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Imagine that you are sitting in a darkened movie theater, eating popcorn. You have already seen three previews of coming attractions and now it is time for the feature presentation. The screen goes black, and from the speakers you begin to hear the sounds of a meal in progress -- the clink of utensils, the murmur of conversation. As the picture swims up out of the darkness you see men in robes reclining around a collection of greasy plates, bowls, pitchers, cups, some of them still eating, reaching out with a piece of bread to sop up the last bit of gravy. "Jerusalem, AD. 33," announces the subtitle as the camera slowly zooms in on the solemn face of a man who takes a long look at each of the others, then turns his eyes toward heaven.

"Holy Father," he sighs, "I pray that they might be one, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. And then, closing his eyes, clenching his fists, he prays with urgency, "Let them be one, Father, let them be ONE!" The camera tilts up crazily from his face into a sky full of swirling stars as the title score swells in the background and the name of the film appears on the screen. As the opening credits roll, the whole history of the church unfolds in a kaleidoscope of images tumbling down through the centuries, until the director’s name fades from the screen, the music dies and you hear the steady buzz of a crowded modern convention hall.

"Let me have your attention, please," says a man at the podium, and as he bangs his gavel we learn that this is "Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1999." The convention hall is quiet. "Let me welcome you to this international, interdenominational gathering of Christians," he says with a smile. "As you know, our purpose in these three days is to find some common ground, to draft a confession of faith for the year 2000 with which we all can agree, adding with a chuckle, "impossible as that sounds. We’ll do it like this: Each of you should have received a large card, red on one side, green on the other. As I read the following statements and ask for a vote, show me the green side if you agree, the red side if you don’t. Then we’ll go on to the next statement. All right? The first statement from our panel is this one: ‘Jesus was born of a virgin.’ Remember, green side if you agree. Red side if you don’t."

The camera slowly pans a sea of red and green cards, just about evenly divided. The moderator chuckles again, but nervously. "It looks like a tie," he says. "Let’s go on to the next statement and see if we can do any better."

But before he can say another word an argument breaks out on the convention floor. News cameras converge on the scene as one of the delegates shouts at another, "If you don’t believe Jesus was born of a virgin, then you don’t belong in this meeting!" He grabs the other man’s card and sends it sailing across the room like a Frisbee. Then it’s bedlam, with everybody reaching, snatching cards, throwing punches. The moderator ducks behind the podium as red and green cards rain down on the platform. Cameras flash like fireworks.

The next morning’s Milwaukee Sentinel carries this headline: "Christian Convention Erupts in Violence: Delegates Disagree on Virgin Birth." In a downtown café, a truck driver points to the picture as a waitress fills his coffee cup. "Willya look at that? Ain’t that the biggest crock you’ve ever seen? And my mother-in-law wonders why I don’t go to church!"

The church is sadly fragmented. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Christian denominations in the world divided along lines of doctrinal difference. The prayer Jesus offered up nearly 2000 years ago has not been answered. We are not "all one." And if you pay attention to his words you can see what a problem we have. "Holy Father," he said, "I pray that they may all be one, so that the world may believe that you have sent me." If we don’t show some unity, then the world won’t believe. But is there any point on which we can agree?

Three days later, the Milwaukee convention hail is in a shambles. Folding chairs are overturned and trash fills the aisles. The delegates are looking sullen, many of them with bandaged heads, arms in slings. The moderator steps cautiously to the podium and announces in a tired voice, "We will close our, um, meeting with communion. Ushers will pass the elements from the aisle." And as the plates travel down the rows, from

white to black to yellow hand, a silence falls on that room.

When everyone is holding both bread and cup, a retired minister gets up slowly from his chair, shuffles to the podium and invokes the ancient formula: "On the night that he was betrayed Jesus took bread, and when he had blessed it he broke it, and said, ‘This is my body, broken for you."’

And then he stops, as if he has forgotten what to say next. For several minutes he stands in that deafening silence, staring at the broken loaf in his hands. From somewhere in front of him, a young woman whispers, "The body of Christ was broken for me." The man beside her hears it and whispers: "The body of Christ was broken for me." Then it ripples across the congregation like a breeze, until every voice in that room is whispering in unison: "The body of Christ was broken for us!"

I am indebted to my friend and former pastor Paul Duke for the image of Jesus as a mother standing with her hand on the doorknob, her coat over her arm, watching her children play with Legos on the living room floor. One of them looks up suddenly and, noticing that she is about to leave, asks:

"Where are you going?"

"I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am there you may be also."

"Can we go with you?"

"Where I am going you cannot come.

"How long will you be gone?"

"A little while and you will no longer see me, and again a little while and you will see me."

"Who will take care of us?"

"I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever."

The context and questions are those of departure -- appropriate in the hours before Jesus’ death, but also appropriate on the Sunday before the ascension. Jesus is leaving again, and like children we want to know "who will take care of us."

There is no account of the ascension in John’s Gospel, no story of Jesus leaping up into the sky while angels ask, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?" (Acts 1:11). There is only a hint, whispered to Mary Magdalene: "Go to my disciples and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, my God and your God"’ (John 20:17). Still, we can safely assume that there came a time when he left his disciples, when they found themselves as alone as children whose mother has just walked out the door.

