Mark 1: 1-8; Isaiah 40: 1-11 \/ Norman B. Bendroth \/ December 11, 2011<\/p>\n
This letter recently came to my attention from two de\u00advout parents who wrote about the anguish that their son brought to them.\u00a0 I thought I would share it and see if it gives us any perspective on the anticipation and promise the Advent season brings.<\/p>\n
“When Johnny was first born to us we had such high hopes for him.\u00a0 We had been trying to have children for years with no luck.\u00a0 Since we were in our twilight years we as\u00ad\u00adsumed that our lot was to be childless. Zeke was a pastor and I spent my time doing volunteer work. We were content growing old together.\u00a0 But all that changed when, sud\u00adden\u00ad\u00adly and unexpectedly, the news came that we were preg\u00adnant.\u00a0 We had such confidence that this child was a gift from God.\u00a0 We had prayed for him.\u00a0 We had, what we thought, were signs from God that this child was special.\u00a0 John\u00ad\u00adny grew up just like any other boy playing stick ball and running with his friends.\u00a0 He enjoyed church and seemed to be receptive to spiritual truth.\u00a0 He said he wanted to be just like dad when he grew up.\u00a0 But all that changed.<\/em><\/p>\n “Johnny started becoming more distant, more intense, more of a loner during his teenage years.\u00a0 His mind always seemed to be someplace else–preoccupied with some great sense of ur\u00adgen\u00adcy–when other boys were going to school, play\u00ading sports, dating, or learning a trade.\u00a0 He became quite an embarrassment to us, espec\u00adially since his father was a minister in a large, well-respected church.\u00a0 His fath\u00ader had so bragged about his boy when he was young, about how he would do great things for God one day.\u00a0 What a dis\u00adap\u00adpointment instead.<\/em><\/p>\n “Johnny never seemed to be particularly rebellious grow\u00ad\u00ading up, but then he began to challenge authority and ac\u00ad\u00adcepted ways.\u00a0 He grew his hair out shoulder length and nev\u00ader seemed to comb it.\u00a0 He began spending a lot of time in the country.\u00a0 He needed to be by himself, he said.\u00a0 His clothes were atrocious–unkempt and of ‘natural fibers,’ as he put it.\u00a0 He was rather immodest as well.\u00a0 He also ate this ‘nat\u00adural food’ diet of legumes and foods he found in the wild.\u00a0 We wondered aloud, ‘why couldn’t he be like his cousin of the same age?\u00a0 He learned his father’s trade, was con\u00ad\u00adtent to stay home, and respected the traditions of his el\u00ad\u00adders.\u00a0 Where did we go wrong?”<\/em><\/p>\n “What was most disconcerting was his brand of radical pol\u00ad\u00aditics. He joined the Occupy Jerusalem movment. He began publicly op\u00adpos\u00ading every established auth\u00ad\u00adority in stable society.\u00a0 He criticized the economy.\u00a0 He crit\u00ad\u00adicized the government.\u00a0 He baited the soldiers in the mil\u00adi\u00adtary.\u00a0 He even screamed publicly at several ministers from some of the largest, most prestigious down town chur\u00adches.\u00a0 We were morti\u00adfied.\u00a0 Then he seemed to become de\u00adlu\u00adsion\u00adal.\u00a0 He kept talking about some utopian society which would be led in by a revolutionary new leader.<\/em><\/p>\n “He even attracted quite a following which made the lo\u00ad\u00adcal officials nervous.\u00a0 He crossed the line, however, when he openly condemned the governor for the way he con\u00ad\u00adducted his family life.\u00a0 Shortly thereafter Johnny was ar\u00ad\u00adrested and couldn’t post bail.\u00a0 We had such high hopes for him.\u00a0 He had such promise.\u00a0 But now we are so heartsick and confused.\u00a0 What can you do with a boy like ours, with a boy who calls him\u00adself John the Baptist.”<\/em><\/p>\n From the outset John the Baptist was an un\u00adlikely hero.\u00a0 Us\u00ading a little imaginativeness we can see how John might have appeared to his parents and to polite society in his day.\u00a0 From that perspective he shows little prom\u00adise that he might be the messianic messen\u00adger, the harbinger of the coming kingdom.\u00a0 Yet every gospel writer saw John as such.<\/p>\n The gospel writers un\u00adder\u00adstood John to be the one spo\u00adken of in our old testament reading from Isaiah 40 this morning. “com\u00adfort, o comfort my people, says your God…in the\u00a0 wil\u00adder\u00adness pre\u00adpare the way of the lord, make straight in the des\u00adert a highway for our God.