Mark 1:1-8

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,
“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,'“

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 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. Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He 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. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

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One of my favorite activities in Maine was keeping watch for groups of deer that would wander into the field running down a gentle hill from my house to the cove. One or two or even three deer used to find their way into the clearing, mostly in the morning or right before dark, nosing around for food, lifting their heads from time to time to watch for anyone or anything that might disturb them.

And so the task, really the game, was always how not to startle the deer. I did this either by standing perfectly still while at the window or if I weren’t right at the window, by tiptoeing soundlessly and, I thought, invisibly toward the window.

Invariably though, by knocking into something or by just breathing, I would attract their notice. Startled, they would look up suddenly and then with a flick of the tail bound away into the woods.

I’ve never thought of myself as a person who startles easily, but once, at the end of a training session as a feedback mechanism, we were asked to go around the circle and hear from other participants which animal we reminded them of. When my turn came, someone said to me; “A deer—Melissa, you remind me of a deer—you give rapt attention to what’s going on, but I also have the sense that if I said or did something that startled you, you’d be gone like a shot or at least give me that “deer-in-the-headlights” look.”

I guess there was something true about what he said, because I know I do best when I can see something coming—when I’m not surprised or startled by something unknown suddenly coming into view.

All of which (this preface) is probably a way to protect you and maybe myself from being startled this morning by our gospel: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” our Gospel declares.

This is the first line of the Gospel of Mark. No “Hi. How are you?” No “Is this a convenient time?” No, instead “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

And the startling quality of the Gospel doesn’t stop there at the first line—no, it goes speedily on. In the space of a few verses we have a prophecy from Isaiah, a vignette about a wild and powerful man named John appearing in the wilderness baptizing people, and John’s own startling announcement of the coming of Jesus, the one who is even more powerful than he.

All of this sets the tone for the entire gospel of Mark: abrupt, inelegant, urgent, without appropriate prefaces or decorous endings, a Gospel peppered with the Greek word for “immediately,” meaning that the experience of hearing this account of Jesus’ life is startling, very startling.

And relevant, I believe. For we’re in a time of being startled, aren’t we, and then being startled again. We’re in a time when though we would prefer to be undisturbed and nosing around for food in a familiar field, we are instead looking up, waiting for the next unwelcome thing to appear. We are alternatively ready to bolt (if we only could) and stuck with paralysis in the glare of what appear to be headlights speeding toward us.

And so it’s fascinating on the second Sunday of Advent that our lectionary delivers a piece of startling news. The news is not about unemployment figures or the Dow or which industry needs a bail-out.

It’s the startling news that good news is on its way, that good news comes and is coming to a people in the wilderness, to a people sick of living with bad news—both their own and the bad news of the society around them. The startling news is that good news is on its way.

“The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ the Son of God.” Mark’s Gospel begins.

How will this be good news? How is the coming of someone named Jesus and called the “Christ” and “the son of God” good news to a people in the wilderness? A lot of the good news is freighted in an expectation within his listeners that Mark plays on and then turns upside down. For the terms “Christ” and “the Son of God” during the time would have been applied to an anointed and conquering king, one who would come to restore the people by putting things right in the world. And God knows we continue to have the same hope.

But this is not the savior that Mark announces. Rather the full message of Mark’s googd news is something that can only be delivered with an embarrassing abruptness, for he proclaims the coming of a savior so preposterous that it can only be blurted out.

The good news, it seems, is not that a newly anointed and powerful king will save us, setting things right economically, politically and socially. No, the good news is that the fullness of our self-giving and justice-loving God has shown up in the person of a nobody born to a Jewish teenager. And what is more, this nobody into whom the fullness of our self-giving and justice-loving God was poured does not choose to live a quiet, out of the way life. No, that one chooses to love and to give, to extend himself toward his circle of disciples and to strangers in need under good and bad condition, but mostly under bad conditions.

And so the good news is that God has walked our path, has ridden the startling ups and downs of Wall Street and Main Street, has been in the hills and the valleys of life on Queen Anne Avenue as it traces its way from the top of the Hill to here where we are and down into Belltown. In all these places, he is walking down a Street called Calvary Street, showing us that every path, every hill and every valley, can be a path of life as long as we continue to love and to give of ourselves to those right beside us and to strangers in need who are after all our family members. He is the one, as John the Baptist says, who is more powerful than John could ever be. And in Advent, he is the one whose birth we again await—whose birth we await in us.

I was so struck last week by how many of us turned out for the meeting with the representative from the Millionair Club. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go to www.millionairclub.org. It’s an organization in Belltown that feeds, provides services for and connects homeless men to work.

What was so striking about the meeting was this: there we were, some 20-30 of us, some of us in the room who had to be concerned about their own jobs right now or in the future. There we were, talking about ways to get involved with an organization that helps homeless men, most of whom we’ve never met, find day labor in the city.

I have to tell you that it was the healthiest and most hopeful I’ve felt since all this financial mess began.

“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” says Mark’s Gospel. With this opening fragment, Mark plunges us into the startling and saving story of the Son of God, a son who is not an anointed king who will set things aright all around us. It is a story that should startle us—the story of a God who not only speaks to us in our wilderness, but has walked it, who not only walks it but invites us to walk it with one another.

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