I picture it like this:

Wherever they are -- in an upper room, on the shores of Galilee, on the Mount of Olives -- they look at each other in surprise, even shock. At first they are speechless, and then one of them blurts out, "Who will take care of us now?" They begin to look to Peter for answers. He is, after all, the one Jesus has commissioned as shepherd of the sheep (John 21:17). But it is that other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, who remembers.

"Wait," he says. "He told us that he was going away, but that he would be coming back to us, remember? He said he was going to the Father, and that he wanted to tell us beforehand so that when it happened we would believe. Well, now it has happened, and we don’t need to be fearful; we need to believe."

The others start nodding their heads. Yes, he had said something like that. They remember now, remember clearly.

"In fact," says this disciple, "he said that we would remember because the. . . what was it? The Advocate! The Holy Spirit would teach us everything, and remind us of all the things the Lord told us while he was still with us.

And then it dawns on them: they are remembering the things he told them as if he were standing right there, whispering the words in their ears! And in that same moment they realize with a shiver that they are not alone, that the promises of Jesus to them are promises that have already been kept.

The Greek word for "advocate" is paraclete, formed from a verb that means "to call alongside." When I teach the Gospel of John, I usually tell my students that a paraclete is the one whose name you call when you are hauled into court on false charges, when the school bully is beating you up on the playground, when you wake up from a bad dream in the middle of the night. A paraclete is the one who comes to your defense, your rescue, your comfort, and Jesus has done that for his disciples. But now another paraclete will serve that function. As Fred Craddock puts it: "The Holy Spirit will do for the Church what Jesus has done for the disciples.

John Kysar summarizes the "Paraclete passages" in the Fourth Gospel by noting that the Paraclete meets the needs arising from the departure of Jesus. The work of the Paraclete is within the community of faith, keeping the words of Jesus "fresh." The Paraclete is connected with the power of the witness of believers for Jesus. The Paraclete functions beyond the community of faith by judging the world and demonstrating its wrong. And the Paraclete leads believers into all truth. With that in mind, perhaps we should "rejoice" as Jesus suggests. We are in good hands.

When my wife puts her hand on the doorknob, her coat over her arm, my children look up from what they are doing to ask: "Who will take care of us?" and she gives them the name of one of their regular babysitters. All of them are capable, and my children enjoy the attention, but if my wife gives them one name --"Brittain"-- my children leap up from what they are doing and rejoice. Brittain reads to them, romps with them, acts out plays and makes chocolate chip cookies; she nurtures their young lives like a loving parent, and as long as she is with them they are not afraid.

I don’t know that the Holy Spirit has ever been compared to a babysitter. But if you can imagine Jesus as a mother, then it may not be so hard to imagine the Spirit in this other role, as one who cares for the church in the interim between Jesus’ departure and return, as one who comforts, teaches, reminds and, yes, sometimes even romps with the sons and daughters of God.

In the words of Jesus then, "Rejoice!"

"After these things," John says. After Jesus had been crucified and buried, after he had risen from the dead and appeared to his disciples -- after all these things, "Jesus showed himself again."

Why?

I remember a concert at which the singer left the stage before we in the audience were ready for him to be done. We got to our feet. We clapped and whistled. We shouted, "Encore!" And a few minutes later he bounded back onto the stage, strapped on his guitar and launched into the finale: those last few songs we had been waiting the whole concert to hear.

I can understand why he came back. There was something unfinished about his concert, something that he needed to do before we could let him go. But what about Jesus? What kind of encore can you play after you have risen from the dead? What sort of finale would add anything to that most final of acts?

The clues are abundant.

At the beginning of the epilogue (chapter 21) the disciples have left Jerusalem and are gathered by the Sea of Galilee. Simon Peter is there, along with Thomas, Nathanael, James, John and "two others of his disciples." What they are doing there we can only guess. They seem to be waiting for something. Or someone. You can almost hear the clock ticking. Finally Peter says to his peers, "I’m going fishing." And with a sigh of relief (or resignation) they offer to go with him.

I don’t know that John means it this way, but Peter’s words in this passage have always depressed me. All those high hopes that had been his when he was with Jesus have come crashing down, and now, with no reason to go forward, he goes back to that thing he knows best: fishing. There is nothing wrong with fishing. It is honest work. But Peter has been up on the high slopes with Jesus and is now back down at sea level.

That would be bad enough, but to make matters worse, Peter cannot succeed at the thing to which he has resigned himself. "That night they caught nothing," John adds flatly. And can’t you see Peter? He flings his net out over the black waters again and again, hauling them in dripping wet and as empty as his dreams. "What’s the use?" he mutters under his breath. "What’s the point? Even the one thing I thought I could do I can’t do anymore.

