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Hespeler, 6 December 2020 © Scott McAndless – Communion
Isaiah 40:1-11, Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13, 2 Peter 3:8-15, Mark 1:1-8 (Click to read)

Good morning. It is Monday, November 9, 2020, and we take you now live to the headquarters of international drug companies, Pfizer and BioNTech for an announcement that that world has been waiting for:

Good morning, Scott, I am standing outside of the building where a stunning announcement has been made. The chief executive officers of Pfizer and BioNTech just came out to announce, and I quote, “Comfort, O comfort my people,” says the corporation. “Speak tenderly to the world, and cry to it that it has served its term, that its penalty is paid, that it has already received from the deadly coronavirus a double portion of suffering.

“For unto us, a vaccine has been born and an inoculation has been given. And behold, it’s efficacy shall be established at 90%.”

That is the announcement, Scott, though I would note that there is a little bit of fine print. There are a few steps yet to be accomplished. The vaccine will have to receive final approval and, of course it will have to be manufactured in significant quantities. But that’s not even the most complicated part. The companies say that, in its original form, the vaccine will have to be stored at -80 degrees Celsius, which will definitely complicate distribution. There is also the thorny necessity of convincing the vast majority of a population that, over the last little while, has discovered that it has some reasons to be wary of political authorities and medical experts, to actually take a vaccine that might make them feel sick for a short time.

And so, between now and the time when a sufficient portion of the population can be vaccinated and herd immunity be attained, there is a whole lot of work to be done. Basically, to get from here to there, we’re going to have to build a distribution highway. And you know how you build a highway: “Every valley shall be lifted up, And every mountain and hill be made low; The uneven ground shall become level, And the rough places a plain.” And I know that that sounds like a lot of work and that it’s going to take a lot of time, but, my friends, this really is still good news. Our salvation has arrived! Take comfort, O my people.

I have said it many times during this difficult year of 2020. Again and again as I open the scriptures during this year, I read familiar passages that I thought I understood and I see them in an entirely different light. And that is true yet again on this second Sunday in Advent. Every year around this time, the church traditionally reads from the fortieth chapter of the Book of Isaiah. We not only read it, but we also sing it or hear it sung as one of the most favorite arias of Handel’s Messiah. The passage is so powerful that you would think that it could not more deeply affect me this year than it has in the past, but it has.

This part of the Book of Isaiah was originally written to people facing a very difficult historical struggle. It is addressed to the people of Israel who have, for far too long, been living in exile in the land of Babylon. Forcibly taken from homes, they have been made to live in a strange land surrounded by strange gods and strange customs. It has been extremely hard for them. But, in this passage, the prophet comes to them with some exciting, good news.

Babylon has fallen (or maybe it’s just clear that it’s about to fall) and the Persian Empire is about to take over its territories. And that might not seem like a big deal, I mean, who cares if you exchange one overlord for another, but actually it is. The thing that makes that good news is that Cyrus, the king of the Persians, has a different policy about exiles. As far as he is concerned, if they want to go back home, they can. Yes, the good news of the moment is that the people of Israel can finally go back home.

And it is in that context that the prophet says, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” He is announcing that the exile is over by saying that God has decided that the people have suffered enough.

But, like I say, I really found those words sounded very different to me this year after we have seen our society struggling with an extended period of suffering caused by a pandemic. And when that announcement of a vaccine came, it certainly seemed like the very same kind of announcement of comfort to a people.

So, the words of the prophet certainly hit me on a different emotional level this year, but there was also something else that really struck me, something that I hadn’t seen before. When these words of comfort appear, it’s like a sudden announcement that everything is going to change for the better. The announcement of the vaccine sounded like that too. But, after that initial euphoria, there comes a let’s-get-down-to-earth moment when we realize that there is still a long way to go before we get there, that the road is going to be difficult and that it might even get worse before it gets better. I think we’ve all been feeling that as well.

Well, the same thing happens in this prophecy from the Book of Isaiah. Because, you see, no sooner did the prophet announce this incredible, wonderful news that the exile was over, than the people had to deal with a huge realization. The people were in Babylon, and Babylon was a long, long way from Jerusalem. I mean, not only was it about a thousand kilometers in an age where most people travelled on foot, but it was a thousand kilometers across the biggest, most uncrossable terrain in the entire world – a vast desert.

