Mark 1:1-8
December 15, 2002
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
When I was growing up in Boston, one of the things I remember doing was not wearing shorts when I went downtown. I always thought that I needed to wear long pants. Wearing shorts in my Roxbury neighborhood was okay but going downtown with all of that concrete and steel, big trucks splashing dirty water on me, I needed long pants to protect myself from the threat of the big city.
Now that we live in the San Francisco Bay Area, we know better to not wear shorts in the city when the cold fog blocks out the sun. You can always tell who are the tourists because they are the ones in shorts!
When John the Baptist was preaching and baptizing in the Jordan River, he was saying that the cities were like the wilderness and the desert. He recited Isaiah 40:3,
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”
Not too flattering an image of where we live, is it? The cities were like wilderness not knowing the Lord. They were like the desert with no clear way to come to God.
And if we honestly examine our sexual mores, our business habits, our government’s leadership, violent life in the nation’s inner cities, or even calculating the millions spent on mind-numbing drugs and alcohol, the words wilderness and desert, are not too much of an overstatement of our situation. Our world sometimes looks wildly out of control and deserted from knowing the truth.
When I was in Boston, we used to call our fair city an urban jungle and Roxbury, a poor ghetto. Is San Francisco any better?
Coming Back to Chinatown
Maybe that’s why John went out to the natural wilderness along the Jordan River to preach. He called people out of their wild cities and urban jungles and beckoned them to come out into another wilderness along the Jordan River. From the violent wilderness and alienated desert of their daily lives, John called people to come out to another wilderness along the baptismal waters of the Jordan River to hear that the Good News is coming.
The desert had been the place where God called Israel after they were enslaved in Egypt during the exodus. The wilderness was where Israel lost its way and wandered for forty years. Now we see John was calling people out of their cities and inviting them to go into a new wilderness to repent.
The prophets had spoken of a time when Israel, separated and alienated from God because of sin, would once again be gathered and re-united with God. John was calling Israel back out into the wilderness, like a new exodus, a re-gathering of the scattered, despairing people.
And isn’t this what is happening today? We have come back into the wilderness of Chinatown—from San Jose, San Luis Obispo, Berkeley, all over the larger Bay Area to experience a new exodus, a re-gathering of scattered and often time despairing people to know God.
From where we live, we have everything we need—everything we ever would want. But in a divine way, the wildernesses and deserts of our neighborhoods have not satisfied our hunger for living bread and thirst for living water. So we come to the baptismal waters in Chinatown, a downtown wilderness to repent and become honest with ourselves.
God Summons
But a people separated from God due to their sin cannot come back to God unless they are summoned, unless God is willing to forgive, to let go of God’s justifiable case against Israel and receive the chosen people back.
Mark is saying that this is what’s happening in John the Baptist and his preaching. Israel is being summoned back to God. The way back, that straight highway through the desert comes through confession and forgiveness. Thus John proclaims a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”
Advent is a time for us to be honest. Sometimes we complain that God seems so far away from us. But to be really honest with ourselves, perhaps it is more accurate to say that we are far away from God. God is truth, and yet we live by deceit. God is light, yet we seem, in countless ways, to prefer darkness to light. How can people like us, living in this wilderness, this desert we call home, can we ever hope to come back to God?
The answer is that God has come back to us. In the ministry of John the Baptist crying in the wilderness, God comes to us saying, “I will forgive you. You can come home.”
That’s how Mark opens his gospel. Did you hear the opening words today? “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” John the Baptist, preaching baptism for the forgiveness of sins, is announcing the beginning of the good news. Later on, Jesus, the Good News, will demand much of us. He will teach us about the narrow way that leads to life, and we will wander away from that way. Countless times we will forsake his way, we will disappoint him, deceive him, and deny him.
But none of our sin is able to defeat this beginning of the good news. For those who dwell in the wilderness, a voice is leading us. For those who are lost in the desert, a prophet is showing us a way home. God has sent John the Baptist out to us to proclaim to us the way back home.
Coming Back to God
For us to know the good news of Jesus Christ, there are two steps.
The first step is simple honesty: we sin, we fall short of the glory of God, we wander away, we lie. We don’t know how to save ourselves from ourselves. This is repentance, the simple admission that, in our sin, we need to be forgiven.
The second step is related to the first: God forgives. Isn’t it interesting that the very first thing that God has to say to us in Mark, the very first sermon in this gospel, is forgiveness? We can be washed, made clean, born again. We can start over, made fresh like a newborn. God forgives.
In our Baptism Service today, we are privileged to witness how God has summoned Tommy Lim, Edmund Lee, and Justin Louie to be born again for God has forgiven them.
