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THE GIFT OF A SECOND STORY
Gifts of the Season, Part 1
December 2, 2007
Pastor Bob Sanders
Introduction
Advent officially begins today, but for most people the holiday season began on “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving. Shoppers were off and running long before the church even got to the starting line. The National Retail Federation predicts that we Americans will spend over $450 billion this season.
$450 billion on ourselves – the best dressed, best housed, most “gadgeted” and overfed people on earth. Which causes some of us to wonder what all this has to do with celebrating the coming of Jesus our Lord? How is the One who was born poor and homeless honored by this feeding frenzy? And couldn’t some of that $450 billion be used to make a difference in this world He came to save?
It’s why I was encouraged to learn of a movement started by the Imago Dei church here in Portland called the Advent Conspiracy. It’s all about replacing consumerism with compassion. Instead of buying a lot of expensive presents, the idea is to give simpler, more relational gifts, and then share the money saved with the people Jesus hung out with – the poor and needy.
It doesn’t have to be a big thing. In my extended family we decided this year to pool the money each of us normally spends on a gift for another family member and give to a charity chosen by one of the children. I know some of you are working on this as well. And as your Advent insert shows, there are a number of opportunities here at Lake Grove Presbyterian to help you replace consumerism with compassion:
- There’s the Care and Share program to feed folks throughout the year (many of you deliver a box of food as part of your Christmas tradition).
- There’s the Angel Tree to help kids who have a parent in prison.
- There’s our alternative gift catalogue featuring all kinds of opportunities for giving.
- And there’s our Christmas Eve offering dedicated to helping exploited and enslaved children in southeast Asia.
I hear people talk about “putting Christ back into Christmas.” Frankly, I can’t think of a better way to do that than by giving to someone who really needs it in the name of Christ. I hope you’ll think about joining this Advent Conspiracy and doing something generous this season.
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During the Sundays of Advent we’re going to preach a series of messages entitled “Gifts of the Season.” Not the gifts you buy in a store, but the gifts God gives us in the advent of his Son. Next week we’ll look at the gift of hope that comes from knowing this Jesus who has come and will come again. In two weeks we’ll think about the gift of joy, as we hear “The Magnificat,” Mary’s song of protest and praise. Then just before Christmas Day we’ll celebrate the gift of a Savior as we kneel before the manger in Bethlehem.
This morning we begin with the gift of a second story – that is, the gift of a new beginning, a second chance. And we meet one of the classic figures of Advent: John the Baptist. Our Scripture reading is from Mark’s Gospel, chapter one at verse one:
Mark 1:1-8 (NRSV)
1The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
2As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
3the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,’”
4John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5And 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. 6Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7He 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. 8I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
The Watchdog in the Wilderness
One writer calls John the Baptist “the Doberman pinscher of the gospel.” In the traditional Advent lectionary, he usually shows up just as things are getting started, before we’ve had a chance to get ready. We’re making our lists and checking them twice – what to buy for whom, how much to say in the annual Christmas letter, what concerts or parties to attend. We’re just about to put on the Christmas CD’s and start decorating when all of a sudden – GRRROW-ROW-ROW!!! – this big scary dog with a spiky collar gets us by the ankle and starts shaking us. “Repent,” he hollers. And before we know it, people are confessing their sins and getting dunked in the river Jordan, when all we really wanted was to have a cup of eggnog and hear Nat King Cole sing “The Christmas Song.”
But there’s no getting around him. Every one of the Gospel writers introduces Jesus by talking first about John. And that means that somehow John the Doberman is God’s idea. John is the watchdog that nips at our heels to get our attention, to get us awake and alert, to get us ready for what God is doing.
Mark tells us John “appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” John’s baptism wasn’t about becoming a Christian – that came later. John’s baptism was about repentance, about getting people ready for their encounter with the Messiah who would be here any day.
Now this was radical. See, at this time the only people in Israel that got baptized were Gentile converts. If a non-Jew wanted to become a Jew, he had to get a bath, get washed from the old ways, get baptized. But John comes along with this unheard-of idea that even the chosen people, Israel itself, must get a bath – must repent and get baptized. Your Jewish heritage? John says, “It doesn’t count.” Your ethnic background? Your theological orthodoxy? All worthless. Because here’s the point: the only way to get right with God is to admit you’re not right with God.
What John offered was a second story, a new beginning. He offered to clean them up, to hose them down. If they were willing, if they could see what was wrong in their lives and say so out loud, then he would wash it away forever. All they had to do was confess it, repent and return to the Lord, and they could start their lives all over again before they even dried off. The past would lose its power over them. What they had done, what they had said, the hurt they’d caused and the hurt they’d received would no longer run their lives. They would no longer hear those nagging voices in their heads, the ones that told them how bad they were, how hopelessly messed up. Instead they’d be free to hear God’s voice, telling them how blessed they were, how beloved.
As scary as John looked (I always think of Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies), what he said was a pretty good offer. No wonder people came from miles around to hear him. No wonder they stood in line for hours under the hot sun waiting their turn to have John baptize them. They heard John shout “Repent!” and they came running.
