On Sunday, the sermon will also appear below so that you can read or listen at your leisure.
Encountering Mary’s Story
Sermon From Mark+ For Advent 4
We now inch day-by-day towards Gods third great act of creation. Genesis offers us stories of the original act of creation when the Spirit of God hovered over the abyss and brought order to the hitherto undifferentiated universe – separating night from day, light from dark, sea from sky, and the emergence of solid ground on which God planted the seeds of all life. With the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the primordial garden we see the first shift in the way the creation will hence forth progress.
Genesis reports that things continue – going from bad to worse – until in the story of Noah and the Flood we God’s destruction of all but the sea and sky along with the solitary ark bearing the remnants of living life. This great eruption of divine anger is followed by an act of remorse. God grieves – it seems God has been hasty destroying the very thing he ha most loved. His profound remorse is symbolized for all eternity in the sign of the rainbow – a sign in God of of the triumph of love over rage.
The Christmas Carol It came upon a midnight clear speaks of an angelic song which opens the way for God’s third great action in the story of creation. The carol’s second verse speaks of angel-song as:
With peaceful wings unfurled, their heavenly music floats O’er all the weary world; Above its sad and lowly plains, They bend on hovering wing, And ever o’er its babel sounds The blessed angels sing.
Yet beneath the unimaginable beauty of the angelic strain:
with woes of sin and strife The world has suffered long; Beneath the angel-strain have rolled Two thousand years of wrong; And man, at war with man, hears not The love-song which they bring; O hush the noise, ye men of strife, And hear the angels sing.
In God’s third great act in the creation, we find a 15-year-old girl sitting entranced by the words of a heavenly messenger– hail O highly favored one, the Lord is with you. Mary alone hears the angel-song. She lets the words enter deeply into her, slowly allowing them to arouse in her a deep curiosity. Her first words are the predictable how can this be?
On the surface of things, the angel’s greeting makes little sense to her.
Mary’s world is far from secure. A 15-year-old peasant girl occupies a vulnerable place within a world that is consistently harsh and often cruel. A world in which for a young woman there can be little hope of escape from the endless round of servitude and labor. So how can this be?
Yet, there is curiosity in her question. I often comment that curiosity is one of the essentials in the pursuit of a spiritual life. There is a wonder in curiosity in the way it opens the curious to new and undreamt-of possibilities. Curiosity precedes hope – hope the whispering of longing to be translated into action in the present-time.
And so, Mary sits in silence. Gabriel, the angel with unfurled wings hovers soundlessly with a deafening soundlessness that penetrates every cell of Mary’s body – every fiber of her being. Together their silence brings all of creation to a stand-still – like the pause between two breaths. Mary sits, Gabriel hovers patiently, and God – the Creator of heaven and earth and all they contain – our God waits. For God must now wait upon Mary’s response.
Suddenly the waiting is over. From the depth of her being Mary whispers her yes – a simple yes – her word of agreement that will change forever the course of creation.
In the words of the carol through Mary’s yes the creation (the whole world) finally gives back the song which the angels sing.
Despite the difference of time and context separating us from her, like Mary’s – our world is a far from easy or safe place. If nothing else, 2020 has brought this home for many of us who otherwise enjoyed the illusion of a degree of separation from the harsher realities of the world. We struggle to hope – hope which ultimately requires us the whisper of a yes. But our question is not Mary’s but how can this be? Our question is more often yes, but yes to what? A conditional yes.
All we can know is that when we whisper our yes we, as Mary did, consent to enter into a partnership of covenant with God – giving ourselves over to God’s purpose for us. In every moment of every day God addresses us as highly favored ones – asking for our willing consent to become those in or through whom the Word of God is born.
Our Advent waiting is over. Our confusion as to what or who we have been waiting for becomes clear. We are the ones God has been waiting for. Let it be to us according to the divine life-giving word.
Fifteen years old – The flowers printed on her dress Cease moving in the middle of her prayer When God, Who sends the messenger, Meets His messenger in her Heart. Her answer, between breath and breath, Wrings from her innocence our Sacrament! In her {white} body God becomes our Bread.
