Something Old, Something New
II Advent
December 7, 2008
David Brubacher
Texts: Isaiah 40:1-11
Mark 1:1-8
My father-in-law always wore his glasses to eat. “Food tastes better that way,” he reasoned. He was suggesting seeing enhances taste. Today the conversation between our scriptures and our Advent theme reflects something of one sense enhancing another. Our theme, Let Your Face Shine, explores the faces of God shining upon us so that we might be saved. Today we consider, The Comforting Face of God. Curiously, the texts speak of hearing the word of God. Hearing God’s word, I am suggesting, enables us to see God’s comforting face. Furthermore, as we live in the light of God’s shining face, others will also see God’s comfort.
Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas is a time of preparation. In worship as in life we prepare for the coming of Jesus the Christ. God, the one from of old, from all time, comes to us in the person of Jesus to do something new. The message of Advent is of something old becoming new. God comes to us in the context of life’s realities. Last week we heard the distress of God’s people suffering under a sense of God’s abandonment. In lament and confession they cried out to God. This week we hear from another time in the life of God’s people, a time when there was also much confusion and uncertainty. God speaks tenderly to the people revealing a comforting face. When we are most vulnerable, God comes to us with a voice offering comfort and direction.
God’s coming in Jesus beams comforting light. The political and economic crises unfolding in our time cause us to be anxious and angry. We live with other stresses: health concerns, broken relationships, loneliness and loss. Yet, God’s grace is also miraculously present. Many years ago I read Jeffery Knowles’ book, What of the Night? Knowles chronicles his journey through depression and anxiety as a way of reaching out to God and affirming his personal faith. In his story I hear what many of us feel in our reaching for God’s comfort in troubled times. I offer a few excerpts:
“It’s Christmas … the kids and Lezlee are sleeping peacefully upstairs. In a couple of hours they will sleepily open their eyes to the warm realization that the best day of the year is here. They will sense the momentary wonder,… Then they will be up and embracing the special traditions of this unique day. My goal is to survive the day, to seem chipper enough to avoid suspicion, to rearrange enough food on my plate to give the appearance of eating. I feebly pray that I can once more pull off the charade. They say death takes no holidays. Neither does depression. It looks forward to celebrating the special torments it can produce when you are supposed to be happy.”
An active Christian, there was nothing in Knowles’ current or past life that made him a likely candidate for depression. He wrote the book to confront his dark night and to affirm God’s presence. Of faith Knowles writes: “Strange that this whole ordeal should come down to a matter of faith. Oh sure, you’ve always said all the right words and phrases, speaking at times movingly and with genuine sincerity about how God can handle all problems, that you simply have to give those problems to him. And even when miracles didn’t come, you believed they could have happened,… Yet the issue of faith won’t go away, as if refusing to jump back into the neat cubbyhole you have maintained for all these years. And you wonder fearfully… how big is this problem? How big is this God?”
Knowles concludes: “I took a renewed sense of joy, as well as the conviction to conclude and let go of my small testimony to God’s real world – this book. If nothing else, perhaps it will be a reminder to me, or, perhaps you, that behind everything we see and do in life stands a world of real and eternal truth. Our task is to reach for it.”
How do we reach for God’s comforting presence? I received an excellent piece of advice to that end while visiting with Marta Armin this week. Speaking of God’s presence through her long life and her current reality of having pneumonia she said, “I am both thankful and hopeful.” Now that sounds like Advent preparation.
In our gospel reading, Mark 1 introduces John the baptizer. As a prophet of anticipation and preparation John becomes one of the more appropriate voices of Advent. Mark is written in a time of uncertainty to bring comfort and direction to God’s people. The Jewish Temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed. The fledgling Christian church is being persecuted. Mark writes to provide an historical and theological frame of reference for the new thing God is doing in Jesus. Mark opens on a note of anticipation: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Clearly there is more to come. And it is good news. In Jesus, God’s comfort and direction comes in our distress. “The beginning of the good news,” in Mark is reminiscent of the opening line of the Bible, “In the beginning God created.” From the opening syllable Mark anticipates a new manifestation of God’s activity in human history.
