Being Found Again: A Letter to John

Mark 1:1-11

John

A letter to our ancestor, John.

Dear John,

Who are you? Under all that sweat and dust and camel hair? Behind all the drama and noise?  What do you think about out there when the crowds have gone home, and the stars are glowing above you, and the sounds of the desert creatures and the wind are all the noise that’s left? What keeps you awake, tossing and turning?  What gets you up in the morning, for another day of locust-eating and yelling yourself hoarse with passion and fire?  

You are pissing people off, you know.  You don’t live much longer than this – you’ll die soon for telling Herod like it is and calling him out on his adulterous marriage.  And you don’t get much sympathy from the establishment after your criticism of them and your direct competition – baptism for repentance? Really? The people can get that in the temple. The favor and forgiveness of God is already available…for a fee. But you offer it for free? All the while saying something greater is brewing and you’re just the warm-up act?

I’m sure you heard the story over and over in your childhood, in those few short years your ancient parents had left - between all their prophet-grooming, their stories of prophets of old and messages to Israel and encouragement to listen, listen for the voice of God, the surprise of God that would bring life to deadened wombs and laughter to creaky voices, lay mountains low and raise valleys up, bringing hope and wholeness – between all of that I am certain you heard tell time and again of when Mary came to see your mom, the moment your fetus self bumped belly homes with the embryonic Messiah, as you jumped for joy, recognizing already that everything was changing, and there was nothing to do but celebrate it.

And the messages, all those prophets swimming in your mind, taught to you from Torah, spoken in story from your priest father and your devout mother – it must have meant even more to you than to others…

Did you three carry this secret promise, this crazy truth that you had come from impossibility?  Were you always aware that God had broken in, and nobody knew it yet, but the time was coming when they would all see…? 

And did you ever forget, John? We forget all the time.  Did you? Did you ever wake up knowing there was something to remember and then have the truth wash over you in wonder once again? That God was making good on all those promises of old, that God was coming in?

Did you recognize him in the prophesies? Jesus, I mean. When you were kids, did your cousin seem like the one? Tell the truth now – was he just so ordinary? Or did you know all along?  Did you know before he did? Or more than he did? Or did the two of you whisper about it together at sleepovers?

What was it like, by the way, the day he came to the river, the day you plunged him under the water and the sky opened up and the voice of God claimed him? After the elation that it had come at last, were you psyched to retire? Be finished with your message? Or was it anti-climactic? Or even disillusioning? 

Who are you now, once the one you’ve prepared the way for has arrived in our midst?  When the thing your whole life has been about has been accomplished, what is your life for then?  

If you knew then what you know now, would it all have gone the same?

Mark begins all of it with you, you know. “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ the Son of God,” then he has you bursting out like you couldn’t contain the secret any longer, the message ripening within your young body and mind until you had to get out of the city, flee to the wilderness and give the message room to breathe, give it space to expand or it would swallow you and everything else with its magnitude and power.

The others don’t begin with you – Luke and Matthew, they tell Jesus’ genealogy and his birth, and the book of John starts with the very, very beginning, with the Word of creation, light in the darkness, but Mark starts with you.

Where would you begin the story?– I bet you’d go back to those prophets – your lifeblood, your mother’s milk, your father’s breath in your ear, whispering their messages and hope.

  

You’d begin the story by saying there were those who said it was coming… remember those voices? Remember those promises?  Then you’d say, It’s true. It is coming. It’s already begun. 

You spoke fantastic visions as well—baptized with the Holy Spirit?  The very Spirit that hovered over the water at Creation, is claiming and cleansing us? Now?  It was a fact.  You spoke these things like they were a fact – preached the future with a present tense. Perhaps you had such bold confidence because you yourself had come from the impossibility that was becoming.  You believed it and you made them believe it too.

I heard someone say once that ‘repentance is what happens to us when the truth of who we are and who God is enters our lives and scatters the darkness of competing ideas.’ (Nadia Bolz-Weber)  It’s like being found, being grabbed on the shoulders by love and turned from death toward life, to see it all stretching out before you with a different horizon.  

Trading our way of perceiving for God’s way - it doesn’t just happen once. It can happen any and every time we start to drift back to the fear, to hide ourselves in the anger, to barricade ourselves in the false security.  When the truth of who God is and who we are enters in, we can repent, and are freed again. It’s an option available to us at any moment.