Advent is a time that refocuses our attention on the spiritual virtue of hope. Hope is the universal aspiration of the human heart. Regardless of differences in the imagined outcome -hope is a universal of the human spirit.
I’ve mentioned before that one of my fatalistic Irish grandmother’s sayings was don’t hope- never be disappointed. This saying captures that quality of risk inherent in hope. To hope is to risk wanting – and wanting raises the possibility of disappointment. But my grandmother’s expression, while it captures our fear of risk, it nonetheless misses the essential point about hope. Hope’s not primarily a picture of a longed-for future – realizable or not. Hope is the compass setting that establishes a direction of travel in the present.
Hope is the compass setting that establishes a direction of travel in the present.
You see, hope is not a future dream – although much of human hope is couched in this way. Hope is primarily an expectation for the present. Don’t hope -never be disappointed is not simply a protection against future disappointment it’s a severe limitation on present time possibility.
We are the ones we have been waiting for is a saying the origin of which has multiple attributions. We are the ones we have been waiting for is however the title of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning book about which Alice Walker has said:
We are the ones we have been waiting for because we live in an age in which we are able to see and understand our own predicament. With so much greater awareness than our ancestors – and with such capacity for insight, knowledge, and empathy – we are uniquely prepared to create positive change within ourselves and our world.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for was also used by Barak Obama – not to indicate that he or his administration were necessarily the ones desperately awaited but that present generations of our society have the potential to really change American society’s direction of travel towards an – as yet – unrealized future.
Don’t hope -never be disappointed is not simply a protection against future disappointment it’s a severe limitation on present time possibility.
Sustaining hope is a lifetime’s work. Advent invites us to refocus on this task of sustaining hope in a world that tends often – like my grandmother’s saying – to play up the risk of hope’s disappointment.
We can see the tension between hope as a longed-for future expectation and hope as the invitation to open to present time possibility played out in the book of the Prophet Isaiah – which forms the mainstay of Advent’s O.T. lessons. On Advent Sunday, picking up on Third Isaiah’s plaintiff cry: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence, I posed the question: in Advent what are we waiting for, and why are we still waiting? I noted that the answer was too complex for one sermon and I promised to return to the question.
Third Isaiah’s cry: why God are you too long in fulfilling your promises – is certainly a complaint we can identify with. But the problem here lies in the nature of expectation. Third Isaiah’s complaint is an expectation of a God who dwells outside of human affairs and is required from time to time to swoop in to rescue us from our folly. Yet, in the book of Isaiah we find the earlier voice – that of First Isaiah, writing some 200 years prior to Third Isaiah. First Isaiah anticipates God’s arrival not as an all-powerful – God who rescues us – but as Emmanu-El –literally, God is with us.
The implications of First Isaiah’s expectation of God as Emmanu-El – is of a God who has come not to rescue us and take us out of the mess of our own creation, but as God who enters into the mess of the world alongside us: to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.
If our Advent hope causes us to raise our eyes heavenwards waiting for divine rescue – we will miss the object of Advent hope- that God is already here – among us – journeying alongside us in our travail.
At the heart of our Christian faith is the realization that in the birth of Jesus, the Creator, hitherto dwelling outside of creation – now enters to dwell within the tent of the creation. In the Incarnation God comes to be with us. However, the birth of Jesus is only the beginning.
Although not the gospel appointed for Advent 3, Luke’s chapter 4 show us the adult Jesus’ first act in his public ministry. On entering the synagogue, he reads First Isaiah’s words: the Spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. His audience’s familiarity with these words as future promise give way to astonishment and then to anger as he tells them that: today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. They react badly to being told to forget about the future, and open their eyes to see that things are really happening now. In Jesus, hope has come as the challenge for change in the present time.
We are the ones we have been waiting for focuses our attention firmly on the present time in which hope is not a future dream but a present-time activity. Of course, there is a hidden irony here. Writing of Obama’s use of the phrase in the Atlantic Magazine, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
But I think some have missed a nuance. The phrase is actually a self-indictment as well as a self-congratulation. The point is surely that we shouldn't wait for someone else to save us, or lift us up, or fix our problems or address our fate.
