Comforting the Challenged and Challenging our Comfort

Isaiah 40: 1-11
Mark 1:1-11
This morning, we focus on Advent in a different way, a new beginning, a new center.

A Century and a half ago, America went through radical change. There was a rapid increase in the number of new settlers, there had been famine, draught, economic collapse across the developed world and the Midwestern Frontier was opened for expansion. Settlers raced across the face of the countryside, as if devouring the unspoiled wilderness, they had never seen such natural resources. They fished indiscriminately, they chopped down trees for being the closest rather than being deadwood. They killed what they did not know. They shot buffalo for sport. They herded the indigenous people, as if animals, to be bought and sold, abused. A Great Cheyenne Chief was asked by his Tribe “Why are they doing this?” He is recorded as saying, “This is a people who have lost their way, lost Center, they no longer know what provides balance, meaning, what is needed or what is evil. They kill and hurt and destroy, because they are off-center.”

Advent is a time of “Preparing the Way of the Lord”. Different from the Season of LENT which is 40 Days of Fasting and Prayer and Reflection; Advent is the wisdom of knowing God is sending “Innocence into the world”, God is offering Grace. Lent is sacrificial because we know we crucified him, humanity made the Son of God suffer and die. Humanity was wrong, in Lent we pray for forgiveness. But Christmas, Christmas is God's choice to enter in, not based on anything we have done, or have avoided doing, but simply because God loves us. Advent then, is our attempt to re-Center, to confess brokenness and hope to begin afresh. We prepare so we do not miss Christ's coming.

Friday evening at the Community-wide blessing of the Creche, we described that each of the Four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John begin differently, telling a different story. John begins at Creation itself, poetically, symbolically reading back into the Creation. Matthew begins at the Genealogy fulfilling each of the Covenants of Abraham, David, the return from Exile in the reality of Jesus. Matthew and Luke both begin with the Birth, the infancy of this most human child. Mark begins differently.

Friday night we had a Biblical Storyteller, who recited The Gospel of Mark. This is NOT a history of Jesus, or the meaning of that history, or the meaning of all history, this is, this is the Beginning of the Gospel, the Salvation of the world, not as an abstract theoretical event to be taught and learned. His presentation was avant-gar-de, this ordained minister was stepping over the pews, getting in our face, allowing us to hear the Gospel not as a 2000 year old text, but as real words of real people encountering Christ in their lives.

Salvation is experienced, lived and felt as something far more than going through the motions of life. As the Poet Laureate Billy Collins described in this morning's Call to Worship, Salvation is more than SEEING where a fictional character tells you to LOOK, Salvation is pointed to in the Word: BEHOLD! So often we see and respond, we recognize and react. Life has become a Race, where the quickest to the answer regardless of the MEANS, wins; and everything seems to be about winning, having the most, the fastest, the biggest and flatest, the most miniaturized.

We have routinely confused Theology with Politics, pushing one agenda, liberal or conservative to declare our intent as God's Will. The Gospel is different because this is not about Theology, but about Christology, recognizing and seeing more than the Created Order, Choosing to enter in, because of Justice responding to Evil; or Love for the Lost. Christology is The Centering of humanity, more than a reactionary response of Fight of Flight, to stand with those who are impoverished, alone, victimized, because Communion with one another is Righteous. To Love and act with Compassion for those who are lost.

Years ago, there was a woman who came as a visitor and sat among us. By the second week we had learned her name. By the third we were inviting her to consider claiming this church as her own. She declined but continued to participate, to be part of the communion, to listen, to pray, and to sing. One morning she looked horrible, and she named she had had a recurrence of Cancer. We would go and sit together while she had her treatments, driving slowly on the way home, so we could pull off when she needed to. Then one day she decided she did not want the treatments anymore. She continued to worship, then because of her body's schedule she shifted from Sunday morning to taking a Bulletin and sitting in the Sanctuary whenever she was able. We tried to call, but she did not answer. After a few months, someone called the Church one afternoon. They identified themselves as her sister. She had had a falling out with the family several years before, and they had lost all contact. Then, a call her sister had died. She was cleaning the apartment, and found a whole stack of Church Bulletins, worn from being held tightly, read over several times, tied with a ribbon to a Bible. The sister was in shock, saying “I didn't think my sister believed in God, and here after she is dead and buried, I learn she has been part of a church?” We shared what we knew, and her sister said “Thank you. Thank you for being there when/and/as my sister needed. You helped her find peace, when we were at war with each other. You helped her find God.”

The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in Mark, begins with this private conversation between God and Christ: BEHOLD! See, I am sending my messenger before your face, to prepare a way for you. Like John the Baptist, our role at Advent is to Prepare The Way for Christ in the World by Challenging our Comforts and Comforting those who are Challenged.

These words from the Prophet often called II Isaiah, are strange to us. Seeming to have come from a different time and place. “Comfort, O Comfort my People says your God” is dissonant with a people who have so much. In 2005, when I went to South Sudan for the first time, Isaiah 40 is the passage we read in worship on Sunday morning. The 25 year long civil war had just barely ended. As people gathered at the church, from out of mud huts and steel box cars, they lay their rifles near but outside the place of worship. And we named that universally, they described themselves as the Suffering People of God, yet for their sons and daughters who were refugees in America, this place infested with flies and mosquitos, malaria heat of 120 degrees and rain for nine months was Home, with all that Home means. But whether to that people or our own, the centering-gospel comes through: All Flesh is grass, the grass withers the flower fades, but the Love of God endures for ever.