Stoop Down
Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8
December 4, 2011
I always wondered, how did John’s call for repentance – “Prepare the way of the Lord!” – get around and circulate among the population and summon them all the way down to the River Jordan, a lengthy and dangerous journey from Jerusalem. How fast can the word of mouth fly? I must also admit that I was never able to catch the excitement and passion that was obviously crammed into that imperative. Lost in translation I supposed until that play and movie Godspell came out in the early 1970’s, and put to song and image an inspired interpretation of the dynamism of the Gospel.
No River Jordan here in this thoroughly modern rendering, for the wilderness, the wild place is mid-town Manhattan in which a voice sings hauntingly out of nowhere like a siren beckoning, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord!” A mix and match of people hear the call out of the teeming throngs: a waitress, an African-American young man, a woman exercising in sweat suit, a ballerina, a nerdy fellow, a fashionably-dressed young woman. From all directions they gravitate to a fountain in Central Park where they giddily splash around in the calf-high water, falling in, being immersed, with John the Baptist welcoming them gleefully, dressed in a Sergeant Pepper-style jacket. The Baptist here is not thundering the need for repentance, but an invitation into a new way of life. There are only about 10 people in the fountain – the Christian Church has only been a mass movement at its worst – and each one discards shoes, coats, fancy hats, purses and briefcases as they approach their impromptu baptisms. They have pre-pared themselves, pared away the accoutrements of society that values things too much.
The only time the Baptist is not smiling and laughing are two brief moments when he catches a glimpse of a young man at the edge of the fountain watching them, looking to step in, but holding back. John knows who he is, but does not speak to him yet.
This may be the centre of Nineveh West, the godless realm of Gotham, but the Baptist exults to the newly baptized that there comes yet another person who won’t just baptize you with water, but with the Holy Spirit, a person so magnificent, so holy, that John is not worthy to take off his shoes. It seems in the midst of the hippie free love ‘70’s a little out of place to use such ancient language. Nevertheless, in any age that’s how the Spirit does move, something radically new yet incredibly old. We become young by becoming old again; we are made new at the moment we conceive how to relive the ancient.
See, we don’t necessarily begin with a birth. The Church figured it out long ago that before the Nativity you need an Advent. Nothing fancy or spectacular, no fireworks or angelic choirs singing, just a time to prepare for a future we can barely imagine. Christians have not been very good at waiting all these years. Advent drives us crazy because it is too vague, and we’d much rather get right on to the familiar Christmas morning scenario. I am not one of those Advent police who want to ban Christmas Carols during Advent, let’s sing them all, because when Christmas Eve arrives you and I need to know what is happening.
What is happening in Advent is that with a new year, we are beginning again from the beginning. You are becoming a new person again and together we are again becoming a new church, paring away our old stuff, welcoming strangers, becoming friends with people who are different than us, engaging in undignified activities.
We begin by stooping down. “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie,” says John whether he is on the verge of Jordan or in Central Park. In the first century sandals were the rule, but on dusty roads one’s feet still became quite dirty and it was the responsibility of the lowest level of slave to get down and take off the sandals of a guest and wash their feet, and who knows what substances those feet had walked through. John the Baptist, the last great prophet, knew he was not even good enough to do that. This is not false humility, playing humble pie, but the recognition that in the first place we are servants of God, not powerful people, or wealthy managers of worldly capital, or even wonderfully virtuous and righteous people. We are imperfect and incomplete, call us sinful if you wish according to the old language, but the paradox is that once you are truly humble you can do infinitely more than the most powerful and proudest people.
John wore funny weird clothes, camel’s hair and a leather belt, eating locusts and wild honey. He probably smelled a mighty smell as well, and he wasn’t worthy to untie the smelly sandals of an itinerant preacher. Joseph and Mary were long seen to be an unmarried couple, pregnant out of wedlock, a disgrace in society, who had to settle for the stable because the motel was full, and gave birth to the son who changes everything except that he was born in an animal’s manger in less than sanitary conditions. This doesn’t meet our standards of what being divine is all about. This isn’t the way we think we should look like as a church with straw and dirt and crunchy locusts at the fellowship hour.
Being Christian, being godly, being the Church is not always the prettiest and most prestigious in this world that insists upon being pretty and prestigious to get anywhere. When you stoop down and pre-pare the way of the Lord in yourself and in this community of faith, you get rid of a lot of pretty and prestigious stuff. What you and I are left with is God’s imagination. God imagined the world and all of creation, thought it through, and then said the Word. When your mind and heart is not consumed in having possessions and power and honour, you and I can imagine a new world, a new way of life, a new church once again. If we can stoop down, then we can imagine how to live in the kingdom of heaven.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan