybe they just didn’t want to believe it. But she told her truth anyway.
I don’t know about you, but I’m reluctant to turn on the news or open my computer these days because I don’t want to know who will be next. After the deafening chorus of “me, too”s that flooded social media last month, it shouldn’t be any surprise that powerful men from Hollywood to Lake Woebegone have been taking advantage of their status for a long time. When she spoke up, Anita Hill was a lone voice, crying out for people to notice a culture that was okay with the harassment and objectification of women. Her courage and witness, and her subsequent research and advocacy to fight harassment, misconduct, and gender bias have, in part, led us to the current moment. Her truth telling enabled a different future. Public opinion has shifted, and there is now a tidal wave of voices who say, we will not be silent. Harassment is not okay, and it won’t be tolerated; all people deserve to be treated with respect.
Prophets are truth tellers, analyzing the now for the sake of a different future.
John the Baptist was a prophet, calling people toprepare the way of the Lord.
Mark’s gospel moves too fast to tell us much about where John came from or why he starts preaching when he does – he just appears, calling the people to repent.He must have read the signs, or maybe he saw a flaming chariot like Elijah or heard a whisper in the night like Samuel. We don’t know. But there is something about the fullness of time at that moment that John noticed –the messiah was coming. And he knew that the advent of God would change the world forever.
The authorities don’t want to hear what John has to say, because the Messiah was thought to be the one who would restore Israel to power. But John doesn’t preach in the middle of the city. He cries out in the wilderness. On the margins of society. And that is where Christ’s ministry will begin - with people who have been forgotten, harassed, or dismissed by those in power. People whose lives have been devalued or commodified. The oppressed, the occupied. That’s where will God appear, in the flesh.
John tells the people they need to make some changes to be ready for Christ when he comes. They need to be baptized a sign of their repentance.
Before a surgeon goes into surgery, she scrubs in, washing hands and nails and wrists in an intense ritual. Nurses and doctors wash their hands with each new patient, and our Muslim brothers and sisters wash their feet and hands at least five times a day, before prayer, to become ritually clean.
It makes sense, then, that when John called people to prepare the way for the Lord, he baptized them – a ritual washing to symbolize their repentance; they were ready for God to draw near. How fitting that we reaffirmed our baptisms last Sunday when we ordained Leigh Ann as a minister!
We are called to prepare, too. Not just our homes for Christmas with tinsel and trees, but our hearts. Our lives. We’re called to prepare just as John did – by looking back to the prophets of Israel and remembering God’s promises made known to us through them. Then, looking around, analyzing our current context in light of God’s promises. And repenting of that which is wrong. John calls us to repent to make way for Christ to come. To change. Then we can look forward to the future with hope.
The road to where I lived in Guatemala was jokingly called the “calle de Dolores” by my Guatemalan family. The calle de Dolores means, the street of pain or street of sorrows, and it was called that because it was a bruising, bumping experience to drive from the valley to the mountainside where my family lived. the sheer number of rocks and potholes made it painful to drive.
Martin, the father of the family I lived with, was the driver for Presgov, the entity of the national church in Guatemala that hosted mission groups from outside the country. That meant he often went home with a van or bus in order to leave at the crack of dawn to get groups from the airport, to save himself the expense of staying overnight in Guatemala City. It was to his great frustration that the road did not go all the way to his property – turning off the calle de Dolores toward the family compound, one had to cross an uneven field of boulders on foot to get to their house.
Martin’s great project was to build a parking area close to their house. Whenever Martin had a day off, he would enlist the help of a few friends and neighbors and work to dig out boulders and move rocks from the field. I can remember one particularly stubborn stone that refused to budge. No amount of digging could get him to the bottom of it. He even attacked it with dynamite on more than one occasion, to no avail. But he was determined to make a driveway, and if had to blast his way to it, he would.
In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. What boulders do we need to move to make a way for Christ to enter our lives and our world this Advent?
I have to wonder if the voices crying out against harassment, calling for respect in the workplace and everywhere else, are helping prepare us, pointing out that we need to repent. Just as Anita Hill and women like her prepared the way for our current moment.What other lone voices do we hear crying out in the wilderness? What prophets are speaking today? Who is analyzing the now with the hope of leading us to a different future? William Barber, proclaiming a national poor people’s campaign, for one.
Maybe we need to be in the wilderness to hear those voices…that is, anywhere we find people who are struggling to claim their power, anywhere that feels forsaken. Because that’s where the good news is needed most! The prophet brings news of our God made flesh – God entering into human life, to redeem it, all of it. God becomes embodied because our bodies matter – and that is very good news, indeed. A voice cries out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. How will YOU prepare this advent?
[1] Lewis, Karoline, “A Truth Telling Advent,” Working Preacher.org, 2014.