But then day breaks and a stranger asks the question all fisherman have heard from the shore: "Caught anything, boys?" They shake their heads. Nothing. "Cast the net on the right side of the boat," he suggests, and to humor the stranger they do. But this time everything changes. This time they are unable to haul it in because of the live, wiggling weight of the fish they have caught. Like the parallel story in Luke 5, the miraculous catch serves as an epiphany, shining a light on the stranger, showing him for who he really is. The disciple whom Jesus loves turns to Peter and says with a gasp, "It is the Lord!"

Impulsive as ever, Peter throws on his clothes and jumps into the water, swimming toward shore while the others drag the full net along behind the boat. At first his strokes are long and strong, then he slows as he gets closer to shore, closer to Jesus. What will he say when the two of them stand face to face? How will he explain not only his denial of Jesus (John 18:15-18, 25-27), but now the denial of his calling as a disciple?

Nonetheless he comes ashore, and after an awkward breakfast at which Jesus acts as host -- giving bread and fish to a hungry, though much smaller, multitude by the sea -- Jesus nods to Peter and they start off down the beach.

"Simon," says Jesus, "do you love me?" And Peter, pained by the question, answers, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." And then Jesus asks it again. And then again. Each time Peter answers with all the sincerity he can muster, his anguish evident in his voice. And each time Jesus follows his response with a simple command: "Feed my lambs. Tend my sheep. Feed my sheep."

Most scholars believe that Peter’s threefold profession of his love for Jesus parallels his threefold denial, that Jesus is giving Peter the chance to fill the hole he has dug for himself with three huge shovelfuls of love. They are probably right. There is a symmetry here. But there is more. Jesus is not only trying to bring Peter back to where he was before but to move him beyond that. Jesus looks Peter in the eye and speaks the words that won him in the first place: "Follow me.

Suddenly it is clear. Jesus has made this encore appearance for Peter’s benefit. In the same way he returned for Thomas, to move him from doubt to faith, he now returns for Peter, to move him from faith to action.

Perhaps in these days after the resurrection we need that as much as Peter did. We, too, have come down from the high slopes of Easter and now find ourselves stuck in the same sea-level routine. We have seen the risen Lord and believed, but what difference has it made? Perhaps, having heard the invitation to follow so long ago, we need to hear it again, and then to act. . .

Encore!

On February 19, 1998, a car sped across the grassy median of Interstate 95 near West Palm Beach into southbound traffic, then back into the northbound lanes. At least three people reported seeing a woman throw her infant son through the driver’s side window. When questioned by police, Krisann Haddad said she would "rather have her child dead than in this world."

We are shocked that a mother would try to take the life of her own child. Normally, it is just the opposite: a mother will lay down her own life rather than see her child come to any harm. In I Kings 3:16-18, Solomon, the wise king of Israel, depends on that truth to settle a dispute between two mothers.

One of them relates the story: she and the other woman were living in the same house. They gave birth to sons within days of each other. One night the other woman discovered that her child had died, took the first woman’s living child from her arms and replaced him with her dead son. The first woman tells the king, "When I rose in the morning to nurse my son I saw that he was dead; but when I looked at him closely in the morning, clearly it was not the son I had borne." The king is asked to settle the case. Who is the real mother? How can he tell? By testing the strength of love.

"Bring me a sword," he says calmly, and when he proposes to divide the child and give half to each mother the real mother protests, "Please, my lord, give her the living boy; certainly do not kill him!" But the other mother coolly retorts, "It shall be neither yours nor mine; divide it" (notice the language: the real mother refers to her son as "the living boy," the other woman twice refers to him as "it"). "Give the first woman the living boy," Solomon says, his voice full of sympathy, "do not kill him. She is his mother." How did he know? Her true identity was revealed by her love.

After Judas goes into the physical and spiritual darkness of the night in John 13, Jesus turns to his remaining disciples and, like a mother on her deathbed, says, "Little children, I am with you only a little longer."

You can almost imagine a mother bidding her children good-by. Gathered around her bed in a crumbling farmhouse, the younger ones, wide-eyed, clutch cornshuck dolls and wipe their noses on their sleeves. The older ones try to be brave, but are unable to keep an occasional tear from spilling and washing wet tracks down their dirty cheeks.

"Little children," says Jesus, "you will look for me, but where I am going you cannot come.

Even the youngest ones sense that something is dreadfully wrong. The tears begin to flow freely. The baby drops his rattle and begins to wail.

"I give you a new commandment," Jesus says, "that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another."

With a brave smile and a trembling voice, the mother says: "I won’t be around to take care of you much longer. You will have to take care of each other. I want you to be good to each other, watch out for each other and most of all, love each other. Promise?"

"By this everyone will know that you are my disciples," Jesus concludes, making his most important point yet, "if you have love for one another."

Just as Solomon was able to discern the true identity of a mother by her love for her child, so will the world be able to identify the true disciples of Jesus by their love for one another.

This is a serious matter, with serious implications. This means that if the disciples of Jesus squabble over doctrine, over decisions, over property, over power, then people everywhere -- looking at them -- will shake their heads and say, "They must not be real disciples." As the old song insists, "They will know we are Christians by our love."

