Disorderly Preparations

A Sermon Series for Advent & Christmas

Mark 1:1-8

“The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is written in Isaiah the prophet: "I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way"--"a voice of one calling in the desert, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.'" And so John came, baptizing in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. John wore clothing made of camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. And this was his message: "After me will come one more powerful than I, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."

"Disorderly Preparations." How many of you think that I am going to preach this sermon directly at you? In particular, that I am going to address your disorderly ways of preparing for Christmas? "Disorderly Preparations." How many of you think that this sermon should be confessional? That I will be preaching to myself, to my disorderly ways of preparing for Christmas?

Yesterday one of the people in our church who needs to know what is happening here on Christmas Eve asked me about my preparations for our Christmas Eve Service. "I haven't worked much on that yet," I confessed, but it is on the top of the agenda for Monday. I have mailed out our family Christmas leter, a very large task since we send out over 300. Our Christmas decorations are mostly up and nearly all the Christmas presents I am giving have been purchased and wrapped. You have probably read somewhere that you are invited to our Christmas Eve Party after the Christmas Eve service. If not, we do hope you are coming. These are hardly the signs of disorderly preparations.

However, if this sermon were intended to be personal and confessional I might have to tell the truth about how I have been preparing myself spiritually for Christmas. Have I been taking time for prayer? Have I been preparing my heart for the Christ Child? Do I long for His coming into my life and my world more than I long for anything else, more even than I am excited about the Christmas presents my children are buying me? More than I long for a wife? What do you long for? My guess is that you are working the hardest this Christmas to prepare for the object of your greatest longing--a gift, your family, security, love--Jesus?

But I am not going to preach a personal confessional sermon today. And I am not going to focus on whether or not your preparations, spiritual or otherwise, for Christmas this year are disorderly. What I do want to consider with you today is God's disorderly preparations for Christmas--the disorderly, even chaotic, ways God prepares the world for Jesus.

We begin with John the Baptist, which is exactly where the Gospel of Mark begins in presenting the story of the coming of Jesus. Mark, it is usually said, does not have a Christmas Story. No angels, no Wisemen, no birth in a manger, no flight to Egypt. Mark is silent on the events surrounding the Birth of Jesus. He uses instead a different approach to announce the beginning of Jesus. Mark just says it...

Mark 1:1--"The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God."

Period. It happened. What happened? Jesus. Who is he? The Son of God. It is not a theatrical and emotional announcement about the coming of Jesus but it does accomplish the same purpose as the Christmas Stories in Matthew and Luke. It announces Jesus and it tells us who he is. Then Mark focuses in on what is important to him--the preparations, getting people ready to receive Jesus, paving the way, planting the seeds, opening the hearts. That was important to Mark because that was the work the people he was writing to around 60 AD had to do. That early Christians in the first century church had to prepare the way for Jesus. So do we.

But back then it was a wild man planting those seeds and paving that road; most presentations of John the Baptist in movies present him as nearly a crazy man, slovenly, uncivilized, untamed, savage, out of control, deranged, frenzied...

John the Baptist, the wild man, prepares the way for Jesus.

And consider the history into which God sent his Only Begotten and Dearly Loved Son as an innocent baby born in a manger. You could almost use the same words I just used to describe John the Baptist to describe that time in history, the beginning of the new millennium, wild, uncivilized, untamed, savage, out of control, deranged, frenzied--the Romans of course did not see it that way. They were standing on top of the world and on top of conquered and desperate people everywhere. But their subject peoples knew that history was out of control. And even in Rome debauchery reigned even more than Caesar. It was a savage world. The history that prepared the way for the coming of Jesus was wild and crazy.

One might easily think that God, in God's infinite wisdom, could have designed a tamer, saner, more civilized, safer plan and place and time for the coming of Jesus than:

First Century Palestine
The Roman Empire
John the Baptist screaming
An improbable story about an immaculate conception
Destitute and smelly shepherds
Pagan astrologers from afar, following a star
Herod slaughtering baby boys
Joseph and family fleeing to Egypt

It is all so...so uncivilized...

If anyone should be preaching a confessional sermon here this morning about His disorderly preparations for the coming of the Christ, it is God...

Why wait to the last minute to bring Joseph in on the plan, which forced Joseph to first reject Mary and cause so much unnecessary pain?

But rather than second guess God's choices of people, place, time and methods for sending Jesus, let us look at the circumstances that surround the coming of Jesus into our lives. Now, I am not suggesting that those circumstances always look and sound like John the Baptist, but they often do, and I am not suggesting that our lives have to look like the history of the Roman Empire in order for Jesus to enter our lives, but they often do. We are often ill prepared to receive Jesus. Disordered, confused, wild, untamed--our lives, busted, rebellious, out of control. The way for Jesus in our lives is seldom prepared by the nice things that we are and that we do. Nice stuff seldom gets anyone ready for God. It is the uncivilized stuff inside us that prepares the way for God to do a great and mighty work; our passions run wild, our sin, our addictions, our fear, our loneliness, our desperation, our suffering. It is often the broken dreams that build the highway for the Lord.

God's plan in our lives and in our history and in our church and in our city and in our world at the turn of a new millennium is, by all appearances, a wild and crazy plan. You can not predict where that plan is going or how it will change us--but change us it will. And, it is possible to see signs of the Advent of Jesus and it is possible to be open to His coming and it is possible to get ready, and it is possible to believe that God is up to something, that God is present...

In Angels that protect and guide, then and now.
In Stars that show us the way, then and now.
In people whom God uses to fulfill God's plan, them and us.
In cities that are in that plan, Bethlehem and Springfield.

It is possible to understand the chaos of our lives differently--as the ways God is preparing us to receive Jesus. Even if we have accepted him, there is still and always another part of our lives into which we have not allowed him to enter. He needs to be born again in all of us this Christmas, but do not be surprised if the way is prepared by the things that seem to be wild and crazy or altogether extraordinary.

It is possible to understand the tragedy of our history differently--as the ways our world is being prepared to receive Jesus. It is possible to understand that one who shouts about the coming of God into our lives and our history will always seem to be a wild and crazy man like John the Baptist, who tells us that now is the time to repent, now is the time to tell the truth about what we have done and what we have been--and what we have not been and what we have failed to do.

I want to be well prepared for Christmas this year. I want the people I love to know how important they are to me, because of the plans I have made that include them and the gifts for them I have selected and the time I spend with them. I want to have plenty of time to pray and worship this Christmas, to go to a couple of inspiring Christmas Concerts and to arrive at Christmas Eve ready to hear the angels singing. AND, I also want to be open to the possibility that God will move the most powerfully in those areas of my life that are still in chaos, that have not been tamed, that I cannot control, that, for example, God will be present in the couple of days it will take to reunite with my family up in Niagara Falls, New York for the funeral of my Uncle Bill, who was both the best and the worst of men, whose home and family enriched my childhood and gifted me with a place of belonging--yet a man who died with far too much of the truth still untold, a disorderly and wild and insecure man--whom I loved--and within whom, at times, God lived and moved. Whatever is wild or broken or painful in your life—that is exactly the entry point of God into your life.

So be it.

Amen