What are we waiting for and why are we still waiting? Maybe this is not the question after all.
The great 20th -century theologian Paul Tillich wrote:
the power of that for which we wait is already effective within us. Those who wait in an ultimate sense are not that far from that for which they wait.
On Advent 3 we arrive at a different question from the one I posed on Advent 1. What are we waiting for becomes who are we waiting for? Allowing for an appropriate sense of humility, if we are not to be the ones we have been waiting for – then who will be?
https://stmartinsprov.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/New-SMEC-Logo-Fixed-300x69.png00msutherlandhttps://stmartinsprov.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/New-SMEC-Logo-Fixed-300x69.pngmsutherland2020-12-12 14:29:312020-12-12 14:29:33Worship Resources for December 12, Advent 3
On Sunday, the sermon will also appear below so that you can read or listen at your leisure.
Present Prophecy – Linda+
Advent 2 Year B 6 December 2020 Isaiah 40:1-11, Mark 1:1-8
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Was John the Baptist the last prophet, or the first evangelist? Yes. The writer of Mark’s Gospel begins, not with shepherds, magi, and a manger, but with the resounding liminal presence of one who stands on the threshold of fulfillment of God’s promise to Creation. John the Baptizer evokes the foundational prophetic tradition, appearing as a wild specter of Elijah, dressed in camel hair and subsisting on locusts and honey, preaching repentance of sins. Mark reminds us of the words of Isaiah; a messenger from the wilderness, crying out,
“…prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
John the Baptizer harkens backward to the prophets while pointing forward to Jesus: Repent. Prepare. Something new is coming. Wake up. Good News, Good News, Good News. Prophet and evangelist, old and new, linking past and future.
We often think of prophets as predictors of the future, but that’s not a complete picture. The idea of touting prophecy as a foreteller of future events was actually a way of reinforcing something more important: the call of the present moment, the call to repent, to turn away from systems of injustice or complicity or idol worship, lest the judgment of God be passed upon the people of God. So when calamity struck Israel, as it did in 597 B.C.E. with the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile that followed, the prophets’ words became, not just a call to the people to heed their current situation, but also a predictor of future events: “See? Disaster has befallen us just as Isaiah predicted!” That’s the sexy bit—the idea that certain people can look ahead and tell us what will happen. Somehow it’s easier to ponder and contemplate and speculate about whether prophecy is right or wrong than it is to actually listen to what the prophets are saying and then do the hard work of healing and justice.
Prophecy of the present moment is more than just knowing the future; it is a call to awaken to the challenge of creating a better one.
The reason the writers of the Gospels so often cited the prophets was not just because the prophets lent them credibility by imaging God’s future actions, but because they recognized a commonality and solidarity with the past. The Gospel writers recognized that the people of their history had stood at similar thresholds—meeting crises of war, famine, occupation, exile. And how they responded to those crises mattered to their future as the people of God.
Mark the Evangelist knew that invoking Second Isaiah would have an impact on his audience. While First Isaiah, written in the 8th century B.C.E., had warned the people of the consequences of their idol worship and turning from God—a warning that went unheeded, ultimately to their downfall–Second Isaiah spoke to the people two centuries later, during the Babylonian exile. And this time, for a change, God spoke words, not of warning, but of comfort. This was because the people were at a different kind of threshold from the ones they had encountered before. They spent a generation in Babylon without their home or their Temple. They had to find, in their new circumstances, a way to get along from day to day in a new country and culture. They had to learn new ways to worship and live their faith as people of God in a foreign land. They were struggling with what it was like to be in a New Normal. They needed reassurance—to know that God was still with them.
“Comfort, O comfort my people…she has served her term…her penalty is paid…”
Whew.
“The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.”
Thank God. This time of struggle is temporary—we will get through it, somehow.
The prophet speaks of a God of both strength and gentleness; of a God who can lift valleys even as he carries his flock gently in his arms. The prophet speaks God’s hopeful promise of deliverance; coming in might yet feeding his flock like a shepherd. Comforting God’s people. But comfort is not to be equated with complacency.
