December 4, 2011
They Came to Hear John? - Mark 1:1-8
Pastor: Luke Maybry
DownloadI have been very surprised lately about several holiday traditions. The first is Black Friday. Black Friday, as you know, is on the Friday after Thanksgiving. It’s the biggest shopping day of the entire year. It started earlier this year, at midnight on Thanksgiving night, before the turkey was even cold. People lined up for miles, I understand, to get a good deal. People got trampled, in fact, because other people ran over them to get the good deals. This one woman bragged that she counted it all up and saved $80 by shopping on Black Friday. What she did not say was that had she played her cards right and maybe shopped online or on other sales days, she would have saved probably $50. That’s a net savings of $30. She worked probably ten hours to save $30, which comes to $3 an hour, which is less than I made grading peaches all summer when I was twelve years old. Psychologists tell us that it’s the survival instinct, that people believe that they’ll get something for practically free. Maybe it’s the promise of prosperity, or the idea that they can get something for free. Whatever it is, people showed up in record numbers this year to a much earlier Black Friday.
Now compare that little holiday tradition to this one. I started an Advent Devotion this year on Isaiah. The last couple of years, we compiled an Advent devotional booklet from people’s favorite Christmas memories. But this year, we decided that I would just write a devotion based off the daily lectionary reading. We went with the Old Testament because I’m preaching from Mark. The Old Testament readings in Advent are all from Isaiah 1-39, which, needless to say, is anything but Christmassy. In fact, God basically tells us in Isaiah 1, that he really hates our worship. That’s pretty much what he says. If we fail to live out our faith, if we fail to care for the least of these, then God hates our worship. We’d be better off staying at home. When we pray, God will not hear us. Forget prosperity. Forget a free lunch. Forget the warm, easy feeling of Christmas. Isaiah 1-39 is almost all doom and gloom. It could not be more diametrically opposed to the bells and whistles of black Friday. And yet, people have flocked to those devotions. I’ve had people I don’t even know tell me how meaningful those devotions have been to them. And it’s all so polar opposite to everything else that we hear right now. Why is that?
Why did people come to John? For the life of me, I cannot understand that. There is no way in the Bible to get to Jesus without going through John. So if we’re going to talk about Christmas, if we’re going to talk about the manger and the angels and the “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” we’ve got to at least mention John. John introduces Jesus. John prepares us to meet Jesus. It seems like, based off what we have turned the “Sweet Little Jesus Boy” into, or at least what we have turned Christmas into, then we’d have somebody like Mr. Rogers or maybe even Barry Manilow introduce Jesus to us. But no, we get John. He comes straight from the wilderness. The Greek there could also mean “desolate.” He is anything but hip. He is anything but “feel good.” He hasn’t had a bath in months. He eats grasshoppers and wild honey. He’s hellfire and brimstone. He tells us to repent. Imagine that. He’s supposed to tell other people to repent. He’s supposed to tell my enemies to repent. He’s supposed to tell those people who haven’t darkened the door of a Church since last Easter to repent. He’s supposed to tell all those bleeding heart liberals, or all those stone-hearted conservatives to repent. But no, he tells us, me even, to repent. That’s his primary message, a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins (my sins, that is, not theirs). John, like Isaiah (whom he quotes) is everything that modern day Christmas is not.
But the amazing thing is, people came out to hear him. People actually listened to John. That’s astonishing to me. Isaiah has the difficult task of confronting the kings of Israel, Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah for their unfaithfulness. You would think that the kings of Israel, some of the most powerful men the world, would just ignore Isaiah. Who is Isaiah, anyway? And why don’t the people just ignore John?
We often pay people very well to tell us what we want to hear. Black Friday is a great example. If you aren’t happy, then getting more stuff will make you happy. What you need, for example, is the new X Box, whatever that is. If you get it, you’ll be happier. And, at 12:01 on Black Friday morning, they’re half off. So what do you do? What would anybody do? We wait in line for three hours out in the cold to buy it. But it’s not true, is it? We get the X Box half off, and it’s fun and all, and it may even give several months of entertainment, but then we go hock it for something else, that promises the same thing, that, of course, fails to deliver. Yet, it’s a fairly simple fix to a complex question. It is what we want to hear, and we will pay and have paid dearly for it.
Imagine if, instead of Jesus, God gave us what we wanted. Instead of a tiny little infant born in a barn, God gave us a tremendous Black Friday. You could have whatever you wanted for free. Anything. Nothing is off limits: money, stuff, houses, boats, bigger biceps and breasts, eternal youth, health, power, beautiful women… you name it. Whatever you wanted, God, the divine secretary, would give it to you. Maybe God will give you a new wife, whose sole purpose in life, like God’s sole purpose in life, is to make you happy. What if God was a divine secretary who gave us everything we wanted whenever we wanted it? We’d all be dead in a week. Or at the very least, we’d be spiraling out of control.
We know that, don’t we? We know it all too well. In the 1930s, the Times of London asked the leading intellectuals in that day what they thought was the biggest problem in the world. The best response was also the shortest. “Dear Sir,” it read, “I am. Sincerely Yours, GK Chesterson.” He was right, wasn’t he, and we know it. So here comes John, grumpy, stuffy, stinky, crazy, grasshopper-eating John, who, for a change, tells us the Gospel truth, which includes the idea that we need to repent. And we know it. We may not like it. It might make us mad and uncomfortable, but down deep, we know full well that it’s true. The idea of an eternal black Friday where everything is free and cheap and easy is enticing, but also deadly. The idea that if we could just get rid of our enemies, if we could just get them to change so that they would be like us, the idea that if just your wife would change then your marriage would be fine, if Obama would become conservative or Newt would just lighten up a little, that if Muslims would just go away, or if bankers would just give us more money, then everything would fine… We know that’s not true, because we are the ones who need to change. It’s not enough to ear it, and down deep acknowledge it. We need to sure enough repent, every one of us. We need to repent individually and corporately.
We had an Advent Vesper service at Church last Wednesday night that was not well attended at all, and to be honest, if you missed it, you didn’t miss very much, at least from me. I’m never sure what to do with those, if anything. We even skipped them last year. We’ve got two more this year, and then we’ll have our longest night service. So do you know what we’re going to do over the next two Wednesday nights? You know what? Repent. That’s it. We’ve talked about it for too long. Now we’re going to do it.
People lined up for miles and miles on Black Friday to get more stuff for less money. We will all buy into the myth that all we need is what we want, more stuff, more health, less frustrations… You can fool most people most of the time, my late aunt was fond of saying. What she failed to say is that you can also fool yourself most of the time. We’re masters at it. But then there’s John, who calls our bluff, who calls us to a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. He’s right, and we know it. So now we’ve got to do it.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
