Sermon Ideas For Mark 1:1-8 Part 4
A few years ago I heard a story, likely by Garrison Keillor in a News
from Lake Wobegon segment, that captured what many Christians may regretfully
admit is the spirit of the season. A pastor had preached a powerful sermon, a
scathing critique of the commercialization and secularization of Christmas calling
for focus on spiritual realities. After the service, he drove thirty miles and
back to buy his son a video game called Annihilation, muttering to himself
a still more scathing critique.
It is common practice this time of year to denounce the sentimentalization,
commercialization, and secularization of "the Christmas season;" and
then mourn our failure to live up to our ideals. We rightly perceive a challenge
in the collision of faith and popular culture. In reality, however, the challenge
is greater than we might imagine. We are not in
"the Christmas season." That is itself a secular idea for this time
of year, so capitulation to its worst aspects is almost unavoidable. "The
Christmas season," which bids us hasten ahead to give gifts and celebrate
the time, bears little resemblance to the liturgical season of Advent with its
notes of solemn joy. Our theological task is not to rescue "the Christmas
season" in these weeks before the day of our Lord's nativity. It is to speak
faithfully of living before our Lord's coming.
Advent is the time in which the church dwells with the awareness that it
exists in the tension between the first and final comings of Christ. This tension
shapes proclamation. It challenges us, perhaps this year especially, to speak
clearly about the tensions of an "in between time" and of reclaiming
the Advent word par excellence, "prepare."
There is a widespread awareness, certainly reaching its zenith this month,
that all humanity now lives in the tension of an "in between time." The
second millennium of the common era is in its final days. The third has not arrived
and will not be ushered in prematurely. The world and its peoples live in and
with the tension, waiting. This "in between time"
has been a time of great uncertainty. Its real significance is unknown. At the
time of this writing, the scenarios range from mild disruption to "the end
of the world as we know it."
By contrast, rather than being a time of uncertain meaning, Advent signals
an "in between time" full of significance. Being between the gospel's
beginning in promise and its final consummation, our time is part of what Origen
called the "continuing middle" of the gospel. Our time, no less than
any other, is the time of God's good news. It is a time of hope, of the patience
of the Lord which we are to consider as salvation (2 Pe 3:15). The church lives
between the realities of Christ's first and final advents, embodying what we
proclaim in song as "the desire of nations" in our memory and hope.
We live in memory of the coming of God into human life and history. We live in
the hope of the full redemption of all life and history. In this tension of memory
and hope proclamation of the gospel begins.
Throughout the history of Christian theology, John the Baptizer has been
interpreted as a figure standing in an "in between time" of memory
and hope. In him, the memory of the promises made to the Israel and their hoped
for fulfillment met. Augustine wrote that the prophets before John were granted
only to foretell the coming of Christ in Christ's absence. To John it was granted
to foretell Christ in Christ's absence and to behold Christ in Christ's presence.1 His
proclamation began in that tension of memory and hope that Mark identifies as
the beginning of the gospel (Mk 1:1). Given our connection to John, his call
to prepare is appropriately our own. This brings us to another theological reclamation.
As the year has passed, ever more urgent calls to prepare for
"Y2K" have come. The calls, however, have not reflected the joyful
solemnity of preparation for the coming of God. They have not even reflected
the stereotypical "millennial warnings" of God's impending wrath. Even
among those warning of impending chaos, we hear more about the technological
dimensions of the millennium than about the theological. The dawn of the new
millennium may bring human suffering, but as Patrick Miller notes, it will not
be self-evident divine judgment. No, "this is one we are not inclined to
blame on God, nor are we likely to see it interpreted theologically. The millennium
bug is our own problem…."2 Has our Advent theme of preparation
become, "We have gotten ourselves into a predicament. Now how can we fix
it?"
We speak from the perspective of faith when with Karl Barth we declare
that preparation cannot be along the familiar lines of human thought and desire.
Preparation can mean one thing only—renewal.3 We should define
this renewal as repentance. Given the memory of God's fulfilled promises of salvation,
and anticipation of the fullness of salvation, repentance cannot be interpreted
in terms of remorse or sorrow. It is a turning toward the God whose coming is
both remembered and anticipated. George R. Beasley-Murray has noted that metanoia is
rightly represented only by those terms that speak of turning toward, of conversion
to, of change in relationship to God.4 To repent, then, is to orient
oneself in openness and commitment to God's promised future. As such, to repent
is to prepare for the coming of God.
Philip E. Thompson
Roberts Chapel Baptist Church
Pendleton, NC
NOTES
1. Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall, eds. Ancient Christian Commentary
on Scripture: Mark (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998), p. 9.
2. Patrick D. Miller, "The Millennium Bug," Theology Today,
55, Jan. 1999, p. 92.
3. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/4, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Edinburgh:
T. & T. Clark, 1969), p. 57.
4. George R. Beasley-Murray, Baptism in the New Testament (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962), p. 34.
