Speaker: Caleb Schrock-Hurst
Bible Passages: Mark 1:1-8
Summary: Advent is a season of waiting — but as we wait to celebrate Jesus’s birth, and as we wait today for justice to be brought into the world, we should not wait passively. We can instead wait actively, being Jesus’s hands and feet in the world.
Hello everyone! This is the first time I’ve ever preached an advent sermon, so be ready to be on the receiving end of a decade of pent-up Christmas and advent puns — Just kidding.
I genuinely love advent and Christmas. In fact, I’m well known amongst my friends for starting to listen to Christmas music as early as October. My family lived in the Philippines for three years when I was in elementary school, and the common joke in that hot, tropical country, that was sweltering year-round, was that Christmas decorations went up once people started saying “brrr;” since it never gets cold there, people only start saying “brr” when we enter the “brr” months: September, October, November, December; Christmas decorations usually went up in malls and businesses in September!
All jokes aside, I find Advent both one of the most meaningful and most fun times of the year — it’s a season I like to take seriously.
Like Pastor Tig talked about last week, Advent is partially so special because of all the traditions, time with family, and nostalgia that thus accompanies it. But I also think Advent — the season of waiting — is particularly poignant for modern American Christians, because waiting isn’t something that comes naturally to us.
We live in a culture of instant gratification. We carry around in our pockets access to almost all information about the history of the world, with immediate access to any material we want. Where we used to ponder questions until we could ask someone about it or research it — questions from as mundane as “who is the prime minister of Germany” to as esoteric as “what does rizz mean.” Rizz, from Charisma, was just chosen as word of the year, and yes I had to look it up too) — now we don’t need to wonder, and ponder, and wait.
But the problem goes even deeper — we’re now so uncomfortable with waiting that we’ve almost abolished it in all its forms! I am more guilty of this than anyone. When we do need to wait for something — for a meeting to start, in traffic, or for anything else — we tend to fill those small times of waiting with the bright light of our phones, or music, or podcasts.
So, it’s in our non-waiting world that we practice Advent; and we don’t just practice it, we actually celebrate waiting — and this is radically strange! Why should we have to wait for God, particularly when we aren’t used to waiting for anything? And if we are waiting for an all-powerful God, why shouldn’t we just wait passively, doing nothing while we wait for God’s overwhelming power to be revealed?
The most dangerous assumptions, I believe, are those we don’t interrogate. The assumption that waiting is always bad is one such assumption that Advent invites us to question. Advent should anchor us; ridding us of the assumption that all good things are readily and immediately accessible. During advent we are invited to feel — and dwell with, for a sustained period — the hunger of Jesus’s absence from the world. Only after waiting and searching for Jesus during Advent can we be ready to celebrate his coming with Joy, as we will together, at Christmas.
So — we need to wait. But how do we wait? And does waiting mean doing nothing?
I loved Pastor Tig’s four suggestions in his sermon last week, title ‘keeping awake while we wait.’ Those things were: Read the signs of the times; Acknowledge the pain, stress, and grief of the world; Witnesses faithfully to Jesus; and Remember that God is with us.
Today I want to run with a roughly similar theme and add the nuance that we can and should seek to partner with God to work for the kingdom while we wait for God’s return. We don’t just wait for God, sitting on our hands — we wait while living lives full of meaningful work for the kingdom.
Ultimately, I think we can work like Mark did to tell the story of Jesus; we can work like the prophets did to model partnership with God; and we can work as Jesus did, working toward a peaceful kingdom with acts of peace.
So, today, we’ll start by looking a bit at the gospel of Mark and how it differs from the other gospels; then, we’ll talk a bit about the biblical prophets and John the Baptist; and then we’ll close with some steps and approaches we can take as we work while we wait for Jesus’s return.
First, I think we can work like Mark did to tell the story of Jesus, and to do this I want to begin with some comments on the book of Mark.
Scholars believe Mark was the first gospel written, and it’s the shortest gospel at only 16 chapters — it is short enough to take in in one sitting.
If you haven’t ever sat down and read Mark through at one time, this advent might be the time to do so; it only takes about an hour and a half to read all of it.
And actually, I want to take this suggestion one step further — scripture was written to be heard, or listened to. Most bible apps on phones have an audio-option built in, calling back to when Mark was written, when most people couldn’t read. Today, we often take literacy for granted, but in fact, it wasn’t until the 1960s that the world-literacy rate passed 50%! That’s right — the majority of the world population was illiterate until about 70 years ago.
Hearing scripture spoken aloud in a group setting, rather than reading by ourselves, can reveal things we miss when we read small passages. When we read, we can tend to get stuck on small details — the proverbial losing the forest for the trees. When we listen — or, when we read a whole book at a time — we notice themes and broad stokes that can be otherwise missed.
If you listen, or read, to all of Mark in one go, you’ll notice a few things.
First, it’s very sparse. Unlike Matthew and John, in Mark Jesus doesn’t preach long sermons to his followers. Instead, Jesus is a dynamic healer and actor, busy in the synagogues and the countryside and in people’s lives. As I just mentioned, it’s the shortest gospel — but it packs a real punch, being built on only the essential ingredients of Jesus’s story that Mark feels we need to know.