\u00a0 Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low.”<\/em><\/p>\n It’s the announcement of a divine highway con\u00adstruc\u00adtion program through the wilderness. Isaiah was writing dur\u00ading the period when Israel had been conquered and car\u00adried away to Babylon. The Israelites had all but given up hope. But here is a promise that God would not\u00a0 leave them in this wilderness. God would lead them out of this slav\u00adery, just as God had led them out of Egyptian slavery.<\/p>\n Surely, the wilderness experience that followed their lib\u00aderation would have to come to mind. Between Egyptian slav\u00adery and the freedom of the promised land lay a vast wil\u00adderness. Wilderness for Israel was, not a back-to-na\u00adture adventure in the White Mountains, but wild beasts, temp\u00adtation, sin, and bewildered wandering with no star to guide. It took Israel forty years of wandering in the wil\u00adder\u00adness finally to find their way home.<\/p>\n While wilderness as Isaiah and John perceived it was a ge\u00adographical and political reality, it is also a metaphor. Wil\u00ad\u00adderness is a metaphor for lostness, exile, home\u00adless\u00adness. Wilderness is that place where we lose our way, wan\u00ad\u00adder from the path, get lost.\u00a0 Exile is that time when we be\u00ad\u00adcome enslaved to false Gods, serve an alien empire, sell out, forget.<\/p>\n Not too flattering an image of where we live, is it? Wilderness. Desert. And yet, if you will honestly look at our business mores, our sexual habits, life in this nation\u2019s inner cities, or even calculate the millions spent on mind-numbing drugs and alcohol, the words wilderness<\/em>, and desert<\/em>, don\u2019t seem to be too much of an overstatement of our situation.<\/p>\n The captivity in Babylon was one of those wilderness times, but Isaiah promised a way out, a highway. Note that it’s a straight road. Ordinarily, the way back from Babylon to Israel followed the fertile crescent, going out of the way to avoid the desert wilderness.\u00a0 But this road is “straight in the desert.”<\/em> notice also that it is the lord who will be traveling that road, leading Israel homeward. It’s an announcement of homecoming.<\/p>\n Then John unexpectedly appears.\u00a0 Suddenly, to a peo\u00adple chafing under the rule of pagan Rome–a rule that be\u00adlonged to God alone–who were yearning for the coming of God’s kingdom, and yet who felt God had be\u00adcome silent, ap\u00adpeared a new prophet with the announcement, “the king\u00addom of God is near.”<\/em> Here was some\u00adone who would call them out of their wilderness.\u00a0 Ironically, John does just the opposite. John is calling Israel back out into the wilderness to repent. The prophets had spoken of a time when Israel, separated and alienated from God would be once again gathered and then united to God. John invites Israel back into the wilderness, like a new exodus, a regathering of the scattered, despairing people.<\/p>\n The dominant theology in Judaism when John was active was if the nation repented then<\/em> the kingdom would come.\u00a0 There was a cause and effect relationship between re\u00adpent\u00adance and fulfillment.\u00a0 But John’s message was different.\u00a0 He said, repent because<\/span> the kingdom is coming–like it or not, it is coming and you had better be prepared.\u00a0 This is God’s do\u00ading, not your doing.<\/p>\n In ancient times in the east the roads were bad.\u00a0 They were no more than tracks and were never surfaced.\u00a0 Trav\u00adel was always an adven\u00adture. There were, nev\u00ader\u00adthe\u00adless, a few surfaced and well-made roads.\u00a0 Josephus the Jewish his\u00ad\u00adtor\u00adian, for instance, tells us that Solomon laid a cause\u00adway of black basalt stone along the roads that lead to Jerusalem to make them eas\u00adier for the pilgrims.\u00a0 These roads were built originally by the king and for the use of the king.\u00a0 They were called “the king’s highway”<\/em> and they were kept in re\u00adpair only when the king needed them for a jour\u00ad\u00adney.\u00a0 Before the king was due to arrive in any area, a mes\u00adsage was sent out to the people to get the king’s roads in order for the king’s journey.