So, immediately after announcing this enormous comfort, the prophet goes on to announce a gigantic work project: “A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” It was a highway for the people to return home and a very difficult highway to build: “Every valley shall be lifted up, And every mountain and hill be made low; The uneven ground shall become level, And the rough places a plain.” That’s right, we need to bring in the bulldozers and level the whole terrain, and that’s all before you can even start to lay down the asphalt!

Now, to be clear here, this passage is not describing the construction of an actual highway to take the people home. This is poetry – a poetic way of saying that it’s going to be a long and difficult process that takes a lot of work to get the people home. But it is still a stunning change of tone from the original promise – we go from supernatural comfort to a major public works project that has to be completed before the promise is fulfilled.

But that is how life often goes. We are told that we get to go home, but then we have to build the highway to get there; the vaccine gets announced but there is all this other work to be done before its promise is realized. This is the kind of thing that keeps on happening and so this passage is forever new – forever speaking to the hopes and the frustrations of delays that people have to live with.

Which is, of course, why, when the author of the Gospel of Mark was trying to capture the mood in Galilee just before Jesus appeared on the scene, he turned to this very same passage in the Book of Isaiah. He describes John the Baptizer as, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”

Now, on the surface, it might seem that what has happened here is that Mark has just misunderstood the original meaning of the Book of Isaiah. The original prophecy said, “A voice cries, ‘Prepare the way in the wilderness.’” And Mark has changed that to “A voice in the wilderness cries, “Prepare the way.” That is pretty close, but it is not exactly the same thing and Mark makes that change because Mark does see John himself as the voice that is crying in the wilderness because John preached out in the wilderness.

But I do not think that this is simply a mistaken interpretation on the part of the gospel writer. It is rather his way of saying that the ministry of John the Baptizer was a fulfillment of what had been anticipated in the prophecy in Isaiah, not literally in the sense that John was building a highway out there, but certainly in the sense that John’s call had so much in common with that of the ancient prophet.

In fact, I think we should greet the message of John the Baptizer today in almost exactly the same way that the ancient exiles in Babylon greeted the ancient prophet’s message – which is to say, much like how we received the news of the successful vaccine trials.

When John announces, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals,” how should we react? We should greet that news – the news that God has come to us in the person of Jesus Christ to show us the power of God’s love and salvation – with joy because that means that the end of the story is written. God will bring us home. Because of Jesus we can know for sure that God’s purposes will not be thwarted and that our destiny and indeed the destiny of the whole world is safe in God’s hands.

And yet at the same time we cannot help but recognize that there is still some highway building to do before we get from here to there. And now especially, during this season of Advent, we are living in that tension between the promise of the coming of Christ, a promise that is sure and certain, and the simple reality that we are not quite there yet.

Because of Jesus because of his incarnation, because of his extraordinary teaching and example, because of his death and his resurrection, God has accomplished it all. The world is reconciled to God in Christ. The kingdom of God is established in the face of all the powers, principalities and rulers of this world. And we are forgiven, renewed and reconciled to God. That work is all done. As Jesus said on the cross at the very last, “It is finished,” which could also be translated as, “It has all been accomplished.”

And yet we are still in that waiting place. That is, by the way, what the season of Advent is all about; it is about life in the waiting place. Because, while everything is in place for all of that salvation to play out, we are still stuck here preparing for it all to be rolled out, for the highway to be built through the desert, for the vaccine to be approved and manufactured and safely distributed. That salvation is there, we can almost taste it, it is in the sights in the smells of this season of wonder, but there is still that sense of not quite yet.

And as Christians we are called to live into that promise. We are called to offer hope to people, to let them know that God has done the work and it is completed. And we are also called to live as if it were already so, and, in so doing we will make it so. That is our job. That is how we build the highway through the desert.

For our Holy Sherlocks group.

Our Christmas story continues.

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Here's Scott's daily devotion.

