Sermon: A New Road Home. December 10, 2023

This sermon was preached at Grace Lutheran Church (River Forest, IL) on the Second Sunday of Advent. You can view the livestream and follow along in the bulletin. The photo of the Home Alone house is in the public domain.

Sisters and brothers in Christ, grace be unto you and peace in the name of God the Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

1. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” “Call me Ishmael.” “In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit.” And, perhaps best of all, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Like all great authors, Dickens, Melville, Tolkien, and Austen knew well the value of a good opening line. A well-written beginning pulls you in, opening up a new world, making you want to learn more. But not one of them has anything on St. Mark the pithy Evangelist, who drops the needle with this: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” It’s all there, right there, without the need to speak of dreams and visitations, shepherds and angels. No poetry of the preexistent to be found. While Matthew, Luke, and John each help us more fully understand this Jesus Christ, Mark has no time for extra details. The opening line of Mark propels us into a tense, taut telling of the gospel story, pushing us headlong to the cross. But so much of what we need to know is embedded in the beginning. We learn of one named Jesus, which means He Will Save. He is Christ, which no, is not Joseph and Mary’s last name; it is a title for God’s anointed One. And this anointed Savior is the Son of God. How can this be the beginning of anything other than news that is good?
2. This beginning finds us in our middle. The human story, by the time Jesus entered in and even now, is a muddled middle of sin and suffering, oppression and injustice. So has it always been. No sooner does Mark tell us about Jesus than we find ourselves with someone else – John, the baptizer, whose preaching is so persuasive, whose baptism is so compelling, that all the people (Mark was apparently prone to a bit of hyperbole), all the people were coming out to repent, to confess their sin and seek a new beginning. John, in Mark’s telling, comes to us by way of Isaiah. Here, too, Mark’s storytelling savvy is on full display. Mark wants us to know that, in a way with little to do with geography, we are a people in exile. We live in captivity to sin and death, far from home. But if we are far from home, there is One who is coming to us, just as the Lord came to the people six hundred years earlier to bring them forth from Babylon. This One is now given the name Jesus, and he is building a new road to bring us not from Babylon to Jerusalem, but from sin to forgiveness, from death to life.
3. How are you preparing for this One who is coming? Our Christmas preparations take on many shapes. In our house, and perhaps in yours, our annual rituals include rewatching favorite Christmas movies. And no matter how secular they are, these stories all seem to have an element of exile and an inability to get home but for acts of grace shown to them. From George Bailey to Clark Griswold, we see lives brought to the brink, only for restoration to break in unexpectedly and, of course, just in time for Christmas. It’s a story that plays out for Kevin McCallister, the young hero of Home Alone. He hasn’t gone anywhere, but exile finds him through his family’s forgetfulness. While he bravely defends himself and his home against bungling burglars, his mother embarks on a relentless quest to get home to her boy. At one point, exasperated with a ticket agent, Kate says: “This is Christmas! The season of perpetual hope! And I don’t care if I have to get out on your runway and hitchhike! If it costs me everything I own, if I have to sell my soul to the devil himself, I am going to get home to my son.” And home she gets, because how can a mother’s love for a child be defeated, especially at Christmas?
4. It is just this sort of mothering relentlessness at work in God’s insistence on coming to us. God will do anything to reach us – and thank God, for we have done much to distance ourselves from God. We are so comfortable in so many ways, yet so desperate for true comfort. Advertisers insist upon telling us that the best way to prepare for Christmas is to buy the perfect gifts. And while a gift given in love and received in joy is a wonderful thing, make no mistake – more stuff is not what we truly need. And does anyone really buy a car for their spouse at Christmas without telling them about it beforehand? Those commercials are bonkers. Anyway, John, preparing the way for Jesus, points people to the deeper issue, challenging them to acknowledge their sin and to live in new directions. His preaching afflicts the comfortable so that the gospel can enter in and comfort the afflicted, to borrow a line from the old Chicago Evening Post humorist Finley Peter Dunne. John helps us to see that we are in exile so that our eyes can be opened to watch for the One who is coming to save us, the God who does indeed give up everything for our sake and salvation.
5. Just as God spoke through Isaiah to the people in exile, so Christ speaks now to us: Comfort! O comfort my people. We have managed to lose ourselves, but God has not lost track of us. The Shepherd, to pick up on Isaiah’s imagery, will gather his lambs into his arms and lead us home. And home is here, where Jesus Christ, the Son of God, takes up residence with us until the second Advent, when we shall dwell with him in glory. For even though we have no more permanence on our own than grass or flowers, the Word of God stands forever. This Word of which Isaiah prophesied is the same Word that has taken on our flesh, Jesus the incarnate Christ who takes us up into the story of our God through his death and resurrection.
6. This story now started will be brought to completion. And we are invited to tell it. Shout it in the wilderness! Get you up to a high mountain and speak the good news! In a world exiled from itself, in which violence and hate rage, speak the good news of comfort and joy. God is coming. Jesus who was born will return, and is present even now, comforting you with a feast of love to nourish you for days ahead. God has brought you into the story and will not let you go. Prepare. Repent. The good news is beginning, and God is just getting started. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

And now may that peace that passes all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus, this day and forever. Amen.