It happened to me yesterday.  There was a conversation I’d been dreading, practicing what I’d say in defensive language, couched in self-protection.  Then a friend told me to bring my honest self to it, my sadness and fear, and tell the truth.  She invited me to repent. She’d probably laugh to be told that’s what she was suggesting.  But it was, and I did, and I felt my armor fall away and the fears subside. I found myself feeling hopeful again, and secure in whatever God might do there, because the truth is we all belong to God and each other no matter what, and I could feel that truth again.

  

What did it look like, John, to see so much repentance on people? Could you see it in their eyes? Was it relief? Joy? The darkness scattering, the truth seeping in… Did their faces change as the light entered their lives?  Did their bodies feel lighter coming up out of the water than they did going down? Did seeing it strengthen your own hope and trust?

Did you know how they looked at you? How they saw you? You must have.  You dressed like Elijah, you sounded like Isaiah, you were a prophet, and the people came. They came from far and wide to hear you, to catch a glimpse of that modern day prophet who was just like the ones of old.  But the others thought you were dangerous, crazy, threatening, an embarrassment, a freak show.  Did all that bother you? 

Once someone well-known and respected who speaks in front of large crowds told me that what is hardest is the admiration, being admired.  You feel you either have to live up to people’s expectations or disabuse them of their notions, is that how you felt? Is that why you were always so quick and forceful to point out that it wasn’t about you at all, that you were paving the way, clearing the clutter, making the paths straight, because the one who would bring life to the world was coming -?  

I know what’s ahead for you too, John – when you’re in prison and you hear about what Jesus is doing and you send your people to Jesus to ask if he “really is the one who is to come or if we should wait for another?” when you question if it all really is real.  Even you!  That doubt and fear are such an intrinsic part of being human, such an integral part of faith, that even YOU wondered, faltered.  You, who told everyone else so confidently, that God was doing this thing, you too had those scary secret moments when things didn’t look like you thought they would, and you weren’t sure if you could trust what you had believed. It gives me some comfort to know that.

And when your messengers reached him and asked your question, he answered, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” 

What was it like for you to hear that? Did it put you back inside the cosmic story? Could you trust again that what the prophets had said was really happening when your friends had seen it unfold right in front of them?  

Did you repent then?  Let the light scatter the darkness of competing ideas? Sitting there in prison, just days away from your unexpected and senseless death, did you feel the chains fall away and the trust return? Let the truth of who we are and who God is release you from your fear? Did it bring you peace?  

  

I’ll bet you never heard that right after he sent away your messengers and they were hot-footing it back to you, he told the crowd with conviction in his voice that you were a prophet, just like those of old, actually, more than a prophet, he declared, you were the ‘One who announced the Messiah.’  Then he said, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist;” and then did what he does and added, “yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.”  

I think you would have liked hearing him say that.  About the least being great, I mean, the poor and forgotten being lifted up that way in God’s kingdom.  Maybe even more than his message to you, it would have affirmed that this is all really happening after all- God’s kingdom really is breaking in, showing how upside down we have it all.  You would have liked hearing him say that, I bet.

When you died, John, it crushed him.  He left everyone to be alone with his terrible grief.  Did that shake his faith, I wonder, bring him to doubt?  That even though the way of God has begun and the light is in the world, the darkness is still here too, for a time?  How did he reconcile that? How can we? What would you say to us now about that, John? 

What would you think of the world right now, John?  

What would you shout at us if you were here? 

You see, we have the benefit of hindsight, we get to see all of this WAY after the fact, so we don’t have to stand on the banks of that river with the mud in our sandals and the insects buzzing around us, listening to you roar out your message and wonder who to believe –wonder whether what you say is even remotely possible, or whether you’re just another fanatic off his rocker. We know who you are and how it all goes down from there. 

So we can ask you now, and we’re willing to listen, what would you say to us? What would you have us do?  

How can we receive our Savior?

Ah, but you’re long gone. You’re silent now.  And so it’s on us.  

See, John, it’s like this every year.  It might have been all new and amazing to you, but we’ve beat this message to death with jingle bells and sentiment and buried it in a sea of candy, carols and wrapping paper and when January comes it is behind us and we’ve moved on.  We’ve put Jesus in the manger and we like him there; he’s so cute and clean.  

So if we really take you seriously, what does it mean for us? 

How does it shape our lives?  

Does God still come?  Is God still coming? We need a little taste of your honey and fervor, I think. A sense of wonder and awe once again. A longing to be stirred enough that it feels like absolute refreshment to be plunged under and feel the water roll off us along with all that keeps us in darkness, to be baptized into a promise that holds us even when we can’t see it.  How should we live a good life, a meaningful life, a life that matters, a life that sees God?  What should we do, John?  

But you would never really say, would you?  When we plead for some direction, Tell us how we navigate all of this, desert prophet! You’d just point your finger again at him and tell us God has come.  In the flesh.  Right here.  

“I’m just using water, people,” you’d say, “he’ll immerse you in the Holy Spirit, you’ll be surrounded and filled by the life-creating breath of God.  

So get ready. Be ready. Live ready.  God is coming.  God has come. Repent.”  

And you’d leave us to it, this holy exchange of our way of seeing for God’s, that scatters the darkness of competing ideas, and welcomes us back to the impossible that is becoming.

So, because I’ve not said it before, John, thank you.  

Thank you for your words and your life. Thank you for preparing the way.  Thank you for reminding us what’s real. Thank you for pointing us back to Jesus.

Sincerely,

Kara Root, and your sisters and brothers at Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church, Minneapolis, MN, 2020 AD.

This is part of a series, journeying with some of our Biblical ancestors: Hannah, Mary, Anna & Simeon, John, Samuel, David*, The Samaritan Woman, 

(*This is an older message about David, in this series, we had a wonderful performance of 'David" by Theater for the Thirsty)

The truth about Christmas

Luke 2:22-40
Anna & Simeon

A few days after Christmas I looked at my tree and was filled with disgust.  It no longer represented all the joy of the season; it just looked like clutter in my living room, a big depressing task waiting for me.  And while I had room for one more glass of egg nog, I couldn’t even muster another round of Bing Crosby tunes to accompany me in the chore.  

Add to that the fact that I had to take it down alone. Nobody wanted to help me, and I didn’t want to force or coerce them into it. For some reason, the absurdity of it all made me very emotional, and I ended up crying through the whole process. Resentfully wrapping the ornaments, wiping bitter tears off my face while I unwound the lights, I felt unhinged. 

I kept saying to Maisy, who was nearby and watching me with a worried look, “I am not trying to get you to help me with this! You get to have a real choice! This is not manipulation! I don’t know why I am crying! I’m just having some big feelings!”

Christmas is weird. 

Every year my mother-in-law’s husband gives us a big gift box from General Mills, where he used to work, filled with fruit roll-ups and pudding mix and cereal, and it’s a bunch of crap I don’t buy, and wont eat, in lots of packaging I will throw away. But I know it means a lot to him to give it, so in the moment, I actually genuinely enjoy receiving it. And then, after my kids rifle through and take what they want, I try to incorporate things like cheese-flavored soft taco bowls into our lives.

And my dad wouldn’t take his shoes off when he came over, because he has diabetes and his feet get cold, so the rest of us spent the evening walking through his melted shoe water in our socks on my freshly washed floors, and I stuffed down my frustration didn’t say more than one teeny little side comment right at the beginning, because I wanted things go well and for everyone to get along.

And I lost the gift I bought my mom, and at the last minute I ordered another one to be delivered, which got there after Christmas, and then I found her gift on Christmas eve, and now I am stuck with a beautifully wrapped gift card to a movie theater chain that doesn’t exist in the Midwest, and a CD of Christmas music I’d already bought myself for Advent. And I don’t know what to do with either of them.

And after mailing it out I discovered that our Christmas card had 5 typos.

And my grandma, who this year lost her house and her dog, spent Christmas helplessly watching her son die of cancer, and he spent it unwillingly dying.  My cousin’s baby is due in April, and my uncle most likely wont get to see his grandchild’s life begin.  And there is absolutely nothing I could do sitting across from him except cry along with him.

Some of us have kids that we can't talk to, not really, no matter how much we try. Or we spent Christmas day overwhelmed with the grief of missing someone who wasn't with us anymore. Plans changed, people got sick, and the dinner had fewer place-settings than it was supposed to have. Some of us said the wrong thing, or regret not speaking up. 

And some of us spent the season trying to ignore the gnawing loneliness, or the nagging worry, and just stay happy like we’re supposed to.

So I cried while I took down the tree. 

Because I love Christmas. But also, if I’m honest, what a great big let-down it always is. Along with all the shimmer and warmth, Christmas is awkward and exhausting, and it is never how we remember it was or hope it will be.  It’s just not big enough or deep enough to hold all the expectations and longings we pile onto it.  

So we put Christmas away. It’s all done. Forget the whole 12 days of Christmas thing – in an era of sound bites and viral tweets we have moved on.  You’ve had your little holiday break. Time to turn your attention back to the distractions of your busy lives, and the urgent struggles of the world. Life moves fast. The Valentine candy is on the shelves, people. 

