Straight Road
Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8

December 7, 2008


Straight road! What more fitting venue for the arrival of the Messiah - a perfectly untwisted road for our royal guest. But where to find such a straight road? Even the legendary Saskatchewan roads do meander crookedly eventually. Head up to Southey and the Qu’Appelle Valley twists Highway 6 up and down and sideways. South on Route 6 may take you directly to Weyburn and Estevan, but that wide yaw to the left before Milestone attests to our need to correct our direction. Going to Moose Jaw is straight enough, as long as you leave out Belle Plaine. No, we tend to be always adjusting our paths, trying to straighten them out, but while a truly straight road is ideal, it is barely human, and therefore, barely divine either.

Instead, our road is something akin to what Robert Frost found somewhere behind his house.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

As I may have told you before, I am not a poetic analyst. I leave that to people who know better. Yogi Berra, former catcher for the New York Yankees, analyses it most precisely for our situation at the beginning of the Gospel. “When you come to a fork in the road - take it!”

“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The simplest, straightest way for the first lines of the first Gospel, a touch of the “once upon a time,” but this is a loaded sentence. The first word, the beginning, is exactly the same word as in Genesis.

But what is the beginning, the first step in a thousand mile walk, except a venture out into what looks like nothingness. In the beginning, there was nothing but chaos, if anything in the Hebrew mind, an unending ocean, without form and void. God separated the waters, organized it, gave it order and the world took shape.

Mark has a different chaos in mind at which to begin: the wilderness. The problem with the wilderness for human beings, then and now, is that it is out of our control, it is wild. With no warning, a human being appears in the wilderness imposing a kind of divine order upon things and people. John is anything but a straight human being.

Clothed in camel hair, a leather belt, eating locust and wild honey, John was not what good religious folk expected to see, for their holy men were dressed in colourful flowing robes. Smelling like a camel with locust breath, John roared out his preaching of repentance, baptizing everyone it seems. And everyone had to come down from Jerusalem and Judea to the River Jordan travelling the same dangerous road on which that man was robbed and beaten and left for dead until the Good Samaritan passed by. This is a road with many a shelter for bandits and other disorderly types - a straight highway through the wilderness it was not.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it, and John the Baptist was the fork. I had never noticed it before, but several people have pointed out one of the real problems of John the Baptist and Jesus. John is older by six months than Jesus according to Luke, and he is the first one to begin his ministry. Jesus comes to him, like everyone else, as a disciple, and it is no wonder the followers of Jesus took a little umbrage at Jesus being subordinate to this wilderness prophet. Here in Mark, John never tells us what he is preaching, what he means by repentance. But he does point us to a fork in the spiritual road, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.” John points away from himself because he knows one thing - he is not the Messiah.

That’s a handy thing to know. Hey, we know what it’s like in this lovely era of Byzantine political machinations in which there are more than a few Messiahs out there willing to lead us back to the Promised Land, and for that matter, a Herod or two - you sort them out. Even on a smaller stage, many of us desire deep down to save the world, to be the superman or superwoman who accomplishes all good things, who has the answers all crave for.

John the Baptist was not an insignificant figure in that time. He continued to have devoted followers after Jesus had begun his ministry, and there were some who wondered why Jesus’ disciples didn’t follow in master John’s way. Did you know that at least until quite recently there were still some disciples of John the Baptists, Mandaeans by name, living in Iraq? John, however, knew he wasn’t the Messiah. Did you remember today that you are not the Messiah?

This is where the Gospel begins. In the midst of wilderness chaos, there is Good News: there is only one Messiah and we have been given one. The load is off our shoulders. The burdens of the world are a little easier to bear. The highway is being made straight, so when you come to the fork in the road, take it, the road less travelled, or the road not taken.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan