Sermon January 11 2015
Genesis 1:1-5
Psalm 29
Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-11
“Into Right Relationship”
God-with-us in right relationship, open us to understand the unjust relationships in which we participate every day. Inspire our concern and guide our actions with your Spirit, as we question and seek to change them to reflect your justice and love. Help us claim our baptisms in Christ as a blessing and source of power. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Have you ever met anyone like John the Baptist? Something about John drew people out of the comfort of their homes, from the culture of the city of Jerusalem, even from the regular and relatively safe expectations of the synagogue and the temple to hear something different. They didn’t go and hear a man preaching about how great they were doing, but instead they heard about their shortcomings. While his particular words don’t appear in Mark’s gospel, according to the other gospels, he told some that they were a brood of vipers, hissing, dangerous, and, I think, to be avoided.
But whatever he said, exactly, he was talking about sin, repentance and how to be forgiven. While those who went out to see him may have come out of some kind of curiosity, many welcomed his preaching and were baptized to take away the sin from their lives. John was preaching to all who would show up—the poor, the country folk, the city folk, and, we hear in other places, the leadership from the synagogues and temples, possibly even one guy, Herod, who liked to call himself a king. People from all over, it seems, heard him and some listened and decided to be baptized, to confess their sins, this text says, and repent.
This is a radical message—to repent is to change the way they were living and live some other way. I often talk about repentance in my baptism and membership classes about repentance as realizing you are traveling down a road in some direction you don’t intend to go, then turning around and going in the direction of your destination. If you are headed to Lawrenceville on highway 1 and you are traveling north from here, then you may need to repent, turn around and drive in a more southerly direction.
While life sometimes doesn’t offer such obvious choices, if we begin to look closely at the pattern of our choices, we may realize that the choices we have made don’t have the goal of sharing God’s love as we know it in Jesus anywhere near them.
Now, at this point in John’s story, without taking clues and hints from other gospels, he didn’t know exactly who he was waiting for, it seems that he only knew that he was a forerunner, a herald, a prep guy for the one who was to come. He told the people who came to see him that more power was coming after him, and he didn’t even know what it was like—he was like water, the next one came with God’s very own spirit.
But John was one of those people who challenged what was around him, he had that in common with Jesus—the person we’ll discover Jesus to be in Mark’s gospel—but today we’re looking at John. John, who wore camel’s hair, camel’s hair likely felted into a kind of cloth, scratchy, and uneven, with a few fleas and things leftover, just tied around him with a leather belt to keep it on. And he neither sowed nor did he reap, he just found bugs and honey to keep him alive. I’ve heard it’s a good, fairly nutritious and lean diet, but I’m guessing the honey is used to just get the bugs down. If you want to eat a Paleolithic diet, really, this would be most authentic.
Have you ever met someone like John? Maybe not in looks or diet choice, but someone who was out, sent out, called out, to call people on their sins, on the ways that people need to turn their lives around. Maybe we think of old style preachers, calling down fire and brimstone like Jonathan Edwards did several hundred years ago, talking about God dangling the sinner above the fires of hell like a spider dangles a bug. And there are other folks I’ve heard on television more recently who have decided that great tragedies like the earthquake in Haiti, hurricanes on our gulf coast, the tsunami in Asia, and even the events of 9/11 were punishment for sins they have perceived, including but not limited to the practice of voodoo and other native religions, the acceptance of homosexuality or divorce, and other things perceived as sins.
Maybe that’s one way of seeing it . . . but that’s not the only way to call people on their sins, their need to turn around their lives.
I’ve got friends around the country who remind me of John the baptizer in other ways. My friend, Sandhya, in Oakland, California, preaches the gospel of justice every day as she works to house the homeless, as director of the Oakland Peace Center, and as a sought out antiracism trainer in our denomination. And she preaches the gospel most Sundays in various pulpits, too. But her life centers on moving systems away from the sins of racism, hatred, fear, and unjust economic policies that keep the poor, poor and maintain the status quo based on race in this world. I don’t think she eats locusts and wild honey or dresses in camel’s hair, but she is preparing a place to experience the just kindom that Jesus began to preach after his baptism.
I have another friend who was the pastor of a church in the south. He preached and taught that God is more about loving us into loving one another and that perhaps we are living in deeper depths of sin when we participate in or just ignore systems that perpetuate poverty than when we perform bless loving relationships between people of the same gender. I assume that many in his congregation didn’t agree with him because he no longer serves that church—part of the ministry that he was encouraging them to do included feeding the hungry and providing places for the homeless to sleep within their building.
For several years within the women’s ministries in the Disciples of Christ, the issue of human trafficking has been raised—though this issue isn’t exclusive to our denomination. Through study materials, conversations within workshops, and through other events, I’ve learned about many situations where people of both genders and all ages are forced into situations of slavery, though most victims are young and female. Some young people of both genders are sold as sexual objects; some boys and girls are forced to fight wars they are too young to understand; many people are taken advantage of when they are fleeing from dangerous home situations and pay thousands to those who promise to take them to freedom only to take them to factories where they never see daylight, homes and businesses where their “employers” keep their identification documents. This happens in this nation and in others. Some of those kept enslaved are tattooed with bar codes as a way of dehumanizing them and keeping track of their identities. I know of some tattoo artists who help these folks by redeeming their tattoos from marks of slavery to signs of freedom.
Some of these situations are so heinous that we recognize the injustice, the inhuman torture and some of them are difficult because changing the systems that cause others injustice may mean giving up privileges that we call rights.
That’s the kind of repentance that John called the people of the Judean countryside, the city of Jerusalem and the leadership of the synagogues and temple to participate in. They may not have really understood what their actions did to other folks around them—but once they heard John preach, they didn’t forget what they’d done or participated in. They confessed their sin before God, maybe out loud, before or while they were being baptized. Imagine that!
The wild man in the wilderness was a man who lived a life of fasting and simplicity and taught the people of his land that they needed to repent. And Jesus came to him to be baptized into that repentance, into the way of life that was about over turning injustice, taking action for hope and mercy and life. I know some people have questioned Jesus need to be baptized with John’s baptism, but perhaps it was about taking on that mission of overturning what was wrong with the world. And his message came out differently than the one John preached, but there was still a call to repentance, to a life lived toward where God called, toward authentic life in relationship to God and other people a life leading toward God and not away. Jesus offered and still offers a life moving away from the ways that corrupted, that filled people with hate and fear, and a life without hope or understanding, a life without forgiveness for oneself or one’s neighbor. Jesus offered and still offers hope, grace, and love.
John preached repentance, turning around, forgiveness of sin, and baptized as a sign of those. Jesus takes our lives and teaches us to turn toward what a right relationship means.
To the glory of God, calling us to life and life as Beloved Child. Amen.
