God cares about you.
God cares about you and me.
God cares about you and me and us.
God cares about you and me and us and all people.
God cares about you and me and us and all people and those persons who have wronged us.
God cares about you and me and us and all people and those persons who have wronged us and all creation.
God is head over heels in love with who and what God created.
This is a pure gift.
We as sentient beings are also capable of pure gift giving.
The mutual exchange of gifts is the very definition of love.
What hampers the gift-giving impulse are sins.
I think two sins typically get in the way of gift giving in this season where we pray, Come, Christ Jesus, Come.
They are jealousy and envy.
These are often spoken of as if they were interchangeable.
But each is a stumbling block in its own right.
My jealous behavior comes out when I am afraid I will lose something I possess to someone else who does not have it or at least, not as much of it as I possess.
The root of it is fear and the effect of it makes me guarded and miserly.
Second generation immigrants to this country sometimes behave in this way toward new immigrants.
My envious behavior comes out when I desperately want what another has, and I don’t care if they have to go without once I have obtained it.
All manner of lies, deceptions and theft fit this behavior.
Our displays of jealousy and envy, in turn, tempt others to resent us, which can only lead to a downward spiral in our relationships.
To counter our jealousy and envy, we can examine our rationalizations.
For instance, “I deserve this.”, which implies that someone else does not deserve this.
For instance, “I worked hard for this.”, which implies that someone else did not work as hard as I did.
For instance, “I’ve waited a lot longer than they did for this.”, which implies they are lucky to be in the queue at all.
When tribes and nations and ethnic groups give in to either envy or jealousy, then wars and genocides are possible.
It often comes down to, “Whose grievance is more deserving of a remedy that, in turn, deprives someone else of life or liberty or livelihood or land?”
Our reading from the Second Letter of Peter can help us a lot this morning with our sinfulness.
The passage may not directly deal with jealousy and envy, but it does deal with why God does not step in to settle it once and for all, meaning mostly, to my liking.
The letter’s author suggests God does not want to settle scores for us, sending the deserving to heaven and the rest to hell.
Rather, God demonstrates patience because God desires the repentance of not just a few, but all people.
If you find a time to read that passage again, consider the love of God waiting patiently for our repentance.
Now on to our Gospel passage.
When our government sends an aircraft carrier to within bombing range in a tense part of the world, the reporters will likely use the phrase, “projecting power” to describe the implicit threat posed by a war machine capable of inflicting unimaginable damage and harm on anyone tempted to call it a bluff.
Keeping that modern threat in mind, look again at our opening passage from Mark’s Gospel.
If indeed John the Baptizer was drawing a crowd as big as Mark claims, don’t you think the Roman Empire’s legionnaires or Rome’s proxy forces controlled by King Herod would be “projecting power” close by the Jordan River?
I suggest we meditate on the scene from this point of view because it seems the Baptizer is taunting someone who is visibly monitoring his activity.
“The one who is more powerful than me is coming after me.”
Mark’s readers/listeners find their ears perking up at this scene of the Baptizer taunting the power of the Emperor and the Empire.
Is he calling their bluff?
But surely he knows that the Emperor and the Empire do not bluff and will do anything to protect the dominance established by brute force and conquest.
But then the baptizer talks about a new baptism in the Holy Spirit.
Now Mark’s readers/listeners pick up the coded meaning.
Holy Spirit means the spirit of Christ Jesus whose power does not taunt, but rather asserts that God’s power patiently and surely reconciles even those who depend on the illusion of power — power manifest in the implements of war and subjugation, whether it is a spear or a sword or an AR-15.
God’s power resides in forgiveness.
In much of recorded history, the power to pardon someone who has violated societal norms was reserved to the leader, e.g., governor, president, monarch, emperor.
But the power to forgive sin is reserved to the divine, to God.
The pardoning power exercised by human leaders can be corrupted by bribery, tribalism, and self-interest.
On the other hand, God’s power to forgive is perfect and unerring.
But God’s forgiveness is not cheap grace.
As the John the Baptizer tells us, God calls us to repent our sin.
That requires us to recognize the sin in us and among us.
The truly great and wonderful grace of God consists in this – God helps us open our eyes and ears to our sin, to our short comings, to our missing the mark.
The tragedies in our personal history and the history of human societies come about from rejecting this grace, this gift of opening our eyes and ears to sin.
This grace is often proffered by an angel who suggests that we are living in the illusion of false security.
Bayard Rustin was one such angel. Rustin was the civil rights activist who made the 1963 (Aug. 28) March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom possible. A biographical drama about Rustin came out just this year in a movie.
Bayard Rustin was also the instrument God used in 1956 to convince Rev. Dr. MLK, Jr. to use exclusively non-violent means to promote the civil rights movement starting with the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Certain epic figures in our history seemed to spring to their stature and reputation as if touched by the divine.
And perhaps that is so, except that the divine touch comes in the form of persons with a prophetic and confrontational style.
Rev. Dr. MLK, Jr. was already a rising star in the civil rights movement in 1956 when he contemplated leading the movement into Montgomery, AL.
What would become the Montgomery Bus Boycott came about because MLK had the counsel of a man who was steeped in Gandhi’s non-violent, civil disobedience methods.
That man, Bayard Rustin, convinced MLK to embrace the method not only for the movement, but also for his personal life. MLK had, up to that time, carried a handgun for personal protection.
God sends us prophets like Isaiah and John the Baptizer and Bayard Rustin to prepare us, to point out the sins we need to repent from and to remind us that God has in store for us a new heaven and new earth where righteousness lives.
God is patient and wants us all, each and every one, to be saved.
When we repent our sins, that is what righteousness looks like; and the new heaven and the new earth surround us.
Bayard Rustin (/ˈbaɪ.ərd/; March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was an African-American leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights.
You redeemed the world from sin by your first coming in humility;
may we embrace that same humility as we approach our families,
our co-workers and our neighbors in the coming days, we pray …
You have taken our weakness upon yourself;
help us demonstrate true charity with those whose weakness disturbs us, we pray …
You are the Prince of Peace;
direct us in our efforts to make peace a reality in our world, we pray …
Please state now the names of those whose needs are uppermost in your minds; for these and all whose names are written in our Book of Intentions, we pray …
Holy One,
the day draws near when the glory of your Anointed
will make radiant the night of the waiting world.
May the lure of greed not impede us from the joy
which moves the hearts of those who seek the Christ.
May the darkness not blind us
to the vision of wisdom
which fills the minds of those who find the Christ.
We ask this in Jesus’ name.