But they will also assume some things about Jesus if we don’t love. In the small town where I live people often blame parents for the way their children turn out. If the children are mean or rude or disrespectful, the leading citizens of the community will cluck their tongues and say, "The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree."

So, for the sake of our identity and Jesus’ reputation, we should love one another, and we should do it in a certain way. Jesus has said to his disciples, "Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another." He does not mean the feigned affection that sometimes passes for love in the church, but the genuine article -- the kind of love Jesus has always shown for his disciples, the kind of love that a mother normally shows for her children, the kind of love that stands ready to lay down one’s life for the other.

Until we love like that, we cannot throw stones at Krisann Haddad; none of us is without sin. How many times have we "thrown out" our fellow disciples, the little children of Jesus? Or, like the woman who stood before Solomon, called for the sword that divides Christ’s church? May the motherly words of Jesus pierce us to the heart and move us to new levels of sacrifice and love.

At Christmas, even the most Protestant among us can be drawn to the contemplation of Mary. It seems right to recall her humble courage, her receiving and carrying and giving birth, and her joy as she sang of the saving work of God. The old King James Version puts part of Mary’s doxology this way: "He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts." Those words seem especially apt to me, for it is indeed by our imagining, by what our hearts picture in fear or desire, that we humans are pushed and pulled in our many directions.

Yet if imagination is such a medium for our destruction, could it not also serve to gather and bless us? Instead of imagining fantasies and terrors, may we not imagine ourselves alongside Mary, seeing history’s hard cruelty give way to hope and gracious surprise? We sing her song of praise and envision the vindication of the poor. We picture her child newborn as if we ourselves held him in our arms, as if God thus came to us as well. By "making believe," we may in fact come to believe. Yet more, what we imagine may take on flesh and truth before our eyes.

I think that we practice this imagination of the heart, by the gift and command of God, in our worship. We make believe that love rules already, that the lowly are lifted up, death conquered, sin cleansed away, peace triumphant, and Christ touched and seen and tasted. On the verge of Christmas, we imagine and sing with Mary in this way.

Yet grateful as I am for her example and companionship in this, there are a couple of things about Mary, or about our churchly imagination of her, that trouble me. The first might be termed an ethical worry. It is that we who are privileged play at a nativity-scene peasanthood and join in the song of Mary without placing our real lives in its context. The Magnificat may move us with its dream of redistributive justice, but do we make imaginative solidarity with Mary only to domesticate her to our decidedly inexpensive fantasies of peace on earth? Are we drawn to consider what this will cost us and to begin paying that price?

I pray that we who have much of the world’s goods and power will hear Mary’s words about the proud and rich as warnings and salutary threats to ourselves. If we are able to sing those words lustily, let it be because we are seduced by the grandeur and grace of the salvation she describes, but let it also join us to those who yearn for a turning of the socioeconomic tables. I fear that we will instead use her as a talisman, a manger-set figure, in order to feel as if we’re already on the right side of the revolution she sings about. She ought to be more humanly real and powerful than that.

I also worry that Mary will be easily domesticated to my ethical evasions because she is often pictured as meekly compliant. And there begins my second, more theological, Marian discomfort, having to do with the themes of power and consent in this story of our salvation. Part of this is Luke’s vision. His Gospel is known for its attention to women, but they are portrayed in accord with his strong emphasis on piety and filial obedience. The banter and hard questioning we hear from women in the other Gospels is hardly prominent, if even present, in Luke’s imagining. His Mary can seem a paragon of compliance.

Perhaps we are intended to see the contrast between Mary’s assent -- "Let it be with me according to your word" -- and the primordial disobedience of Eve. The implication is that womanhood, or the soul of all our humanity, will be redeemed not in self-assertion but in abnegation and subordination. We may resist that ideological paradigm and its implications, but it seems near at hand in the account of Gabriel’s visit to Nazareth.

Indeed, the angelic annunciation is not worded as a proposal but as an exercise of irresistible power: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you." Our piety may protect us from seeing an analogy here with the rape of Io, mighty Zeus covering a woman in the shape of a dark cloud, but even without such blasphemous association the suggestion of patriarchal violence lurks in the story’s shadows.

And yet I think we can hear something else in the assent of Mary. To me it seems as if her yes has transfigured the story, for now it hinges on her word, her participation and presence in the drama, That’s the kind of story the Bible repeatedly tells. The suggested pattern is no longer so much of divine imposition as one in which Gabriel and God and all the heavens stand in breathless suspense. All history, the salvation of the world, now seems to hang on this one young woman’s answer.

Like the assent of Job to God’s cosmic majesty in Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., gentling God "the way a farmhand / Gentles a bulging, bugling bull," Mary’s consent subtly recasts the story of power. It is as if the grand God of Israel has become for us -- is willing to be for us -- like Myles Standish, dispatching Gabriel as a substitute suitor to plead his case. The case may be pressed with claims of power and promises of blessing, but still the ancient one trembles and waits for an answer.

Imagine that. Imagine that he’s waiting for us too.

