What Brings Us Home (Mark 1:1-8)

Lost

When I was about thirteen, my brother and I went for a hike. We were out at a retreat center in New Mexico, not far from Santa Fe. I had hiked before with my family, but this occasion felt special because it was just my brother and me. You feel big, as a child, when your parents trust you with something.

Exhilarated, I bounded up the side of the mountain with my brother. Hiking in the southwest, we would learn, is a bit different than here on the east coast. The trees are not densely packed. Sometimes the trail is less obvious. I’m not sure we ever reached the destination of our particular hike. Somewhere on the way up the mountain, we lost track of the sporadic trail markers. Suddenly, it seemed like there were many trails, like every step was a fork in the road.

We chose this way, then that way, but everything looked the same. Worry crept into my thinking, and it grew with each passing minute. What if we missed dinner? What if we never got home?

My brother reassured me. He began with the obvious. We had started at the bottom of the mountain, so we needed to go down, not up. As we scrambled down the mountain, we would occasionally catch a glimpse through the scraggly trees and rocky outcroppings of the valley below. We never saw the retreat center, but we saw other features that clued us in to our surroundings. At one point we stumbled upon a dried-up creek bed. My brother reasoned that water generally leads to civilization, so it wouldn’t hurt to follow the creek.

Just as the sun was beginning to set, we wandered into what seemed like a more planned environment. It was lusher and greener, and there were flowers spotting the ground here and there. Soon it became apparent. We had reached a cemetery that was on the outskirts of the retreat center. An ironic symbol of life, perhaps—but my fears were relieved. We would not miss dinner.

Mark’s Minimalist Christmas

This Advent, I want to look at how each gospel tells the Christmas story. Each gospel tells it a little bit differently in a way that reveals the gospel’s own personality and reminds us about an important part of our faith. Today we read from Mark and learn a little bit about hope.

You will have noticed in our scripture that there was no mention of Mary or Joseph or the angels or the shepherds watching their flocks by night. Here, it may help to remember that the gospels weren’t written down until a generation or so after Jesus’ lifetime. The gospel writers—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—are recording in writing the sayings and stories that had been faithfully handed down to them from other Christ-followers. Historians tell us that it is likely that Mark had never received a story or tradition about Jesus’ birth.

Even so, Mark’s introduction and opening scene—his “Christmas” story, if you will—are fitting for his style. Mark is the shortest of the gospels. His style is minimalist. If you visited Mark’s house for Christmas, you might find candles in the window or a simple wreath on the door. Maybe even a small tree. But I doubt that it would be filled with sentimental ornaments from years gone by. He is so focused on his central point that he simply doesn’t have the time or interest to decorate it.

Mark’s gospel is perhaps a tonic for our world today, which can get so caught up and distracted in the decorations and festivities. Mark keeps it simple.

“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ…” (Mark 1:1). Right, so this is about good news. And what is that good news?

The Good News of Home

In a word, home. Mark frames his entire gospel with a prophecy that Isaiah gave to the Israelite people who were living as exiles in Babylon. The prophecy was a simple one: This exile is not forever. Soon, God will bring you home! Get ready. “Prepare the way of the Lord.”

Then Mark fast-forwards from Isaiah to John the baptizer and suggests that John is the final herald of this homecoming. Which is a little odd, perhaps, given that the people of Israel have already returned to their homeland and rebuilt their temple. They’ve been “home” now for about five hundred years.

And yet, if truth be told, their experience is otherwise. Even on home soil, they have continued to live under the thumb of foreign empires: Persian, Greek, Roman. Soldiers wander their streets and do as they please. The temple has been desecrated more than once. This does not feel like home at all.

Imagine entering your home…only to find an armed stranger inside, telling you what to do. 

Hope Is Not a Plan

Isaiah and John the baptizer both proclaim the hope of homecoming. But neither provides a roadmap. There is no blueprint. No plan. No campaign strategy. Instead there are these nebulous invitations. “Prepare,” says Isaiah. “Repent!” shouts John. And it might help to remember that “repent” does not mean groveling in self-accusation and shame. The “pent” in “repent” comes from the same root we see in the word “pensive,” which means thoughtful. Repent literally means something like “rethink,” “think again,” “have a new mind.”

