If you haven’t yet heard, my family is deep in the midst of an epic three day Christmas party. We hosted a Christmas party for adults of the congregation on Friday night, we had a party for children, parents, and some grandparents last night, and in about four hours from now our house will be a stop on the annual Woburn holiday house tour. Before the weekend is through, we will have easily hosted over a hundred people from church and the community.
When you host parties, you want to make sure everything is just right. The house is as clean as it ever gets and just about every surface is covered with some kind of Christmas decoration. Bing Crosby is singing “White Christmas” in the background and the Christmas tree is aglow.
People, in turn, want to be good guests. They come dressed in their Christmas finery, bringing their signature covered dishes. Even the kids have been on their best behavior. (Well, mostly.)
It’s everything we love about this season: the warmth, the wonder, the love. Its a very beautiful tableau.
But then I come to church this morning and I am confronted, as we always are on the second Sunday of Advent, by John the Baptist, who sticks out like a sore thumb in the midst of this season – standing on the banks of the Jordan River dressed in camel’s hair (and not the sport jacket kind) and a leather belt, eating locusts and wild honey.
John is a crude figure and the picture Mark paints of him is a far cry from anything by Currier and Ives.
It is one of the most curious things in all the Bible to me that Mark would take the time (in the midst of this urgent good news about Jesus that he’s about to share) to describe John the Baptist’s apparel and eating habits. In my Greek class in Divinity School, we translated this portion of Scripture from Greek (the original language of the text) into English. I distinctly remember looking up the words “camel, honey, leather” in the Greek dictionary, and thinking even then, “Why would they bother including this?”
The official answer is that this was the kind of outfit that prophets in the Bible would wear, and so the earlier readers of this text would know that John is a prophet – an identity that is reinforced when he quotes the prophet Isaiah from our first reading. This clothing and his speech identify John as a prophet, as someone who speaks for God.
These many years later, I think, they function in a different way: to get our attention. John stands in contrast to everything we associate with the Christmas season. It causes us to pause from our revelry and ask, “What is going on here?” which, in fact, is the central question of Advent. Because Advent preparation is about understanding and embracing exactly what is about to happen in that manger in Bethlehem.
And it’s not just about how John looks. It’s what he says: his call to repentance.
He’s taking about people’s sin, which, as anyone knows, is a terrible faux pas this time of year. People go to great, and sometimes painful lengths, not to confront others during Christmas, not to stir the pot, but John doesn’t mind. He says, “You’re sinning and you need to change.”
John the Baptist is someone you would never ever ever invite to a party.
John the Baptist is a party crasher.
The Beginning
And this how the good news begins – how Mark decides to start of his Gospel – with this introductory character, the strange herald of glad tidings, whose tidings that aren’t actually all that glad.
I wonder: Why does the Gospel begin this way? And why must our journey to Christmas always go through John the Baptist?
Well, it definitely helps to jar us awake, as last week’s readings implored – and he calls us to prepare our hearts and minds for the coming of Christ.
But, mainly, I think, it speaks about the kind of world that Jesus was born into.
The good news, for me here, is that Jesus wasn’t born into a Currier and Ives painting either, or an idealized manger scene, or even that classic Folger’s coffee commercial that runs this time of year where the son arrives home early on Christmas morning and makes the coffee.
Jesus isn’t born into an idealized or romanticized version of our world, the world we wished we lived in (which the nostalgia of our Christmas festivities, movies, and marketing can evoke).
Rather, Jesus is born in a manger to an unmarried couple, a family, despite their obvious need, who sent out to be in a stable. Jesus arrives amidst the pain of childbirth, the smell of livestock, after a forced journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem because of Roman occupation and oppression. The only reason they are in Bethlehem at all is so the empire can calculate their taxes.
Jesus grew up with the smell of sawdust of Joseph’s shop. He traveled with disciples that probably, even when they gave up fishing as a profession, always had a tinge of fishy smell.
He consorted with the sick, the feared, and the despised.
That is to say: he was born right into this complicated and challenging life.
And this really is the beginning of the good news because that’s where we really live – not where we wished we lived or where we once lived in times gone by, but where we live right now.
Jesus is born into the places we know but don’t talk about during the holidays: the grief we carry for the loss of loved ones, who we miss more intensely this time of year. The loneliness we can experience if separated or estranged from family. The strained family relationships that are thrown into relief when everyone is trying to be nice and happy but it doesn’t quite cover the pain of old hurts.
This time of year we hold our gratitude and the disappointment, our achievements and our failings all together. That’s where Jesus is born.
The good news is that Jesus came to us just as we are right now. Not who we were or who we are going to be. Right now, with our gifts and faults, our hopes and our fears, our joy and our grief.
The Good News of Christmas, that John the Baptist in his own way, reveals to us in his crazy clothing, food, and his sharp tongue is this:
Jesus came to the world as it really is …and loves us as we really are. And he was born, lived, died, and rose again to save it…and us.
Preparing the way of the Lord is not a matter of decorating up our lives to make them more presentable to God. It is preparing to receive the love of God just where we are, just as we are.
For, this is what Advent is all about: God and humankind turning to one another, realizing how impoverished existence would be without the other – turning to one another and meeting in a stable in Bethlehem.
Amen.
