I can’t help
but go all Bible geeky over our Gospel passage for today because this is one of
those passages that, when we do a little peeking behind the curtains we
discover new and vibrant truth that makes the Bible come so alive for us as
Christians. Today’s passage, when I got
this insight back in my seminary days, is one of those new discoveries that
really put a tiger in my tank.
Mark’s
Gospel, the earliest and shortest of the canonical Gospels starts out by saying
“The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Son of God WAS John the Baptist
and his message of a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” It’s really cool how he starts his Gospel
with the same word that starts what we call the Old Testament in Genesis 1:1
“In the beginning.”
There’s
something funky about the way we have come to translate and also interpret
these lines in the New Testament. And we
want to understand, first of all, the wilderness. Usually the way we read this is that John the
Baptist was the voice of someone in the wilderness. But if you really think about it, if you’re
in the wilderness, why would you be voicing anything? Who’s in the wilderness, after all? The lovely wilderness people? Is the wilderness where you go to find the
most receptive audience? What
audience? Okay, I’m going to let you in
on a little secret that they only tell you when you go to seminary and learn
Hebrew and Greek. The earliest
manuscripts of the Bible did not have any punctuation in them. They didn’t even have any spaces between the
words. No periods, no commas, no colons,
no semicolons, no exclamation points.
When you look at the oldest extant scrolls we have available what you
see isn’t a nicely divided and punctuated reader-friendly text, but something
that looks more like one of those printer test documents that make no sense
because the printer is just testing out everything. This is what the oldest manuscripts of the
Bible look like: A printer’s test page.
So, when we
read the quote from Isaiah, it could be read a lot of ways, but the most likely
way it was meant was this: “The voice of
one crying out: ‘In the wilderness
prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’.” We have grown up thinking that the voice was
coming FROM the wilderness, but in reality, and no one was willing to stand up
and say it, it would be stupid to be crying out IN the wilderness. Think about it, where would you need paths to
be made straight but in the wild-erness. It only makes sense.
So what
difference does this make, especially during Advent? Advent is that time when
we wait. The word Advent means coming
and the coming that we await is the coming of the Christ Child. This second week of the season of Advent
takes us to the earthiest gospel of Jesus that exists in the Bible, the gospel
of Mark. What is available to us is the
opportunity to transcend those old ways of thinking. Repenting, the Greek word is “metanoia”
meaning beyond the mind, beyond that place that makes you crazy, repenting is
an action of, for once in your life, getting what’s so, I have really messed
things up for my life, and only God’s good grace can bring me out of it. The wilderness is the ontological mailing
address of our soul. It is that barren
wasteland that exists between broken promises and unfulfilled dreams. It’s that vacant lot that you drive past and
say, “Oh we could have done something really great with that place, if only . .
.”
The difference this understanding of the
wilderness makes is that John the Baptist’s message starts to really hit home. Ah, the wilderness, that barren wasteland that
loses our luggage and skins our knees, THAT is the place where we experience
the exigencies of life. No one would be
surprised to hear this. Please get this,
there is nothing wrong with the wilderness.
It’s kind of like the 23rd Psalm’s “Valley of the shadow of
Death.” “Lo, though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death, I will walk, well I better RUN through the
valley of the shadow of death, because you always want to get through the valley
of the shadow of death as quickly as possible.”
It is IN the
wilderness where the paths need to be made straight. It is in the yuckiest of things in life that
we long for the experience the bigness of God.
It’s when we are experiencing the most unlovely of things that we need
to experience the most loving. What
makes the difference? The path.
This is what
Mark’s gospel is telling you today: The path, the path that leads to abundance
and truth and joy, that path? That path goes THROUGH the wilderness, and yes
the wilderness is scary and no one really wants to go through the wilderness,
but the wilderness is where God is. “In
the wilderness make way for the coming of our Lord.” God is in our lives when things feel most NOT
like it if we will only let it impact us.
Today, as we
journey toward Bethlehem and the babe lying in a manger and God’s Nativity, let
us celebrate our own naivety. Let us
all, with verve and unabashed zeal, take hold of the joy that is offered
us. Let us all be the voice crying out,
“In the wilderness, where your mind already is, make straight pathways for the
Lord.”
“The one who
is coming IS more powerful than you or I, none of us are even close to being
worthy to even stoop down and untie his sandals. As you have been baptized in water, let
yourself now be baptized in the Holy Spirit.”
To the only
wise God our savior, be glory, majesty, dominion and power, both now and
forever. Amen
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