“A voice says, ‘Cry out!’ And I said, ‘What shall I say?’”
Cry out deliverance! Cry out that God is near! Cry out hope! And John the Baptizer does just that. Good News! The Messiah is here among us! The world is changing! The Holy Spirit is on the move! Wake up! Prophet and Evangelist. We don’t have to wear camel hair and eat locusts and wild honey to be either of these things. Or both. Cry out!
What shall we say? How shall we proclaim the might and grace of our God to a world consumed by sickness and fear; to a country riven by division and failure of political will, hungering for justice, compassion and healing? Because make no mistake, in this Advent season we are being called to be prophets and evangelists, crying out for world-turning change and proclaiming the now-and-not-yet of the Dream of God for all of Creation.
That’s a tall order. How dare the Gospel make such demands when we are dealing with so much, when we are trying to find a way to get along day to day, trying to learn new ways of worship and live our faith as people of God in what feels like foreign land of masks and social distance? When we are struggling with what it is like to be in a New Normal? How dare the Gospel make such demands upon a people in exile from our lives of ten months ago? How do we begin to meet such a challenge? By facing it, naming it, and trusting in God’s paradoxical mountain-leveling strength and shepherd-like lovingkindness. Hear the words of Bishop Steven Charleston:
Sometimes prophecy is pragmatism dressed up for church. And that is not always a bad thing. Take our current situation, for example. It doesn’t take a mystic to determine three things: we are in a bad way on many fronts, things will not get better right away, and the only way forward is together in faith. These statements are just facts. They pragmatically describe our context… But notice one other thing: this down to earth, common sense, give it to me straight approach releases a deep fountain of spiritual strength in us. …There is prophecy here because we now understand what we are up against and what we have to do. Prophetically, the future is not ours to see, but pragmatically it will be what we make it.
The people of God have been in exile before, and they learned that they would be changed by it. It is no different today. Like ancient Israel, like the first century Mediterranean world, we shall be changed by where we are now, and it remains to us to decide what our future will look like. And then, with God’s help, to make it so.
February 7, 2021 Worship Resources
/in Prayer List and Sermon /by Kathryn BarrJanuary 31st, 2021 Worship Resources
/in Prayer List and Sermon /by Kathryn BarrJanuary 24th, 2021 Worship Resources
/in Prayer List and Sermon /by Kathryn BarrJanuary 17th, 2021 Worship Resources
/in Prayer List and Sermon /by Kathryn BarrJanuary 10th, 2021 Worship Resources
/in Prayer List and Sermon /by Kathryn BarrJanuary 3rd, 2021 Worship Resources
/in Prayer List and Sermon /by Kathryn BarrDecember 20, 2020 Worship Resources
/in Prayer List and Sermon /by Kathryn BarrWelcome to our weekly updated Worship Resources section. Here you can find helpful links for virtual worship.
Click here to see view the Holy Eucharist in Advent booklet.
Click here to view the Scripture readings and the responsive Psalm.
Click play below to hear the weekly prayer list. Names submitted after the recording are read during livestream and the following week.
Click here for our Virtual Offering Plate and we thank you for your support during this time.
On Sunday, the sermon will also appear below so that you can read or listen at your leisure.
Encountering Mary’s Story
Sermon From Mark+ For Advent 4
We now inch day-by-day towards Gods third great act of creation. Genesis offers us stories of the original act of creation when the Spirit of God hovered over the abyss and brought order to the hitherto undifferentiated universe – separating night from day, light from dark, sea from sky, and the emergence of solid ground on which God planted the seeds of all life. With the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the primordial garden we see the first shift in the way the creation will hence forth progress.
Genesis reports that things continue – going from bad to worse – until in the story of Noah and the Flood we God’s destruction of all but the sea and sky along with the solitary ark bearing the remnants of living life. This great eruption of divine anger is followed by an act of remorse. God grieves – it seems God has been hasty destroying the very thing he ha most loved. His profound remorse is symbolized for all eternity in the sign of the rainbow – a sign in God of of the triumph of love over rage.
