December 10, 2023
Go Out Into the Wilderness
Mark 1:1-8
Today is the second Sunday of the church season of Advent. We are on the way to Christmas, but we’re not at Christmas yet. Advent is a season that holds together two key events: the second coming of Christ at the end of history in power and glory, and the first coming of Christ in the middle of history in weakness and vulnerability. And we are in between, living in the time between Jesus has come and Jesus will come again. Last week, in the sermon, I tried to place us in this in-between Advent time. Today, I want to place us in an Advent location. Today’s reading gospel from Mark puts us precisely in the in-between location, and it is called the wilderness. Listen now for the word of God.
1 The beginning of the good news[a] of Jesus Christ.[b]
2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,[c]
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,[d]
who will prepare your way,
3 the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord;
make his paths straight,’ ”
4 so John the baptizer appeared[e] in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 And the whole Judean region and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him and were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins. 6 Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7 He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the strap of his sandals. 8 I have baptized you with[f] water, but he will baptize you with[g] the Holy Spirit.”
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness. This is how Mark begins his gospel. A brief title about the good news of the Messiah, and a quote from Isaiah, and he says John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness. Unlike the other gospel accounts Mark does not have a birth narrative for John or for Jesus. Mark assumes that we know the characters on the stage and that we are familiar with the basic story. He simply says that John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness.
If you’re thinking about a beautiful, protected, recreational area like the Shining Rock wilderness, or Pisgah National Forest, put that out of your mind. It’s not that kind of wilderness. The truth is, Mark doesn’t tell us the exact wilderness where John appears because Mark doesn’t care about the precise geographic location. Mark is interested in the wilderness as a metaphorical, spiritual, and theological location – not a geographical one. So let me give you an example of the kind of metaphorical, spiritual, and theological wilderness in which John appears.
I just finished watching two seasons of the Apple TV show Foundation, at the recommendation of my brother. To me it was gripping, but it might not be a show for you. Foundation is based on the science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov. In the story there is an evil empire that has managed to colonize the universe with a total control that is supposedly benevolent, but which squashes any shred of real freedom in the name of security. The Empire guarantees security through an autocratic emperor, who is called Empire, and who is continually cloned from one generation to another, with a complete memory transfer every time, so that the emperor is always the same person, for hundreds of years.
But one person, a man named Harry Seldon (a little like our real-life John the Baptist) prophesies the collapse of this empire and the end of the clone emperors. And he predicts the rise of a new age. Now, because Harry Seldon is a threat to the Empire but at the same time has a following, he is not killed by Empire, but he and his followers are exiled to a faraway planet. The planet is called Terminus – the last stop at the end of universe. And from their base on Terminus, which is a deserted planet, Harry Seldon and his followers prepare for the end of the empire, for a great conflict, and for the dawn of a new age.
Now, this is the metaphorical landscape of Mark’s gospel and Terminus is exactly the kind of wilderness that Mark has in mind when he says, “John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness.” It is a place on the edge the universe, at the end of one age and the dawn of another. It is a place of desolation and preparation for something that is coming. John the Baptist appeared in a metaphorical, spiritual, and theological wilderness to call people out of one age and prepare them for a new age to come, to call people out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of God’s marvelous light.
John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness. There are several memorable things about John the Baptist. He was known for baptizing people. He was Jesus’ cousin. His birth was miraculous. (In case you’re wondering, he did not write the gospel of John. That was a different John.) He wore camel’s hair clothes and had a leather belt and ate locusts and wild honey. Because of his outfit and his diet and his wilderness address, people thought he was the second coming of the prophet Elijah, whose return would signal the dawning of a new age. And that is exactly what John came to do when he appeared in the wilderness: signal a new age.
To pivot from science fiction to the Old Testament, the forerunner of this wilderness in which John appears was the space between Jerusalem and Babylon. In history, not fiction, the empire of the Babylonians conquered the Jewish people, and took their leaders and much of their society into exile to the city of Babylon and made them servants there. They were subjugated in servitude for generations. The fortieth chapter of the prophet Isaiah, the chapter you heard read today, is written when the exile is nearly over, though the people don’t know it yet.
A word comes to the prophet to bring comfort to the people and say to them,
“A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
You heard that quoted in the reading from Mark. Mark is quoting Isaiah.
The wilderness is the place between Babylon and Jerusalem. The wilderness is the place that separates them from their home. The wilderness is where the highway will be built over which God will travel to rescue the exiles in Babylon and bring them home. The wilderness is a place of peril, but also a place of promise. It is a place of desolation, but also a place of hope. When the people get to the wilderness, they have left the empire of Babylon and are heading to the kingdom of God. God will come down the highway and meet them in the wilderness.
Now, you’re beginning to understand the metaphorical, spiritual, and theological wilderness in which John the Baptist appeared. Maybe you are also beginning to imagine the kind of metaphorical, spiritual, and theological wilderness in which you might find yourself, the kind of deserted place that might be a place of promise for you, the kind of desolate experience in which God might come to meet you.
