When our kids were younger and consumed by Xbox or
Playstation, I would sneak downstairs to play one of their video games. Certainly, I should have the wherewithal to
play whatever game for a couple hours, figure a few things out, and get some
enjoyment out of the game. Inevitably,
what would happen, is, within the game, I
would wander around aimlessly looking for a hidden door, tunnel, or way out,
get pummeled over and over again, or get shot several times, revive, and get
shot again without ever discharging my weapon.
Not able to see any creativity in the game, I repeated the same action
and get the same result. I tried the
same door, went through the same cave, pushed the same button, and ended up
trapped or wandering around, or dead or all three. This was usually followed by me, muttering
something under my breath like, “These video games are stupid,” or “Our kids shouldn’t be spending so much time on these stupid video games.” The operative word of transference or
projection from player to game, of course, being stupid. No game is much fun if you cannot figure out
how to move through them or get from one level to another.
Life is like that too. If one is stuck, not able to move through one
life, or, as it were with my gaming exploits, several lives without some
direction or accomplishment, then to what end or what purpose? Alcoholics Anonymous defines insanity as repeating
the same action over and over again expecting different results.
Within ancient Jewish mythology, at the time of John
the Baptist, the prevalent understanding was that God was in control and in
charge, such that if the Jewish people lived under the thumb of some other
sovereign and empire, it was because God had ordained it to be so. I say ancient Jewish mythology because Jewish
and Christian mythologies have since developed much different understandings of
God’s power and many and varied understandings of why people suffer the scourge
of war, persecution, and oppression. I
find myself bending to more Jewish explanations than Christian.
But the Bible is dealing with these ancient
mythologies originating in the Babylonian Exile. Other than the Exodus, the Babylonian Exile
was the other major Jewish story that informed Jewish teachers and prophets,
priests and people. That Exile happened
long after the Exodus story but some 500 to 800 years before the Roman
occupation. Even before the Roman Empire
and its caesars, prophets had told the Jewish people that the Babylonian Empire
and its King Nebudchadnezzar were God’s chastening iron rod to discipline the
Jewish people. Empires overran
To move from one place to the next, from one level
to another, the problem standing in the way was corporate sin and disobedience
to covenant. For the Jewish people to
move on, find end and purpose in life, their corporate sin and disobedience to
covenant would need a resolution.
How does a 1st Century Jew move from
wandering and wilderness to end and purpose?
Collaborating with the Romans in Jerusalem, the priesthood promised forgiveness
of sins for the right price. It will
cost you. You may remember Jesus
pointing out the poor woman who gave everything she had into the
Meanwhile, there is this lunatic out in the
wilderness, the place where Moses encountered Yahweh, the Living God, some 1500
to 2000 years earlier, who seems to be forgiving the sins of the people
willy-nilly. This John the Baptizer is helping people to
emerge out of the water, forgiven, able to get from point A to point B, get to
the next level from wilderness to promised land by baptizing them in the River
Jordan, the same river the people crossed after the death of Moses to get from
the wilderness to promised land. People
emerge from this water free, no longer bound by their sin. The only thing required for forgiveness is a
repentance that quotes the Hebrew Scripture prophet Micah with one small
change. “Prepare the way of the Living One, make God’s paths
straight,” is the quote from the prophet in the verses preceding the verse we
have before us today.
“Prepare or make a path,” says the prophet Micah.
Rather than prepare or make a path, however, the one
small change is the author of Mark using a verb which suggests that the people
are not to prepare or make a path but weave, construct, forge, a new way.
To get from point A to point B, people are to piece together a new path
in the shell of the old world.[1] Resolution has occurred. Now it is no longer their sin and covenant
disobedience that stands in the way of their relationship with God and the
land. Rome and its Caesar are the old
shell, and a new path must be woven together from within that shell.
In
the same way, in 1930s
Pastors
and theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer of the Lutheran Church, through which
the Evangelical wing of the United Church of Christ emerged, and Karl Barth
from the Swiss-Reformed Church, through which the Reformed wing of the United
Church of Christ emerged, and Helene Jacobs who was jailed for forging papers
for Jewish people, and Helene Meusel a Berlin Deaconess, who went the furthest of any preacher or
teacher in condemning actions against the Jews,[2]
came together to form the Confessing Church and oppose Hitler by reminding the
fewer and fewer people who would listen that God’s grace allowed them to hold
Hitler and the Nazi party accountable. These
are the anti-fascist ancestors of St. John’s United Church of Christ who stood
courageously against a pharaoh, a Caesar, a Führer. These authoritarian rulers demonized entire
peoples and used “sin” as a weapon to say that they, as their leaders, were God’s chosen one.
Sin,
yes, these faithful ancestors acknowledged their sin, but they would not allow
their sin to deny them relationship with God nor be unable to hold accountable
the evil they saw rising in Germany.
Grace, long ago preached by
This
has been the ancient story from throughout time. God’s voice is not found in the halls of
power or in the most magnificent cathedrals, but on the edges of the
wilderness, outside of the main. God
spends absolutely no time on the margins, out in the wilderness, reviling and
castigating a people who are already pushed down, regularly imprisoned, and executed
for their courage. The wilderness was
the place where the movement started. As Quaker and New Testament scholar, Ched
Myers, writes, the wilderness was that place in Jewish tradition and mythology
where a person or people withdrew to gain “both personal strength and prophetic
commission to return to [their] people as the agent of revolution against an
oppressive regime.”[3]
In
our Scripture today, a man, in camel’s hair and a leather belt, the very
clothing of the prophet Elijah[4],
gives direction and resolution to a movement.
The author of Mark then points to John the Baptist, as the prophet
Elijah. When Elijah’s life was
threatened, he went straight out into the wilderness. Elijah did not blink when he was to challenge
King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. They had falsely
accused Naboth, paid off witnesses, and had him murdered so that they could
take Naboth’s orchard. Elijah, came out
from the wilderness, spoke with courage to challenge the most powerful in the
land. King Ahab tried to pin the sin of
the land on him by calling Elijah, the troubler of
We
are told by the experts and the authorities that our sin is too great, that we
do not know enough about economics and politics to make our voice heard. We are told that faith is confined only to
private prayer and polite blessings of our civic activities. Our faith is to be compartmentalized,
private, and kept behind closed doors. As
God draws close, however, a wild-eyed prophet in the wilderness tells us that
our sins are forgiven, dunks us in the muddy rivers of the Jordan, and asks us
to challenge the powers and the principalities of the world so that Naboth
might never be foreclosed on or evicted from the orchard and home he knew,
concentration camps and detention centers might forever be a thing of the past,
and that God’s peace and compassion might be made real in the wider world. We are to weave a way, piece a new path in
the outer shell of a dying world.
Rather
than judging, God has been waiting, hoping we can see that the way from point A
to point B is made by walking it. The
way of a confrontational peace is made by walking. Our sins are forgiven so that we might be
able to get from point A to point B . . . in the world. May it be so.
Amen.
