🦁 Advent 2-👑
Sunday Readings: Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; 2 Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8
From the TRNG Room;
Reflection
Hello and welcome to First Forward. This is Advanced Scriptural Insight for sermonizers, preachers, pastors, and just anybody. This is the First Forward for Advent 2, December, I want to say 11th, but let me double check. December 10th, um, it'll be available to subscribers all week and on the morning of the 10th, I'll release it and make it public for anybody who wants to listen.
This morning's readings for Advent 2 the Revised Common Lectionary have Isaiah 40, Psalm 85, 2 Peter 3, and Mark 1. There's a couple of things I want to talk about. You'll notice that the weekday readings, First Formation, I read them myself. This is different for First Forward in that I just go straight to the meat of it.
Anybody who wants to understand the Sunday readings with, through the eyes of a grunt, you know, you'll know if you're a grunt. We kind of like to be direct and frank and so I don't pretty it up. If you're someone who is a homiletician, a preacher, you, that's your job. You can do that. This is for information, insight, interpretation through the eyes of a grunt for people who subscribe to first forward.
So with that being said there's a couple of things that are important for soldiers and grunts. Any high church, low life, whether you served or not the first in Isaiah 40. And clearly the theme for today is introducing John the Baptizer and what he does as the forerunner for Christ, which we'll get to in a moment in Mark, but Isaiah 40 lays the groundwork for that in verse four, in particular, every valley should be lifted up every mountain and hill made low.
The uneven ground shall become level and the rough places a plane. So, what is happening here, and what I, I always think of Martin Luther King's you know, Parable of the Good Samaritan on the way to Jericho, where he says, you know, I can only you know, fill the potholes on the road to Jericho so much before I ask what's going on further up the way, you know, what is making these things happen?
And the road to Jericho was rough. It was hilly. It had winding roads that could be hidden. And so part of the reason that that's why bandits would hang out there because it was hard to enforce. It wasn't very open. It wasn't very straight. It wasn't very wide and even and easily traversable. And the road between Jericho, where the Israelites first made their kind of foothold, as we used to say in the military, into Canaan back in Joshua chapter 6, Jericho has a lot of important symbolism for Israel, and it's about a day's walk to Jerusalem, the holy city.
But that walk, as I've said, is dangerous. So part of the imagery of the people of God is that the road between God and humanity is rough. We, we kind of screwed up. We bombed the bridge between God and humanity back in Genesis when we screwed up. And so the work of God, one of the central. works of God is atonement.
anD the, the word that is often used, uh, or translated atonement is this Hebrew word kefar. It's Hebrews 37 22 if you want to look it up. Kefar, even though it's translated atonement and it is a primitive root, what it really is, it's like saying some Older commentaries will call it pitch or bitumen.
We might call it asphalt or gravel. And what you do is you lay gravel on the road to keep it nice and flat. It's, it's paving, it's literally paving the road. So atonement between God and humanity is about making straight the path, straight, wide and level the path between God and humanity. This is what Mark looks back on when Mark lays the story out for John the Baptist, paving the way for Jesus.
And in Mark one It quotes Isaiah 40 in verse chapter 1, verse 2, uh, sorry, 2 and 3. I'm sending my messenger who will prepare your way, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. And that's like an abbreviation of Isaiah 40 but the idea is the same. It's the work of paving a road, this thankless work.
You see, there's construction up the road between our home and one of our, the one of our girls schools. And so we're always stopping because it's not paved. Right. But when they pave it, it's nice and smooth. We can walk along it. We're not going to be paying extra money for maintenance. So that's, that is the underlying principle of atonement, making it easy to get to God.
But because we're the ones that screwed it up, we're the ones that suffer the consequences when it's difficult to get between ourselves and God. And John is called the baptizer. And we're, if you're, if you grew up Christian, you kind of take it for granted that baptism is just one of the things we did, but it actually wasn't.
It was right at the first century when baptism, immersion in water or dipping became pretty popular. And John. Or the school that he was a part of, which may have been some kind of a scenic community, which there's increasing scholarship suggesting he may have been influenced by the scenes who had a kind of stark view of the world and who were kind of obsessed.
If you look at it historically, they had a significantly higher interest in purification. And one of the ways they would do that was they would wash their hands all the time. They would baptize themselves or immerse themselves. Once a week, once a day, I can't remember. John makes it a Recruitment event not an ongoing thing.
So to get into this community you are purified with water one time And that's it and that's kind of going taking an ascenic idea of the world is bad and we need to be made good and Lowering the temperature a bit. You only have to do it once you have to do it every day or every month or whenever the Heck the scenes we're doing it, but it was not something that was an incredibly You know, it wasn't very inspired by the Bible.
In the Greek Septuagint, Baptizo occurs in exactly one place. And that place is 2 Kings 5, and it involves Naaman, the Syrian military commander who had leprosy, which is essentially any kind of skin disease. I have eczema that almost cut me out of the military, and it's flared up now that I'm older. That would have been considered leprosy.
And you can read about Naaman in, at the training room, I have a post about him and the the parallels between Naaman the Syrian and Captain Marvel in, we sometimes call Centurion of Great Faith. But Naaman goes to Elisha to cure him of this leprosy and he has the help of a Hebrew slave woman that he has acquired through a military raid and this Hebrew slave woman seems sympathetic to him because she tells him how to be healed by one of his, her own prophets and he does.
Travels out to Samaria where Elisha was living at the time and he's kind of, He's like, why can't he just wave his hands in the air and I'd be made better. And his, his, his lieutenants are like, look, you want to be cured. Just do what the guy says. Alicia tells him, go to the river Euphrates and dip yourselves, baptizo yourself seven times and you will be clean.
And he's like, Oh, I could have done this in one of our rivers or blah, blah, blah. And as again, as lieutenants are like, Dude, just do it. You came all this way. Just do it. He does. He's cured. He's cleaned. That is the only place this word specifically, baptizo, occurs. And so they're clearly drawing inspiration from this moment where Elisha the prophet and the, the, the mentee to Elijah has cured this military commander of a skin disease that in his own culture, maybe it would have carried some stigma, but it wouldn't have made him unclean.
The Syrians didn't give a shit about like, you know, whether you come before God with broken skin or something like they didn't care. It was probably cosmetic to name him. But he, he subordinates himself, however reluctantly to the God of Israel and he is cleaned. And so this is about outsiders. In, in the Jesus movement and the John, and which was inspired by John's movement is about recognizing the problem that Israel has become inherently and perhaps irreversibly corrupt.
And so it's the remnant, the people who are devout, who don't necessarily have power, and it's outsiders who are creating this movement. So Kaffar on the one hand, the making. Straight the ways of the Lord is a very blue collar thing. Think road construction, that is what atonement is. Secondly, baptizo, it has inherent and irrevocable connection to military service in Naiman and what he is told to do, very much like Captain Marvel in, in Matthew eight and Luke seven.
So if you are preparing a sermon, keep those things in mind. If you are listening to a sermon. Ask yourself whether or not it aligns with some of that. I will post links in the show notes for training room blogs that go into deeper detail on Naaman, the Syrian commander and then also Captain Marvel.
There's all kinds of stuff that you could talk about there. I don't have a post on Kefar. Explicitly but you can also look up, you know, whatever correspondence you want to use. It's Hebrews Strong's 3722. And with that, I hope that you take it and take it to heart as you craft your sermon or listen for those themes if you are listening to a sermon based on the RCL.
Either Advent 2 or any time of the year, hopefully as, as this episode will be made available after this, after Advent 2, and you can listen to it whenever you like.
