December 4, 2005

(Jimmie Johnson)

Isaiah 40:1-11

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. A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 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. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” A voice says, “Cry out!” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the Lord blows upon it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever. Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!” See, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

Mark 1:1-8

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’ “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “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. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

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On my morning walk, there is a one-block stretch that begins with the home of some of our church members who I know are grandparents like Sherry and me of young grandbabies. This block has become a “trigger” for what I call my “prayer for grandparents and grandbabies.” This prayer is a powerful yearning on my part that God would please help the world which our grandbabies will receive from us, that it would be a world where grandchildren and grand parents can be together in joy and love—without fear of violence. “God, please help make the world safe for our grandbabies.”

Look, it is no secret to you after twenty-three years of sermons that I have a restrained belief regarding supernatural involvement. I don’t tolerate well a silly supernaturalism, but that doesn’t make me cautious with prayer. I pray more and more even though I understand less and less about prayer. I have found the honest awkwardness of prayer can lead to an even more robust yearning for God. I am simply more humble about my act of praying because I now know my prayers for most of my life have been so wrapped up in certitude, privilege, and entitlement.

Now I pray because not only do I believe prayer helps us but it also assists God, and (I know this will strike you as odd) I believe prayer relieves God of being alone in a sense--alone with carrying the weight of the world on God’s shoulders. So I believe, but I am cautious about claiming I know what God does or doesn’t do or how God carries out God’s job description. So much local, conventional expressions of Christianity simply sound (to me) inflated with an exaggerated sense of self-importance. Therefore, I must say thank you from the bottom of my heart to you as a congregation for your willingness to accept my cautious belief.

Many congregations want preachers to be certain and emphatic. I can’t be because I understand faith as trusting more than claiming to know and preaching to be more about truth telling than cheerleading and worship to be more about entering into the experience of being “astonished” than a pep rally. I have always felt when I stand in this pulpit you want me to tell you the truth of what I believe about God and about us as human beings and how Jesus as God’s gift holds God and us together. It is a belief we robustly share, but one which, for many of us, is always accompanied by a flurry of questions and doubts.

Besides, I never preach a sermon without counting on you to know I know I could be dead wrong and most likely am. Why is it likely that I am wrong in my preaching? There are two reasons: first, God is so much more beautifully grand than human beings could ever imagine, and second, my ego always contaminates my preaching. There is no innocent interpretation of the Bible. All interpretations are colored by vested self-interest--mine and yours. It’s Presbyterianism 101. It’s old school. It’s called total depravity. It means we should be very humble about our certainties, for they tell us more about us and our need for control
than God.

So, the truth as I see it this morning is our world is in trouble. You, I, our grand babies are all in trouble. It is a wilderness world with treacherous mountains blocking the horizon and valleys so low and lonesome you don’t want to walk them by yourself. The pathways we moderns have built in this wilderness seem to lead to nowhere but deeper trouble. Our egotistical and hoped-for salvation through science and therapy, technology, consumerism, and militarism is a road that has brought us to a place of fear and terror where the whole world seems to want to go mediaeval.

Therefore, that particular block on my walk where I pray for the world of grandbabies and grandparents is the time I poignantly yearn for the future and God’s help. It is the very yearning that helps me to believe God is breathing hope into our lives and world. Yearning is far different from lusting, coveting, wanting. These expressions of desire are all about us, but yearning is more about Someone Else who is standing at the door and knocking. Yearning is God’s Spirit breathing inside you. Yearning is a prayer that hopes for peace for the babies and wellness, too, and that the people of the world, whether it be within the walls of buildings where the mighty meet to decide our common fate or in our homes where we live, it is a yearning that we people would stop hurting each other, judging each other, and begin loving each other. It is a prayer so childlike as to embarrass me even to tell you.

But, I know this is the time of the year when if yearning is going to have a chance to show its power, now is the time for us who believe to overcome our shyness about matters of the heart and mind pertaining to God and Jesus. Simply because fundamentalist religion has left us suspicious, let’s don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. The faith we love is still there. And this is the time of the year worship emphatically places before us the claims of the supernatural, specifically the claim that the Supernatural wants to come to us, yearns to return to us. And astonishingly, our Christian story declares Heaven doesn’t do this yearning from the safety of far away with no chance of risk or hurt, but rather God breathes God’s yearning for us right beside us, underneath us, even within us while in this wilderness and its darkness. The Christian story believes we don’t have to build the highway for God. The Christian story believes God makes God’s way to us on this wrong road we have taken into the wilderness.

The problem for us is we are lazy and self-preoccupied with our importance, and because we are a people of education and the Enlightenment, we are embarrassed by the claims of Christianity--never having moved beyond a child’s Sunday-School literalism. The result is that we are always caught off guard by the astonishing way, truth and life with which God chooses to appear.

But God’s children have never been comfortable with God’s humility. The prophet Malachi, the prophet Isaiah, the great forerunner John the Baptizer, they, like us, believed when the supernatural came to us, showed up on earth, everyone would know and see and all would be swept away by transformation. Repentance, good faith, religious actions like baptism would be automatic. God would go Hollywood, spectacular. We believers would look like the winners we always secretly desire to be. This is the beauty of the correction offered us each year by the manger. The coming of God, if Jesus is the clue of clues, is never going to look or sound as we would imagine. It will always be restrained and capable of being easily overlooked and discounted.

God’s final appearance, God’s final expression of yearning for us, God’s return, God’s advent among us is best captured not by the sights and sounds of triumphant armies with victory parades led by the Lion of Judah followed by millions of exuberant angel warriors with no one doubting the identity of the winners and losers. The end of the world, the Lord’s Return, will be like God’s return to your life this day, this hour, this moment: the way God appeared in Jesus.

If Jesus is the clue, expect God’s advent in your life to be captured best by the sight of a baby, and the smell of his diaper, or the sound of him nursing—a beautiful, gentle, humble appearance of the Divine. Later, the narrative will rudely insist that God’s highway through the stars to us will not only be a manger scene with barnyard animals milling about but also God’s highway to us will be with the silence of heaven as Jesus prays from his bloody cross.

Look, this whole place and experience called church is the astonishing news that in lives as paltry as ours, as sinfully ordinary and self-preoccupied, and in a world as wilderness-like as ours, besieged by fraud, alcohol, pornography and greed, God still has plenty of game for the loving of you and me and us all. We need simply to cease the stubborn insistence that the Supernatural prefer a Hollywood, media-inspired, miraculous form that makes everything as we want it.

Let God be the stinky little baby in the manger. Let God “out-imagine” you and me with our petty, silly notions of how God should appear. It is all miraculous if the little baby of the manger who becomes the man on the cross is the sign. Yes, God returns to us as God always does--in the thickness of creation where we are always uncertain and where we have to trust and interpret for one another. For we are in the wilderness where the way is rough and the fear is great and where it will take all the courage and conviction we can share with each other to see the astonishing appearance of God.

Driving on the mesquite and scrub oak-lined, sparsely populated Highway81 in southern Oklahoma around nine o’clock at night returning to our hometown for her mom’s suddenly scheduled surgery on Thanksgiving, Sherry and I were startled by the sheer number of stars we could see that night. Drive out into the country, away from all the artificial lights, go out into the wilderness, and you instantly see the stars again. It is because of the darkness that you see them, not in spite of the darkness.

Our yearning, yours and mine, is God showing up in our very dark lives, in our very wilderness, God’s returning to your life. Just be willing to be astonished by the humility
of God’s presence.