Today's Sermon: A little better than the draft. UPDATED

Here we are back at the window. And in this second week of Advent we find ourselves also back at a river, back with John the Baptist. Much of Advent is revisiting stories that we have heard before looking again at characters we have seen many times before. And of characters in the Bible John is definitely one of the wildest. He is quite a character as my daddy would say. This usually means that he is odd, an odd bird, a few bricks short of a full load, long on dry wall short on studs. In other words, crazy! And to be sure ol' John the Baptist is a bit crazy. And what is even crazier is that Mark chooses the Baptist as the beginning of the story of the good news.
He does not begin his narrative by letting us linger in a manger, like Matthew and Luke do. He doesn't even begin with the philosophical grandeur that John does. He starts with John the Baptist. And not even a baby John the Baptist or fetal John the Baptist leaping in the womb of Elisabeth at the entrance of Mary and the in utero Jesus. No instead Mark begins with a brief fanfare and the entrance of a fully formed adult John the Baptist. And John is performing baptisms and pointing the way to someone else. People are coming to him, coming to him to be baptized, to join a movement. And what is he doing? He is saying, eh, I'm not that great Now can you imagine this? Think about if Barack Obama had appeared on the scene this election season (not back when he gave the speech at the convention four year ago) and said I am here to tell you about a new way of being, the poor will be made rich, the sick will be made well, the week will be made strong. Come join this movement. Sign up. Donate. Tell your friends. Oh and by the way I'm not actually the leader. Someone else is. Someone who is a lot better than I am. So get on board but I'm not the one. No we cannot really imagine this at all, because the leaders we know pump themselves up. They aren't trying to pave the way for someone else. They are usually trying to pave the way for themselves.
But not John the Baptist he is pointing to a future leader, a future savior, a future messiah. But first Mark is doing something else. Because in reality he is not starting the story of the beginning of the good news with John the Baptist. No he is pointing us forward by pointing us back. He is pointing us back to the prophet Isaiah. Those words that we read earlier from Isaiah Mark then uses as the brief fanfare that I mentioned. "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight." Now the one Isaiah is pointing to is Elijah. And to be honest, Mark wants us to make that connection as well. Because his depiction of this raggedy haired bug eating prophet closely resembles the descriptions of Elijah. It gives him credibility, John is a new Elijah, pointing the people to the messiah.
But Mark is also making an important statement. Before we look forward we have to look back. Before we can see the Messiah we have to look back, we have to take note of the low places, the valley's that need lifting up, the uneven ground that needs to be leveled. As I mentioned last week, we have to take note of the streaks and smudges.
And it is at this point that I most often get stuck. When I was young and got to this point it was pretty easy. I had a litany of things that I had done or thought that would be streaks and smudges. Although, in reality I probably had very little to confess, very little to clean away, or very little to repent of. But the point is that I thought I did. I'm sure I would have thought getting angry with my brother would have been a smudge. Or thinking about another boy in that way would have been a big ol’ smudge. Or not doing a chore around the house would have been a streak. But as I got older I realized that perhaps profanity and dancing and drinking weren't as awful as I thought they were. And that sometimes getting angry is actually healthy rather than an abomination to God. Then I went to seminary and those streaks and smudges became larger issues. The way we treat the poor was our sin, the homeless on the street was our corporate stain, war was our uneven place that needed to be leveled out. So we were all sinners, but we were sinners in a larger communal way. There was no real individual personal issue to be concerned with.
But neither of these understandings of sin and the stains and smudges that prevent us from looking forward is really sufficient. Because the first puts too much emphasis on fairly benign and sometimes healthy actions and emotions. And the latter gives me the opportunity to never reflect on the ways that I am clouding the windows of my heart and my soul.
And so finally what I have come to see as sins are those actions that prevent us from seeing clearly the heart and mind of God. The ways that we become more concerned about our own desires our own selves. In short the ways that our egos get in the way. The times when we lose sight of the rest of the world to attend solely to ourselves. The ways we try to protect ourselves from feeling, from living. The times when we treat others as less than human. The times when we think we are protecting the person by not being fully truthful when in reality we are only protecting ourselves. In general the times when we think it is all about us. And it is these words of Isaiah that come to us, "the grass withers, the flowers fade." We are the grass, we are the flowers. Now here is the thing the grass and the flowers are still beautiful, but they are only here for a season. But God's word, God's heart, God's desire for humankind and the world we inhabit remains forever.
So how do we go about repenting. I've called this sermon "Window washers wanted." How do we become window washers? I've been reading a book by Madeleine L'Engle titled "A Severed Wasp." In it the main character reconnects with a man from her past. A man who is now a retired bishop. But in her first meeting she had been told that he was a violinist. But he introduces himself as a "window cleaner" To which she responds, "A window cleaner and a violinist?"
" 'No and. Music is my window cleaning.' And he had gone on, with unexpected passion for one who seemed so languorously wan, to talk about the human isolation 'in this fragile bag of bones, where all our windows have been so fouled with futility and folly that we can't see out. So there have to be window cleaners.' Artists, he said, would clean the muddied windows with the purity of their art’
When they met up again, she says "Is becoming a bishop a way of becoming a window cleaner?" And he says "Becoming a priest. That was my hope."
Art takes us out of ourselves and points us toward what is beautiful. It clears away the muddy places. It invites us to let go of our egos and our desire of what we want it to be and instead allow it to be what it is. Sculptors and painters often talk about listening to the stone or the clay or the canvas for what it is saying it wants to be. But I think what the priest was saying in the end is that art is not the only thing that does that. For him it was becoming a priest. A priest was a window cleaner of sorts because he too was pointing people towards something greater and more beautiful than themselves, something pure.
But we are all window cleaners--whenever we live out our passion. Whenever, we are faithful and true to the person we were created to be. Whenever we point out what is beautiful to someone else. Whenever we invite others to be present to the immediate beauty in their lives. We are not John the Baptist pointing the way to the messiah. Not paving our own way like the politician, but instead paving the way for the Christ. We are all window cleaners.
This advent season we are invited to look back, to take notice of the ways we have pointed to ourselves. The ways we have focused too intensely on our own withering lives and failed to see the beauty all around us. The ways our ego has gotten in the way of caring for the people and the world around us. And then we are being invited to turn around, turn out. To wipe away those smudges and look for the beauty that is just outside our windows. To become window washers stepping out of our fragile bag of bones of isolation, wiping away the futility and the folly and seeing clearly the pure and beautiful. Amen.