I speak in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Please be seated.
So on this second Sunday in Advent, on this second Sunday in our new church year, we finally
get to start at the beginning of the story.
On the first Sunday of Advent, we actually start at the end with the reminder that God
will come again, the promises of God to come and be with us once more at the end of all
things because after all, what better time is there to talk about the second coming of
Christ than at His first?
But the second Sunday of Advent then serves as a reminder that God is constantly faithful
to us even if we are not constantly faithful to God.
God has promised from the moment of the fall and the Garden of Eden that God would continue
to work with us, to love us, to lift us up and call us out of our brokenness and continue
redeeming us and the world around us.
The beginning of Mark's Gospel is very much unlike the other three.
Mark's Gospel sets us right down in the story.
There is no birth narrative.
There is no history.
There is very little context.
There's no genealogy of Jesus tying him to the house of David.
There's no poetic scripture passages tying Jesus to God's beginningless and endless
reign.
There's no shepherd.
There are no wise men.
There are no angels.
Not even a mention of Joseph's gentle but unshakable faith in God, not even an account
of Mary's wondrous and inspiring courage in saying yes to God.
In Mark, in the First Evangelist, our first Gospel, we have the first attempt to write
down what before then had only been spread by word of mouth.
Mark just skips all of the beginning and starts with Jesus' ministry.
But make no mistake that Mark's Gospel is as poignant as it is short.
It is an absolutely packed 16 chapters.
Mark makes everything that he writes mean something.
The opening sentence of Mark is relatively short, just like the rest of his Gospel,
but it is brimming with key theological and narrative ingredients.
His first words, the beginning, harken back to Genesis and the cleus, the reader into
the fact that something new is happening.
Just as God moved over the earth in the beginning of time and the beginning of creation, God
even now with the birth of Jesus and with the astounding events of his life is bringing
new things into existence.
In this story, God is bringing new grace, new hope, new love, new mercy into the world
to a wayward people still searching for our way home.
Mark is writing at a time of war, which will sound familiar to all of us.
The temple, the center of Jewish life and first century Jerusalem has been destroyed
by the Roman government.
People are afraid.
They're afraid for their livelihoods, for their safety, for their loved ones, for their
own lives.
Home remains a constant force, a danger against which the people are powerless.
Their homes, their cities, their communities, even their places of worship are not safe.
War and violence are persistent threats in the background, the lens through which the
people are living their lives.
And it is into this dark time that Mark has the audacity to write this story down and to
call it good news, to call it gospel.
Finally, Mark's concluding sentence, his opening sentence concludes with a fantastic claim that
he will spend the rest of his gospel proving that Jesus Christ is the anointed one, the
long awaited and long promised Messiah coming to redeem the world.
And that's all just the first sentence.
Mark's gospel is a mastery of storytelling.
It is compelling.
It drives the reader deeper and deeper into the text, into a greater understanding of
who Jesus is.
And we, like those first blessed readers, cannot come away from this book unchanged.
Nothing Mark promises us can compare to the adventure that we embark on when we encounter
the strange and fantastic events that Mark lays out in his short story.
So Mark makes no mention of the birth of Jesus, Mark's gospel does give us good material for
Advent in the story of John the Baptist.
As is characteristic of Mark, John, a major prophet, an integral part of understanding
who Jesus is.
A prophet who has been prophesied for centuries only has seven verses to share his story.
That's it.
Seven short verses to share his life altering message of who Jesus is.
John the Baptist will only reappear in chapter six of Mark's gospel with an account of his
death.
But in these short verses, Mark tells us that one who is great, John tells us that one who
is greater than he is is coming into the world.
Mark wastes no time in telling us that even though Jerusalem has been without a prophet
for centuries, here is one now in John the Baptist, claiming that even greater things
are happening, that God is drawing even nearer still to the people that God loves.
John uses his ministry in his life to point past himself to the ministry and life of Jesus.
John and his ministry of baptism and his teaching of repentance never allows the focus to slip
from God to himself.
But instead, John uses his gifts, his voice, his calling to help bring Jesus into better
focus for the people he encounters.
John's ministry, like all of ours, will pale in comparison to the one in whose name we
minister.
We, like John, are unworthy to call ourselves ministers in the same vein as Christ, and yet
Christ calls us into this very ministry all the same.
It is so very fitting that on today's, this Sunday, when John the Baptist's voice still
rings in our ears all these years later, we have a baptism today.
When John's prophecy and ministry of pointing to Jesus takes center stage, when we get a
better picture of who we are supposed to be, what we take on when we say our own baptismal
covenant is clear and takes a center picture today, and the day when we get to invite someone
else to join us in our ministries.
Through John, we understand Jesus better, but we also understand ourselves better.
We are to be voices of love, voices of light in a dark world.
We are to be tellers of God's nearness.
We are to be voices crying out, declaring that even now God is always breaking into the
world and creating new things.
God is always breaking into our own lives, our own hearts and souls and making things
new.
Like John the Baptist, our lives and our actions, our stories, our whole selves should be spent
pointing to Jesus and to the marvelous deeds that Jesus is doing even now.
At our own baptism, this is the work that we promise to partake in.
Christ is the ministry that we point to.
Christ is the good news, the gospel that we are always invited to share.
At each subsequent baptism that we will attend over the course of our lives, we have the
joy of remembering our own promises and of celebrating with those who are choosing to
live into these promises with us.
On this second Sunday in Advent, we remember and celebrate the life and ministry of John
the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness, daring us to acknowledge the closeness of
God, reminding us that all of our ministries are supposed to be spent pointing past ourselves
to Jesus as we work to share the joyous message of our salvation and to remind the world,
the whole world of its status as beloved members of God's family.
John reminds us to turn to God in all things and that this baptism and every baptism we
will be fortunate enough to attend, we get the chance to say yes to God all over again.
Amen.