Well, we are in our second Sunday in Advent.
And so maybe you come from a church that celebrates Advent, you're familiar with that, or maybe it's something that's new to you, maybe you just have heard the word at some point.
Well, Advent is a the season, the weeks leading up, the four Sundays leading up to Christmas.
So we celebrate Advent to prepare our hearts for Christmas.
It's a season of waiting and hoping.
That's what the season is about.
For us, that's kind of what our lives are about, right?
Like waiting and hoping.
I mean, specifically, we can think about that in terms of the last nine months.
I mean, it just feels like we're constantly waiting for something, some change, something, waiting and hoping for something to change.
But all of life is sort of like this.
Certainly the Christian life, how we like to word it in our church, is already, but not yet.
You're already fully restored in Jesus, and yet you're not yet experiencing the fullness of the restoration that you have in Jesus, that wholeness.
You're already free in Jesus.
Already, because that was earned for you on the cross.
And yet, not yet, not yet, experiencing the extent of which God intends for you to have that freedom.
Already healed in Jesus, great news, but not yet experiencing the fullness of that healing that we one day will experience.
So we wait and we hope, and this is Advent, this idea of waiting and hoping.
This past summer, our neighbors went out of town.
So our neighbors next door, they have four little girls, and we have three little girls, that's seven little girls, in two homes that are about ten feet apart.
There's a lot of little girls, and they play together a lot.
They play together every single day.
And so everything is great until one of us goes out of town, and then the other family doesn't quite know what to do with their children.
And so one week this summer, they went out of town, their four little girls disappeared, and a vacuum appeared inside the hearts of my children.
What do they fill this with?
And so the days went by.
Finally, the day came when our neighbors would be coming back in town.
And so, art girls, they made a banner, welcome home, and they put it on the front porch, and they got their chalk and they filled their driveway with art and welcome back, and wrote all the family members' names and drew all these pictures.
It took hours and hours of preparation.
And then when the time grew near, two of the little girls, two of my little girls, they rode their bikes down to the end of the street about an hour before the family was due home.
I'd let them know, hey, you don't have to go down there.
Like we could just text them, you know, like let us know when you're really close.
But no, they were all in, they're riding down, they're sitting there waiting and waiting and waiting for this return.
And then, because they're eagerly waiting, right?
Like they've been preparing for this.
And then when the time came near, the car turned on the street.
I mean, it was as miraculous as Jesus born in a major.
This was the same status of miracle is what this was.
And my girls come pedaling down the street, and all three of my girls are there in the front yard welcoming them back, right?
This is a good image for us, Radvin.
This image of eagerly awaiting and preparing our hearts to celebrate, to celebrate the coming of the one that can fill the vacuum in our hearts.
So I want to pause before we open and look at our text to pray for us, for us as individuals and us as a church.
To pray that the Holy Spirit would prepare for us, prepare in us room to celebrate, to celebrate as Jesus that the season's about.
So let's pray together.
God, we come before you to say there is a vacuum in our hearts that can only be filled by you.
And we while we say that, we know that we do not always fill that vacuum with you.
And for that we are sorry.
And yet we celebrate that you love us in spite of that, and that we know that you are the one that fulfills.
Not only do you fulfill the law, you fulfill our hearts.
We live in the already and not yet, and we hope and we wait for the day when we will experience in fullness all that which we are tasting, just a little bit now.
We pray as we open your scriptures.
Would you speak to our hearts?
Would we understand things more deeply, even our minds?
Would our hearts be opened up in a greater way to be astonished by your love for us?
In Jesus' name, amen.
Our text this morning is Mark chapter 1, verses 1 through 8.
John the Baptist is in this text.
We got John and Jesus in this text.
John the Baptist in this text, and John is this wild man in the wilderness.
We'll read about how he he wore camel hair clothing, a leather belt.
He ate locusts, he's out in the wilderness, a wild man.
He's a rock star as well.
I mean, he's preaching, and people are just showing up.
I mean, this guy is being well known and followed.
So Mark 1, verse 1.
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet, behold, I send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way.
The voice of the one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
Now John was clothed with camel's hair, wore a leather belt around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey, and he preached, saying, After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I'm not worthy to stoop down and untie.
I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
Point number one is this we are recipients.
We have recipients and participants in God's redemptive story.
We're both of those things.
We don't have to just jump into being a participant after becoming a Christian and forget that we're recipients.
So easy to move into what we can do for God and forget that God is delighting in us long before we do anything for Him.
And so we are recipients of this redemption story that God is redeeming us.
He's doing that redemptive work inside of you.
And then we go and we become participants in that story in the world, neighbors and friends and family.
John's this rock star, he certainly could have made much of himself.
I mean, he had the status, he had the resume, he had the following.
He could have easily boasted in his own following in that regard and made a lot of himself.
And yet he's saying the opposite.
He says, No, I'm not even worthy to untie those sandals.
