From the Wilderness of Black Friday
A sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, 2008
Isaiah 40: 1-11; Mark 1:1-8
With a new church year comes a change in the Gospel from which our weekly readings come. And so we turn, as Advent begins, from Matthew to Mark. Mark is the earliest, and the shortest, among the four accounts of Jesus’ life. And my, but doesn’t Mark cut to the chase? No long genealogies. No angels. No shepherds. No birth story. No visitors from far away places. No poetry.
Chapter One, verse one of the Gospel of Mark: The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God. It rings out like a starter’s pistol and we are off and running. It’s not unlike the department store doors that swing open at 5 am on Black Friday, the great shopping day after Thanksgiving. It’s called “Black Friday,” I just learned, because on that one day people buy so much that store accounts are put in “the black,” rather than “the red.”
Did you all hear, in fact, about the 34 year old maintenance worker who was trampled to death the day after Thanksgiving this year? Something like 2,000 shoppers apparently couldn’t even wait for the doors to open. They broke through the glass doors at a Wal-Mart store on Long Island, NY. The Advent hymn, “Fling Wide the Door, Unbar the Gate” takes on all kinds of new meaning now I’m afraid. The sales known as “door busters” have now become “life busters” – literally.
If John the Baptist seems disgusting and outrageous with his camel’s hair coat and breakfast of locusts during Advent, this incident makes his voice crying in the wilderness sound like children singing “Away in a Manger.” I was so disgusted over this Black Friday death that I penned this tongue in cheek version of “Onward Christian Soldiers:”
Onward Christian shoppers trampling as in war With the birth of Jesus our excuse for more
Sales and longer hours coax us to the stores Ads say this stuff makes us happy, so let’s storm the doors!
Onward Christian shoppers trampling as in war With the birth of Jesus our excuse for more!
“A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are,” says Eugene Peterson, “to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way.” I wonder if this puts us there yet. What a disgusting and outrageous twist on Christmas -- and yet what an opportunity to hear the voice of John the Baptist again for the first time, calling us to a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” In the spirit of Mark’s gospel, this incident cuts to the chase and gives us a powerful and swift Advent wake up call. It shows us in bold relief how far we have strayed from the point: the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
What happened? How has it come to this? How is John the Baptist crying to us from the wilderness of Black Friday, and what does he want us to hear? Certain news stories tend to haunt me. This is one. So the headline caught my eye. “Police try to identify tramplers at Wal-Mart.” Then it caught my heart. In an uncharacteristic Advent posture of repentance, it dawned on me when I saw that headline, “That would be me.” Have the police identified me yet? No, I wasn’t part of the crowd at Wal Mart in Valley Stream on Long Island on November 28. I wasn’t even out of bed that day until 9:00. But I too can be a trampler. I can beat others down so as to crush, bruise, violate, or destroy. I can treat those I love harshly or ruthlessly. I can tread heavily or contemptuously. I can do all these things even when I think I’m doing the right thing, especially when I have a loftier goal in mind at the time, even if I’m not after a sharply discounted television set for one son or a computer for another. We trample for lots of reasons. And it always feels, at the time, like our life depends on whatever it is we need that seems to make the trampling necessary.
“Every child, when she is born,” according to a parable a friend once shared with me, “is given a bucket. Each child has a right to have that bucket filled with acceptance and unconditional love. But most of us never get that bucket filled. That’s because most of our parents never had their buckets filled. As long as that bucket is not full, we will be driven to get it filled in whatever way we can. We will do, do, do, all kinds of things for people, hoping unconsciously that they will love us in return and our buckets will get filled. This quest to fill our buckets is a life long, never ending job that takes all of our time and energy but we’re not really aware we’re doing it. We’re scared to death to stop doing it because that bucket is our life. If I stop, I might begin to be aware that the bucket isn’t full. And to feel that the bucket isn’t full is unbearable. And so we hold these buckets out, driving ourselves to do whatever might be necessary, in the hope that just this one time, at least, my bucket might get filled.
And how misguided we are. It’s as if we haven’t read the instructions. It’s like going to the hardware store to buy bread. A lecturer once explained stress management to an audience. She raised a glass of water and asked, "How heavy is this glass of water?" Answers called out ranged from 20g to 500g. The lecturer replied, "The absolute weight doesn't matter. It depends on how long you try to hold it. If I hold it for a minute, that's not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you'll have to call an ambulance. In each case, it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes." She continued," And that's the way it is with stress. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won't be able to carry on. As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we're refreshed, we can carry on with the burden."
And so it is with those buckets we hold out. Those buckets, over the course of our lives, become such heavy burdens. We put ourselves through almost anything and everything for those buckets to get filled because we certainly cannot put them down. And the great irony is this: Like the glass of water, the way to get what it is we’re after is precisely to put the bucket down. John the Baptist’s wake up call from the wilderness of that deadly Black Friday is, “STOP. Put the bucket down.” That’s what repentance means, says Frederick Buechner: “coming to our senses.” Repentance is not wallowing in guilt about what I have done in hopes that maybe that will get the bucket filled. Repentance is waking up to realize that what I’m doing is not helpful. Repentance is setting the water down. You see, the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is that we don’t have to hold the water. It’s the water – the baptismal water – that holds us. The frenzy and the trampling and the stuff and the doing doing doing in order to get that bucket filled not only will not make us happy or whole, they cannot make us happy or whole.
“Repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” proclaims John the Baptist, “says ‘Stop.’ Put down that water. Instead, rest in the water and the word, and in the power of the Holy Spirit to bring you comfort and peace. This is a power that refuses to control or crush others. It is a power that doesn’t trample but invites us into God’s just and loving reign.” This is not about ruminating on the past and dwelling on the “I’m sorry.” This is about looking to the future and saying “Wow!” This is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. AMEN.
Pastor Dana Runestad
Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Livonia, MI
7 December, 2008 (Year B, Advent 2)
Sources:
Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith, “Repentance,” San Francisco: Harper, 2004, p. 343
Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society, Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, p. 25.
John Stendahl, “Living By the Word,” Christian Century, December 2, 2008, p. 20.
Dawn Ottoni Wilhelm, Preaching the Gospel of Mark, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.