Mark 1:1-8
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God.
As it is written in the book of the prophet Isaiah: “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you who will prepare your way. The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”
John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were coming out to be baptized by John, in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
Now, John wore clothing of camels’ hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me. I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
This weekend, my son Jackson and I found ourselves binging a Netflix show called “The Confession Tapes.” It’s a series of one-hour, crime documentaries about cases where men and women (and children, too) seem to have falsely confessed to some pretty heinous crimes.
I’ll spare you most of those details, because it is Sunday morning, but suffice it to say, through poor – and often criminal – detective work, corrupt interrogation tactics, a desire to close cases at all costs, and an inability for the average bear to withstand all of the above when it’s stacked against them in just the right way after hours and hours and hours of questioning, the show tells of mothers who confess to crimes against their own daughters; fathers who confess to crimes against their own wives and children; young men who confess to committing crimes with and against complete strangers. And it tells, too, about how ready and willing a jury of one’s peers is to believe such a confession in spite of tangible evidence and common sense that seem to prove otherwise.
(According to the Innocence Project, of all criminal convictions that have been overturned and exonerated thanks to DNA evidence, 30% of them involved false confessions as part of their initial investigation. But I digress.)
Of course, what John the Baptizer is calling people to, down at the river, is entirely different from all of that, but it got me thinking. First of all, John’s invitation to repentance is for sins, actually committed. Maybe not arson or murder or anything that would make its way to Netfix for most of us, – but maybe some of that, too. Who knows? Whatever the case, these confessions he was calling for were to be made, rightly, with the goal of true repentance and real redemption, in the end.
Which means these confessions and this repentance John was calling for were invited, not coerced. These confessions and this repentance were to be made with hope and trust in God’s grace and mercy, not out of fear for God’s judgment and wrath. And these confession and this repentance led to new life and second-chances, not life behind bars or some kind of eternal shame and punishment.
And this was a new way to understand God those coming to John back in the day. John was promising something new and better and different in the Jesus who was coming after him. See, John was in tune with what God was about to do in and through this Messiah who was on the way. John seemed to know what others didn't: that Jesus was the Son of God, that Jesus had been born to save the world, not to condemn it, and that Jesus' ministry of peace, love, and justice, of healing and hope and mercy was about to begin in a big, beautiful, world-changing sort of way.
And John the Baptizer wanted others to be in on it. So, for John, “preparing the way” was about getting people to acknowledge how badly they needed this new kind of savior. John was speaking to Jewish people who knew what it was to be enslaved. He was preaching to Jewish people who knew about being in exile. And, like the prophet Isaiah before him, John wasn’t screwing around. He was reminding whoever would listen to him about their history – banished from a garden called Eden, captive in Egypt and set free to wander the wilderness, so often pushed, pulled, and persecuted and at the mercy of the world around them.
And, the hard holy truth of this, is that this is our story, too… still… as God’s people on the planet. If the events of the past year have taught us anything, it’s that we are at the mercy of so much that feels beyond our control – banished in our own way; wandering, lost sometimes, in our own kind of wilderness.
We are a law-abiding people who pay our taxes (I hope) and obey the speed limit (most of the time), but who are at the mercy of social and political systems that seem broken in so many ways.
We are a people feeling exiled from our church buildings, from our work and schools, from our friends, neighbors, and families, even.
We are a people wringing our hands and clenching our fists with more anxiety and fear, more frustration and sadness, more uncertainty and so much that we can’t possibly know about what’s coming next. And to be honest, I can’t help but wonder if all of this, for the likes of most of us listening to me, anyway, is just a taste of how most of the world lives, more of the time than people like me have been willing to see or understand.
Which means John the Baptist’s warnings and wishes and welcome to the river are for all of us – me, included – in still new ways this time around, if we’ll let them be.
What I mean is, I’m trying to recognize in all of this pandemic fear and frustration, that this is nothing new for a lot of people. So many in the world are worried about their health and their healthcare – and that of their loved ones – like this, every day, all of the time.
I’m trying to recognize that so many nations around the globe live constantly, year after year, with the kind of social-political tension we’ve been wrestling with in our own country, lately.
I’m trying to recognize that the day-to-day frustrations and uncertainties we’re feeling about work or school or worship, are ways of life for more people, more of the time out there in the world – and I, like many of you, I think, am just getting a taste of it in a way I never expected.
And I’m embarrassed by that. Ashamed, even, sometimes when the fullness of it hits me. And all of it makes me want to break out my camel-hair coat and my leather belt, too, and, like John the Baptist, call us all to task like some carnival barking, street-preacher out there in the wilderness.
I mean, I want to say, what if we complained less and confessed more?
What if we stopped complaining about how inconvenient all of this is and confessed, instead, our greed and selfishness and entitled living?
What if we stopped complaining about everyone with whom we disagree and confessed, instead, our own impatience and lack of understanding and pettiness, too?
What if we stopped complaining about all we don’t have or can’t do and confessed, instead, our ingratitude, our despair, and our lapses in judgment?
What if we stopped complaining about how much has changed for us these days and confessed, instead, our pride and our indifference and our denial of the suffering that was and is and will remain for so many others, when things go back to the “normal” we long for?
What if we confessed our Sin, people – Sin with a capital S – and what if we meant it; and repented to the point that we were changed to the degree that we found ourselves in solidarity with the world around us in a new way?
That’s something like what John the Baptist was calling people toward, out there in the wilderness, so many generations ago. And it’s what, I believe, he would say to us now as we wait and long and hope for Jesus.
Because if people like us can apparently be coerced or scared or tricked into making false confessions to things we’ve never done, might we not be invited and loved into faithful confession, too – real contrition, true humility, sincere repentance that leads to change – by a God who promises our forgiveness at all costs?
We would be transformed by that and we could change the world, because of it, too. We would experience the Kingdom alive and well and here and now. We would see love and justice and mercy “on earth as it is in heaven.” We would prepare the way and be prepared, ourselves, for God’s grace to be born – for our sake and for the sake of the world.
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