Now it'd be easy to just cast religious shame here and view it as a religious shame, but that's not what this is.
It's not saying I'm worth nothing.
It's actually saying, even while I'm created in the image of God and hold immense beauty and worth, even then I'm not worthy because he is that worthy.
And the gift to us, what a gift.
This the gift to us here is that you and I, we don't have to spend our whole lives trying to make much of ourselves as to be important or worthy.
And to get that, embrace that, and come into the story of Jesus' immense worth, to be free of having to make much of yourself over and over again, just to be more important by what you do, to be worthy, and to be free of that, and to be a recipient of worth, and to come into the redemption story for you.
What a freedom we have.
That's true of me as a pastor.
It's true of you if you're a teacher or a banker or a stay at home with your kids.
I mean, it's just the truth that we have, this gift of grace.
Verse 8, John makes this incredible statement.
I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you Jesus.
Jesus will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
Elizabeth this morning, and then separately, like a second time, you'll get baptized with the Holy Spirit.
That's not what we're talking about here.
This is beautiful imagery John's laying out for us to say, Jesus is coming.
And we're moving from ritual to a relationship of gift and grace.
Point number two is this.
Our hearts revert to using law.
That's a religious way to say works righteousness, which is another religious way to say, if I do good enough, I'll be accepted by God.
If I do this next thing, then I'll be accepted by God.
So our hearts revert to using law to feel accepted by God.
So we must keep preaching the gospel to ourselves.
The context here is these baptismal pools, mikvas.
They're all over the place.
They're surrounded the Temple Mount.
And the followers of Yahweh, before entering the Temple Mount, that presence of God, they would cleanse themselves in these mikvas.
So the key there is they would cleanse themselves.
They would go into these pools of water over and over and over and over again before they went to the Temple Mount.
They cleansed themselves before entering the presence of God.
And can you see what John's laying out for us here?
This idea of baptism or a practice that we do, moving from a works righteousness, something you do in order to be accepted by God.
And then he says, but Jesus does this for you, gives you the Holy Spirit, that you are covered.
That's that word baptism, to be immersed.
So we poured water over busy, or we could have dunked her, or dunked you, or dunked somebody else underwater.
Either way, it's the imagery of being covered.
John knew that his baptism, this way of baptism that he was baptized in, wasn't quite enough.
Like he's kind of in between.
He's one of those prophets, like a prophet in the Old Testament.
He's preaching repentance.
He knows that Jesus needs to come to fulfill the law, and he's standing in between and he's saying, No, there's somebody, there's another one coming.
This Jesus is coming to fulfill the law.
That we don't have to live by ritual.
The good news is that our Heavenly Father so desires a relationship with us, not of guilt or obligation, free of guilt and obligation, that he came through his son Jesus.
And that's what we celebrate.
See, the law in works righteousness assumes that if you can only do enough or do one more thing, then you would be okay.
Then you would be enough.
Then you'd be fine with God.
But the law never works.
So a quick response, you can think about this as I ask this question.
Has being told to wear your mask and wash your hands and socially distance make you want to wash your hands and wear your mask and socially distance, right?
Those two different things.
Now, maybe you would say, uh, no, you know, I'm not washing my hands in 30 seconds like I did in March.
Maybe you'd be willing to admit that.
We probably all should be, right?
The guidance is good, the law is good, but it's not making you want to do those things.
Actually, as soon as you are told to do those things over and over again, you begin to build some resentment.
Now, maybe you would say you'd admit to that.
You say, Yeah, that's me, I'll do it, but I am being resentful of it because I hate people telling me what to do.
Now, maybe you're being told what to do and you're like, no, I'm in line with it.
Like, I'm all in, and so you're all in and you're doing it, but you're resenting everybody else who's not doing it, right?
Like you're just judgmental of them.
Good, kind of like religious judgment, like we like to do in churches.
Either way, what we see here is the law can't change your heart.
Being told what to do doesn't have the power to change and create a heart that is pure to be obedient and pure to love other people.
We have to have the fulfillment of the law, Jesus, for us.
I was baptized as a 17-year-old at Hebron Southern Baptist Church.
We talked a lot about baptism in the church, because it was a Baptist church, and so that was just part of our spirituality.
And for me, it was an incredibly serious and contemplative thing for me.
I really prayed about that and processed that, and my decision to be baptized was a big decision for me in my life.
It was important, it was a marking moment for me.
It was about me, the symbol of me surrendering to Christ, and it was that.
Looking back on it, I do think I mistook it a little bit.
Because I saw it solely as my statement about my commitment to Jesus.
Right?
Like it was about me, my commitment, my statement.
Which oddly, of course, in that line of thinking and reasoning and motive, I enjoyed just as much all of the people afterward telling me how proud they were of me as much as I did enjoy the baptism.
Of course.
And what I was missing was that wasn't that wasn't about my commitment.
That was a piece of it, but the majority of it was about being covered with God's love for me, God's pursuit of me, God's commitment to me, God's covenant for me.
