Mark’s version, church tradition tells us, is based upon Peter’s recollection.  Mark was secretary and personal assistant to Peter in his last years.  Mark’s—Peter’s—account begins, not with a genealogy, nor the circumstances and location of Christ’s birth, nor with the cosmic pre-existence and power of Son with Father, but with the fulfillment of God’s promise to His wounded people, with a call to repentance—that decisive course correction, that heartbroken recognition and cry for God to come and save.

This account begins with the deep, stuck need of people where they are.  That’s where every believer’s story may be said properly to begin: that outcry for salvation.  No supposed salvation, as offered by the powers and sages of this world—new political regimes, expertly-directed economies, pharmaceutical nirvanas, new, great societies of dictated justice and pre-determined equality.  Only God has salvation—true God, all of God, finally wanting God, all of God, all God’s Word, in our lives, directing, reshaping our lives.  When we’re done trying to be the driving force, when we’re done with letting this and that desire of the flesh or false religion of this world be the force driving our life, when we wake up, stop, fall on our faces, and cry out for God—that’s where your story, where my story, with God really begins.

And Mark tells us—quickly, directly—that God responds.  Confession and repentance take two, working together: prompted and prompter, the one who lacks and the one who has, the one who needs and the one who provides.  God is not far away; He’s not refusing to listen.  God is not content to act as if you and I do not exist.  He’s the one who called us into existence!  He wants us for life.  He isn’t going to force us.

Oh, people love to talk about freedom and independence and choice, forgetting to remember all the times when our exercise of those has gotten us into deep trouble.  God will allow us to have the freedom, independence, and choice we value so highly, more highly even than God, especially when His Word should happen to get in the way of our freedom, independence, and choice—not that those are idols or anything like that.

God is very near.  He sends His Word at just the right time.  His Word is very strange, beloved.  His Word does not flash like lightning, boom like thunder.  His Word walks along the dusty path, down through the tall reeds and grasses, down to the water and in, to John, just like you and me.  God’s living, incarnate Word didn’t look like anything special, anyone special!  Shouldn’t Good News look like something?!  If you could give Jesus a makeover, what would he look like?

Mark tells us his subject: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God” (1:1).  The beginning—so what is the continuation, and the conclusion?  Does the story end with the last chapter of Mark’s account?  The beginning—this is just the beginning of the good news; the good news is just getting started.  Remember, your life in Christ is the start of something really good!

Mark is clear: he’s telling us good news.  Couldn’t we all use some of that?  Especially this year.  You know it’s going to be a messy year, beloved.  Around the world and much closer to home, powerful interests are going to be exercising all their power, overt and covert, to get and keep power, stoke anxiety, and build fear.  Scare you into their way.  What about all those who must live below those commanding heights?  Who actually cares about people like you and me, down here in the low places, the out of the way places, the “unimportant” places?  Does it sound too cute to say God cares?  He does, though.  The proof is that He sends us good news, right where we are.

The good news is Jesus the Messiah.  Now, to an ancient Jewish audience, that term Messiah would have been sizzling with power, dreams, hopes and yearning, saturated with pain and praise.  The people needed a Messiah; God had told them they would have a Messiah.  The problem was the same problem people always have in coming to God’s Word.  What people want out of God’s Word and what God promises by His Word aren’t the same.

What do we want from Jesus?  Our prayers can tell us.  How often do you pray?  What should God be doing right now about our culture, our society, the economy, China, Russia, Hamas, the border, COVID, Democrats, Republicans, heretics, trans people and those terrible Trump people?  Mark tells us Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.  Why phrase it that way?  Perhaps as a reminder that the Messiah is not the fulfillment of our power dreams.  Not on our terms but God’s terms; not the Hero of our conceiving but the Savior of God’s sending.  What we need to understand about the Messiah, Peter is telling us, is that he is, first of all, above all and always, the Son of God.  The Son of God comes to us as Messiah, from God, according to God’s purposes, God’s plan—promised Savior, the anointed, consecrated, set apart for holiest purpose.

What does that mean?  If we know our Bible, if we remember the Jesus story, we already know.  It doesn’t exactly resemble those ancient stories of the conquering power of God, wiping out in a single blow cities of Sodomites and entire armies of Egyptians and Assyrians, crushing skulls, galloping through the blood of the vanquished.  Mark means to show us that the Messiah comes to restore man to God’s service, through his own blood.

So far as the news goes, the last few years haven’t been too encouraging.  I barely pay attention, anymore: I don’t need the depression!  Good news changes our perspective, even if only a little—good news reminds us at just the right time that things aren’t so bad, after all, that there is hope, after all, and kindness, mercy, and grace.  The Messiah, Son of God, comes to show the power of hope, of God’s lovingkindness.  The Messiah reminds us that God is a loving God, not an angry God; a God of salvation, not a God of annihilation and indifference.  Indifference, anger, mass annihilation—these are what we bring to the table.