In a small and beautifully written novel, filled with visceral language, the author Christine Smallwood describes the kind of life-wilderness that is created by the experience of loss, disappointment, and disillusionment. Her book is called The Life of the Mind. A person named Dorothy who is an adjunct professor of English, and is trying to come to terms in her mind with the enormous privilege of her life as well as the precarious fragility of her life. As the novel opens Dorothy is on day six of experiencing a miscarriage. She is ignoring a call from her therapist because she does not want to explain how she feels. And she is second-and-third-guessing herself as she always does.
Dororthy teaches two to four courses per semester at a private university, including a course called “Writing Apocalypse,” and it is not lost on her that the tuition list price of the school is three times her annual salary. One of the important plots of the novel is that Dorothy is coming to terms with the end of things, the end of pregnancy, the end of career dreams, the end of the world as she expected it to be. She continually compares herself to another character, Judith, who is a mentor and her dissertation advisor.
Smallwood writes:
“Judith was old and Dorothy was young, Judith had benefits and Dorothy had debts. The idols had been false but they had served a function, and now they were all smashed and no one knew what they were working for. The problem wasn’t the fall of the old system, it was that the new system had not arisen. Dorothy was like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.”
A janitor in the Temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be. This is the wilderness in which John the Baptist appears. A wilderness that lies between the fall of an old age and the rise of a new one. A wilderness in which we confront the endings of things, a wilderness where we wait in the twilight for new beginnings.
It is interesting in Mark’s story of John in the wilderness that he tells us that all the people of Judea and Jerusalem went out to meet John. They went out to the wilderness. Why did they go out? Because sometimes life throws us into the wilderness, like Dorothy in Christine Smallwood’s novel – and sometimes we need to get up and go into wilderness.
People went to John because they needed to get into the threshold space of the wilderness; they heard a voice calling them and they could not sit still. They could not prepare for the dawning of the new age from the relative comfort of their houses. They heard a voice calling them from the wilderness, and they felt a holy discontent in and with their lives. So, they could not stay where they were, they had to go out. Life had not thrown them into the wilderness, but they needed to get into the wilderness so that they could prepare for the Messiah.
The arrival of the Messiah in Christian theology is not just a sweet moment of angels singing and shepherds with the baby Jesus. The arrival of the Messiah is the beginning of a new age and signals the end of the empire of death, sin, and evil in the world. The Messiah marks a turning of the ages, a reversal of the fall of creation into sin. You don’t prepare for an event like this from the comfort of your couch. You have to get up – metaphorically, spiritually, and theologically speaking (and maybe physically speaking) and move into the wilderness.
If you lay awake at night because you can’t get the images of bombs falling on children out of your mind, that is the voice of the wilderness calling you, the stirrings of holy discontent within you. If you get angry when you hear that homeless children in our community are sleeping on the floor of DSS because there are not homes to go to, then the voice of the wilderness is calling you, the stirrings of holy discontent within you.
The voice from the wilderness is calling you to wake up, “to stop sweeping the Temple because you have nowhere else to be,” to move toward the pain of the world and not hide from it. To sit with this pain, to look honestly at the darkness of the world, to feel the stirring of lament and longing, to let it come out in prayer and petition, to bring comfort and help when you can, to let hope emerge, to wait in the twilight for the Messiah. This is Advent.
One of the most dangerous things, spiritually, metaphorically, and theologically, is to ignore the longings that call into the wilderness where we can meet God who is coming to save. We need to recognize those longings of holy discontent as calls for transformation, not just improvement. The good news of this season is that God is on the way to meet us. God is not remote or distant or uncaring, God is on the way to save and meets us in the wilderness.
One more example of where we might hear the voice of the wilderness calling us. So many of us live with self-doubt, with fear about our self-worth. We look confident to one another, but you can never judge a person’s insides by their outsides. On the inside, many of us struggle. We try to earn our worth by running on a hamster wheel of accomplishment, of perfectionism, of image. We try to calm our doubts by achieving and by pleasing, we keep symbols of our accomplishments around us to remind us that we have done something and therefore we succeeded, and we rely on the continual affirmation of others to believe that we are okay.
Yet, on the inside, there is a longing to be accepted as we are, a longing to prove nothing, to be loved for just being ourselves, and to be free. There is a longing to rest deeply, to find our identity in something deeper and better than what other people think about us. That longing is a voice crying in the wilderness. That voice calls us to turn around and look for the Savior who comes to us with boundless love and calls us to be his friends.
The waters of this baptismal font are like an oasis in this particular wilderness: they are a constant reminder to us that our identity is in Christ, that we belong to God, that we are bathed in mercy, we are loved as we are, we are eternally secure, there is nothing to prove, and we are free. Week by week, when we worship and pray and sing and listen for God’s word around this font, we gather around an oasis of grace in the modern wilderness of identity formation. At this oasis, we are reminded of who we are and to whom we belong.
John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness. He preached the good news of a Savior. The Savior he preached was born the surprising son of a poor family in a manger in Bethlehem; that is the first part of the Advent story. The Savior he preached is coming again in glory and power to make the world new; that’s the second part of the Advent story.
And right now, in the wilderness place, the Savior he preached – in the power of his Spirit – meets us here. If life has landed you in the wilderness, the living Christ is here. If you feel a voice calling you to the wilderness, a holy discontent and longing for a new age to come, the living Christ is here. The One who is coming has come. Emmanuel is here. God with us is here. Thanks be to God.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina