Sermon by Tom Are Jr. | December 1, 2024 | Fourth Presbyterian Church

First Sunday of Advent
December 1, 2024

Celebrating Christmas with Mark

Tom Are Jr.
Interim Pastor

Isaiah 11:1–12
Mark 1:1–12

When our kids were younger, Christmas meant a road trip. We would rotate among my wife’s siblings. First to brother Bob’s house: he was the oldest. The next year, brother Dave’s house. Then sister Laura. Finally we would host. We drew names for gift exchanges. Seems most years I would draw Uncle Fred, which is an envied choice. He’s impossible to shop for. But he is the most gracious of all of us. No matter what you give him, he will say it’s perfect. You could give him salt and pepper shakers that look like nuns playing bongos and he would say, “Perfect! Just what I’ve always wanted.” The family meal is the center of the gathering. You should have been there the year everyone got evicted from the kitchen because we had a surplus of gravy experts — I think there were six. Turns out when you have that many gravy experts you can stack them all end to end and they still will not reach a conclusion on how to thicken the gravy.

We sit at the feasting table, hold hands, and sing the Doxology for our table prayer. The meal is always wonderful. We will tell stories, particularly stories we have told before, including the story about the great gravy eviction. We will take the family pictures. Hugs all around, back in the car, and head home.

The picture had to include the right Christmas decorations as background. Brother Bob always had a big tree. Brother Dave had single candle lights burning in every window. Sister Laura loved her Christmas cookies and played carols on the piano. At our home there was a nativity scene in almost every room.

I imagine that your family has your own traditions. As we celebrate the birth of the love that makes sense of our lives, we all do it our own way.

Over this Advent season I am going to invite us to engage in some holy imagination. We will stop by to celebrate Christmas at the homes of the Gospel writers. We have no archaeological evidence to support this imagination. We just have the words that they have left us. But that should be enough to spark the imagination.

We will begin by visiting Mark. When you arrive at Mark’s house, he will not greet you with “Merry Christmas” or even “Season’s greetings.” No, when you arrive, you will have to tell Mark that it’s Christmas, because Mark knows nothing of Christmas.

The first word of Mark’s Gospel is “The beginning.” But is it? Mark never speaks of Jesus as a baby or mentions a special birth. He has no wreath on the door. There are no Advent candles on the breakfast room table. He’s never heard “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” When you are at Mark’s house, there is absolutely no way to know that it’s Christmas; it just seems like ordinary time.

Christmas is the celebration of the incarnation, the good news that God has chosen to take on flesh and step into human history.

Mark may not know how Jesus was born, but Mark knows where the Son of God can be found in this world. He is very clear about that.

Mark’s story begins with Jesus’ baptism. And as Jesus comes up out of the water, the Spirit of God falls on him, and he hears these words: “You are my Son, whom I love.” It is a sweet moment. But it doesn’t last long. Immediately the Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness. That’s what it says, “the Spirit drove” — it sounds like the Spirit is Jesus’ Uber driver. But the Greek is ek-ballo, which means “cast out.” It is the word used to describe Jesus when he casts out demons. The Spirit casts Jesus into the wilderness. Clearly the wilderness is where God wants Jesus to be.

Now when we hear the word wilderness we are supposed to remember all the other wilderness stories in scripture, and if we do, we remember this. The wilderness isn’t a zip code. The wilderness is anywhere that God’s people are tested. The wilderness is anywhere we must decide if God’s word can be trusted. The wilderness is where God’s ways will seem foolish and other voices will sound reasonable. The wilderness is anywhere disappointment is fresh, where fear is in the air, anywhere hearts are broken.

You know wilderness. You might find it at home, at work, sometimes even in church. The wilderness is never far away.

Mark knows this, so we might wonder why the Spirit of God would cast Jesus into the wilderness. If I understand the text, it is because that’s where we all live, at least sometimes. And if you ask me, Jesus never gets out of that wilderness. From the beginning to the end of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is in the battle. He battles demons and storms. He pushes against social structures that oppress. From his first moment until his last, he is in the battle — feeding the hungry and healing the sick and attacking the powers that dehumanize us. His ministry starts that way and it ends that way, with his blood spilling on wilderness ground. And there at the cross, we hear again those words that begin this story — “Truly he was the Son of God.”

If I understand the text, Mark is telling us he may not know where Jesus was born, but he knows where the Son of God can be found: in the wilderness, because that’s where we are. The Son of God shows up in the broken places.

So Mark’s home is likely to be a mobile home. You might find Mark’s house in the center of town where the powers of the city meet and there is always tension between ideals and power. Or his home can be in the suburbs, with manicured lawns and children with activities scheduled morning, noon, and night — running after some promised future that consumes the gift of the present. He sometimes lives in a noisy rental, with locks on the door and the neighbor’s TV playing too loudly. He sometimes lives in the dorm — the place of all-nighters and those lonely times trying to decide who you are going to be. Or in the retirement home where the pictures of the grandchildren fill the shelf but the loneliness is in the air.

He is in hospital rooms and jail cells, where nightmares are lived in the daytime and morning comes too often with no promise of a new day.

Mark doesn’t know where Jesus was born, but he knows where the Son of God lives: in the wilderness, because the Son of God shows up in the broken places.

At Mark’s house, they don’t sing “Silent Night” or “Away in a Manger,” but they know “There Is a Balm in Gilead” by heart.

While all the Gospel writers talk of Jesus in the wilderness, Mark is the only one who says when Jesus was there he was with the wild beasts. It’s an odd thing to say, so odd we might skip over it. But don’t.

Some read the mention of the wild beasts as a symbol of the powers against which Jesus fights. But I’m not convinced. I think when Mark says Jesus was with the wild beasts, Mark has that old promise of the prophet Isaiah rumbling around in the back of his mind.

You remember it.

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together.

It’s a metaphor of God’s promised day. Jesus goes into the wilderness, as God’s holy love in flesh, and there, even in the wilderness, there are glimpses of God’s promised day.

Tony Snow was a news commentator and, for a while, press secretary for President George W. Bush. At age fifty-three, he died of cancer. Before he died, he wrote,

“Picture yourself in a hospital bed. The fog of anesthesia has begun to wear away. A doctor stands at your feet, a loved one holds your hand at the side. ‘It’s cancer,’ the healer announces. The natural reaction is to turn to God and ask him to serve as a cosmic Santa. ‘Dear God, make it all go away. Make everything simpler.’ But another voice whispers: ‘You have been called.’ Your quandary has drawn you closer to God, closer to those you love, closer to the issues that matter.”

Some time later Tony Snow did an interview on one of the news networks, I don’t recall which one. He began to speak of his sons. As he spoke, he broke down. He said their names and began to cry. Then wiping his tears he said, “It is so great to love this much.”

This is the truth of life. There is no escaping the wilderness. Everyone is sentenced to wilderness time. But this is also true: the wilderness does not extinguish the love of God. Love is the power that brings joy and hope and beauty even in the wilderness.

Mark knows this. When your life is hard, when your heart is broken, when you eat disappointment for breakfast and the night is long in fear, in those moments, sometimes with the greatest clarity, we discover the Son of God, or learn that the Son of God has discovered us, for he has come to say “I love you.” And those are the most important words.

Christmas can be hard. It’s supposed to be so wonderful, so joyful, but sometimes it simply magnifies our hunger, our grief, our fear. That’s when we need to spend Christmas with Mark, because he knows the Son of God will meet us in the broken places.

If that’s you, you will want to visit Mark’s house this Christmas. He will get it.

I am thinking of those of you who are painfully aware of the empty place at the table because death has come in all its harshness this year.

I am thinking of those of you who have all the externals lined up in perfect order — family, career, accomplishments — and yet there is a hole in your soul and you feel absolutely lost.

I’m thinking of those of you who look at the world the way it is and it breaks your heart. You yearn for a sense-maker. You hunger for kindness and compassion. You are starved for a love that can be trusted.

You will be welcomed at Mark’s house. Mark’s house is filled with those who are in the storm, who find themselves in the wilderness.

That wilderness can show up anywhere, and the truth is it is never far away.

But Mark knows that because Jesus is always in the wilderness, it is also there that we gain glimpses of God’s promised day, for the love of God is sometimes most obvious in the broken places.

At Mark’s house there is no nativity with shepherds and a star, but everywhere you look you can tell the love of God has taken on flesh and has come to live where you live and to speak the only words that matter really: You are my child, whom I love.