2 Advent, Year B
December 4, 2011
Gary D. Jones
St. Stephen’s Church
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God. (Mark 1:1)
(Gary began this sermon with a humorous story about a lady’s trip to the hairdresser.
You can hear him tell the story in the audio version of this sermon. After the story,
Gary continued:)
There are plenty of people out there who are ready to tell you the bad news, aren’t
there? Even when things are going well, when there is every reason for deep
gratitude…, still, some people in our lives seem to have this need to go to a negative
place. They’re ready to tell you about how bad things are in the world, about what a
mess we’re in as a country, about all the problems in our city, in our community, in
our church, and they’ll even be happy to tell you, if you have time, how bad things
are with you! As if we didn’t already know! It can be so exhausting.
But the reason you and I are here, week after week, is that in spite of the naysayers
and the harbingers of bad news, in spite of the voices in our own heads that are
quick to point out what is wrong in our lives,…in spite of all the evidence we can see
to the contrary, Christians are people who have had intimations of something
beautiful and extraordinary and life-giving that is far greater than all the
accumulated bad news we can muster.
The Gospel according to Mark is the shortest of all the gospels, and its tone is urgent,
almost breathless. And there in the first verse of the first chapter of this Gospel, it is
clear. Mark wants us to fix on the Good News that is among us, that is all around us,
and that is even within us. The people for whom Mark was writing were an
oppressed people who knew hardship and suffering on a scale much greater than
anything most of us could imagine. But in spite of all the grief and sorrow they
could see around them, Mark is pointing to something Jesus called the buried
treasure or “the pearl of great price” to which all the others stuff in our lives is not
worth comparing.
Many poets and mystics have intuited this truth through the ages. And you have, too.
You have had that experience of being at the ocean and looking up at a starry sky, or
suddenly catching your breath when you see the face of someone you love, and
simply saying to yourself, “Oh, my….”
I think of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who spoke about the whole world being
“charged with the grandeur of God.” In his poem, “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins notes
the many ways people through the ages have made a mess of things, through wars
and callous disregard for the earth and for each other; still, Hopkins writes, “there
lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Reading Hopkins and other Christian
poets and mystics, you get the sense of an enduring, deep-down core of goodness.
It’s the same thing that once in a while makes you catch your breath in awe.
And to bring his point home most forcefully, Hopkins said something else
extraordinary in another of his famous poems, entitled, “When Kingfishers Catch
Fire.” Hopkins wrote, “Christ plays in ten thousand places,/lovely in limbs and eyes
not his” own. In other words, Christ is within people all around you, even in
yourself. The Presence of God is not in temples of stone, but “lovely in limbs and
eyes not his.” It’s a little like what Jesus said, when he said, “I am the vine and you
are the branches.” Our true life is the Divine Life which is constantly flowing into
and through each other.
This Good News is a part of us that we often fail to see, even though “we live and
move and have our being” in this Good News – it is the ocean in which we swim
every day, it is the air we breathe. It is so close to us that it is a part of us, but for so
long we have been looking for something outside of us that we fail to see what is
right here within us.
It doesn’t matter what your circumstances are, what your diagnosis is, what your
employment or your marital status is…it doesn’t matter if you’ve gotten into the
college of your dreams or you just flunked your exams.
Our true life and true joy are not dependent on anything except the Presence of God.
And since God is always present, so is the possibility of living your true life and
knowing your true joy.
That’s what John the Baptist was announcing. One is among you now who is so
powerful that I am not worthy to tie the thong of his sandal. And the One whom
John announced in turn would say, “The Kingdom of God is within you.”
A friend of mine who is a cartoonist sent me a cartoon last week that he said he
hoped might help me with my sermon. The title to the cartoon is “A Voice Crying in
the Wilderness,” and it shows this vast expanse of empty desert wilderness. And in
the middle of it there is a lady standing there in a nice dress, with her handbag over
her arm, and she’s crying, “Somebody get me the heck out of this place!”
The truth is, nobody likes going into the wilderness. When Jesus went there, the
Gospel says that the Holy Spirit had to forcefully drive him there. For most of us,
times of true wilderness are times when our hearts are crying out, “Somebody
please get me out of this place!” It’s easy to romanticize the wilderness from afar.
It’s easy to espouse platitudes about how much a person can learn from the
wilderness. But when you’re in it, the wilderness can feel like hell.
And one of the reasons is that we have actually come to believe that a new Lexus in
the driveway on Christmas morning will make us happy. We’ve actually come to
believe that getting into UVA or the college of our dreams is the pearl of great price.
We’ve actually come to believe that a comfortable income or a perfect marriage or a
favorable diagnosis is key to discovering our true life and joy.
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And the function of the wilderness, painful as it is, is to show us that when all of that
has been stripped away, there is something more. Beyond the life we hop for is a life
God wants to give us.
And the message of John the Baptist was that we can begin to live this Life now. The
painful part is that sometimes we have to let go of what we’re hoping for, in order to
receive what God has to give. That’s the wilderness part.
Of course, people were so ready for some good news in John’s day that they flocked
from all over to hear him. And we know from Luke’s gospel that the people who
flocked to John asked him to tell them more specifically, “What do we have to do to
receive this new life, this Good News, to make the way straight for God in our lives?”
And here’s what he told them. He said, if you have two coats give one to somebody
who needs it, and if you have more food than you need, share what you have.
You would think that it would be a lot more complicated or difficult. You would
think that John the Baptist would have had a harsher message. But he didn’t. The
secret to the Good News, it turns out, is being the Good News.
Eventually, it would all become clearer when people saw how Jesus lived his life.
Anybody with any common sense at all, could see that there were all sorts of people
in Jesus’ day who had gone astray, people who were bad news. And the religious
people were often the first ones to point them out.
But when Jesus looked at these people, he saw good news. He saw in them what he
sees in us, and what he hopes we are learning to see in each other.
The Divine Presence, “the dearest freshness deep down things,” this is something we
can obscure in ourselves and we can overlook in each other, but it’s not something
we can erase. Sins can be erased, but not the Divine Presence. And since both John
and Jesus were all about the forgiveness of sins, all that was left over, for them, was
the Divine.
We all know the human inclination to focus at times on the bad news, on what is
wrong in the world and in each other.
But we are people who are beginning to sense that, really, the whole point of this life
is to see deeper than the bad news, not to be people whose heads are buried in the
sand, but to be people who are so immersed in the Good News that we are finding
our true life and purpose in becoming the Good News for each other.
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