Mark 1:1-8

Mr. B. was a good guy, but a little scary. He was one of the more active members of the New Canaan Church that I served. He was a big man with a deep voice and a very commanding presence. Not one of those guys whose smile was particularly obvious. If you were around him long enough you saw grace come from him and extend to others in some pretty moving ways. But, if you didn’t know him very well he made you worry just a bit.

I remember the morning that he brought our adult education discussion to a screeching halt. The focus of the series that we were doing was sin. We always had guest teachers come and lead our classes, and this session happened to be on systemic sin, or collective sin – sin and pain and brokenness that results from cultural dynamics that we cannot help but be a part of. Mr. B. listened for a while and then concluded, “I have enough trouble dealing with my own sins. I’m not going to take on anyone else’s either.”

The guest speaker kind of froze as he tried to figure out how to respond. And, all these years later I can’t recall how he did. But, I do remember thinking that behind the statement was a pretty good question. Sin, when thought of as more than just personal infractions, but in fact the general brokenness of human relations around the world, adds a whole new layer of stuff for us to think about as we ready ourselves for the gifts of God.

The middle two Sundays of Advent always point to the ministry of John the Baptist This is how the good news of Jesus begins, says Mark. Just as the prophet Isaiah foretold, there’s a voice in the wilderness calling the people to prepare God’s way. “Confess, repent, and be baptized,” says that voice. Turn around, change your ways, and ready yourself for the coming Messiah, says John.

            The question is: given sin’s expansive reach, what exactly are we called to repent for? What are those ways that we need to change?

In the light of what’s been happening in Ferguson, and in response around our country, these questions, I think, are especially relevant. I’ll confess, I’m confused over what has happened. I don’t have clarity over the decision not to indict. I don’t have more evidence than the people making the decision did, and so part of me doesn’t understand how the decision ignited such a firestorm of reaction.        However, I also know that I don’t understand racism from the perspective of those who have been victimized by it. If the protesting points to a greater dynamic of race relations, and I believe it does, a dynamic that hasn’t progressed far enough, that somehow perpetuates destructive and unbalanced cycles of advantage and disadvantage, then I can understand (if not the rioting) the emotional reaction and the outrage.

And, I can say, I haven’t actively or knowingly been discriminatory, but perhaps I’ve benefited from the status quo in ways that I haven’t strongly enough considered or objected to.

Again, if we are to repent; if we are to turn things around as John the Baptist tells us, what exactly should or can any one of us do? And, how do we know just how much we have to repent for?

In the Methodist church you pastor a congregation long before you are ordained. (Seems odd, right?) As I was pastoring a church and preparing for ordination interviews I was also enrolled in a program called Compass. Compass exposed us to the broader realities of our greater Conference. The idea was that we could be called to minister in any setting in that Conference and we needed to be exposed to, have our eyes opened to, worlds (lives) that differed even radically from our own.  And so, we were brought all over much of CT and NY. We visited a Manhattan church in a fancy neighborhood that, even so, ran a pretty active food pantry. We met a chaplain in Fishkill who toured us through the surreal world of prison ministry. We visited with a worker rights group in a back alley office somewhere in the maze that is Chinatown. We met with migrant farmers in upstate New York, whose plights were undeniably unjust and even more heartbreaking.

In all of these settings, though I found that my life was quite different than the lives of those we were meeting, I also found that I was less removed from their plight than I had thought. I remember the very firey Chinese activist who spoke about a particular company both employing and oppressing so many of the people in his neighborhood. He said, “This company just stinks!” Except, he didn’t say “stinks,” and I was pretty sure that the sweatshirt that I was wearing bore that company’s brand.

I remember the migrant farmers telling their stories. How hard they worked. The unbelievable conditions they endured. I remember the shock of hearing how while it was illegal to treat all workers in this country in certain ways, it wasn’t illegal to treat these workers those ways. I learned how their treatment and our appreciation for an abundance of produce at the lowest possible prices were very much related. And yet, when we asked them what we could do, they didn’t tell us to stop buying produce. They didn’t tell us to boycott major shopping markets. They didn’t even tell us to write our politicians. They said, “Remember us. Care about us. Know we are here.” (I wondered what it meant that in their shoes I would have asked for more than that.)

How do we, with integrity, follow through on John’s orders? How do we repent for all of this? How do we overcome all this sin that in known and unknown ways we are a part of? Repentance means to turn, but honestly, I’m not even sure that turning is completely possible.

John’s out there in the wilderness wearing his camel hair clothing and living off locusts, calling (without regard to convention or anything that would approximate propriety) for people to ready themselves for the coming of the Savior. He’s a man with a mission; he’s a man who never doubts his own authority, but remarkably, what he does with all that authority is point away from himself. “I am NOT The One,” says John. I’m not even worthy to untie his shoes, let alone walk in them. But, I will point you to the One. For indeed One far greater than I is coming, and in fact, is here among us even now.  

The light of the world has come into the world and John is not it. John needs that light just as much as any of us. As much as we repent and as much as we try, we will never cover it all. I mean, we will never be the One who takes away the sins of the world.

The first two steps of repentance we learn from John. With him we might learn to say, “I am not the Savior, but I need and know the one who is.” That’s first. Second, with all our love, and attuned to our better, more compassionate, holy impulses we might point out where the light of Christ is shining. We might walk in that light and let its glow shine off us too.

By holding ourselves more lightly, by clinging more tightly to the divine grace that we are given, we are able to become more powerfully the ones in whom Christ the Savior is being born.

Writes Ann Lamott, “I do not at all understand the mystery of Grace, only that it meets us where we are but it does not leave us where it found us.”

Grace! That’s our world’s best hope. A love greater than us, and beyond our greatest brokenness. A love that calls us into what we are not able to become on our own.

And so we might pray: Not me, O God, but You; more and more of You. For the more of You in us, the more of hope, the more of justice, the more of love there will be.