The Christmas Carol It came upon a midnight clear speaks of an angelic song which opens the way for God’s third great action in the story of creation. The carol’s second verse speaks of angel-song as:
With peaceful wings unfurled,
their heavenly music floats
O’er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains,
They bend on hovering wing,
And ever o’er its babel sounds
The blessed angels sing.
Yet beneath the unimaginable beauty of the angelic strain:
with woes of sin and strife
The world has suffered long;
Beneath the angel-strain have rolled
Two thousand years of wrong;
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring;
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.
In God’s third great act in the creation, we find a 15-year-old girl sitting entranced by the words of a heavenly messenger– hail O highly favored one, the Lord is with you. Mary alone hears the angel-song. She lets the words enter deeply into her, slowly allowing them to arouse in her a deep curiosity. Her first words are the predictable how can this be?
On the surface of things, the angel’s greeting makes little sense to her.
Mary’s world is far from secure. A 15-year-old peasant girl occupies a vulnerable place within a world that is consistently harsh and often cruel. A world in which for a young woman there can be little hope of escape from the endless round of servitude and labor. So how can this be?
Yet, there is curiosity in her question. I often comment that curiosity is one of the essentials in the pursuit of a spiritual life. There is a wonder in curiosity in the way it opens the curious to new and undreamt-of possibilities. Curiosity precedes hope – hope the whispering of longing to be translated into action in the present-time.
And so, Mary sits in silence. Gabriel, the angel with unfurled wings hovers soundlessly with a deafening soundlessness that penetrates every cell of Mary’s body – every fiber of her being. Together their silence brings all of creation to a stand-still – like the pause between two breaths. Mary sits, Gabriel hovers patiently, and God – the Creator of heaven and earth and all they contain – our God waits. For God must now wait upon Mary’s response.
Suddenly the waiting is over. From the depth of her being Mary whispers her yes – a simple yes – her word of agreement that will change forever the course of creation.
In the words of the carol through Mary’s yes the creation (the whole world) finally gives back the song which the angels sing.
Despite the difference of time and context separating us from her, like Mary’s – our world is a far from easy or safe place. If nothing else, 2020 has brought this home for many of us who otherwise enjoyed the illusion of a degree of separation from the harsher realities of the world. We struggle to hope – hope which ultimately requires us the whisper of a yes. But our question is not Mary’s but how can this be? Our question is more often yes, but yes to what? A conditional yes.
All we can know is that when we whisper our yes we, as Mary did, consent to enter into a partnership of covenant with God – giving ourselves over to God’s purpose for us. In every moment of every day God addresses us as highly favored ones – asking for our willing consent to become those in or through whom the Word of God is born.
Our Advent waiting is over. Our confusion as to what or who we have been waiting for becomes clear. We are the ones God has been waiting for. Let it be to us according to the divine life-giving word.
Fifteen years old –
The flowers printed on her dress
Cease moving in the middle of her prayer
When God, Who sends the messenger,
Meets His messenger in her Heart.
Her answer, between breath and breath,
Wrings from her innocence our Sacrament!
In her {white} body God becomes our Bread.
Annunciation by Thomas Merton
Worship Resources for December 12, Advent 3
/in Uncategorized /by msutherlandSermon from Mark+.
Who Are We Waiting For
Advent is a time that refocuses our attention on the spiritual virtue of hope. Hope is the universal aspiration of the human heart. Regardless of differences in the imagined outcome -hope is a universal of the human spirit.
I’ve mentioned before that one of my fatalistic Irish grandmother’s sayings was don’t hope- never be disappointed. This saying captures that quality of risk inherent in hope. To hope is to risk wanting – and wanting raises the possibility of disappointment. But my grandmother’s expression, while it captures our fear of risk, it nonetheless misses the essential point about hope. Hope’s not primarily a picture of a longed-for future – realizable or not. Hope is the compass setting that establishes a direction of travel in the present.
