Advent II (B) December 7, 2014 Trinity Parish, Seattle Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8 As any of you who are students of the Bible will know, only two of the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) have stories about the birth of Jesus and that would be Matthew and Luke. But all four of them talk about John the Baptist. And the Gospel of Mark, which biblical scholars tell us is the oldest of the four gospels, starts out the story of Jesus life and ministry with, yes, John the Baptist. Last Sunday was the beginning of a new church year in which the Gospel of Mark will figure prominently throughout this Year B of our three-year lectionary cycle. Today, we hear its very opening verses: the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God words that then start us off with the messenger in the wilderness, John the Baptist. And right from the beginning, he draws heavily from the words of the prophet Isaiah which we also heard today that beautiful text perhaps best known to many from Handel s Messiah: Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the LORD's hand double for all her sins. A voice cries out: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together John the Baptist has come as that voice crying out in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord! It is an anguished cry of the prophet for all things to be set right. These words echo a deeply felt sentiment for our own lives and our own times. Yahweh is offering comfort to the people of Jerusalem who have endured more than their share of punishment. And the prophet calls out for a new era of justice 1
for the highway in the desert to be made straight, the mountains and hills to be brought low, the rough places become a plain. In these poetic words, I hear the voice of God saying to us, here and now, The time has come. Enough is enough. How long will racial injustice continue to take its toll on the people of this land? There are crooked places that need to be made straight, high places that need to be brought low, and the uneven places leveled out. THEN, the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and ALL people shall see it together. All of us, regardless of our political persuasion or our opinions about recent grand jury decisions, or our own unique perspective on issues of racial justice we all have to admit that there are serious, unresolved issues around race in our country. A chord has been struck that we cannot ignore in Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland, and lots of other places that haven t yet shown up in the news. The wake-up call is sounding, and we must pay attention. Many if not most of us here today have lived our lives with the unspoken and largely unacknowledged privileges that go with being white. Most of us here today have not faced the same prejudices and suspicions, the same barriers or obstacles that our brothers and sisters who are people of color have had to face in our society. Our lives may not always have been easy, but most of us cannot say that that had anything to do with race. Some of us here, of course, can and you have stories you could tell. And I hope you will share them with us. We need to hear them. Some of you are far too polite and some of you perhaps don t want to complain or to ruffle feathers. But your stories will help the rest of us understand better what you have experienced, and what we need to know in order to begin to live into a new kind of relationship with all of our neighbors. I d like to share a story about growing up in a very racially divided Midwestern city. Several years ago I was driving along in my car and I turned on public radio, right in the middle of an interview, so I didn t immediately get the details of who this person was or the topic. But as I listened to (I believe it was) Terry Gross guest speaking, it began to dawn on me that he was talking about my hometown of Muncie, Indiana. His name was Gregory Howard Williams, and he had written a book titled Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy who Discovered he was Black. And the more closely I listened, I realized he was talking about the 2
neighborhood in which I had grown up for the first ten years of my life from 1955 till 1965. The story I was hearing was of a young boy in a poor white family, seven or eight years older than I. He had had a hard-scrabble life with an alcoholic father and a mother who abandoned them when he was young. And when that happened his father took him and his brother back to their hometown of Muncie where his father had relatives who could help him raise his boys. They were relatives the boys had never met. They had always believed and had been told that their father s swarthy skin came from being part Italian. But, it turns out that all the relatives they went home to were black. It was a revelation to them that their father was a very light-skinned black man, and that now they, both white boys as far as they knew, were living among a large extended black family. The two boys had to learn how to be black to fit in to their new life. The boys went to live with a great-aunt in her 70s a kind and loving presence in their lives. She took them to church at Christ Temple Apostolic Church which, coincidentally is the church where my own mother had grown up a few years earlier as part of the only white family in an otherwise all black Pentecostal church. The home they lived in was just a few blocks from our home in a working class neighborhood just on the other side of Muncie s invisible color line. The boys were enrolled in Garfield Elementary School, the same school I went to through the 5 th grade. Greg s walk to school each day passed just two doors from the house I grew up in. There are many very painful parts to the story, but one that hit particularly close to home for me was his story of being in the sixth grade at Garfield. He had the highest academic achievement in the school that year. But before award day arrived, the whispers had begun among the teachers and school officials, revealing that Gregory was not white he was black. The award was given to another student instead of Gregory. Teachers from that time on began to treat him differently. Some of the things he aspired to all of a sudden were out of the question as far as his teachers were concerned. He spent the rest of his school life with people projecting low expectations onto him based on race something he had to learn to deal with, but that millions of young people in this country live 3
with every single day. His is a strange, but poignant tale about the effects of race in the minds of white America. Gregory Howard Williams ended up, against all odds, becoming a lawyer, and the Dean of the Ohio State University Law School but only through the most extraordinary courage and effort and perseverance. We can easily hear such stories today and say, Oh yes, that s how it was in the 50s in the Midwest, but things have changed so much. And many things, thankfully, have changed. But one of the things we re being told these past two weeks is that not everyone experiences it that way. There are still some rough places to be made plain. It is clear from the reactions to the grand juries in Ferguson and Staten Island and now another in Dayton this past week, together with the child who was shot and killed in Cleveland, that race very often continues to be the determinative factor in how people are treated in our society, sometimes with deadly consequences. It s pretty clear that Michael Brown, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin (how long does the list have to grow? none of them would be dead if they had been white. And it s clear, too, that none of us, white or black or any other color would sit still while our children were being killed for any of the petty offenses these men and boys were accused of. The protests in our streets across this country are a cry of anguish that says how long, how long, O Lord, will this continue to be? It reminds me of another prophet who loved to quote Isaiah. Martin Luther King Jr. put aside his prepared speech as he stood on the Washington Mall in 1963 during another time of unrest and protest. Looking out at the hundreds of thousands of people gathered there he launched into his I have a dream speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Mahalia Jackson, standing behind him and sensing that he was losing the crowd with his prepared remarks, said to him, tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream. Switching gears, he went into his well-rehearsed dream speech, in which he said, I have a dream today! I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; "and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together." 4
People of Trinity, I d love for us to share our dreams about the kind of world we want to see and to live in. And yes, we can share our hurts and our fears and our frustrations, too. But share we must. And listen we must to one another, to our neighbors, to those who are different from us, to those who vote differently than we do and watch different news channels than we do, to those whose life experiences are different from ours. We re going to look for opportunities for us to do just that share our dreams, and our hurts, and our fears because we must. Advent calls us to Keep Awake, dear friends! And it calls us to prepare the way of the Lord, to make the rough places plain and the crooked places straight. Yes, in our own hearts, and in our streets, and in every city and town in our land, so that the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, until finally, all flesh shall see it together. 5