“A Wake Up Call”

Mark 1:1-8

December 4, 2005

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

Imagine this. It is late, late at night, or if you would prefer to call it, early, early in the morning. It is that time in your sleep that the experts would say is a deep, deep sleep. So it might take a freight train or perhaps the sound of your baby’s cry to wake you up. There you are, in that deep and sound asleep. You are in la la land. You are dreaming. That is when it happens. Suddenly someone bursts through your bedroom door, flips on the overhead light that has no choice but to shine in your eyes. This someone’s voice cries out to you, it calls out you, interrupting your dream and your dream world. The voice interrupts your sleep and shouts out, “Wake up! Get up! You’ll be late!”

Since you are just waking up, maybe you are little disoriented, and confused. This voice is not one of your parents’ reminding you that you have to get out of bed or you will be late for school. This voice is isn’t the familiar one of your spouse who shakes you and says, “Wake up, honey; we overslept. If we don’t hurry, we’ll both be late for work!” No, this is a different voice, a deeper voice, a more startling voice. If turning on the lights and screaming out to you isn’t enough, the person to whom the voice belongs comes right up to your bed, splashes water, cold water, right in your face, just to make sure that you get the point. You see, it is time to stop wishing and dreaming. It is time to face the most important day of your life!

This image. This idea is what the opening of the gospel of Mark is supposed to be like. Mark’s gospel, we believe, was the first written. He does not begin his with the angels whispering in Mary’s ear. There are no shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night. There are no wise men from the east, or anywhere else, for that matter, following the glow of a star. There are no big eyed animals standing near the straw of a manger. Mark either did not know about those things or thought that they were not all that important. I say that because he didn’t include them in his story of Jesus.

For him, the good news of Jesus Christ begins not in a stable, but in the wilderness of Judea with an old timey prophet whose name was John. Some folks say that John was the first real prophet who had showed up in more than three hundred years! A lot of people had been looking for a sign from God for some time, but they never expected the sign to look like John. Just look at him. He doesn’t look like anyone else! Mark gives us his description. Mark says that on his back was camel’s hair. Now, this was not a camel’s hair sports jacket or overcoat. Around his waist was a leather belt and for his meals and snacks he ate locusts and wild honey. John’s outfit is like the one of the greatest prophet, Elijah. Elijah would have worn such a thing eight hundred years before John’s time. Surely this is a statement of some kind. We might not understand it, but the ones standing near him certainly would have. They knew that the man standing knee deep in the Jordan with shivering people standing beside him was a messenger, predicted by Isaiah, dressed like Elijah, and sent by God. Maybe this is why people flocked out to see him. I can’t figure it out myself. Everything about him makes me think that I would go to great lengths to avoid him, not to go out of my way to see him. I don’t think that I would have been drawn to him.

John was scary all right. He was uncivilized to be sure. He looked like someone from another world, but he spoke with conviction. He spoke as if God himself were whispering the words into one of his ears. John talked about one who was coming, though he did not have any of the details. He didn’t know what the Messiah would look like. He had no idea about that. John didn’t know the Messiah’s name. He had no idea that the Messiah would be his own cousin. All that is obvious because of a passage in the Bible that has John sending his followers, his disciples to Jesus and his disciples with this question on their minds, “Are you the One, or should I wait for another?” John didn’t know. What he did know is that one world was ending and another was about to begin and that it would be carried in on the shoulders of this one who would follow him.

John begins all of this with quoting the old 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 is the wake up call. John is the one who said that someone was coming soon, very soon. It was his job to get the people ready. In the days of Isaiah, if a king were coming to your town, things had to be spruced up. The town had to look its best and if there were winding roads that led up to the town’s limits, if the king were going to visit. Those roads had to be straightened because of the fear of bandits hiding in the road’s curves. There is an old joke in Britain that says that wherever the Queen goes, she smells fresh paint.