You see, hope is not a future dream – although much of human hope is couched in this way. Hope is primarily an expectation for the present. Don’t hope -never be disappointed is not simply a protection against future disappointment it’s a severe limitation on present time possibility.
We are the ones we have been waiting for is a saying the origin of which has multiple attributions. We are the ones we have been waiting for is however the title of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize winning book about which Alice Walker has said:
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for was also used by Barak Obama – not to indicate that he or his administration were necessarily the ones desperately awaited but that present generations of our society have the potential to really change American society’s direction of travel towards an – as yet – unrealized future.
Sustaining hope is a lifetime’s work. Advent invites us to refocus on this task of sustaining hope in a world that tends often – like my grandmother’s saying – to play up the risk of hope’s disappointment.
We can see the tension between hope as a longed-for future expectation and hope as the invitation to open to present time possibility played out in the book of the Prophet Isaiah – which forms the mainstay of Advent’s O.T. lessons. On Advent Sunday, picking up on Third Isaiah’s plaintiff cry: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence, I posed the question: in Advent what are we waiting for, and why are we still waiting? I noted that the answer was too complex for one sermon and I promised to return to the question.
Third Isaiah’s cry: why God are you too long in fulfilling your promises – is certainly a complaint we can identify with. But the problem here lies in the nature of expectation. Third Isaiah’s complaint is an expectation of a God who dwells outside of human affairs and is required from time to time to swoop in to rescue us from our folly. Yet, in the book of Isaiah we find the earlier voice – that of First Isaiah, writing some 200 years prior to Third Isaiah. First Isaiah anticipates God’s arrival not as an all-powerful – God who rescues us – but as Emmanu-El –literally, God is with us.
The implications of First Isaiah’s expectation of God as Emmanu-El – is of a God who has come not to rescue us and take us out of the mess of our own creation, but as God who enters into the mess of the world alongside us: to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners.
At the heart of our Christian faith is the realization that in the birth of Jesus, the Creator, hitherto dwelling outside of creation – now enters to dwell within the tent of the creation. In the Incarnation God comes to be with us. However, the birth of Jesus is only the beginning.
Although not the gospel appointed for Advent 3, Luke’s chapter 4 show us the adult Jesus’ first act in his public ministry. On entering the synagogue, he reads First Isaiah’s words: the Spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. His audience’s familiarity with these words as future promise give way to astonishment and then to anger as he tells them that: today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. They react badly to being told to forget about the future, and open their eyes to see that things are really happening now. In Jesus, hope has come as the challenge for change in the present time.
We are the ones we have been waiting for focuses our attention firmly on the present time in which hope is not a future dream but a present-time activity. Of course, there is a hidden irony here. Writing of Obama’s use of the phrase in the Atlantic Magazine, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
What are we waiting for and why are we still waiting? Maybe this is not the question after all.
The great 20th -century theologian Paul Tillich wrote:
On Advent 3 we arrive at a different question from the one I posed on Advent 1. What are we waiting for becomes who are we waiting for? Allowing for an appropriate sense of humility, if we are not to be the ones we have been waiting for – then who will be?
December 13, 2020 Worship Resources
/in Prayer List and Sermon /by Kathryn BarrDecember 6, 2020 Worship Resources
/in Prayer List and Sermon /by Kathryn BarrWelcome to our weekly updated Worship Resources section. Here you can find helpful links for virtual worship.
Click here to see view the Holy Eucharist in Advent booklet.
Click here to view the Scripture readings and the responsive Psalm for Advent 2.
Click play below to hear the weekly prayer list. Names submitted after the recording are read during livestream and the following week.
Click here for our Virtual Offering Plate and we thank you for your support during this time.
On Sunday, the sermon will also appear below so that you can read or listen at your leisure.