But that’s not how Church time works.  Church time is slower, and deeper, and is not in a hurry, and doesn’t stop either. So it’s Epiphany now, the festival of Christmas spreading out and sinking in. It’s when we celebrate the light coming to all the world, for all the people. 

We don’t put away the story with the ornaments and stockings, or keep Christmas in its precious, nostalgia box that comes out once a year and otherwise doesn’t intersect with life. The story of Christmas continues.

And for Luke, it continues just after the Shepherds depart, with the scene we just read, that happens when Jesus is just a few days old. 

This is way before the Magi, who don’t actually arrive until Jesus is a toddler. On Epiphany, the Magi are usually the stars of the show. Because of them we remember that we Gentiles are in this story too. The Wise Men are a big deal; they get way more airtime in Matthew than the birth of Jesus does.  And that story has such exciting drama with its spices, and gold, and camels, and the star guiding them to Christ child, the crazy murder-hungry King and dream warnings and such, that we turn usually eagerly from Luke’s Shepherds to Matthew’s Magi and often overlook this little story.  But this is a pretty incredible Epiphany story too.

Joseph and Mary bring their firstborn baby boy to the temple, like every good Jewish couple, for the ritual of “the redemption of the firstborn son.” It’s a ritual of expectation and nostalgia, really.  It is a symbol of the deliverance of firstborn sons from the Angel of Death in Egypt when the Jews were freed from slavery; it is a symbol that this one, and everything that comes after this one, is a gift from God. And so the first fruits of labor, the first money made, the first grains and livestock are given to God, to whom they rightly belong, because God gives us all. The firstborn son, then, belongs to God; he is considered holy. 

But this ritual is, in effect, to buy the child back from God. Rather than the child being set aside to be holy, to live in the temple like Samuel did, or perhaps to become a priest when he grows up, the parents would pay God for the right to raise the child as their own, and let the child to grow up participating in ordinary life, rather than only holy things. This makes it sound heavy, but it wasn’t.  It was a celebration of God’s provision, a reminder of God’s care, and an act of joyful gratitude. You brought your baby to the temple, where a sacrifice was offered and a blessing was made, and you brought your child home, and he belonged to you.

Now, there is this man in Jerusalem, Simeon, a prophet, who spends his days searching the streets, wandering and watching the ordinary world, waiting to see a sign of the salvation of Israel. Simeon is a seeker of the light.  Every year, year after year, Simeon watches for a sign. He lives in expectation that God is going to do something to save the people. Year after year goes by, Simeon gets older and older, hanging onto the promise that he would not die before he saw the God’s salvation. And he waits, and he watches. Year after year, his expectations hang there, unfulfilled, and still Simeon waits.

But on this day, in the middle of the regular holy activity of the temple, Simeon suddenly sees this poor, plain family approach the priest, just getting ready to carry out the ritual.  He rushes past the rest of the world in its routine, and makes a beeline for the family.  Reaching out his hands he gently lifts the baby from his startled mother’s arms.  Holding up this unremarkable couple’s small, red-faced infant in the air, Simeon’s face breaks out in joy.  He raises his voice above the din of the temple, and astonishing Mom & Dad and everyone else, he shouts out his Epiphany, “You can let me die in peace now, God! I’ve seen your salvation with my own eyes! The light has come to the whole world and glory to your people Israel!” 

Then he lowers the child softly into his mother’s arms. And with tears running down his wrinkled face and into his beard, he embraces and blesses the little family.  And when he has finishes his blessing, he leans close to Mary; his hands grip her shoulders and he looks directly into her eyes.  His voice dropping and striking a chillingly serious note that causes her to shudder, he speaks, “This child will be the rise and fall of many in Israel. He’ll be misunderstood and opposed, and his being here will expose the hidden truth of people’s hearts. And it will wound you terribly.”

What did Mary think this was going to be like? Raising the God-child? Did she expect this? The recognition, the outburst, the prediction, the warning? The last people to tell Mary that this child was God-with-us were the shepherds. And Mary has been pondering their words in her heart ever since.  Now someone else has recognized who Jesus is. And he has seen her too, and what it will mean for her life to have Jesus in it.

Then comes Anna, another temple regular.  Once a young, sad widow, she has been in the temple over sixty years devoting her whole life to fasting, praying, and serving.  She gave up her common, ordinary life and took on the life set aside to service of God.  She too is a seeker of the light.

  

When the commotion begins, Anna feels a surge of awareness, a powerful déjà vu.  As though in a dream, she rises from her prayers and slowly walks over, staring at the baby, now awake and starting to fuss. When she reaches the small group, she looks up and locks eyes with Simeon. In deep recognition without words, her soul fills with joy that spills from her eyes.  She raises her head and begins to laugh, and cry, and shout to God, right then and there, Thank you! Thank you, Lord!

Then after placing one small leathery hand tenderly on the baby’s downy head, she whirls around and began telling people, spreading her Epiphany throughout the crowd, grabbing this one walking past, bending to that one kneeling there, her voice filled with wonder and delight, “See that child! Redemption has come!"

Then these two stand as witnesses and watch as the priest completes the ritual. And as light-seekers, Epiphany-bearers, they understand what nobody else sees: In this moment God-incarnate is being claimed by human beings to belong to the human family. The Holy One is called out of the holy to live as an ordinary and common human child. 

And then, his story becomes so ordinary, so commonplace, so representative, that the next dozen or so years of Jesus’ life are summarized in one line: “And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.”

Those years were full of absolutely ordinary things –cuts and bruises, and stomach flu, and temper tantrums, and baby sisters, and making friends, and being teased, and doing chores, and laughter, anger, gladness and tears. And like every human life those years were also full of tragedy and loss and fear and surprise. Politics and violence shaped the world Jesus lived in too. In his teen years many Galileans were killed in political uprisings; throughout his childhood Roman atrocities were still happening in the villages around his. 

And before Jesus turns 30 Mary buries Joseph. His dad doesn’t get to see his son’s ministry begin. And then she will have to helplessly watch her son die.  Because he lived an ordinary human life.

The light has come into the world. INTO the world – the very fabric of it. Inseparable from it. Tangled and tied and mixed up and stirred in, so that it cannot be extracted.  It’s not set apart for holy places or special people. The ordinary is infused with the holy, the holy has been claimed by the ordinary; God is irreversibly here. 

Christmas is not a brief episode, a happy but empty event; Christmas is a reorientation to the future. Christmas is the beginning of God’s joining us in this life. In every single ordinary, and unholy, and joy-filled, and disappointing part of it.

  

Simeon and Anna glimpsed the future right now. They recognized in a tiny baby given over to an ordinary life, the mighty movement of reconciliation and redemption coming into the world. It wasn’t a future either of them would get to see unfold in its fullness, all they would get is this one glimpse. But they proclaimed its coming nevertheless.  They recognized, and knew that the world would never be the same. 

Our traditions and rituals are not big enough or deep enough to hold all the expectations and longings we pile onto them. But Christ is in the world.  And we are asked to put our expectations and longings on him.  All the strained relationships and lost opportunities, all the people we hurt and those whose hurt we can’t release. All the love we have and don’t know how to show, and the places where we are just perpetually disappointed—confess them, in pain and sorrow, to this child, this God in here with us, who has lived it all alongside us.  

This One can bear the weight of all our expectations. This One can hold all our disappointment, and unfulfilled longing and grief, and work new life in us. Christ can set us free from resentment, free from being defined by anger, or loss, or worry, free from fear, and free from the power we give to the stories we tell ourselves. We are not trapped or stuck. That is the gift of Christmas.

Anna and Simeon recognized it, and so can we. We are the light-seekers and we are the Epiphany-bearers.  We are the ones who glimpse in the ordinary the future that is coming. We can live in the promise that these hard places within us and between us one day will be healed. We can trust that this brokenness in the world is being healed.  We can watch for it, and tell about it when we see it in front of us in subtle and wonderful ways. 

So maybe we sit by a candle, or by the window when the first light of dawn is breaking, and let the tears come. Or maybe it happens as we are taking down the tree, or by the light of the wildfires raging on the news, or in the car on the way home from the hard visit, or sitting across from the dying one’s own tears. 

To feel the brokenness, the incompleteness of it all, and pour it out to God is not some kind of failing; it’s brave faith.  Telling God the truth of our disappointment, anger, and unfulfilled longings and expectations is an act of trust. Trust in the one who knows the longing, who is bringing the healing, who can handle our sorrow, and who will make us whole.

The Kingdom of God is slower, and deeper, and is not in a hurry, and doesn’t stop either. God’s salvation comes. Darkness is all shot through with light. Christ is in the world.  Sometimes the wait is long, like Simeon’s. But the promise is real. Christmas is still spreading out and sinking in.  And one day, the love, freedom and joy of it will be all that remains. 

Amen.

This is part of a series, journeying with some of our Biblical ancestors: Hannah, Mary, Anna & Simeon, John, Samuel, David*, The Samaritan Woman, 


(*This is an older message about David, in this series, we had a wonderful performance of 'David" by Theater for the Thirsty)