Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Second Sunday of Advent 2023

Many of you, I expect, will have heard of the street-artist Banksy. His main ambition seems to be to puncture pretention through satire. He’s controversial because he doesn’t always ask permission to draw rats on drains, or windows on blank walls, which tell a story in themselves of those who live within. His work is described as graffiti, not art. Yet there are those who are happy to pay large sums of money for his work as long as it’s not painted on the walls of their properties!

One of his most famous graffiti is in Palestine/Israel. On the wall that divides Palestine and Israel at the West Bank, east of Jerusalem, he has painted the scene from the Palestinian side as if you’re looking through the wall. It is so realistic that the blue sky on the wall matches the real blue sky beyond. To the casual observer it appears that the wall has, in fact, been blown open and a huge hole opened up to enable anyone to amble through from one side to the other. Little chance, of course. But it’s visionary, challenging and hopeful. The more I view Banksy’s art, the more I think of him as a sort of modern-day John the Baptist.

Mark’s gospel begins with a voice – the voice of the prophet. Mark plunges straight in with John the Baptist. Before Jesus is pushed on to the stage, Mark doesn’t tell us who he is beyond his name and his place of origin – no family background, no Christmas story. Instead, we find John proclaiming a baptism of repentance that locates Jesus with the prophecy of Isaiah. As we heard in the first reading (Isaiah 40:1-11) the prophet says “Comfort, O comfort my people… speak tenderly to Jerusalem” He is declaring to a shattered and exiled people that God has not abandoned then, but cares enough about them to stoop down and touch them as tenderly as a shepherd with a new-born lamb. God is resolved to forgive and pardon; to restore and to save.  It is a message of hope.

Mark’s gospel opens with the words: ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.’ Mark is making a proclamation. Something has happened to be glad about. The something that has happened is likely in some way, great or small, to change the landscape. A ‘euangelion’, a gospel, the good news, is a message about something that alters the climate in which people live, changing the world around them; it transforms the landscape of personal and communal growth. Like a press release from Buckingham Palace Mark is announcing that a significant event of public interest has taken place.

John the Baptist understood that God was focussed on the faithful and how they met the demands of belief. He dismissed the pretensions that came from being inheritors of God’s promises to Abraham and was scornful of the rank and prestige that religion and society confer. Religious leaders were a ‘brood of vipers’ and King Herod was taken to task for his marital misconduct. When John mentioned Rome at all, it was to address the excesses of common soldiers rather than the designs of rulers. John knew where God’s eyes were fixed, and it was not on the nation of Israel, but on the people of Israel.

John’s voice came from the wilderness. It came from the edge, not from the centre of power. None of that is accidental. It is bespoke - intentional.

Some years ago, I accompanied a group of young people from the East End of London on a visit to the Sinai desert. We were a diverse group: Muslims, Jews, Christians, the majority agnostic. For ten days we trekked about the desert guided by local Bedouin and slept under the stars. We learnt a little about life at its most basic. The silence and the emptiness of the desert opened us up. As we quietened down and took our place in the landscape, so we began to open up to one another. It was possible, we discovered, to communicate at a deeper level and to hear things which would have been missed at home.

At St Catherine’s monastery a monk told us about his life and the call to silence. The words were simple but because they had been baptized in silence, they had power. Our consumerist irritability was laid to rest for an instant and we really heard what was being said. The desert taught us about our limitations. It was a great leveller between people who in other circumstances would have been wary of one another. To communicate properly we had to be prepared to risk our dignity and stand on the same level with each other. Words spoken and received in such a context had energy. The point about it was that you felt how precarious life was and so experienced a new sense of dependence upon God and your neighbour. It taught us important lessons about the way in which God communicates with us, and why the Jewish and Christian traditions find their source and inspiration in the desert lands, in the arid and waste places of the earth, rather than in lush green pastures.

This is where Mark begins his gospel. He is making the point that the gospel of Jesus Christ is not an ideology or a life-style package that can be communicated in the way in which commodities are sold. The Christian gospel begins with the contemplation of God who is to be discovered in the wilderness as the one in whom ‘we live and move and have our being’. Contemplation reveals to us God who is not an object of our thought still less a Being who cannot be adequately defined in words and concepts.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor, discovered this for himself in the confines of his prison cell before his execution by the Nazis for plotting to kill Hitler. Writing to a friend on the eve of his execution in 1944, he says:

‘I notice that my thoughts and ideas are tending more and more towards the Old Testament……It is only when one knows that the names of God cannot be expressed, that one can express the name of Jesus Christ; it is only when one so loves life and this world and the thought of losing them appears to be the end, that one can believe in the resurrection of the dead and a new world.’

Banksy, Bonhoeffer and John the Baptist come to us from desert places. Their voices cry out for change in the wilderness and anticipate the graffiti of God’s grace in human flesh, written on the walls of the proud and in the hearts of the self-righteous and arrogant.  Another voice who ‘cried aloud in the wilderness’ belonged to the Welsh priest-poet, R. S. Thomas, who wrote in one of his later poems:

……………………………………. inside ourselves
There are quite different things going on:
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; the mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off but to get
There takes no time, and admission
Is free, if you will purge yourself
Of callousness, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.

‘Faith, green as a leaf.’

Now there’s a bit of graffiti for the outside of Westminster Abbey!