We need a savior.  God sends a Savior from His holy heart.  The prophets had been saying as much all along.  Some among the faithful had understood, had heard and believed.  Others hadn’t believed, hadn’t heard, or understood.  Mark reminds us, “as it is written in Isaiah the prophet: ‘I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way’” (1:2).  We hear as much from Malachi, too.  The message, the promise of salvation, is not new; neither is the entrenched disobedience making a savior necessary.

Why do we need saving?  Saved from what?  Are we in danger?  What’s the danger?  Where’s the danger?  Yes, it can be hard to see, hard to feel.  We don’t have to be out-and-out evil as the world understands that to have a hard heart.  A hard heart is one that does not believe, just can’t believe, for whom all this salvation talk is so much jibberish, just a way to manipulate gullible, weak people: thought control, like Pink Floyd warned us about, denying people their humanity and freedom, failing to honor their truth and their reality.  Our times are very curious, but not exactly unprecedented: when human freedom is primarily and supremely expressed and experienced through the use and abuse to which people put their genitalia while rejecting any responsibility for the consequences, we know we are facing a deep, serious problem.  Scripture calls the problem sin.

Isaiah had sung about preparing the way, clearing the way, as though the road were in sad disrepair.  Have you ever tried to drive on a road in sad disrepair?  And why was the road in such bad shape?  Storms, the elements, mudslides, expansion and contraction, heavy loads—it’s amazing how the works of our hands can so quickly buckle and fail.  Some of the saddest damage to try to repair is the damage that comes with neglect, abandonment, forgetfulness.

Just down the road is a sign welcoming people to the Stephen F. Austin, Brazos River paddling trail.  I challenge you to find any evidence beyond that sign that there was ever a trail of any kind, there.  Totally forgotten, completely neglected, yet there was a way at one time.  Re-establishing the trail?  It’d be hard work, not impossible, but who would really care?  Who wants it?  Nobody used it: that’s why it became lost.  Mark reminds us of the “voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him’” (1:3).  Time to make some changes, start clearing the way.  How to begin?  Where to begin?  We each must begin where all things, good and bad, begin: with the want to.  Want the change.  Want to clear the way.  Want to do the work of clearing the way.

“And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (1:4).  We can’t just keep doing the same things with the same mindset and expect we’ll be forgiven after all anyway.  The problem, as we know too well, is leaving off the things we’ve been doing.  We can even want forgiveness and a changed life yet continue to do the things that block up the way.  Woe is us!  Paul poignantly writes about that in at least a couple places.  But God doesn’t say “first get your life right, only then will I forgive you.”  John isn’t crying out demanding people do that.  This baptism John was offering, this washing, was for an outward sign until the inward reality came, as God had promised it would, had promised He would come.

The baptism was at one and the same time a public confession, a public profession, and a personal cry for God to come.  This baptism with water was how people could begin to come into contact with what their inmost hearts yearned for: restoration to right relationship with God.  If you didn’t really want or care about that, if you didn’t think you needed that, you wouldn’t bother with this baptism business.  Baptism was for those who were so desperate, so aware of their need and inability, that they would go to almost any distance, would be willing to look like sopping-wet fools, hoping that God would be merciful to them, sinners as they knew they were.  Baptism was a way for them to say, definitively, that they wanted to be done with the old life, that living death.  Baptism was a way for them to say, definitively, that they earnestly desired what only God could give, and that they were from that moment going to dedicate themselves to the lifelong, costly labor of not losing what God had freely given.  I repent!—I want the life only You can give: Father, forgive!

People were going out in droves to John in the wilderness, to be baptized, make their confession, to cry out for God’s loving forgiveness.  What a sight!  Dramatic, to be sure: visual, visceral.  They’re not coming in droves, now.  The need is still there.  The world explains it away quite rationally, psychologically, scientifically, politically, soothingly, persuasively.  The world is as convincing as you, or I, or the next person wishes the world to be.  Because what’s the alternative?  Being here?

John made no secret of his prophetic calling: he dressed like Elijah and other prophets of old.  Something old and something new.  Through Isaiah, God had said He was going to do something new.  No one was exactly sure what that meant.  It sounded wonderful and a little terrifying.  It sounded like salvation and judgment, all intertwined, inseparable.  John called out so that everyone could hear, so that no one could say he or she hadn’t heard: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.  I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit” (1:7-8).  If people thought John was something special!  Just wait.  The true power was on the way.

John wanted to be quite clear: he could only show and do outward signs.  The power who was on his way would bring the inward power.  John offered the sign.  The one who would come would be the substance.  John was there to minister to those who desired change.  The one who was about to happen would be the power of change, creation, salvation.  John could only try to work from the outside in.  The Savior works from the inside out.

I, these elders whom we will install today, and all of us—in our families, among our friends, in our workplaces, among our fellow students—we can only work from the outside in.  Let us work.  Here today, we are presented with strong reminders that we have a God, a Savior, working from the inside out.  Power is His.  He wants to use it, for us.

Now, to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.