“He will
baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”[1] This is
a strange message on the second weekend of Advent, the second weekend of our
journey toward the birth of Christ. We expect, because of the popularity of the
stories from Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels, to relax into a comfortable retelling
of the time leading to the nativity, including shepherds and angels.
So what do we get from this Gospel? The Gospel
of Mark has neither a birth narrative nor a real end. No angels and shepherds
appear in Mark’s Gospel. And this Gospel leaves us at the end with an empty
tomb. At least, according to most accepted ending of Mark’s Gospel.
So this is
how it goes this year. Last week was the second coming of Jesus. This week it’s
John the Baptizer jumping in to the scene. And next week we switch to the
Gospel of Luke to hear Mary’s encounter with the angel.
This year’s
Gospel readings sound about as erratic and jumpy as most of us may be feeling
right now. So much left undone; so much left to do yet.
The last
thing most of need to hear is John the Baptist crying, “Prepare the way of the
Lord. Make his paths straight. I mean really, we’ve got too many other things
to worry about this time of year.
But what
might “preparing the way of the Lord,” mean for us, in the midst of all the
other preparations we’re making. Could we find time to prepare for the coming
of Christ the King, not just in the actual time of Christ, but now?
In the time
of Christ, preparing the way for the king meant manual labor. The king came in
his chariot and in front of him came the workers preparing the road, making
straight the path on which the king’s chariot could ride unencumbered. The
coming of the king meant something major going on, and all the rough places
must be smoothed out to make easy traveling for the king’s chariot. A hustle
and bustle must have preceded the king’s chariot: a clutch of road workers and
equipment and beasts of burden and labor and preparation.
I know it’s
tempting to compare this hustle and bustle and hassle of preparing the road to
what we do in our lives to prepare our homes for Christmas: the tree, the
gifts, the food.
This is
different though. What John the Baptist is calling us to do is to prepare our
hearts for the coming of Christ. John calls us to open ourselves to the baptism
of the Holy Spirit that Jesus offers so we may receive the greatest gift of
all: the coming of God into our lives.
John is
talking about more than a one time, lightning flash deal though. He’s not
talking about being “slain in the Spirit” or “convicted,” although there may be
elements of that for some of us in our lives.
To receive
this great gift though, we are required to anticipate, to prepare, to make
straight our own road to allow Christ and the baptism of the Holy Spirit to
enter us. Making straight a path for the
Lord requires the repentance of which John speaks.
The word
repentance seems rather old-fashioned to us now. It’s a word from the past,
heavily weighted with other baggage: being sorry for our sins, guilty, ashamed.
Yet what repentance meant in John’s time and still can mean in our time comes
to us from both the Greek and Hebrew verbs. In Greek, repentance is similar to,
“changing one’s mind.” In Hebrew the verb has the connotation of “changing
direction” or “turning around.”
What this
means for us during Advent, during this time of preparation and waiting, is to
make straight the way for the Spirit to enter us by turning around, by changing
direction toward God rather than away from God.
We look
into the past and take time to see how God has already worked in our lives. And
then we turn toward those life-giving things. We turn away from those things in
the past that have pulled us away from God. We turn from those things that
dragged us down, were sins, or made us guilty or ashamed of our own behavior.
Sometimes
those things require us, as Alcoholics Anonymous says, to make amends. To go to
the people we have wounded and tell them we are sorry for having hurt them. To
tell them we want to turn away from the past and make a new future of peace and
harmony. Sometimes we find we must examine our own habits and turn away from
those that have failed to give us life. And we turn toward those things that
will make straight a path for God to reach us.
Those
life-giving things can be prayer, they can be actions of healing, they can be
bright moments when we see God and say “Thanks be to God.” All these things
make straight a path for the Lord Jesus Christ and the coming of the Holy
Spirit. May we open ourselves to Jesus preparing a way in us and making our paths
straight. AMEN.
©2017
[1]
Mark 1:8b (NRSV)
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