“Is There Anything I Can Do?”

Mark 1:1-8

December 8, 2002

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

I want to paint a picture using words of a scene that you have probably been a part of before. Here is the scene. Your friends have been trying to have you and your spouse over for dinner for some time now. But it is a busy time and all of you have many things scheduled. Finally your calendar and their calendar agree and a date is set. You are invited for 6:30ish. Now these are good friends. You have been in each other’s homes dozens and dozens of times. Normally you would use the back door, but for some reason you get the sense that tonight is special and different and so you and your spouse decide to use the sidewalk and the front door. Your friends answer the door and they invite you in. They look especially nice tonight. She is wearing a nice dress and he is in a pair of khaki pants. You are relieved that you did not come in the sweatshirt that you had on a little while ago. Your friends lead you to some seats in the living room. You have been in their home so many times, but you had never sat in their living room before. In fact, you didn’t even know that they had a living room! The smell from the kitchen almost knocks you over and from where you are sitting, you can see that the table in the dining room has all of the good stuff on it. The china is out and there are more forks in the place setting than you will know what to do with. To be honest with you, I am not good at this sort of thing. Susie is much better at it than I am. In fact, if we were the guests in this story, I would watch her very carefully to make sure that I was using the right fork at the right time!

After a few minutes of visiting, one of your friends gets up to make their way to the kitchen to tend to some of the last minute details. I do not know much about fine dining etiquette, but I know this. I have learned this. When your host or hostess gets up from visiting and makes their way to the kitchen, there is a question that you are supposed to ask. It is this one, “Is there anything that I can do?” The answer is almost always, “No, everything is almost ready.” But still, Susie tells me that you are supposed to ask that question. My guess is that the question, “Is there anything that I can do?” is more often asked before the meal is served rather than after the meal is over and the dessert has been served and after you have been in the living room for an hour or so visiting. Maybe when you ask the question, “Is there anything that I can do?” at ten thirty or eleven o’clock, what you are really saying is, “Well, it is getting late. I have an early tee time in the morning. We pay our babysitter by the hour, so we had better get going.

It has never happened to me. No one has ever asked me the “Is there anything that I can do?” question after a full evening. But if they do, I wonder how they would respond if I said, “As a matter of fact, there is something that you can do. The dishes are still on the table. The Palmolive is under the sink. The dish towels are in the drawer closest to the oven and the dishwasher is broken. And if you don’t mind, turn off the lights and lock the doors when you are finished. Susie and I are exhausted and we’re going to bed!” I do not have the courage to say those words, but I would like to see the reaction on our guests’ faces if I did utter the words.

I will tell you something that I have learned. And that is that the question “Is there anything that I can do?” is not just asked in living rooms when the evening meal is about to be served. It is also asked when things go wrong, when someone is sick, when someone has died, and when something terrible has happened. I have asked that question at least a couple of different times in the past seven days. And the usual answer to the frequently asked question is this, “No, there is nothing that you can do, but if you would pray for us, I think that it will help.”

There was a time, nearly two thousand years ago, when serious minded people who were hoping that their savior would soon come, would ask our question. But they would ask it a little differently. They wanted to know if there was anything that they could do to get ready for the Messiah. Actually, it is a good question for us this morning, don’t you think? After all, Christmas morning is only seventeen mornings away now. Which means that there are only sixteen more shopping days left. I believe that I just heard someone think, “Preacher, did you say ‘get ready?’ Don’t you know that for the past couple of weeks I have done nothing but get ready. I am up to my eyeballs in getting ready. I have pulled down the Christmas dishes and dusted them off. I have found the perfect tree and it’s up and decorated. I have put all of the doodads out on the coffee tables. I have made sure that my husband who has everything will be surprised Christmas morning and that our relatives who do not get along, will not be sitting by each other at the dinner table. John, did you say get ready? I have done nothing but get ready!”

I sometimes say on at least one of the Sundays of December that the Christmas season is like the front line of a football team. The season is down and set and ready to go with its demands and its distractions and its details and its dilemmas and its delights and its duties. For us preachers, it means calendars that are fuller than ever and sermons that have to be better than ever. And here is the part that I like, worship services that are fuller than ever! I don’t want to put any more pressure on you, but are you ready for all of this? I know that this will sound preacherly, but it is my job to tell you that preparing for the birth of Jesus is supposed to have less to do with doodads and more to do with preparing our hearts. Is there anything that I can do? I guess that it is my job to tell you that there is something that you can do.

For sure, it is John the Baptist’s job. Like clockwork, every year, he appears in our lessons on the second Sunday of advent. Just when we are ready to sing, “Joy to the world, the Lord is come, let earth receive her king....” John comes out of the wilderness, humming the same tune, but singing different words. His words are these words: “Jesus is coming, repent, repent. Repent, repent, repent. Repent, repent, repent, repent, repent!” Well, you get the idea. For me, it is as if John has wandered out of a retirement home for really old prophets. Certainly he dresses that way. He is not wearing clothes like we would ever wear. Mark describes him for us by telling us that he wore camel’s hair clothes, with a leather belt around his waist. Mark tells us that for his meals he ate locusts and wild honey. And not only does he look and eat like an old prophet, he also preaches like one, too. He only has one sermon and to be honest with you, I do not like the sermon or his preaching style. John was at the river Jordan, at the edge of the wilderness, standing knee deep in Jordan’s muddy waters, looking at you and me with his dark, deep-set penetrating eyes, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Repent, repent, repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” That is his sermon and that is his preaching style. I think that he ought to speak tenderly. I think that he ought to tell a story or two.