Good news or gospel is not used as a title, rather it suggests what follows is in itself good news. To establish the content of good news Mark quotes the prophet Isaiah, although the actual quotations are from Malachi and Isaiah. A messenger preparing the way for a new incarnat
ion of God is anticipated. Those who knew the Hebrew Scriptures would have understood John the baptizer as that messenger. Good news also rang a note of anticipation for those in the Greco-Roman culture. They would have heard a royal bell ringing from the imperial court to announce the birth of royal son or victory in battle. In both cultures, good news rang a bell of hope and expectation.
Unlike the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Mark does not narrate the birth and early childhood of Jesus. Mark’s primary focus is on the message of hope and expectation present in Jesus. “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord,…” echoes the message of comfort and hope in Isaiah 40. In considering Isaiah 40 we will see how Mark uses words to make his own case. Mark is intending to show John the baptizer, the one preaching and baptizing in the wilderness, as the anticipated forerunner to the Messiah. And so he writes, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord.” However, Isaiah 40 says, “A voice cries: In the wilderness prepare a way.” It seems like the politicians of our day did not invite using words to serve their own purpose.
In Isaiah 40 the Israelite people are exiled captives in Babylon. In the logic of the day the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple meant that God had indeed abandoned them. They had been through decades of intense soul searching. Finally Isaiah 40 announces good news. God is returning. The message of comfort and hope is delivered in series of voices from the heavenly court or divine council. Let us hear these voices as they speak to our need for comfort and hope.
God is the first to speak, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.” I can’t hear these words without also hearing the moving and stirring music of Handel’s Messiah. The music and the text come together surrounding me with feelings of peace and comfort. And I believe that is exactly what God means for us to feel. Those in attendance are instructed to announce that the time of punishment is over. The sins of Jerusalem have been paid in full. From now on God will speak with tenderness and comfort. When I hear tenderness and comfort in a voice I look up. And when I look up I see the face; I encounter the whole person. When voice and face offer the same message I know it is authentic. God’s voice from throughout the ages is being made new in the face of Jesus and God’s people.
One of those to whom God was speaking cries out, “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” In Babylon, where the people were living, special roads were created for an annual procession of the images of the Babylonian gods so that the people could see the gods in all their glory. A highway being created in the wilderness echoed the Exodus from Egypt when God led the people across the desert to the Promised Land. God’s glory was coming with action. “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,” rings equally true today. Often we think God is only present where people seem to have it all together. Often the “seeming to have it together” is only a cover. We are all equally in need of God’s comforting voice and face in our personal wilderness.
Another voice says, “Cry out!” In a note of futility the prophet asks, “What should I say, since the people are withering like grass and fading like flowers?” The prophet’s point is acknowledged, “Yes grass withers and flowers fade; but the future does not depend on the strength and faithfulness of the people, it depends on the word of our God, and God’s word endures forever.” Not only does it endure forever, the speaking of God’s word accomplishes God’s purpose. I think of God’s word accomplishing God’s purpose in terms of self-fulfilling prophecy. When we speak of some situation as hopeless it becomes hopeless. But when like Marta Armin and Jeffery Knowles we strive to be thankful and hopeful in the middle of our wilderness, there we see God’s purpose accomplished.
Having received his commission the prophet speaks in his own voice. He calls these people still unsure of God’s presence to get up on the highest mountain and to shout with all their strength, “Here is your God!” Imagine, such people called to be evangelists. Those who were still quivering from what felt like the harshness of God are being called to pronounce God’s tenderness. Imagine!
Yes, Imagine. How do we imagine God’s comforting presence? God’s coming among us in the Christ-child is God coming along side us in all the realities of life. Coming alongside, God puts an arm around us to help carry our burden, to help find our way. God comes to us not in our perfection but in our reality. Often the first thing we need to be able to do to see God in our reality is to own our reality. That can be both painful and hopeful. The Blue Christmas Service being held next Sunday is a time to experience God coming alongside our reality of life. Gathering with others we reach to God. God comes to us speaking words of comfort and hope. Together we stand under the umbrella of the comforting face of God and meet in Jesus. Advent, when it is Christian, celebrates and anticipates the advent – the coming – of our God. God can never be domesticated to our expectations. Something old always becomes new. AMEN.