This traditional prayer for the First Sunday in Advent begins with abrupt and urgent entreaty. There is no delay for caressing words of prayerful invocation; rude as a wakening alarm, we call for God to get moving. The collect for the following week will pray for God to stir up our hearts, but now, first, it appears to be the sluggishness of God’s heart that is in question. It is God’s spirit that first needs stirring to action.

If Advent prepares us for some fresh coming of Christ -- at this year’s Christmas and/or in that larger future whereby we reimagine our present -- then it is a time to acknowledge more deeply the ways that we need Gods anointed to come. Lighting our candles, we see ourselves again as dwelling in darkness. Despite all the lights and noise of Christmas commerce, the world is cold and in need. God is not here. Not yet, not enough.

Isaiah prays, "O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence!" If only the heavens would open wide and we would see God’s overriding majesty, God’s justice and grace revealed to us and to all this sorry world. If only the firmament were rent and goodness poured down into the midst of our lives. If only all that is wrong with this world could be burned away and God’s children vindicated and restored.

But the heavens do not open. Not that way. Beneath the firmament, history continues to play out its recurrent ancient tragedies. We ourselves recall seeing the sky’s lovely ceiling change to horror and then descend in choking clouds of dust. Even when gazing into a starlit night we see no heaven revealed on the other side. The stars are not benignly glittering angels. The firmament is not a thin shell but goes on and on into infinite wastes and countless indifferent galaxies. Even in their clarity, the heavens are as opaque as those over Golgotha, where Jesus could no longer find the God to whom he prayed.

Yet even now we are not so different from the prophet of old, nor from Jesus or Paul and all the others who have prayed this way before us. We address the silent heavens and call on the distant Lord whom we cannot see. We urge on the God who seems so slow. Faithfully, like those before us, we enter once again into the drama of yearning and waiting.

Why? What’s with this double make-believe that pretends both that we are now waiting for Jesus to be born in Bethlehem and that we really expect the heavens soon to open and reveal the Messiah "coming in clouds with great power and glory"? Why again these candles and this ritualized longing? After all this time under an unbroken firmament, would not existential resignation and humane ethical resolve be more honest and ennobling?

I suspect that we choose to enact Advent’s longing partly because it is preparation for whatever good will come in the holiday ahead, a practical delay of gratification in order that we might be hungry for the feast. Perhaps we can even succeed now in readying ourselves in such a way that what we anticipate will come with the power of something unexpected, a surprise after all.

In addition, it may be that we value the faithful make-believe of Advent simply because hope is sweet and despair is bitter. Indeed, perhaps we have found in the season’s mood of anticipation the first, even the best, gift of Christmas, the one we get to open early.

I tell myself also, each Advent, that there can be something ethically and spiritually edifying about this exercise, this taking care to note the shape of the darkness in which our candles burn. What is the need for which I need Jesus to come and the hurt I want him to heal? Where is the light most needed? If the heavens do open at Christmas, where and with whom will I hear the angels sing? Such inquiries may be helpful, individually and communally, even if nothing stirs above us.

But now I think that there is a mighty human solidarity at stake here as well. I cannot help joining Isaiah and Jesus and Paul and all the rest of them, longing for the heavens to open, for justice to come for the living and the (lead., for mercy to make right this damned and beloved world. I will not choose indifference or resignation. I want to be among those who watch and hope, even when the hope feels like despair. It is after all the company in which God chose to be enfleshed, in Jesus, praying to the still unanswering sky.

And perhaps God did then stir in the heavens, unseen above Golgotha. Perhaps those heavens opened for shepherds to hear a song of peace one night, and later on so that the Holy Spirit could attend a baptism at the Jordan River. And perhaps they will at last open for everyone, that every eye may see.

And then sometimes, some blessed times, we have had worked in us such Advent alchemy that our own hearts stir to feel the stirring of God. Not yet so powerful, not yet quite visible, but more, we think, than just imagined. While the sky still appears opaque and silent, seeds quicken in the dark soil. A child stirs in the womb.

Like a starter’s pistol, this brief first verse rings out and Mark’s narrative is off and running. We may take the chain of phrases in this verb-less sentence simply as a title, the announcement of what follows -- the title and then immediately the headlong story.

As so often in Mark, though, we may pause, or go back to what went by so fast and wonder what it meant. Our first thought may be that here is simply a conventional way to say that at just this point we are beginning the gospel story that follows, that Mark’s little book is itself "the good news." But might it actually be, as it seems when read in this day’s lesson, that the title properly superscribes just this portion of what follows? That the witness of John the Baptist is the beginning of the good news, while its fullness is not to be revealed until later?

If that is possible, then perhaps there’s more included under this rubric: maybe it’s the whole first half of the book that is "the beginning of the good news." The whole Galilean ministry, the attempt of Jesus to make known the kingdom through his teaching, is, after all, just a start. Arguably too, it’s a sort of false start, as his message is repeatedly obscured by the cult of his person and power. Thwarted by the misunderstandings of both crowds and disciples, Jesus will resort to a more desperate measure and will make his turn toward the cross. But that comes later.

