Concern for Others
Text: Mark 1:2-4
Title: Concern for Others
Thesis: God makes preparations for us to receive the best gift of all, relationship with God.
Time: Advent 2 Sun, C; Come Home for Christmas
This is a time of year when the shopping malls are crowded and stores like Wal-Mart and K-Mart have long lines at the checkout. It’s an amazing tradition, the Christmas season, that once each year we go out, fighting the crowds and cold weather, to buy presents for our loved ones. Our hope in buying presents for loved ones is that they will like and appreciate what we get them. I can think of gifts I’ve been given through the years that were things I especially liked. As a child I remember getting a red bicycle one Christmas. Every year I usually get a gift certificate to a restaurant of some kind from a family member, as they know I like to eat out. When I was still in high school, my dad got me a tool set for Christmas, I still have and use the tool set. I am sure you also can think of Christmas gifts you’ve enjoyed or found useful. But of all the gifts we could ever receive, the greatest gift is the one we read about in Mark chapter one. Mark one tells us about God’s gift to us.
This gift that God gives is the perfect gift. It’s something that never wears out, is the perfect size, never outlives its usefulness, never goes out of style and is something that isn’t easily forgotten about, as we do some gifts by shoving them in the back of the closet. No, this gift that God desires to give to us is nothing else than the promise than we can live in relationship with God.
Mark emphasizes the importance of this gift, the importance of relationship with God by opening with a quotation from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah said, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way.” In the book of Isaiah, the people knew what it was like to live without God. Isaiah describes their lives as living out in a barren desert, with chalky soil covered with broken stones and rocks. Snakes are crawling through the brushwood, there is no drinking water. Their enemies attack them from all sides. But they will be saved, a messenger will be sent to lead them out of the wilderness, and back into the land of promise, in the presence of God. Mark tells us, and now that time has come, John the Baptist is this messenger, announcing the time has now come, to point people in the right direction.
As I finish up my Christmas shopping, I hope that the gifts I give to family and friends are things they will enjoy and find useful. And I am also reminded in Mark one that the greatest gift I can share with others is telling them about God’s gift. One way all of us can include sharing with others about God’s gift with our family and friends this year is by inviting them to our “Home For Christmas” Christmas Eve Service. Along with the gift certificates and clothes and bicycles, and other gifts we will give this year, we can also share about the greatest gift of all, God’s salvation.
What is interesting to me about the Gospel of Mark is that Mark never tries to prove the existence of God. Instead, the emphasis in Mark is to explain what God is like. Mark explains that God is full of forgiveness, even as John the Baptist, in verse four “appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance, and forgiveness of sins.” Mark also shares that God is able to heal, able to restore broken relationships, God is present in times of trouble, God gives hope for the future, God provides food to eat, and clothing to wear. Just as we can say a gift reveals a lot about the giver, so that is true with God, in order to receive this gift of God’s salvation, of living in relationship with God, we must know something about the giver.
Time magazine shares a story about a mysterious giver. “When the post office in Troy, Michigan, summoned Michael Achorn to pick up a 2-foot-long, 40-pound package, his wife, Margaret, cheerfully went to accept it. But as she drove it back to her office in Detroit, she began to worry. The box was from Montgomery Ward, but the sender, Edward Achorn, was unknown to Margaret and her husband, despite the identical last name. What if the thing was a bomb? So she telephoned postal authorities. The bomb squad soon arrived with eight squad cars and an armored truck. They took the suspected bomb in the armored truck to a remote tip of Belle Isle in the middle of the Detroit River. There they wrapped detonating cord around the package and, as they say in the bomb business, “opened it remotely.” When the debris settled, all that was left intact was the factory warranty for the contents: a $450 stereo. Now, the only mystery is who is Edward Achorn and why did he send Michael and Margaret such a nice Christmas present?”
“Who is man, that you are mindful of him?” we read in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. Reading the Gospel of Mark, we can also but wonder why God has such a great desire to give us the gift of salvation. Even in the opening words of Mark, there is a need for us to repent, to make possible the receiving of God’s gift. All we can really do is praise God for giving us the gift of salvation, as we wonder “Who is God that God is mindful of us.”
As a child I never could wait to open the Christmas presents I got from my Uncle Johnny. Johnny never married, and so, in a lot of ways all his nieces and nephews were his children. Usually, our family went to Johnny’s house of Christmas day and he would give my sister and me our presents. One year he got us an air hockey game, another year a pinball machine. However, one year, I think I was twelve, Johnny sent his gifts to our house for us to open on Christmas morning. I remember I couldn’t wait to open his gift as it sat there under the tree. I remember shaking the package, holding it up to my ear, and guessing what could be inside. I took into account how much it weighed, the shape of the box, gathering any clues I could about the mysterious contents. And, on Christmas morning, running to the living room, the first gift I reached for under the tree was Uncle Johnny’s. I quickly unwrapped the package, and to my surprise, he played a practical joke on me. All that was inside was an old Reader’s Digest book. He had my real present for me at his house, which I got later that day.
The reason why some people never receive God’s gift of salvation is they analyze the gift to death. Like guessing what’s in a wrapped box, they take the same approach with God’s gift of salvation, thinking intellectually about what this gift might mean for their lives. Having this gift means some things will have to change, just as John the Baptist preached about repentance and making room for God in our hearts. Receiving God’s gift means we have to rely upon God, to have faith in God. What happens in Mark 1 is people begin receiving God’s gift. John the Baptist continues preaching about the need for repentance, and an amazing thing happens, more and more people come to hear about God’s gift. In Mark 1:5 we read, “And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him.”
Even today, there are many people desiring God’s gift of salvation. The best gift we can give this year is telling them about God’s gift. As I shared, one of the ways we can share about God’s gift of salvation this Christmas is by inviting friends and family to our “Come Home for Christmas” Christmas Eve service.
But really, there are many ways the gift can be shared. I noticed on a church sign yesterday, “The best gift is a hug: the reason why? One size fits all.” Expressing our love is another way of expressing God’s love for us. Just as Jesus loved others, loving others is a way of sharing with others God’s gift of salvation.
One person writes this, “I have a theory about old age . . . I believe that when life has whittled us down, when joints have failed and skin has wrinkled and capillaries have clogged and hardened, what is left of us will be what we were all along, in our essence. Exhibit A is a distant uncle … all his life he did nothing but find new ways to get rich. He spent his senescence very comfortable, drooling and babbling constantly about the money he had made … when life whittled him down to his essence, all there was left was raw greed. This is what he had cultivated in a thousand little ways over a lifetime. Exhibit b is my wife’s grandmother. When she died in her mid-eighties, she had already been senile for several years. What did this lady talk about? The best example I can think of was when we asked her to pray before dinner. She would reach out and hold the hands of those sitting beside her, a broad smile would spread across her face, her dim eyes would fill with tears as she looked up to heaven, and her chin would quaver as she poured out her love to Jesus. That was Edna in a nutshell. She loved Jesus and she loved people. She couldn’t remember our names, but she couldn’t keep her hands from patting us lovingly whenever we got near her. When life whittled her down to her essence, all there was left was love; love for God and love for people.
So, today let us show our concern for those we love, as we share with them the best gift of all, that through Jesus Christ we can live in relationship with God.