Creekside Church Sermon of December 5, 1999 "Let's Get Away From it All" Mark 1:1-8	Rev. David Bibbee
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Mark doesn't have a birth story. Either it didn't interest him, or it didn't serve his purpose in revealing who Jesus was. There is no angel appearing to Mary or speaking to Joseph in a dream. There is no star. No shepherds. No cattle lowing. No little Jesus asleep on the hay. No strange visitors from the East. "The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." This is how Mark begins. The gospel...the good news has a name and an identity. It is Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

As Mark tells it, the story of Jesus doesn't begin in a manger in Bethlehem, but with an eccentric prophet in the wilderness. It was his task to prepare the way for someone mightier than he. John couldn't tell you his name, or where he was from, or even what he looked like. With fire in his bones and fiery oratory to match, he called all who came out to him to a baptism of repentance so they would be ready for the one who was coming, and recognize him when he appeared.

It had been three centuries since Israel last heard a prophet. At long last, they heard one prophet in John. He wore the same wardrobe as the prophet Elijah...a hair shirt and leather belt to go with a head of hair going every which way and a beard with dried clumps of honey in it. Not a pleasing public appearance, yet the people flocked to him. He was nothing like other preachers. If you closed your eyes while you listened to him, you would have thought it was the voice of God you were hearing. Three hundred years was a long wait to hear such a word, and it was more than mere curiosity that caused people to come to John in droves.

Plato once said that, "Education does not consist in telling people new things; it consists in extracting from their memories what they already know." John's preaching caused the collective memory of the people to surface. He implored them to get ready for the one who was coming by cleaning up, straightening up, and turning around.

It was the word of the Lord for which they hungered, and they would have to come to him to get it. People traveled over vast expanses of arid, scorching limestone desert to hear the voice crying in the wilderness. "The Devastation." This was the name given to the region where John was making a way for the Savior. People flocked to the boonies defying sunstroke and bandits and wild beasts to receive what John offered.

But why go to all that trouble? If they wanted spiritual sustenance, why not look for it in Jerusalem? Why not go to the temple, offer a sacrifice or two, have a counseling session with one of the temple priests? Do you suppose they went into the wilds searching for something that had been lost in temple religion? Maybe more than telling us something about the people, this passage is telling us about God. If we want to know what God is up to, we need to look beyond where we expect to find him...in a word, we need to look for God outside.

When I was in seminary in Chicago for three years, there was something I missed seeing...stars. The light pollution made it nearly impossible to see anything but the brightest stars. The night sky was always orange. To see the heavens, you had to go outside the city where the night was a black backdrop which made the stars stand out.

Jesus was born in a manger, outside the inn. John the Baptist worked outside the proper religious channels - a wiry, wild looking, uncouth and uncredentialed preacher. The message Israel most needed to hear was not in Jerusalem, not in the temple, and not in temple religion. Why? Because people have a habit of trying to control God. They and we try to take God over, locking God up in church buildings and church doctrines or in particular styles of worship. We want God in our hip pocket.

In her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard said, "There is nothing we church people resemble more than a bunch of cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute, oblivious to what the Absolute is all about. She goes on to say, "On the whole, I do not find Christians sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children on the floor with their chemistry sets mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.

Throughout the scriptures there are stories of God using outsiders to accomplish his purposes. Abraham told the Pharaoh that Sarah was his sister. Pharaoh took Sarah into his house and when he discovered who she was he scolded Abraham... "What is this you have done to me? Why did you say 'She's my sister' so that I took her for my wife?" Abraham got a lecture on morality from an outsider.

Ruth, from the pagan land of Moab offered the Jews a wonderful expression of love. Jesus praised a hated Roman centurion. "Not even in Israel have I found such faith." The hero of one of Jesus' parables was a despised Samaritan who helped an injured man on the side the road. It was Saul of Tarsus, an outsider, a killer of Christians who God used as the first and greatest Christian missionary.

And then there is John, waist deep in the Jordan, in the middle of nowhere preaching repentance. All those who were outsiders to the temple were now washed clean, given a new start, freed from the yoke of a religion that was long on theatrics and short on spirit, caked with layer upon layer of extraneous rules and traditions. They heard John's voice echoing in the wilderness, calling them outside of all this so they would be prepared and poised to see the Savior when he came.

December is the month of excess. People will spend money they don't have on things others don't need. Shameless commerce will reach new lows to make a buck off the holiday. It's a month of good cheer, when people drink too much good cheer. The lights and decorations are so beautiful, but while it is beginning to look a lot like Christmas, we know that there is an underlying emptiness in all the contrived merriment. The peace on earth and good will of TV specials will run out of steam before New Years.

Advent calls outside all this...away from anything that would dilute and dull our awareness of Christ in the world. He comes to us from outside...outside the inn, outside the trimmings and trappings of the season...outside the little prisons of Christmas sentimentality where Jesus stays a baby and we stay the same...content and comfortable.

Advent is a wonderful time to be in church, getting lost in the great hymns of Jesus' birth. But remember...John the Baptist didn't preach in a church, but by a river in the boonies. Thank God we can experience him in the church, but if we stay cooped up in the church, we will miss seeing him elsewhere.

Gerald Coffee was for three years a POW in a North Vietnamese prison, confined to a squalid, tiny cell. In his book, Beyond Survival, Coffee described his third Christmas in prison. That year, the Vietnamese guards gave candy bars to the prisoners. The candy bars were wrapped in a foil package, red outside, silver inside. He flattened one wrapper and folded it into an origami swan. He flattened the second and folded it into pleats, tied it with a thread and fanned it into a rosette.

Outside his cell he could hear the guards laughing and talking with their families. The sound of children laughing caused him to think of his own sons. He began folding the last wrapper, not knowing what it would become. When he finished, it was a star...the Bethlehem star. He then pulled three straws from a broom in his cell, attached them to the foil ornaments, and pushed the straws into a crack in the wall above his bed.

As he laid there watching them, he thought about Christ's birth and what Christ meant in his life. He realized that the only sustaining force during his imprisonment was faith. He writes: "There was nothing to distract me from the awesomeness of Christmas-no commercialism, no presents, very little food. I was beginning to appreciate my own spirituality because I had been stripped of everything by which I had measured my identity-rank, uniform, money, family. Yet I continued to find strength within. Though I was hurting, lonely, and scared, this might be the most significant Christmas of my life."

Maybe this Christmas will be the most significant in your life. On your gift list write, "New eyes and new ears." Rather than confine your search to the church, watch for him and wait for him outside the familiar and comfortable. When you hear the messenger's voice, follow it, even if it takes you in to the wilderness, so you will be prepared and able to recognize him when he comes.

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