Then again, maybe it is the whole of Mark’s book, or rather what it recounts, that is being described in verse one. It may all be a beginning, the inception of a gospel not so much contained in these pages as it is meant to be alive in the hearers’ present and future. Do we perhaps go to this story not to look at the past but to think about how it could or should unfold in our own lives?

As I consider these possibilities, I think about how abrupt the ending of Mark is. The white-clad figure at the tomb tells the women that the risen Jesus has gone ahead to Galilee and that his disciples will see him there, but we’re not told what happened next. Did the disciples even get the message? Did they stay in Jerusalem playing church, rather than go back on the dusty campaign trail with Jesus? Did they not understand that he had gone back to renew his mission? He was afoot again in Galilee, the servant of the liberating kingdom. He had gone ahead.

There is ample reason to think that Mark believes the disciples got it wrong once again. But the rough ending of Mark is not really about whether they got the message or not, or about what they did or did not do. It’s about those of us who get the message, and who can now continue, if not quite finish, the unfinished gospel. Suddenly the story is in our hands.

And how do we begin to complete it? Remember the words at the tomb: we go back, as it were, to Galilee, back to the place where Jesus began his mission. We go back to the beginning of the gospel, to announcement, hope and repentance. And maybe this time, knowing what we do now, we will better understand what John the Baptist and Jesus were talking about. Maybe this time we’ll repent and believe the good news. We return to reread the story, to start again with fresh ears and a new heart. The title at the beginning of Mark welcomes back those who come again from the empty tomb, seeking Jesus alive and anew.

The signature text and image of Advent in my Swedish childhood was the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. The crowds, the palms and the hosannas didn’t belong only to Holy Week’s darkening narrative; in a lighter, more hopeful key they were also part of the outset of a new church year. We too were welcoming Jesus, and he was coming to us again on his borrowed donkey. We were glad to greet him, and God was giving us a new chance to receive him aright this time. The story began again for us and we rose to it with hope.

Though the Advent use of that entry text has disappeared from our current lectionaries, it still lingers here and there in our hymnody. It is also not far from the themes of the lessons that we read. It connects to the stirring excitement of hope in the prophet’s words and in the promises of the psalm. In the second lesson,

the apostle describes our waiting for the Lord’s coming not as cause for fatigued despair, but as a gracious forbearance, a gift of time to ready ourselves. And at last th~ voice calls out in the wilderness, preparing the way for the one who comes. A new age begins with cleansing and promise, the gift of a holy spirit after the flames.

To be at a beginning is to find that we are not prisoners of the past. John the Baptist announced as much. We and our blessed and foolish land need not be bound to our idolatries or regrets, our greeds or fears. We can begin again.

That’s not just a prelude; it is already part of what it anticipates. The "good news of Jesus" was already at work in this expectancy and preparation, the beginning of the beginning. Is it not still so?

John the Baptist baptized Jesus. The synoptic Gospels all say so and the kerygma in Acts connects the beginning of Jesus’ ministry with John’s baptizing. But although Mark seems to find it quite right that Jesus of Nazareth should have been among those who heeded John’s preaching, the three other evangelists appear concerned over the suggestion that Jesus was in some way a disciple of this other preacher.

In Matthew’s account, John himself raised the issue and makes clear that he knows who is greater: "I ought to be the one baptized by you." Luke offers us another perspective, providing the story in which John is destined from before birth to be the prophet for his younger cousin. Matthew tells of Jesus explaining the baptism as a "fulfilling of all righteousness," and Luke describes the baptism as an occasion of Jesus’ solidarity with others and his devotion to God.

The fourth evangelist, however, does not offer an explanation; in fact, he depicts no baptism at all. Instead John the Baptist speaks to the superior authority and divine agency of Jesus. The baptizer does not baptize Jesus but attests to his identity as the Christ and the Lamb of God. "[John] himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light." He is explicit both about his own nonmessianic status and about the identity of the one who is anointed.

There maybe nothing more to this than the eagerness of the evangelist to brook no rivals to the majestic and powerful Jesus he portrays. Though there are indications in all four of the Gospels that John’s disciples constitute a sect distinct from the party of Jesus, in the fourth Gospel their leader says plainly, "He must increase, but I must decrease."

Yet perhaps there is more for us here than that, more at stake than a coincidence of rivalry, loyalty and high Christology on the part of the evangelist. Maybe we are to learn something more from John’s clear insistence that he is not the Messiah. Maybe we are to learn to say that about ourselves.

I am not the Messiah.

That negative affirmation may seem obvious, but consider the degree to which faith draws us toward a more positive set of identifications. We are anointed people. We are in Christ and he lives in us. We are his agents, his hands in the world. We are called to emulate him, to cross the false and imprisoning boundaries of the world with God’s transgressively redemptive love. We are to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners. As Luther said, we are to be "little Christs," and in no small and timid way. We do have a messianic calling, don’t we? We are needed and called to do what Jesus would be doing.

All of that is true and worthy to be recalled. But in John the Baptist’s denial is the opposite point, and it too speaks needed truth. Who am I? Who are you? Not the Messiah.