Fleming Rutledge, who's an Episcopal priest, theologian, incredible thinker, she's an incredible thinker.
Here's what she says, thinking about John the Baptist and repentance, Advent, this comes from her Advent book.
If I'm told over and over to repent, to change, to orient my life to God, nothing will ever happen.
I will cling to the Gucci luggage, not that I could afford it, and the earthly status symbols more desperately than ever.
I don't need to hear exhortations to repent.
I need power from outside myself to make me different.
A power from outside is coming, a power that is able to make a new creation out of people like us, stones like us, people who have no capacity of ourselves to save ourselves.
The power that is coming is not our power, not the power of our deeds or our inner strength or our spiritual discipline or our faith or even our repentance.
It is God's power that gives good deeds and inner strength and spiritual discipline and faith and repentance.
What a gift it is to have proper order.
Right?
That God's power in us that comes to us by his grace is what enables and creates the fuel by which we might have repentance or discipline.
Good deeds.
So effort is not over, but earning is long gone.
Point number three is this.
I think this is where it could perhaps intersect our lives, definitely for me.
We are free to rest our hearts in God's love and the presence of God, not politics, vaccines, or the news.
Our hearts will rest somewhere.
And what this is telling us is that we have a place of rest that is not the news or politics or vaccines.
Maybe you just need to keep listing other things of social media or something else.
Those are mine.
Maybe they're yours.
Maybe you understand that a little bit.
Is my greatest temptation, certainly just to look for another update, another bit of information.
You know, like to be baptized in the water of news again today, and that like suddenly that's gonna satisfy me.
That'll be enough all of a sudden.
That'll give me peace.
Has it worked for nine months?
I don't suppose it to work for the next nine months.
There's no amount of information that can give peace to my busy heart.
That has to be solved by the Lord.
Oliver Bergman, who writes for The Guardian, wrote this.
I heard it on the Mockingcast podcast this week.
Here's what he wrote.
See if you recognize this at all in yourself.
Sometime around the one-two punch of Brexit and Trump, I started to notice in myself, and even more so in friends, a tendency I've only been able to describe as living inside the news.
It was as if more and more people were shifting their psychological center of gravity.
So the news was somehow realer to them than the concrete world of work, family, and friends.
I don't just mean they were spending too much time online or addicted to social media, although they were and we are.
I mean that the realm of presidencies and referendums and humanitarian crisis have become the main drama of their daily lives, with their actual daily lives delegated to a sideshow.
Well, he's describing me pretty well.
Certainly the news overlaps our lives and reflects it and informs it.
But there is a difference, isn't there, between the news and what we hear and what we listen and the concreteness of a day, a given day, and our daily lives, our actual work, our actual family and friends and neighbors.
And the Holy Spirit is not waiting for us in the news.
That's not how it works.
The Holy Spirit is inside of us in this moment.
And so that is why we find our rest in Him before we go into the news or into something more abstract.
Because God is operating inside of us in the concreteness of today.
So what does this mean for my life?
Perhaps this is what it could mean.
Number one, listen to the news.
Not saying don't listen to the news, listen to the news, please listen to the news.
But rest in your immersion, that's the imagery of today, your immersion in God's already acceptance in favor of you.
And that's the gift of Jesus.
Many of us are missing the enjoyment of the Spirit on a day-to-day basis to walk by the Spirit because we're just feeling the vacuum inside of us with other stuff.
And news is the easy thing for us to do right now.
We have a resting place for our hearts, an enjoyment that we can have with the Spirit.
Number two, as already accepted and righteous in Jesus, what a gift that is to start the sentence with that.
You get to seek to enjoy the presence of God in you.
You get to do that.
And that is without obligation or guilt.
It is inside of God's delight for you that He's already delighted in you through Jesus.
As much as He delights in the Son, He delights in you.
And so we have the secure Holy Spirit inside of us that we are buried in, immersed in.
And that we get to quietly align our hearts with on a day-to-day basis.
And to enjoy the presence of God.
And so we wait and we hope.
We wait and we hope.
My brothers and sisters, Merry Christmas.
What a Merry Christmas that is to hear that.
That you are baptized, not by water, by ritual, by regulation, by rules, by more, something more to do, but you are baptized, immersed and buried and covered by Jesus and by the gift of the Spirit to you.
Let's pray together.
God, thank you for your grace and your mercy that you fulfilled the law for us.
And while effort is not over, earning is gone.
Guilt as a motivator is gone, obligation is gone, but we are motivated by your grace in us.
Equipped, energized, fueled, empowered, animated by your spirit.
God, we are people who wake up and revert back to trying to do enough, trying to be enough, rather than resting in that we are already enough in you, and forgive us for the way in which we're filling that vacuum inside of us with things other than you.
Help us to move our gaze from the news and from updates to that which is secure.
That we are already delighted in by you.
We pray this in Jesus' name.
Amen.