Christian Revenge
I like to share a story with you on this Advent Sunday. It’s a bit long but I want you to hear it.
Many years ago in India, a group of men traveling through a desolate desert country found a seriously wounded man lying beside the road. They carried him to the Christian mission hospital some distance away and asked the missionary physician who met them at the door if a bed was available for the man. The physician looked at the injured man and immediately saw that he was an Afghan, a member of the warring Patau tribe, “Bring him in,” he said. “For him we have a bed.”
When the physician examined the man, he found that an attacker had seriously injured his eyes and the man’s sight was imperiled. The man was desperate with fear and rage, pleading with the doctor to restore his sight so that he could find his attacker and extract retribution. “I want revenge,” he screamed. “I want to kill him. After that I don’t care whether I am blind the rest of my life!”
The doctor told the man that he was in a Christian hospital, that Jesus had come to show us how to love and forgive others, even to love and forgive our enemies. The man listened but was unmoved. He told the doctor that Jesus’ words about forgiveness and love were nice, but meaningless. Revenge was the only goal, vengeance the only reality. The doctor rose from his bedside, saying that he needed to attend to other patients. He promised to return that evening to tell the man a story, a story about a person who took revenge.
When he returned that evening, the doctor began his story. Long ago, he recounted, the British government had sent a man to serve as envoy to Afghanistan, but as he traveled to his new post, he was attacked on the road by a hostile tribe, accused of espionage, and thrown into a shabby makeshift prison. There was only one other prisoner, and the men suffered through their ordeal together. They were poorly clothed, badly fed, and mistreated cruelly by the guards.
Their only comfort was a copy of the Book of Common Prayer, which had been given to the envoy as a farewell gift by his sister in England. She has inscribed her name along with the message of good will on the first leaf. This book served the men not only as a source of their prayers but also as a diary, as a place to record their daily experiences. The margins of the prayer book became a journal of their anguish and their faith.
Those two prisoners were never heard from again. Their families and friends waited for news that never came; they simply vanished without a word, leaving those who loved them in uncertain grief.
Over 20 years later, a man browsing through a second-hand shop found the prayer book. How it got there, no one can say. But, after reading some of the journal entries in the margin, he recognized its value, located the sister whose name was in the front of the book, and sent it to her.
With deep heartache she read each entry. When she came to the last one, she noted that it was in a different handwriting. It said simply that the two prisoners had been taken from their cell, publicly flogged and then forced to dig their own graves before being executed.
At that moment she knew what she must do. Her brother had died a cruel death at the hand of torturers in a run-down Afghan jail, and this injustice must be requited. She must exact revenge…but Christian revenge.
She was not wealthy, the doctor continued, but she marshaled all the money she could and sent it to the mission hospital. Her instructions were that the money was to be used to keep a bed free at all times for a sick or wounded Afghan. This was to be her revenge for her brother’s torture at the hands of Afghans and his death in their country.
The wounded man was quiet, silenced by this story of such strange revenge. “My friend,” said the doctor, “you are now lying in that bed. Your care is her revenge.” (Thomas Long)
When the sister practiced “Christian revenge” to an Afghan whom she didn’t know, she put away her sin for revenge and forgave all those who cruelly killed her brother. She was able to start her life again. And perhaps this sister’s act of forgiveness and this doctor’s willingness to heal the wounded may have also changed this Afghan man’s own rage and vengeance to understand that we all come up short in God’s eyes. And we too need forgiveness.
Like the Afghan, we don’t deserve this bed in the hospital. But God forgives so that we can be heal and start over again.
Washed Up
Kids would say, “I’m washed up for dinner. Can we eat now?” When I make a big mistake and disappoint you, I might say, “I’m all washed up.” And when it comes to John the Baptist’s message of “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” it means that we are all “washed up and clean” in the baptismal waters of God’s grace of forgiveness and love.
The Advent color of purple symbolizes penitence, a time for us to look honestly at ourselves and admit that we have sinned against God and are in need of forgiveness. And Advent also means that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who will baptize us in the Holy Spirit, is coming into the world to summon us back to be God’s people.
From the wildernesses and deserts of our lives, God is calling you back to the baptismal waters in the wilderness of Chinatown to repent and become washed up from our sins for God forgives you and me.
Let us pray.
God of Joy and Love, we hear you calling us to be honest with who we are—fallen short of your expectations of who we should be. Show us the way to know that we have sinned against you but also touch our hearts to believe that we have been forgiven by you. The coming of Jesus is your everlasting love for the world that there’s peace and goodwill among all in whom you favor. In the name of the Christ who comes, Amen.