Messianic ambitions for ourselves and messianic expectations of others are not just the quaint delusions of people certified as mentally ill. They are found in us and around us as we seek too much from others or wish to be too much to them. In a song that is at once poignant and cruel, Bob Dylan wrote one version of John’s denial: ‘You say you’re looking for someone who’s never weak but always strong / to protect you and defend you whether you are right or wrong, / someone to open each and ev’ry door, but it ain’t me, babe. . . / It ain’t me you’re looking for."

The messianic impulse, the assumed role of rescuer of the other, can be an egoism that diminishes and destroys. And the disempowering reciprocal expectation that this special person will be one savior is not limited to the private and personal spheres of life. These are issues in international relations, in the interplay of social movements and classes, and in political appeals. We have seen dangerous faith placed in false and flawed messiahs. Many of us are praying very hard now over the particular messianic arrogance that often drives our own nation and its policies.

In this context, it is salutary that we should remember Johns pointing away from himself and to Jesus. We are not, any nor all of us, the Messiah. That position has already been filled. To let Jesus be our Christ, our anointed savior and rescuer, may still entail seeking to be engaged in his saving work and mission -- of course it does -- but it also commands us to humility, a letting go of our seducing desires either to rescue or to be rescued by others. We already have a Messiah, and he ain’t us.

In John’s Gospel, this needed humility is worked by focusing on the person of the beloved Jesus, the revelation that he is the Truth and the Way and the Life. He is the light to which both John the Baptist and John the evangelist were sent to testify.

In the synoptics, however, and especially in Mark, focusing on Jesus reveals something quite curious: it is a quality of the Messiah to do something very like what John the Baptist does here. Jesus points away from himself and seeks to deflect the messianic expectations put upon him. Trying to evade his superstar status and the attributions of glory, he points instead to what is near and soon and already stirring in the lives of those to whom he speaks.

Picture the old man with the baby in his arms He stands chuckling with giddy joy, or perhaps he gazes with streaming tears on his cheeks, or is lost in transfixed wonder; in whatever way, he is so very happy. Then he says that this is enough now, he is ready to die. He has seen salvation and he can depart in peace.

But what has he seen, really? It’s just a little child in his arms, a powerless, speechless newcomer to the world. Whatever salvation this baby might work is still only a promise and a hope; whatever teaching he might offer will remain hidden for many years. Nothing has happened yet. Herod still sits on his throne and Caesar governs from afar. The world looks as it did before.

But Simeon stands there in grateful wonder. It is the future he holds in his hands. He has seen and touched it. He is satisfied. It is, as he said, enough. And then Anna, also old and approaching the end of her days, adds her own joy and praise to the moment. She’ll be telling everybody about this baby whom she saw for just a few minutes.

By the time a mature Jesus comes onto the stage of history, Simeon and Anna will be long dead. So will most of those shepherds who came to see the child in the manger, and possibly Joseph, who watched over him, and some or all of the magi who feature in the other nativity story. Thirty years or more will pass before the gospel story recommences in the ministry of Jesus. In the meantime they who saw the baby, knelt at the stable or laid their tributes before him would not know what became of him. They would know only what they had heard and seen back then.

Though some might take this aspect of the stories as no more than an accidental effect of nativity prologues for the Gospels, it seems to me to offer us both connection and encouragement. We too are people who have seen something but not its full unfolding. Paradoxically, Simeon and Anna do not so much belong to the gospel’s prehistory as they are paradigmatic for our own experience of that gospel.

What we have, in a sense, is hardly more than they had. We have the scriptures that school us in hope and attentiveness. We have stories and covenants and signs. We have moments, or the memory of moments, when the tender compassion of our God has come close enough to see and feel. We have something like the shepherds would have had, recalling all their lives a night of mysterious glory, or like what the magi brought back to their homelands, a vision of a different kind of king and kingdom. Their eyes had seen the glory of Israel, the light for the nations.

We have that as well, though for us the world has resumed its accustomed form and, in the light of day, seems largely unsaved and unchanged.

We have also the children now briefly entrusted to our arms for blessing and who will, we hope, live on after us. We pray that their lives will be grand with wisdom and courage and that they will make the world better. As we get older, life becomes increasingly about them and less and less about us. When I hold a child in my arms, as Simeon cradled Jesus in his, my life seems literally recentered: not in myself but just in front of me there. It is around this present future, this vulnerable and miraculous little one, that my universe bends.

You may argue that we have much more than Simeon and the other prologue-dwellers did because we have the rest of the gospel story. We know what happened to the baby and understand more fully the pattern of his life. We know his teaching and the pattern of his passion and vindication. But note that Luke describes Simeon as fairly clued in on that score as well, telling Mary of the conflict and the sorrow that lay ahead. We have no significant advantage even there.

What we have is in these ways hardly more than what Simeon had. But what that is, is wonderful indeed. The canticle he prays has become for much of the church a song to follow the communion meal. We have now seen and tasted the promised future. We have held the Christ child. Taking bread and wine to our lips, we have kissed him and with words and songs we have caressed his presence. We may not get all the way to his future ourselves, not in this life -- but we’ve seen it, and that’s enough, we say. We can go in peace now.

