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Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8
The Collect of the Day
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’” John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” (Mark 1:1-8)
The Coming of God
The Rev. Dr. Bill Stroop, Rector
Among my many foibles, I am addicted to the news. Every morning I stumble sleepily into the kitchen, and while waiting for the coffee to finish, I turn on the TV to watch the morning news. When I get to work, my computer keeps me up-to-date with the many news services I subscribe to. I get several newspaper links sent daily by email, and I often begin my day with the New York Times on line.
We all remember the good old days before cable and computers, when we would tune into a local TV station to hear the 6 or 10 o’clock news with its mixture of news, sports, and weather delivered by a somewhat passionless, robotic anchor person sitting at a desk, blankly reading the news from a teleprompter (and sometimes very badly!).
Cable, the internet, and satellite have changed all that.[1] Now we don’t have to wait until 10 o’clock to catch the news. We can get it anytime of the day. And not just from a single source either. And the people reading the news these days are anything but robotic, and the newsrooms themselves are anything but static. At CNN, John Roberts and Kiran Chetry dazzle me into consciousness each morning with on site and on line interviews, and at “fair and balanced” Fox News, there’s Bill O’Reilly’s outrage du jour. Scanning with the remote, there’s Jon Stewart on The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s Colbert Report who give us a sense of the news mingled with their particular brands of humor. Their news is “fake news” – a tongue-in-cheek view of the day’s events using satire and puns to poke fun at world and national events.
Having fun with the news – and making some serious points at the same time – is not new. We all remember the early days of Saturday Night Live with its totally fake news designed as pure mockery and parody of the newsmakers and politicians of the day. No one then took that news seriously, because it was not intended to be news. It was 100% political satire. The same is true with the The Daily Show and the Colbert Report. But the difference between now and then was that in the past, “late night” was when we expected to be taken to a no-holds-barred comedic forum. Late night was a time for relief from the serious, very gritty, and sometimes terribly harsh reality of the daily news. Even the short monolog that starts shows like The Late Show are often parodies of the news and the newsmakers of the day.
But now, comedy has become mainstream news. During the weeks leading up to the last election, even traditional news channels showed clips of Tina Fey as Sarah Palin in order to attract viewers. In addition, network news programs have done other things to draw viewership back. Have you noticed how news anchors now have to stand in front of the camera instead of sitting at the desk? Walter Cronkite’s big desk is a thing of the past. Does standing make the news better? More believable? More palatable?
It seems that as a culture, we don’t want to hear the hard news any more. Perhaps the news we get from Wall Street and around the world is too much for us to handle. Bad news in our community and nation is bad enough. But hearing bad news from every country of the globe, every minute of every day might just be too much.
To compensate, program executives have come up with “infotainment” programs like The Daily Show to give us a safe way of talking about the bad stuff that is the bread and butter of TV news programs. Bad news wrapped up in stupid by-lines and gallows humor and delivered to us with a coating of with sarcasm is easier to swallow than the raw stuff.
More than twenty years ago, Neil Postman wrote a book called, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. In that book he described the news as something that motivates us or that doesn’t. If something motivates you, like stock information might motivate a broker, or weather information might affect business travelers, it is material with a high information to action ratio. In other words, it is news you can use; that affects you in the here and now. But most news is of the low information to action ratio; news that doesn’t lead to any meaningful action or change.
In the first Chapter of Mark, we hear from that first century anchor man, John the Baptist. Like NBC’s Brian Williams, John stood up to tell the news. But unlike those well-groomed and dressed men, John was not slick or suave. He was about rough as 80 grit sand paper, and he had a wardrobe right out of Afghanistan. Although his low carb diet of bugs and honey kept him fit and trim, he clearly would have looked better sitting on a camel than he did wearing one!
His message was not jocular, funny, or sarcastic. He was not the Stephen Colbert of his day. He proclaimed a baptism of repentance and announced that someone even greater was coming. This was apparently heard as news with a high information to action ratio, because the people responded by coming from all over the Judean countryside to be baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
They didn’t come because of baptism per se. Although “Jewish tradition used baptism, [it was really only something] … for proselytes who came into Judaism from other faiths. [From a Jewish perspective,] it was natural that the sin-stained, polluted proselyte should be baptized. But no Jew had ever conceived that he, a member of the chosen people, a son of Abraham, assured of God’s salvation, could ever need baptism. Baptism was for sinners, and no Jew ever conceived of himself as a sinner shut out from God.”[2] So if they did not come because of the need for baptism, why did they come and submit to it?
First century Jews were oppressed people. For many generations they had been praying for and expecting a savior – the messiah – to deliver them. And John preached that Good News to them with an apparent fervor and believability that they willingly waded into the Jordan to prepare themselves for the messiah’s coming. To these people, John’s message was high information that motivated them to act.
Advent for us is the time of the year when we prepare and anticipate the coming of the messiah. To be sure, we know the messiah is already here. But that news needs to be heard again and again – just like an important news story sometimes needs to be heard again and again to fully appreciate its significance and consequences. And the story is so significant that it needs to be acted upon.
As you have heard me say over and over again from this pulpit, the focus of our attention needs to be on the action; on our response to the news.
Jesus’ coming into the world is high information that demands a response. John’s response was to proclaim him to the people as the One. John’s response was to announce him. There are still people like John today telling of the Good News that Jesus represents. And they do it sometimes like John did – by preaching and teaching. But there are many others who proclaim Jesus to the world by emulating him; by treating others with dignity and respect, loving others as themselves, and giving thanks to God for sending Jesus to us to show us a better way of life.
John came to a decision about Jesus, and acted upon it. John acted on his belief.
What will you do?
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Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18 Qui regis Israel
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,’” John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
Merciful God, who sent your messengers the prophets to preach repentance and prepare the way for our salvation: Give us grace to heed their warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
[1] Timothy Merrill, Executive Editor. “Fake News.” Homiletics. 6(17):42-46 (November/December 2005).
[2] William Barklay. The Gospel of Matthew, Vol. 1, Revised Edition. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1975), 59-60.
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Copyright © 2008, William G. Stroop - All Rights Reserved.
4 December 2008
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