Second, it’s fast paced. When I took Greek at seminary, one of the few words we actually learned while working with Mark was εὐθὺς (euthus), meaning “immediately.” Almost every story in Mark begins “immediately” after the previous story. In reading Mark we get the sense of the urgency and amount of work Jesus has to do — one story always leads directly into another, one healing, one prophetic action, one work leads right into the next, reminding us that Jesus knew the world as a world in need of redemption — a world waiting for his healing touch. Mark’s Jesus always saw more work to be done.
Thirdly, and pertinent to our working with Mark during Advent, Mark doesn’t have any story of the birth of Jesus. Our scripture for today is the opening of Mark; Really we have one verse of introduction — saying, this is the beginning of the good news of Jesus the Messiah, and then we’re right on to John the Baptist.
We should understand this as an intentional writing choice, and it’s helpful to compare Mark to the other three gospels. Luke and Matthew choose to spend several chapters on Jesus’s birth, and John chooses to begin with a mediation on Jesus’s eternal existence as the word; but Mark chooses to dive right in with John the Baptist. What should we make of Mark’s choice?
I think his choice chooses to place Jesus and his story as squarely in the prophetic tradition. John the Baptist is sort of the arch-prophet: what could say biblical prophet more clearly than camel hair and preaching in the wilderness?
John’s message is two-fold: 1, repent of your sins, and 2, you all better be sure to know that I am not the messiah — I am only witnessing to the messiah. If Jesus is greater than John, then he is also greater in his prophethood.
We’ll come back to the prophetic tradition in one second; first I want to wrap-up these comments on Mark.
I appreciate each of the gospels, and we’re so much better off for having multiple literary pictures of Jesus’s ministry and life — I find Mark extremely powerful; it’s probably currently my favorite gospel. We can learn a lot from Mark’s brevity and focus.
One other note from my Greek class is that Mark’s Greek is actually quite clumsy — it is pretty clearly written by someone whose first language was not Greek, with oddly-chosen verb tenses that often disagree within a sentence or paragraph. This isn’t the gospel told in the linguistically and theologically refined, greek of Paul, nor the careful, measured Greek of Luke the greek doctor — it seems to be Greek that was picked up on the street, in cafes, at work on fishing boats. Mark writes with a desire to be understood by the broadest possible audience — this is a lingua franka book, one meant to share the simple story of Jesus as widely as possible.
The first written account we have of Jesus, therefore, isn’t a super scholarly work — it’s a powerful one, a real, human one, where Jesus is struggling against the Romans and the religious authorities, where Jesus is a healer and worker.
I share this because I think it shows us that when we work to tell the story of Jesus, and stories of hope breaking forth in the world, we don’t need to tell our stories perfectly for them to be powerful. Rather, we, like Mark, should be eager to share the core points about God’s good news even as we still wait for that good news to be fully revealed.
So, we work to tell stories of God, and particularly God as revealed to us in Jesus life — but we also work to live and witness as the prophets did.
This brings me to my second main point: We should seek to work like the prophets did; to partner with God to preach and demonstrate that we can live in shalom.
I want to start this section by answering my earlier question — why should we work for the good of the world while we wait?
The answer, I believe, is that throughout scripture we see over and over that God desires to partner with real, flawed people to bring about a shalom world. Our God is a God of partnership, who calls complicated people and turns them into wounded healers.
God partnered with Abraham, who doubted God’s promise that he’d be the father of many to the extent that he fathered a child with his wife’s slave, and turned him into the spiritual father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
God partnered with the cast-away, adopted, softly-spoken, murderer Egyptian prince named Moses, and turned him into one of the greatest liberators in the history of the world.
God partnered with the unprepared, unwed, and seemingly powerless Mary, and made her the mother of Jesus.
God partnered with Saul, who persecuted the first Christians to the point of death, to bring the good news to the Gentiles, and turned him into one of the main authors of the New Testament.
God partnered with illiterate fishermen and turned them into the founders of the church.
If God can partner with the motley crew of screw-ups, cast-aways, and doubters that he partnered with in the bible, than God can partner with us to bring the kingdom a little bit closer.
One group we see throughout the Old Testament who sought most stridently to partner with God were the prophets. Throughout scripture the prophets work to do two things: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, bridging and healing the divides they encounter and pointing people onward towards God, preparing the way of the Lord by bringing the kingdom just a little bit closer.
Now, you may be thinking: What does any of this have to do with today, or our context? Here in the US, where we’re so divided and polarized, there is no prophetic message that could draw different groups together; and our problems seem so insurmountable, is there really anything one person, or one church can do to make a difference?
First, the polarization front: I’ll take a detour to suggest one of the most important books of the recent era — ‘Why we’re Polarized’ by Ezra Klein. Much could be said about this book, but for now I’ll leave it at the fact that the biggest driver and indicator of polarization is the urban vs rural divide — the more urban your context, the more progressive you tend to be, and the more rural, the more conservative.
This may feel like a really new phenomenon; and thus we might think the Bible can’t have anything to say about this. In fact, though, our text for today centers on John bridging this very same polarizing divide, of the urban elites and the rural traditionalists. Verse five, in the NIV makes this plain: “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.”