What are Isaiah and John getting at?

To me, it sounds like they’re inviting us to make room for God. To let go of our own plans and expectations long enough to hear what God might be saying, long enough to see what God might be doing.

Part of me wonders if hope does not become a more endangered experience, the more control we have over our lives. What need do I have for hope when I’ve got a secure bank account, a comfortable home, some loyal friends? When I’ve got the world at my fingertips in a glowing screen? When I can buy a plane ticket at the click of a button and be on the other side of the globe in a day?

Of course, even with all the comforts and conveniences we have at our disposal today, it only takes a second for that illusion of control to be shattered and for all our plans and expectations to be thrown out the window. Maybe it’s a bleak prognosis from the doctor. An unexpected bill. A sudden betrayal. For me, twenty-five years ago—and yes, rather trivially—it was feeling lost on the side of a mountain. I think back to that time. What brought me home? It was not a map. It was help. From outside. It was my brother. It was clues from our surroundings that we got one step at a time. It was an openness of heart and mind.

What brought me home—what always brings us home in the end—is hope. Hope is not a map, a plan, a strategy, a calculated expectation. Hope is an openness of heart and mind to help from outside.

As Paul puts it, “Hope that is seen is not hope” (Rom 8:24). Hope never knows the way. But it always trusts that there is a way.

Hope can only walk one step at a time, taking direction each moment.

Returning to the Home That Is Always Ours

The hope that John proclaims to the Judeans in the wilderness is both frustratingly vague and disarmingly simple: “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:1-8). On the one hand, there is nothing in this message that promises the Judeans immediate relief for all their troubles with the Roman occupation. There are no battle plans, no schemes for liberation, no diplomatic maneuvers, no strategies for independence. On the other hand, there is a much greater promise. Remember how earlier we noted that “repent” means “rethink” or “think again.” When your plans have gotten you in a jamb, or when your selfish thinking has hurt others or yourself, you might repent. Well, the Hebrew word for repent has another meaning as well: “Turn around” or “return.” Turn around to whom? Return where?

John’s baptism makes it clear. “A baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” To repent is to know God’s forgiveness. It is to return home. Some people like to make God’s forgiveness conditional upon repentance, as though God is holding out until a person says, “I’m sorry.” But I like to think that God’s forgiveness is as unconditional as Jesus’ eating habits. (Remember how he made such a scene eating with the people whom society had excluded.) I like to think that God’s forgiveness is always there; repentance is just how we open our hands and receive it. Repentance is how we come home to the home that has always and will always be ours.

Hope in the Flesh

I think back one more time to my thirteen-year-old self. And to all the scenarios when we are thrown overboard from the cruise ship that is our plans and expectations. Of course, I like the happy endings best. My brother and I found our way home. A cure is found. A debt is forgiven. But in the darker scenarios, where things do not turn out quite as we would wish, where is God? The good news that John proclaimed in the wilderness is that, somehow, God is there too. Nothing can separate us from God’s love. I think I knew that in a very small way on the side of that mountain. Whatever would happen, I would not be alone. My brother was there beside me. Those who receive a difficult prognosis in the quiet company of a loved one—they are not alone on that hospital bed.

The hope that John proclaimed in the wilderness would soon take on flesh. This hope-in-the-flesh would go to be with people, to show them the way home—or rather, to show them that they were already home, already with God: tax collectors and sinners, the poor, the blind, the lame, Pharisees, Samaritans, centurions. He showed them all that home was not on the other side of a military victory or in some distant utopia—but sitting right there, across the table.

Prayer

O God our hope,
In whose love we are safe:
Help us this Advent
To let go of old ideas and tired thinking,
Of selfish ambition, shame,
Worry, and fear
…
Open our eyes to your coming
That we might welcome Christ
And know ourselves already home.
In Christ, who makes himself our companion: Amen.