Waiting with John the Baptist

Mark 1:1-8

Advent 2

December 7, 2014

Most of my memories of waiting

have to do with doctors offices or public transportation.

I’m there early to wait for things

that are on slightly different schedules.

When I've been at a doctor’s office or waiting on a bus,

I've usually had something to read.

In earlier days, a magazine or book.

These days something on my phone.

Sometimes I've fallen asleep waiting.

St. John the Baptist
Kehinde Wiley, 2006 

Whatever, it’s usually something that takes me away

from the situation of having to wait.

And you usually do that waiting alone isolation.

Even if someone else is with you, you notice,

You each usually take that time to read or sleep or stare into space.

That kind of waiting is not the kind of waiting that John asks us to.

John the Baptist gathered people together for this waiting,

he baptized them and gave them instructions on how they should wait.

There is no reading or sleeping or staring 

off into space for us in this waiting.

We as the baptized people of God are asked to do more.

John, our waiting guide, lives in the wilderness

and he does not come to us, 

we are asked to come to him.

to be washed in the water, confess our own sins,

and prepare the way of the Lord and make the paths straight.

As a church, we are not supposed to sit back and just wait

until someone else makes those paths straight.

We are supposed to help God to prepare the way.

  

And there are many crooked paths that need to be straightened,

many mountains that are way too high

There are many wildernesses in our world that we could go into.

But the wilderness that is on my heart

and the hearts of many

is the wilderness in our own country today, the one that has grown

in Ferguson, in Staten Island, in Cleveland, in Toledo,

in New Mexico, in Arizona, Los Angeles.

The wilderness where so many black men in our country are being killed

by our own law enforcement for for comparatively small issues.

And the more troubling question 

about why there seem to be no consequences for this, not even trials?

As we wait, we are asked as the baptized people of God,

to go into that wilderness and look around.

To ask the hard questions and to confess our own sins.

Because, as I see it, this is not just the problem of some police officers –

this is our problem.

While we wait for Jesus to come,

we are asked to go into the wilderness of our

dysfunctional race relationships in this country.

To look at it as a whole, not just my personal actions or attitudes

about people who are different from us,

but the whole history of our nation:

From slavery, to Jim crow laws, to legal segregation,

to the high level of incarcerations,

and what this whole picture has done to everyone in this country.

To understand how I as a white person 

have benefited from the disadvantage of others.

To admit that we have a long, long history of systematizing

advantages for some groups

and disadvantages for others based skin color.

And at the very least, if we can’t quite get that far,

we’re asked to have compassion

for the pain and the frustration and fear

our sisters and brothers of color are feeling right now

the feeling that they don’t count as much as white people

The fear that parents are feeling that their child will be the next one.

This work can’t be done alone.

As the baptized people of God,

we do wait in isolation in our cathedrals and churches

simply doing things to pass the time.
We are called to go into the wilderness places together,

to confess our own sins and then work with God

to do the work that needs to be done.

Make those paths straight and the mountains low.

To prepare the way.

Now these paths are really crooked

and some of these mountains we can’t see the top of.
I can’t begin to know what we’re supposed to do with them.

Maybe some of our civil engineers have some ideas.

But I know we’re not just supposed to look the other way

because we can, because we have the privilege of our race

or our status in life to just ignore.

We are asked to go, to look, to ask questions,

to examine ourselves, confess our own sins

and to wait for the savoir to come together.

The one advantage we have as people of God,

is that we know the rest of the story.

We have seen what God can do,

we live in the promise of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.

And so we trust that God will have the last word.

We trust that the one that has saved us will return.

We know that light will come,

We know that justice will be done

we know that paths will be straight, that mountains laid low,

we know that what is wrong will be made right again.

And so, as the baptized people of God, we wait for that day together.