Dressed in animal hair, with a belt around his waist, and locust on his breath, John said that someone just as important was coming. This someone was so spectacular, so amazing, that he himself was not worthy of the servant’s task of stooping down and untying his sandals. John also says that it was not enough to simply hang around and wait for this someone special to arrive. It was time to get ready. It was time to prepare, so that when the messiah did come, there would be a straight path right up to the doors of people’s hearts.

That was the good news that John was the beginning of. He was the messenger and the message lit him up like a bonfire in a wilderness. People were drawn to him, not because of who he was, or how he was dressed, not because they were curious, but because of what he said and what he offered them. And what he offered was a chance to come clean, to stop pretending that they were someone else. John gave them the chance to start all over again. He used water to do that. Using water, by the way, was his idea. He didn’t have anyone’s permission to do that. He just did it. And as he did it he proclaimed that the one who came after him would also offer a baptism, but not with water. His baptism would be more powerful. His would be a baptism of the Spirit. It is a promise and a challenge.

So says John, one is coming. He quotes Isaiah. His sermon has one point and the point of the sermon, the hope of the sermon, was that people would repent. Repent, now that’s an old time word that we don’t hear much these days. What does it mean? In the original language, Greek, it means to change one’s mind. Behind it is the Hebrew verb, “to turn around.” So it means to change one’s heart. It means to change one’s will. It means to change one’s behavior. In short, it means to go in a different direction.

Did you hear about the bow game, the Rose Bowl game that was played in 1927? Playing each other were the teams from the University of California and George Tech. At some point in the game, there was a fumble by a Georgia Tech player. A University of California player picked up the ball and began to run for a touchdown. There was only one problem. He headed off in the wrong direction. In hot pursuit were his teammates who were running as fast as they could and screaming as loud as they could trying to get him to stop. Finally he was tackled on the three yard line, saving a score, but not his embarrassment.

Sometimes we are like that. We go in the wrong direction because we are confused, because we are turned around. We do not know the right way. There are other times when we head off in the wrong direction not because we don’t know the right way but because we choose the wrong way. Our choice is a deliberate one. We know better. We know what we are doing, but make the choice anyway. Sometimes our repentance will happen because we get older and mature in the things that we do. For others of us, repentance happens because something challenging happens in our lives, like the death of someone that we love, or something that happens with our health. For still others, repentance is larger and more profound. You might say that it can be a theological version of a New Year’s resolution. We look at the things that we are doing, the weight that we are carrying around, the hurtful words that we have said. We repent of those things. Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t.

For some of us, the turning is a hundred and eighty degree turn. That was the case for the football player. For others it is a ninety degree turn, for others it is a smaller turn than that. Whatever the turn is, the call to repentance is realizing where God wants us to go and then going there. It may not be where we want to be, but it is where we must go.

I heard the story of a teenager who lived in Russia, in one of the United Methodist Churches there who went to church because her mother made her. She didn’t want anything to do with the church. In fact, she would sit on the back row and drink beer during the worship service. I have alerted our ushers to look out for that this morning! Every week she would show up with her mother, but she didn’t pay any attention to the hymns or the sermon, or to the prayers. She paid attention to the beer. Then one day she noticed that the Bible in the pew rack in front of her was written in English. She desperately wanted to learn more English, and so she began readying the words. Within a couple of weeks, she was no longer bringing her beverage to the church. Instead she would spend the entire hour reading the scriptures, She did not participate in the worship service, she just read. Do you know what happened to her? She was converted, but not by the preaching. That hurts my feelings. She was converted, not by the music. That might hurt the choir’s feelings. She was not converted by the prayers. She became a believer in Jesus Christ, she changed the direction of her life, because of the Word of God. Repentance is going in a new direction, a different direction. Repentance is seeking a new meaning for your life. John the prophet calls you to that this morning.

The gospel always begins with a messenger, whether it is an angel whispering in Mary’s ear, a parent telling their child the story of Christmas, or a strange looking prophet standing knee deep in chilly waters. I guess the real question this second Sunday of Advent is this one, “What will it take to wake you up to a new life?” Let us pray.