Present Prophecy – Linda+
Advent 2 Year B 6 December 2020 Isaiah 40:1-11, Mark 1:1-8
Was John the Baptist the last prophet, or the first evangelist? Yes. The writer of Mark’s Gospel begins, not with shepherds, magi, and a manger, but with the resounding liminal presence of one who stands on the threshold of fulfillment of God’s promise to Creation. John the Baptizer evokes the foundational prophetic tradition, appearing as a wild specter of Elijah, dressed in camel hair and subsisting on locusts and honey, preaching repentance of sins. Mark reminds us of the words of Isaiah; a messenger from the wilderness, crying out,
John the Baptizer harkens backward to the prophets while pointing forward to Jesus: Repent. Prepare. Something new is coming. Wake up. Good News, Good News, Good News. Prophet and evangelist, old and new, linking past and future.
We often think of prophets as predictors of the future, but that’s not a complete picture. The idea of touting prophecy as a foreteller of future events was actually a way of reinforcing something more important: the call of the present moment, the call to repent, to turn away from systems of injustice or complicity or idol worship, lest the judgment of God be passed upon the people of God. So when calamity struck Israel, as it did in 597 B.C.E. with the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile that followed, the prophets’ words became, not just a call to the people to heed their current situation, but also a predictor of future events: “See? Disaster has befallen us just as Isaiah predicted!” That’s the sexy bit—the idea that certain people can look ahead and tell us what will happen. Somehow it’s easier to ponder and contemplate and speculate about whether prophecy is right or wrong than it is to actually listen to what the prophets are saying and then do the hard work of healing and justice.
The reason the writers of the Gospels so often cited the prophets was not just because the prophets lent them credibility by imaging God’s future actions, but because they recognized a commonality and solidarity with the past. The Gospel writers recognized that the people of their history had stood at similar thresholds—meeting crises of war, famine, occupation, exile. And how they responded to those crises mattered to their future as the people of God.
Mark the Evangelist knew that invoking Second Isaiah would have an impact on his audience. While First Isaiah, written in the 8th century B.C.E., had warned the people of the consequences of their idol worship and turning from God—a warning that went unheeded, ultimately to their downfall–Second Isaiah spoke to the people two centuries later, during the Babylonian exile. And this time, for a change, God spoke words, not of warning, but of comfort. This was because the people were at a different kind of threshold from the ones they had encountered before. They spent a generation in Babylon without their home or their Temple. They had to find, in their new circumstances, a way to get along from day to day in a new country and culture. They had to learn new ways to worship and live their faith as people of God in a foreign land. They were struggling with what it was like to be in a New Normal. They needed reassurance—to know that God was still with them.
Whew.
Thank God. This time of struggle is temporary—we will get through it, somehow.
The prophet speaks of a God of both strength and gentleness; of a God who can lift valleys even as he carries his flock gently in his arms. The prophet speaks God’s hopeful promise of deliverance; coming in might yet feeding his flock like a shepherd. Comforting God’s people. But comfort is not to be equated with complacency.
Cry out deliverance! Cry out that God is near! Cry out hope! And John the Baptizer does just that. Good News! The Messiah is here among us! The world is changing! The Holy Spirit is on the move! Wake up! Prophet and Evangelist. We don’t have to wear camel hair and eat locusts and wild honey to be either of these things. Or both. Cry out!
What shall we say? How shall we proclaim the might and grace of our God to a world consumed by sickness and fear; to a country riven by division and failure of political will, hungering for justice, compassion and healing? Because make no mistake, in this Advent season we are being called to be prophets and evangelists, crying out for world-turning change and proclaiming the now-and-not-yet of the Dream of God for all of Creation.
That’s a tall order. How dare the Gospel make such demands when we are dealing with so much, when we are trying to find a way to get along day to day, trying to learn new ways of worship and live our faith as people of God in what feels like foreign land of masks and social distance? When we are struggling with what it is like to be in a New Normal? How dare the Gospel make such demands upon a people in exile from our lives of ten months ago? How do we begin to meet such a challenge? By facing it, naming it, and trusting in God’s paradoxical mountain-leveling strength and shepherd-like lovingkindness. Hear the words of Bishop Steven Charleston:
The people of God have been in exile before, and they learned that they would be changed by it. It is no different today. Like ancient Israel, like the first century Mediterranean world, we shall be changed by where we are now, and it remains to us to decide what our future will look like. And then, with God’s help, to make it so.