<\/p>\n Hear the good news, my friends, that this is God’s high\u00adway. God brings homeless people back home.\u00a0 But note that it’s not so much that we were searching for God, but that God is searching for us. A people separated from God due to their sin cannot come back to God unless they are summoned, unless God is willing to forgive, to let go of God\u2019s justifiable case against Israel and receive the chosen people back. These texts tells us of what God will do, where God is going.\u00a0 God is dragging Israel along, down the straight road home.<\/p>\n Marks says that this is happening again in John the Baptist and his preaching. Israel is being summoned back to God. That way back, that straight highway through the desert, comes about through confession and forgiveness. Thus, John proclaims a baptism \u201cof repentance for the forgiveness of sins.\u201d The way out of the wilderness is initiated and led by God.<\/p>\n Often applications are made from this text, and I’ve done it myself, about what are you going to do about the ruts and crevices in the highway of your life? \u00a0How are you pre\u00adparing the highway into your life to welcome the king of kings? While those are worthwhile questions, I want to put it differently, since we’ve seen that this is work God is doing in our lives. The question for us is “What road is God building toward you today?”<\/em> What voice, what smoothed way has beckoned you back home to God? What has gotten your attention lately that makes you feel “looked after”? Have you ever been sitting in church and felt like a prayer, or a hymn or the anthem was spoken just for you, maybe only for you? Or you’ve had a vaguely felt, but gnawing sense of yearning in your heart. Maybe an ec\u00adho that is evoked from deep within your soul’s memory up\u00adon hearing again a carol not heard since childhood.\u00a0 Those co\u00adin\u00adcidences might not be merely coincidental.\u00a0 Maybe it’s a call to come home.<\/p>\n Dan Wakefield wrote a book a few years ago called Returning<\/em>, which is an account of his own wilderness wandering for forty years before he returned home. He describes how he wandered away from God, how his life as an adult became chaotic and confused. Then, he says, “I cannot pinpoint any particular time when I suddenly believed in God again. I only know that such belief came to seem as natural as for…twenty-five or more years be\u00adfore it had been in\u00adcon\u00adceiv\u00adable. I realized this while look\u00ading at fish.<\/em><\/p>\n “I had gone with my girlfriend to the New England aq\u00aduar\u00ad\u00adium, and as we gazed at the astonishingly brilliant col\u00adors of some of the small tropical fish–reds and yellows and oranges–and watched the amazing lights of the flash\u00adlight fish that blinked on like the beacons of some crea\u00adture of a sci-fi epic, I wondered how anyone could think that all this was the result of some chain of accidental ex\u00adplo\u00ad\u00adsions! Yet…to try to convince me otherwise five years be\u00adfore would have been hopeless. Was this what they called ‘conversion’?<\/em><\/p>\n “The term bothered me because it suggested being ‘born again’ and, like many of my contemporaries, I had been put off by the melodramatic nature of that label, as well as the current political beliefs that seemed to go along with it.\u00a0 Besides, I didn’t <\/em>feel ‘reborn.’\u00a0 No voice came out of the sky nor did a thunderclap strike me…I was relieved when our minister explained that the literal translation of ‘conversion’…is not ‘rebirth’ but ‘turning.’\u00a0 that’s what my own experience felt like–as if I’d been walking in one di\u00adrec\u00adtion and then, in response to some inner pull, I turned,”<\/em> (pp. 23-24).<\/p>\n Christmas is a time for homecoming. Look out on any late to mid-December congregation and you will see faces home for the holidays that we don’t normally see.\u00a0 Wise rel\u00adatives from the east come bearing gifts. And always there are “exiles” who come back this time of year.\u00a0 This season, why not come home to the God who loves you and cared to send the very best?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mark 1: 1-8; Isaiah 40: 1-11 \/ Norman B. Bendroth \/ December 11, 2011 This letter recently came to my attention from two de\u00advout parents who wrote about the anguish that their son brought to them.\u00a0 I thought I would … Continue reading