Repenting of Despair
Maybe that word repent sounds like bad news to you. But to them it sounded a lot like good news. Maybe you hear it and think guilt and shame. But they heard it and thought freedom and forgiveness. That’s why they came – thousands of them.
I think a lot of us have a pretty distorted view of this whole business of repentance. A lot of us think repentance means admitting how rotten you really are. We think it means saying out loud, if only in the sanctuary of your own soul, that you are a selfish, sinful, deeply defective human being who grieves the heart of God, and that you are very, very sorry about it. Repentance means dumping your pride out on the ground and stomping on it, since pride (as in ego, arrogance, vanity) is the root of so much evil.
And maybe that’s where some of us need to start, I don’t know. But I suspect that for many of us the big problem isn’t so much pride as it is the exact opposite of pride. What if the main thing we need to repent of is not arrogance but despair – our sense that things will never change for us, that we can never change? That no matter what we say or do, we are forever stuck in the mess we’ve made of our lives, or the mess someone else has made of our lives? Do you feel that way sometimes? A lot of the time? That there’s no hope for you, no way to begin again?
See, I think that is a very big problem.
I’ve known a lot of people who are caught up in despair. It happens all kinds of ways. I think of a woman who was abused by her father forty years ago, and though he’s dead and gone, she can’t get over what he did to her. She’s bright, well-educated, a gifted teacher. But she won’t let anyone get close. She’ll never let anyone hurt her like that again.
I think of a guy who lost his job and with it his self-respect. His wife went to work while he stayed home with the kids. He got help from a career counselor, and for a while was meeting his goal of one interview per week. But after three months of rejections his energy just drained out of him. And then one afternoon his wife came home to find him sleeping in front of the TV with an empty six pack of Bud Lite at his feet.
I think of a couple married for over twenty years. Somewhere back they began to lose their affection for each other, and the fighting began. They’ve been to marriage counselors and seen things get better for a while. But the change never lasts. And now the hurts are getting deeper, the distance greater. Instead of seeing a counselor, they’re making appointments with separate lawyers.
I think of a moody teenager who doesn’t know what’s wrong with her, but she can’t find anyone to talk to about it. Her mother turns every talk into a sermon, her father is never home, and she doesn’t want anyone to see her coming out of the counselor’s office at school. So she started hanging out with kids who are even moodier than she is, and that seemed to make her feel better. Then one day she got arrested for shoplifting at Fred Meyer’s, and it all hit the fan. Her father picked her up at the police station and told her on the way home how she’s been nothing but a disappointment to him. And something inside her that was still tender and vulnerable hardened on the spot. She didn’t say anything, but determined from that day on she’d show him what disappointment is all about.
The One Who Gives Us a Second Story
For a lot of us, despair is a bigger problem than pride. For a lot of us, what we need to repent of is not so much our rottenness but our hopelessness, our sense that we’re stuck with whatever’s been done to us or whatever we’ve done to ourselves. That prison cell we lock ourselves into that says nothing is ever going to change. Nothing is ever going to get healed. Nothing is ever going to become new.
Maybe repentance means not giving up on ourselves, no matter how many times we have to start over. Maybe repentance means we keep turning around toward God, every day if we have to. Maybe repentance means never saying never (“I’ll never get better, I’ll never recover, I’ll never change”). Maybe repentance means choosing to believe in God’s goodness more than we believe in our badness. In God’s power more than our weakness. In God’s grace more than our sin.
The kind of repentance many of us resist is, in fact, all about us. It’s all about me, me, me – the miserable sinner. No wonder it gets us nowhere. The other kind of repentance is far more interested in God. It spends more time looking at Jesus than looking at the mirror. It has more faith in his power to make things new than in my power to mess things up.
That’s what John the Baptist offered people. As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it in the quote on your bulletin cover:
[He] offered people a fresh start, a cold shower, a cure for despair. He offered it as a beginning, not an end. He knew there was someone coming after him who had something much stronger to offer, although he did not know who or what that was. Meanwhile he was content to be God’s watchdog, nipping at people’s heels to get their attention so that they would be wide awake for what came next.
And what came next – or rather who came next – surprised even John. A short time later he looked up to see who was wading through the water toward him, and he saw none other than the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He saw Jesus, the One who gives us all a second story.
Someone here today needs to hear this. Someone here today needs to know that what John offered is still available. You’re stuck somewhere, and you’ve been stuck for too long. You’re trapped in the pain of the past, and you’re ready to give up on yourself, your relationships, your future.
John is calling for you, calling you to repent. No, not to beat yourself up any more or pretend you have the strength to do better next time. What John wants you to do is turn away from that darkness inside. Turn away from that despair. Turn towards the One who’s come for you, the One who knows you and loves you. The One who has never given up on you, and who never will.
The One who has the power to change you from the inside out. If you’re willing.
Come to him, to Jesus. It’s not too late. Come ask him for a new beginning, for a second story (or third, or fourth, or whatever you need). Don’t let despair have the final word. Come to Jesus. Come to him now.
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