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Hespeler, 29 November 2020 © Scott McAndless
Isaiah 64:1-9, Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19, 1 Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:14-37 (click to read)

I’m going to ask you to use your imaginations here for a little bit. I want you to imagine a year, an entire year, that just went really badly. A year during which just about everything you could possibly think of to go wrong went wrong and a bunch of other things that you would never think of in a million years also went wrong. Say that that year began with terrible, almost apocalyptic bushfires in the far distant continent of Australia killing or displacing an unimaginable number of animals, something like 3 billion. And then say that, only weeks later, a terrible pandemic began to sweep across the globe shutting down ordinary life and leading, ultimately, to tens of millions of cases and well over a million deaths.

And then throw a few other things into this imaginary year – cases of what clearly appear to be racially motivated police violence leading to massive protests and in some cases rioting and violence. Throw in a sharply divisive election and a transition of power wrought with confusion and fear. Hey, while you’re at it, why not throw in a few murder hornets? You know just a wildly unrealistic awful, horrible, no good, very bad year.

And imagine that you were coming to the close of that year with some hope, of course, that maybe the next year would be a lot better but, at the same time, a fair bit of worry that it might just be a whole lot worse. So, say it was around the end of November of that year. What do you suppose the mood of people would be? And given that mood, that I suspect you can probably imagine, what do you suppose that somebody might write that could actually reach people, catch their attention and speak to them exactly where they were?

I ask that question today because it is the First Sunday of Advent which the church counts as the beginning of the year. And, as it is the beginning of the year, we turn, on this Sunday to a new part of the Sunday lectionary. Last year, our gospel readings were mostly taken from the Gospel according to Matthew. Starting today, we are going to turn to a new gospel: the Gospel of Mark.

And what an introduction to the Gospel of Mark we have in our reading this morning: the sun darkened, the moon dimmed and the stars falling from heaven and, indeed, heaven and earth entirely passing away. Now, I know that this passage in the Gospel of Mark is not necessarily everybody’s favourite, but I think that it is actually a very good thing that this very passage is actually our introduction to the entire book in our readings for this year.

Most scholars today believe that of all the gospels in the Bible, the Gospel of Mark is the oldest; it was the first one written. Now the reasons why scholars believe this are rather complicated and I’d be happy to get into the details at some other time, but for the moment, let’s just say that sometime around 70 AD, that is about four decades after the death and resurrection of Jesus, somebody first came up with the idea of writing down the story of Jesus’ life and death, and this gospel was the result.

That immediately raises some questions – questions like, why then? Why, at that moment in the history of church, did someone finally feel compelled (or inspired by the Spirit) to write down the story of Jesus? Did it have something to do with the fact that the first generation of believers was, at that point, passing away and they felt a certain urgency to collect and write down their witness? That may have been part of it, but I am not sure that it was the main part.

No, I suspect that it had more to do with what was going on in the world at that moment in time. Because, as I said, the consensus is that Gospel of Mark was written sometime around 70 AD. And 70 AD was an awful, horrible, no good, very bad year. What’s more, 70 AD was only one in the midst of a number of awful, horrible, no good, very bad years from about 66 to 74 AD. So it actually doesn’t matter what exact year the Gospel of Mark was written, we can be pretty sure that it was written during an awful, horrible, no good, very bad year.

Let me just give you some sense of all the horrible things that happened during that period of time. It started in Judea when somebody made fun of the local Roman governor but, when the governor tried to find the people who’d made fun of him, they’d gone missing and so he just grabbed a whole bunch of people at random and crucified them which led to a bloody general uprising. During this period of time, the reign of the worst Roman Emperor ever, Nero, finally came to an end, but it led to the worst and most violent succession crisis that you can possibly imagine. Does that sound familiar?

During that crisis, one prominent Jew looked at one of the people fighting to be the next emperor (who happened to be in Judea killing Judeans at the time) and said, “Look, there is the messiah!” Now, can you imagine that? A powerful political leader hailed as the true messiah? Well, it happened.

And then, the whole countryside of Judea and Galilee blew up an open revolt against Rome which was brutally defeated by the son of the new emperor at the cost of thousands of lives and the destruction of the temple and the city of Jerusalem.

During one of these horrible years, it is said the Christian church that was in Jerusalem was so alarmed by the whole situation that they up and ran, leaving everything behind them to escape the city – an episode that is likely referred to in our reading when Jesus says, “When you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains; the one on the housetop must not go down or enter the house to take anything away; the one in the field must not turn back to get a coat. Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that it may not be in winter.”

That is the kind of thing that was going on while this gospel was being written. And again, I ask you the question, why, at that kind of moment, did someone decide to write this book. Do you suppose that it might have been because somebody decided that just such a book as this was exactly what was needed at such a moment as that? I suspect that this is exactly what happened. The Gospel of Mark was not written merely to record what happened to Jesus during his life, though it certainly did that, but it was also written to give comfort and guidance to some people who had just lived through an awful, horrible, no good, very bad year.

I think that is true of the entire Gospel of Mark, but it is maybe especially true of the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel which we read from today because it most directly references some of the very things that were going on when this book was written. So what was the message that the writer of the Gospel of Mark was trying to give to people who were living through such times?

Well, one thing is especially clear in this chapter. He wrote it to tell people that this had all been foreseen. In this chapter, he particularly highlights the very things that Jesus predicted would happen and that were now coming to pass. Jesus did predict the destruction of the temple and much of the strife that surrounded it. And so Mark underlines that prediction and, I suspect, doesn’t hesitate to add a few details from the things that he and his fellow Christians have recently lived through.

Now, what would be the point in doing that? How is that supposed to help people deal with all they are going through? Well one thing it tells people is that nothing that has happened is as random as it might seem – that it has all been foreseen.

Now, I don’t think that that is the same thing as saying that every bad thing that happens is a direct result of the will of God. I personally do not believe that God wills that bad or tragic things happen to anyone. But tragedy is an inevitable part of life in this world and our loving God is never far removed from the struggles that people are living through. And, yes, I do think that this was exactly the kind of message that people needed to hear when this book was written.

Think of that in terms of some of the things we’ve been living through. Does the mere fact that a lot of what we have been living through was actually predicted seem like a comforting thought to you? Because it is largely true. We have been warned very clearly for a number of years now that a devastating global pandemic was bound to come sooner or later. We have been clearly warned that the effects of global warming would lead to worse and worse hurricane seasons and worse and worse forest fire seasons and we have just lived through the worst of all recorded times in both cases. Certainly, the post-election strife in the United States that we are living through right now has been predicted over and over again over the last four years.

It has all been predicted, but does that make us feel any better about any of it? Not necessarily. But maybe it does give us an imperative to listen to those who make such predictions next time and to do what we can to prepare a whole lot better. It may not give us comfort but it gives us a sense of agency, of something we can do, and that is maybe the kind of thing we need right now. I think the Gospel of Mark provided something like that for its audience.

And, if there was a comfort to be found, it was to be found in the knowledge that somewhere above and beyond the troubles of an awful, horrible, no good, very bad year, there was someone who had a plan that looked beyond the troubles of the moment to something bigger, to the redemption of a troubled world and its ultimate healing. That also was a comfort to them and I think it can also be for us.

I suspect that there is a reason why God is leading us, through the Revised Common Lectionary, towards reflecting on the Gospel of Mark as an awful, horrible, no good, very bad year comes to a close and a new year begins. I suspect this gospel has some really important things to say to us exactly where we are right now.

I pray that, in the year to come, this gospel might give us some perspective on the difficult things that we have had to live through this year and that might linger in the year to come. Like I say, I don’t believe that it is God’s desire that bad things happen to us, but that does not change the fact that we have a God who oversees the events of this world, who cares and who is determined to bring some good out of the most troubling developments.

Of course, the other thing that the Gospel of Mark gives us is a picture of Jesus. As the first Gospel written (or at least the first one written that was not lost), Mark shows us who Jesus is in the midst of the struggles of this life. And the picture we get is of the Son of God but also of one who is not removed from the struggles of this world, who entered into them willingly and freely, who knows our difficulties and comforts us in them. Because, you see, Mark was determined to present the kind of saviour that people who have lived through an awful, horrible, no good, very bad year really need to meet.

On our way to Bethlehem, First Sunday of Advent.