But Mark lets us know that the people did not mind John’s sermon or his preaching style. Mark gives us this detail, the people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people from Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him. What they heard when they went was that God’s kingdom was coming near and to get ready for it. He said that things are about to change. He preaches that the long last night of hopelessness is coming to an end. Friends, he is the rooster whose job it is to wake up the world. John, the people said, is obviously the one crying out in the wilderness. They were sure of that. John’s voice was the one that was to prepare us for the coming of the Messiah.

The problem was that back in John’s day, everyone believed that the Messiah could not come until everything was ready. The people thought that the world had to be cleaned up a little more and that evil had to be under a little more control before the savior could arrive. I will tell you that the Christmas story tells us something very different from that. The Christmas story tells us that Jesus came before everything was ready. There is something else that the Christmas story tells us and that is that only those who were expecting him saw Him. I think that the same thing can be said of these days. After all, those of us who do not expect much, who do not expect things to be different come December the twenty-fifth, probably won’t see many differences in the world. But I tell you the truth. Jesus Christ is coming. In fact, he is already here. He has already come. Would you do me a favor for a minute or two? Go back in your mind’s eye to the Christmas story. Imagine the manger scene. Really, there were two groups of people who saw Jesus. There were wise men who saw the star and the signs and had open minds. And there were shepherds who heard the angels’ announcement and had open hearts. I guess that there had always been the idea that when the Savior came into the world, he would look more impressive than a baby born in a make shift nursery. Everyone thought that the Messiah would come with power, like a military leader, and with glory, with the angels at his side, who would bring Israel back to it’s glory days. I think a fourth of July kind of fireworks display would have been more impressive than a simple star. But still, Jesus Christ came into the world. And John said, “Prepare, prepare, prepare.” Not because He won’t come if we do not prepare, but because we might miss him and his significance if we do not prepare. Friends, that is what this morning’s gospel lesson is all about. It is one, that seventeen days out, urges us to ready our hearts and souls for Jesus.

I would like for us to go back to the living room question again. I would like for us to think about an answer to the question, “Is there anything that we can do to prepare for Christ this year? Let me make a couple of suggestions of thing that I thin we can do. It is best if we start with the hardest one. For me, that is definitely repentance. At Christmas we talk about love coming down. We sing, “Love came down at Christmas. Love divine all love excelling...” The songs on our radios and the shows on our televisions wrap that up nicely. Christmas is about love. There is the stable and the manger and the baby is there, given to us unconditionally, because, after all, God loves us. It is irresistible. God so loved the world that he gave us his only son. Jesus love me this I know. Jesus asks something of me, this I forget. In Mark’s gospel, before the first chapter is over, Jesus is grown up and preaching the same thing that John preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” In the Bible, repentance is not remorse for the past, feeling sorry for something that you did. No, in the Bible, repentance is making a decision about the future and how you are going to live it and realizing that God gives us new opportunities for life. John isn’t just appealing to our desire to do better. John is telling us that if we really want to be better then we have to change the way that we are living. So if you are doing something that is permissible, but not exemplary then stop it. And if your inner life is empty, then fill it with excellence and wait for grace. Here is the truth. You cannot do that by yourself. God is going to have to help you with that! The Message, a version of the Bible that I like, translates one of the verses of our lesson this way: “His baptism.... will change you from the inside out.”

There is repentance. That is the first thing that you can do. But there is another thing that is just as powerful as that and that is we must put ourselves in a position to be near Jesus. Maybe you have heard the true story of what happened one Christmas Eve in front of a church. The church had one of those life sized nativity scenes. They put it up every year. All of the figures were in their places in the scene. Mary and Joseph were there. The shepherds were there. The animals were there. Everyone was there. Everyone, that is, except the baby Jesus. It was the tradition of this church for the preacher to place baby Jesus in the nativity scene after the late night Christmas Eve service. He loved to do that. On this Christmas Eve, there was a young boy who had been hanging around the church. He could not have been more than five or six years old. No one was sure whose child he was. Someone asked, “Is that the Thompson kid?” Another said, “No, I think that it’s the Tullos kid.” It was obvious that he did not belong to any one at the church. Throughout the day, different people had run the boy away. After the service, no one was around. No one, that is, except this boy and the preacher. Everyone was gone when the minister came out of his study holding Jesus, wrapped in swaddling clothes, ever so gently. When the preacher looked up, he saw the boy, near the manger scene. The child, however, could not see the preacher. The boy knelt and looked with amazement at the angels and the shepherds. He stared into the eyes of Mary and Joseph. He reached out and touched the animals that were there. But he couldn’t take his eyes off the place where Jesus was supposed to lay. His eyes were fixed on the manger.

Then he did something that the preacher won’t ever forget. The little boy looked around to his left and then to his right. When he did not see anyone, he climbed into the scene and he lay his head in the hay, close to the manger. The minister tip-toed over and by the time he arrived there, the boy was fast asleep. The preacher put the baby Jesus in the manger and he knelt and prayed. These were the words of his prayer, “Lord, I pray that this boy’s heart will feel as close to your heart as his head is to this plastic figure of your Son. Amen.” We need to be in a position to be near Jesus. That is my prayer for you this season. I pray that you will draw near to Jesus, for he will draw near to you. Let us pray.