But is it really enough? Are we not both ethically and spiritually called to dissatisfaction with such partiality? Should there not be more, and should not the blessing be made something present rather than just a memory of the past or a hope of heaven? Having tasted the kingdom’s presence, we hunger and thirst the more for it. Having seen it, we strive to bring it home. Frustrated and yearning, we call for God no longer to tarry, to fulfill the promise, to give us today the bread of tomorrow.

That’s all true, but with that struggle and longing we may be the more grateful for the spirit of Simeon and for those times we find ourselves with him. His song has become a sort of Christian Dayyenu, that great Passover song which proclaims each little part of the salvation as sufficient and great enough. We may want more than this manna, but still our hearts lift in thanksgiving.

We have seen. It’s enough for now.

Majestic now Christ stands and proclaims the prophet’s words fulfilled. Well, that’s not quite accurate. He does read the words standing up, but then in good rabbinic fashion he sits down to teach. Still, there is majesty to be imagined in that sitting and in the brief sentence pronounced to the expectant hearers: "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." He sits, but the seat of his teaching is a kind of throne. Just a hometown boy visiting his childhood synagogue, perhaps, but almost regal in his authority.

It was Ezra who stood for so long before the audience of the people, reading the book of God’s law to them from early morning until midday. On that day too there was something majestic, an authority at work. "The ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law."

Ezra himself was not the authority, of course, but the book, the law now reclaimed and remembered, the words given to Israel through Moses. The majesty and glory is in the book. When Ezra opens it in the sight of the people, they all stand up.

But not only the book. Ezra blesses YHWH, the divine name, the great God, and they lift up their hands and cry "Amen, Amen." And then they bow their heads to worship this God, their faces to the ground. Then comes reading and interpretation, that the people might understand. They weep at hearing the law of God, and Ezra, Nehemiah and all the priestly teachers exhort them not to grieve but to go and feast, for this day is holy. The great meal, spread out among the people, is to be shared by all, with portions sent to those who have none.

The passage in Nehemiah describes a great liturgy, a public act whereby the whole nation is reconstituted and rededicated by the covenant and the presence of God. They greet, they bless, they worship, they listen. They are bidden to turn their tears to joy and to eat and drink in one vast and scattered banquet. The Torah makes them a people again. "This day," says Nehemiah, "is holy to our Lord."

We have reason to be uncomfortable with great national liturgies: we have seen them used by the ideologists of this century. We know they can support violence and oppression. We have seen rallies where sense is sacrificed to fervor and crowds are intoxicated with their own unanimity. We know how easy it is to mobilize resentment and hatred in a large group. But we have also seen public ceremonies of sorrow, repentance and rededication, and there have been times in great gatherings when our spirits have rightly lifted to hear of a dream, a vision worth living or even dying for.

For the most part, however, we work not with large gatherings and national liturgies, but in countless local communities. Like that synagogue in Nazareth. Is it possible that the same kind of authority can be heard there, the same work be done? Can the world and nation there be reimagined? Can our common life be consecrated?

Jesus proclaims that the words of the prophet are not about some distant future, nor even about the near millennium. The jubilee year, the good news for the poor, the release of captives, the recovered vision, the liberation of the oppressed: these are proclaimed now. The emancipation proclamation is pronounced here, this day.

Of course, a proclamation doesn’t always achieve what it declares. Moreover, there is an ambiguity in Jesus’ words: is "today" the actual day of freedom, or is it the day when the anointed proclaimer of that future appears? The latter, more modest interpretation would seem safer easier to credit. Certainly there is still captivity, oppression, blindness and poverty; the greater part of the prophecy’s promise lies unfulfilled.

Yet to call this a safer interpretation misses the point. To believe the proclaimer, to hear authority in Jesus’ claim, means believing that this proposed future is at hand. The present leans into it and it has begun. Such proclamation is not an abstracted statement of fact, but a reality declared to reshape reality now. Remember Paul’s bold words in 1 Corinthians: "God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are."

When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in the midst of the Civil War, the slaves who lived within the realm of the Confederacy remained in bondage. Many did not know about the proclamation when it went into effect. Its authority was denied and nullified by local and regional power. Yet Lincoln, in both his words and his claim to authority over the whole of the split and rebellious Union, contended that the proclamation was nonetheless true and real. And so this flawed and partial emancipation became the herald of a fuller freedom, a fulfillment yet unreached.

In form and action, our liturgies are like the one that Ezra led. We bless and worship and listen and think. In some places we even stand up to honor the book and the word it brings to us. We acknowledge grief and are bidden to joy; we eat and drink, and provide some portion for the needy. Are these little gatherings, then, for all that seems domestic and intimate in them, also occasions of public proclamation, gatherings where -- as in Nazareth -- Jesus speaks with true authority? Do they imagine and enact the shape of a future that claims our obedience? Do we believe in such a way that we are reknit as a body, members of one another, a commonwealth and not just people for ourselves? Are the words fulfilled in our hearing?

This Sunday I will stand and declare it to be so.