Advent 2B - "Finishing the Sentence"

 Saint Mark 1:1-8

Every great story deserves a great opening sentence.  Think about it.

If I were to say to you, “Call me Ishmael.”1You would probably say, Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

If I were to say to you, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...”2 you would no doubt remember from your high school English class that this was Charles Dicken’s, Tale of Two Cities.

Some first lines are cryptic and therefore hard to identify, such as, “Mr. and Mrs. of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”3  

Tough?  Maybe?  But every young person, and old person, who got caught up in the adventures of the wizarding world and sometimes waited all night in front of bookstores as if concert ticket for Taylor Swift were on sale, will know that this is the first line of the first installment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter  & the Sorcerer's Stone. 

And some first lines give us huge hints of who the players are.  Think of this one that was to my college years what Harry Potter was to the next generation. "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole ... it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort."4 That is the first line of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the adventures of Bilbo Baggins that gave way to further adventures of his cousin Frodo in the mammoth Lord of the Rings trilogy.

What all of these first lines have in common is that they send their characters and their readers on adventures not of their own choosing.

And today we have before us another famous opening sentence even though some of my linguistic purist friends tell me that it is not a complete sentence.  Saint Mark gives us: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ.”5  And suddenly, immediately as Saint Mark would say over and over again in his Gospel, we are off on our adventure.

Mark rushes us headlong into the story.  There are no birth accounts that we love so much.  There is no Mary and Joseph.  The shepherds are gone and so are the Wisemen.  There is no sound of cattle lowing.  There is no angel chorus.  We are whipsawed out into the desert where we meet a decidedly unkempt fellow named John the Baptist “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” and pointing to “The one who is more powerful than I [that] is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the strap of his sandals.”6

If Mark’s gospel does indeed start with an incomplete sentence clearly it is left to others to complete the sentence and what we find, when we look very carefully, that at the very beginning, none of them were willing participants in the great drama in which they were being asked to play a part.  

They all may have echoed the words of Bilbo Baggins when he said: “...in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Makes you late for dinner!”

When the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God began to sweep through the land there were a lot of sleepless nights and late dinners.

There is a whole cast of unwilling characters who are not so sure they want to play their part in completing the sentence or even participating in the story of the Good News of Jesus Christ.

The first may have been John the Baptist’s very own father who, in his old age (which doesn’t seem so old to me now) gets the news in, of all places, the temple, at worship, that he and his wife Elizabeth are about to have their long awaited baby boy. And what does he say about taking on this challenge?   “Zachariah said to the angel, ‘Do you expect me to believe this? I’m an old man and my wife is an old woman.’”7

But there is no way out for the unbelieving priest and Gabriel is in no mood for excuses.  He strikes him dumb until the baby is born.  He is going to play a part in the story of completing the Good News sentence whether he likes it or not.

Gabriel is confronted with the same and highly justifiable reticence when he tries to sell the story to Mary.  At first, she will have none of it.  She isn’t buying into the idea at all. She cuts the angel off in mid-sentence.  “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”8

At least Mary is willing to hear Gabriel out and finally go along with the plan except there is still one more character to add to the story. 

 When Joseph went to bed on the fateful evening that he told he was to play his part in finishing the good news sentence the questions that caused him to toss and turns were bigger than we could have ever imagined. 

Would he dishonour his family by marrying this woman who told him directly that the child was not  his?  Does he believe her story that not only that he was not the father but that nobody on earth was?  Should he really believe Mary when she tells him that the child she was carrying was not just of God, but from God.  Should he believe her or just conclude that she was unstable and get on with the rest of his life?  He also goes to bed knowing that if he exposed her for being unfaithful to the marriage contract he would be condemning  her to death?

Yet, all of the people I have mentioned – Zachariah, Mary, Joseph – have been asked to do very difficult things and they did them.  They didn’t have all the facts before hand.  In fact, nothing that is put before them is remotely feasible. They had to take risks. They had to upset their families, their communities, their entire way of life.  

And the absolutely crazy thing about the Christmas story to me is that they all did it.  They all completed Mark’s sentence about the Good News of Jesus Christ and helped the story come into being.  

As scholars Brian Blount and Gary Charles note,

 Mark was written principally for a people caught up in, and spiritually burdened by, social and political storms. Mark’s Gospel offers much more than a Jesus intended to soothe and mend the troubled soul; here is a Jesus caught up in the troubles and turmoil of a tormented world.9

I think we know a bit about that kind of a world, don’t you?

Our world is racked by wars on two fronts that bring all manner of inhuman atrocities into our lives from both sides.  And, in the midst of preparing for Christmas we have received the devastating news that the person who we had hoped would join us in our ministry, won’t.   The news was heartbreaking!  

Yet, amid the unfulfilled dreams there is still a sentence to complete.  There is more to the Good News than gloom and doom, there is hope.  Mary and Joseph, Zachariah and Elizabeth, never gave up the hope that the task that was given them to do was not impossible. 

These texts give us hope for a better future. They inspire us to look for better days and have faith ... that such things are possible. During this season, as Christmas approaches, we might call this Advent hope. It’s a vision of the world as God desires it to be.  

Advent hope tells us that things might be tough right now but they’ll get better. Advent hope tells us that someday the world will be turned on its head: those at the bottom will rise to the top, and those at the top will fall to the bottom. Advent hope tells us that peace is possible. Advent hope has faith in a child.10

The best definition of hope I read this week did not come from a theologian but rather a political pundit and a famous television show.

Charlie Sikes writes a daily column for an online publication called The Bulwork which I doubt that many of you read but occasionally contains hidden gems.  Ted Lasso is an award-winning comedy show.  Last week Sikes wrote:

Optimism is the belief that the world is changing for the better; hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better. Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to hope.

Ted Lasso reminds us: “So I've been hearing this phrase y'all got over here that I ain't too crazy about. 'It's the hope that kills you.' Y'all know that? I disagree, you know? I think it's the lack of hope that comes and gets you."11

 With the Gospel of Jesus as our guide we can have hope that what is will not always be.  We have hope that  are a part of the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ and not the end.  We are a part of the beginning of the good news, not the totality of it, but a part of it.  And our greatest hope of all is that  Jesus has not left us; hope is on the way. 

Our job is to help finish the sentence. “The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ” is a story that will continue and be finished by us.  It’s our story now. It’s ours to proclaim.  And our proclamation is that the beginning, and middle, and end of the story is that Jesus is with us and that we would end our sentence, indeed, we would continue and conclude our story with one word ... hope. 

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1.        Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. (New York, , NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2023), p. 1.

2. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (London, ENG: Puffin, 2016). p. 1.

3. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Thorndike, ME: Thorndike Press, 2003), p. 1.

4.     J.R.R Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (New York, NY: Del Rey, 2020), 1.

5. St. Mark 1:1 (NRSVUE) [NRSVUE= The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

6. Saint Mark 1:4 (NRSVUE)

7. St. Luke 1:18. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, in The Message: The New Testament Psalms and Proverbs (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1998)

8. St. Luke 1:34. (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version]

9. Brian K. Blount and Gary Charles, Preaching Mark in Two Voices (Louisville, , KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003).

10. John Vest, “What Are We Waiting For? Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. 7 December 2008.

11. Charlie Sykes, “The Case Against Despair.” The Bulwork. 6 December 2023