Jerusalem, dominated by a Roman fortress and the Jewish temple, was wealthy, elite, and urban; the Judean countryside was and is marginal land that can be hit or miss from year to year — the rural poor and the urban elite very much didn’t get along. In our own times, John’s ministry might be like if everyone from Washington DC and everyone from West Virginia were all going down to the same place to listen to the same sermon.
And yet — John drew them all into the wilderness with his preaching and his life. He gets them all — the Jersualemites and the rural peasants — to repent of the sins they already knew they were committing, be baptized, and await the coming of one even greater.
A core part of what allows John’s work to be so impactful is to admit this isn’t all about him. I’d describe this as prophetic humility — John knew he had important work to do, yes, but he also knew he couldn’t do it all — in fact, he knew that his ministry (which we shouldn’t forget was wildly successful) didn’t even make him worthy to untie Jesus sandals. John reminds everyone — repent of your sins and know that God is coming. This is our task too — asking people to repent of their sins and pointing them on to the one we’re also waiting for: Jesus.
In this mold, I believe a core part of how we work for justice today is knowing, and sharing, our limits and weaknesses.
Like our lack of ability to wait, we live in a culture where humility and acknowledging our weak-points are seen as bad. But in the mold of the prophets — in the mold of John the baptist — we should know that sharing and admitting our weaknesses publicly is a part of what prepares the way for God.
This Advent, may we work like the prophets did — in humility, remembering we are just setting up sign-posts towards Jesus, as we try to demonstrate Shalom, afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.
Finally, while we work and wait, we need to remember what we’re working towards, and we need to find ways to work that are consistent with that end goal.
Sometimes as Christians we forget to ask the basic questions. Let’s ask perhaps the most basic of all: Why did Jesus come? What was the end-goal of Jesus ministry?
Mark very clearly paints us a picture of Jesus bringing good news of healing and freedom to a world in need of good news — preparing the way of the Lord. For Mark, Jesus came to bring life, and life to the fullest, to everyone — to make the rougher places plain, and to remind people that God is real, God is near, and God cares. Spreading and living this news is what we must also work towards.
This is articulated pretty clearly by Jesus’s preaching in Mark. Let’s look ahead in Mark 1 just a little bit, to verses 14 and 15, when Jesus gives his (very short) first sermon: that verse reads: Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
I believe that the end goal of Jesus ministry is healing for all, a peaceful, shalom world — it is this end to which we must also work.
I think, honestly, that most Christians, and more generally most people, are on board with this message of peace and understanding! Where disagreement actually occurs is about what means that will get us to that ends of a peaceful world.
The Anabaptist-Mennonite answer, which I believe is also the most scripturally-faithful answer, is that God’s end of peace cannot be achieved by the means of violence. How we work for peace, how we wait for God, matters, in the large and small.
How we work matters, just as how we wait matters. If we want to work for a peaceful world, we have to work peacefully.
Right now, of course, when we speak of peace, we think of the lack of peace in Gaza. There is so much to be said, and so much suffering there, that I struggle for words. The horrible terror attack of October 7 has led to a horrible bombing campaign that has already led to the death of more than 15,000 civilians. More women and children have been killed in Gaza in the last two months than in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion.
There is much I don’t know for certain — but what I do know for certain is that, 2,000 years after Jesus came, we are still waiting for God’s peace to come to the Holy Land. I also believe strongly that more killing will not move us closer to a stable peace for Israelis nor Palestinians, something everyone claims to want. Violence does not lead to peace — and now, more than ever, we must do what we can to combat voices that claim more death will bring more life.
To close, I want to share one of the most well-known teachings from the Jewish Talmud — it’s that we, as followers of Yahweh, are not responsible for completing the work of redeeming the world — but we are responsible for trying.
We aren’t responsible for ending the violence in Gaza, but we are expected to try and do what we can and support non-violent solutions, and that starts with advocating for a ceasefire.
Closer to home, we aren’t responsible for caring for every refugee and immigrant family that makes its way to the US, but we are responsible to help as much as we can, as this community so wonderfully demonstrates in its work with multiple refugee families.
We aren’t responsible for solving all forms of racial injustice in the world, but we can live into being a multicultural, multi-racial community that knows and values its neighbors of all backgrounds.
We aren’t responsible for solving polarization or the urban-rural divide, but we can prioritize maintaining relationships with people we disagree with, and approach all conversations with humility and curiosity; not with attitudes of condemnation, but with attitudes of invitation to the way of Jesus.
In short, while we wait for the coming of Jesus that makes all these things possible — for the full coming of the kingdom when all tears will be wiped away — we can and should seek to partner with God in working for the good of that shalom kingdom.
In closing — we’re still waiting, for the just world that Jesus taught about and modeled. But we don’t wait with empty hands— instead, we’re invited to partner with God in the work of bringing peace to the world, waiting for the redemption of creation while we work towards it.
May we write and speak with the boldness of Mark; may we work and live with the courage and humility of the prophets; and may we never lose sight of the coming king, Jesus. May it be so.
