The Beginning!

Last Sunday Pastor Harkness welcomed the start of a new Church year complete with a tiara, a noisemaker, and a cheer for a Happy New Year! 

This week, on the 2nd Sunday of Advent I’ll build on that theme in this message called, The Beginning.

As you’ve probably noticed over these last several years together, my brain tends to think in terms of songs and lyrics. Today is no exception!

There are two that are rattling around my noggin today. The first is a song from the early 1970s by the band Chicago. “Only the beginning,” say the lyrics, “only just a start.” And then, to make sure we really got that message, the song ends by repeating, not once, not twice, but an astounding nineteen times, “Only the beginning, only the beginning, only the beginning …”

The other song—also from the 70s—was from The Carpenters. Titled We’ve Only Just Begun,” sure enough, that was exactly the message conveyed repeatedly in the song! 

“We've only just begun to live,” the song begins. “We've only begun … And yes, we've just begun … And yes, we've just begun.”

Clearly, beginnings are on my mind this week. But if last week was the start—the New Year’s celebration—of Advent and a new Church year, why return to beginnings this week?

Here’s why! What was written as the first verse of today’s gospel reading—the first verse of the Gospel of Mark—is believed by many, including me, not simply to be the first verse of the gospel but, in fact, its title! In other words, all 16 chapters and all 678 verses of this gospel proclaim nothing more and nothing less than, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”!

How did the band Chicago put it? “Only the beginning, … only just a start.” And then, repeated nineteen times as the song ended, “Only the beginning! Only the beginning! Only the beginning!” …

And how did Richard and Karen Carpenter echo that message? “We’ve only just begun to live! And yes, we’ve just begun. Yes! We’ve just begun!”

People that I love with all my heart, that’s the message that everything in the Gospel of Mark conveys to us! Everything we read there is simply, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”!

The best, it suggests is, still, yet to come!

From what we surmise, this was such an important message to Mark’s first audience! It wasn’t a pandemic that had upended and destroyed their world. It was the destruction of God’s Temple by the Romans!

Even for believers in Jesus, their world had turned upside down! Like us, they wondered if life would ever return the way it once was. And, if not, what did the future hold for them?

In all 16 chapters and 678 verses, then, Mark addressed their concerns and worries. This is only the beginning! The best is yet to come!

And what was good news to them remains good news to us! With life continuing to be upended for us—with the prospect that life will never return to the way it once was—Mark both reassures and insists, “This is only the beginning! The best is yet to come!”

Let’s look a little more closely at the beginning of the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in Mark.

The beginning of the beginning of the good news begins with a proclamation from Isaiah in the Old Testament (which was our first reading today!). A voice cries out from the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” 

The voice, we learn, belongs to the rough-hewn prophet John, whose words and appearance are stark or even harsh. “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.” Then he adds, “I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

This is pretty neat, since at our in-person service this week, we’re celebrating a baptism for the first time during this pandemic! What John describes as coming, we can celebrate as starting. And that’s only the beginning; only just the start!

Our first reading today, fills out the rest of John’s message. Above all, God says to this messenger, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.”

What a great beginning! God’s messenger (which we know as John) is commanded by God to give God’s people a message of comfort. A message that will not simply speak comfort, but which will itself actually be comfort!

So what is it? What is this message which actually delivers what it says? 

First we hear from God. “A voice says, ‘Cry out!’”

The messenger answers back. “And I said, ‘What shall I cry?’”

God then gives explicit instructions as to where the messenger is to stand and proclaim this message of comfort. “Get you up to a high mountain,” God says. “lift up your voice with strength, … say to the cities of Judah …”

Before I finish that sentence—before I remind you of the word of comfort God gives the messenger; the word that actually gives the comfort that it describes—another piece of music is now singing in my brain.

I’ve heard several scholars say that, if you’re looking for perhaps the finest study of the meaning and message of this part of Isaiah, look no further than Handel’s Messiah. 

But let’s give credit where credit is due! The libretto—the words to the music composed by Handel—came from a certain Charles Jennens, whose genius at making the words of the Bible sing was matched by Handel’s genius in giving them song.

So, back to the message of comfort God wants his messenger to deliver from up a high mountain in a voice of strength. 

In our translation, the messenger is to “say to the cities of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’”  In words and music, however, I think George Frederick Handel and his sidekick Charles Jennens did it better! 

First announced by the angelic voice of an alto but then echoed and repeated by the chorus, the messenger announces, “O thou that tellest good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah …”

And here it is! “Behold your God!”

In a time of upheaval—in days like now when the world is turned upside down—God reaches out through messengers to not only speak comfort but to give—or be—comfort to us. God is in our midst, even now. And this is just the beginning!

But there’s something else to say about these texts and these circumstances that we find ourselves in! Be ready—be on the lookout—for surprises. John the Baptist calls Jesus in our passage today, “the more powerful one.”

He’s right, of course! But Jesus came to us, not as a warrior or a conqueror, but as a child born in poverty in an unknown village in Palestine. And Jesus’ greatest show of strength comes in the weakness of love and sacrifice.

So, let me be a messenger today to tell you that uncertain times and major changes are nothing to be feared! Behold your God! God comes to us, even now, in surprising ways.

To comfort! In Jesus’ name. Amen!