Advent 2.8 Mark 1: 1-8 Desert Walks When | was a newcomer to Philadelphia, traveling here through all the empty countryside in the central part of the state, | thought about what itis to traverse a wilderness like the one we have just heard in Mark's gospel. This morning we have done it in the company of John the Baptizer, the hands-down favorite Biblical figure in the Sunday school classes of my youth, because he never failed to provoke a reaction; clothed in camel's hair, eating bugs and wild honey, he was a standout in my classes, preaching alone in the wilderness of Judea. For all of us, he was invariably voted the least likely Episcopalian we could think of; his dress code was certainly out of the question, and the wilderness where he preached and baptized was so far from what any of us associated with worship that was decent and in order that we all felt alittle lost in trying to find some context for him in our own experience. Like Luke and Matthew, the beginning of Mark’s good news offers us a messenger to prepare us for the coming of something great, the arrival of one radically different from the world we inhabit. But there is not an angel telling a young girl the name of a child to be born to her, or one appearing in a dream to a young man about to dismiss his wife-to-be. There is simply a lone figure, preaching repentance, sounding a lot like a man any one of us would avoid ona street-corner. By comparison with what we hear in the other gospels, he is also astonishingly short on information: we are to prepare, to ready ourselves for one that is coming, ‘one whose sandals he is unworthy to untie. So this is the beginning of the good news of the Son of God, not an angel or a shepherd in sight. But that is precisely why we need John and his abiding strangeness, his obstinate defiance of any reference to which we could attach him. In the middle of the wilderness where Mark throws us, itis a mistake to think that we begin on solid footing or that the terrain will be easy. The starkness of the scene and the deep unknowability of the guide push us back on the promises of God, of the presence of the divine in the walks through our ‘own deserts as we prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight. If we are paying attention, the world John occupies is not much different from ‘our own. We too walk a path through the wilderness: ours is from our worship in this place to the needs of the world. tis this path between contemplation and action, between prayer and work, that is one of the oldest in our tradition and is no more important than in this season of, waiting and preparation. itis woven into our identities, is part of who we are and we are incomplete without making that journey. Several years ago, | spent some time at an Episcopal Relief and Development site in northern Honduras, an experience | have spoken about previously. | was with a group that ‘was building a new community, complete with a church, for a number of families that had previously lived in a row of corrugated iron shacks down by the local river. The work was decidedly unglamorous, mostly digging ditches and pouring concrete blocks. Before the work began, though, our group started a walk down a dirt path in ninety-degree heat at eight in the morning, with small children peering out at us from behind their mothers in the houses that lined the path. | wondered what they thought of us , odd as we looked, foreigners with our sunburns, raising our dust-clouds behind us. But we would eventually arrive at a squat, non- descript building for morning prayer, workers from the community and our rag-tag group of outsiders, praying the office in English and in Spanish. It was then that the real communal work began, our time and our relationships being nourished by the time spent in prayer. When | later received an invitation to the consecration of the church we had helped to build together,concrete with plywood steps leading to the door, | was convinced it was the loveliest church | had seen. Glimpses into the kingdom can feel relatively rare, especially in a season marked by both wonder and cynicism, as this one is. So often we are held hostage by our own expectations, the reconciliations we hope for, the straightening of relationships that have been crooked for so long that we hardly remember what they looked lke before they were broken, But | believe that is also why we need John’s presence among us right now, to prepare us to witness to something so wonderful that no sane person could have imagined it, to remind us to pray and to wait so that we can be alive to the kingdom when it arrives, in the face of a guest at Broad Street Ministries, in the smile of a child at St. Barnabas, in the breathing of the person sitting next to us. In that context, repentance, to literally change one’s mind, is about our ability ‘to see the divine in the disorder, to ready our hearts and minds for the unexpected as we move from the prayer we are cultivating this season to the kingdom for which we are all watching and working. Itis the ability to see the world as it might be, even as it should be, as we make our wilderness walks between our prayers and the demands of the world we inhabit. “Whatever our action,” says the Quaker teacher Parker Palmer, “it can express and help shape our souls in the world. Whatever our contemplation, it can help us to see the reality behind the veils. Contemplation and action are not high skils or specialties for the Virtuoso few. They are the warp and weft of human life, the interwoven threads that form the human fabric of who we are and who we are becoming.” Like John, we walk our own path through the wilderness of our own engagement with the world, nourished and directed by the ‘work we do here in this place , the time we spend in our own prayer and worship. Iti in that journey that we too give witness to the one who is to come. And we are just beginning. With Mark as our companion this year, we will constantly be reminded of how little we know of this one who is coming among us. The good news, the real good news, is that we have the promise of God to sustain us on our paths, who lifts valleys and makes mountains low as we take our desert walks. Angels may be in short supply, but the promise is always of renewal, the same renewal we take from this place into a ‘world hungry for the countless gifts we all have. We require no special credentials, no particular talents, no spiritual acrobatics. All we are asked to do is to drop our expectations, even our cynicism, and prepare ourselves for something so wonderful our souls could not have possi imagined it