December 7, 2008

The Holy Spirit Comes to Clear Out Our Clutter!
Mark 1:1-8
Advent 2 – December 7, 2008

You could always tell when company was coming in my house as a kid. Because when company was coming, my mom recruited all of us, my brother & 2 sisters & I, to a frenzy of house cleaning. What passed for good enough in our everyday lives was suddenly not good enough anymore. Company was coming – so we had to clean up the clutter that tended to fill our house – the shoes left haphazardly inside the door had to be put in the closet, the toys on the floor had to be picked up and put away, the counters had to be cleaned off of whatever homework or mail had taken up residence there. And of course there was the dusting that had been neglected, or the vacuuming that hadn't been done, plus all of the other normal things you do when guests are coming to your house.

But I was always dumbfounded by my mother's actions. Because getting the house to look neat & clean on the surface wouldn't do for her. If it'd been up to me, we would've hidden our clutter away in closets, or down in the basement, or that perennial favorite catch-all, the junk drawer. But when company was coming, that was where you were likely to find her. Knowing company was coming motivated her; she took it as an opportunity to clean and organize the most cluttered places of our family's life. I could never understand it, because from my perspective, cleaning up the surface stuff was plenty – why bother with the places no one would ever see?

I got to thinking about that question when I was reading the gospel for this week. Mark starts off his story of the good news about Jesus with John the Baptist, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'” John comes outta nowhere, telling us, “Get ready – Company's coming!” And I was wondering, how do we prepare? How do we get ready for this company? Most of us are pretty good at preparing for Christmas, but how do we get ready for Christ? How do we make a straight path in our lives for Jesus to come to us? What mountains or valleys stand in his way? What causes such uneven ground, so many rough places, to appear in our lives? How do we level them out, make a plain so that Jesus can come into our lives without having to hurdle the clutter that so easily piles up?

Because our lives are cluttered. Not just with the physical stuff that most of us have more of than we know what to do with, but spiritual clutter -the clutter of too many things to do, the clutter of distraction, the clutter of selfishness or resentment or addiction. All of that clutter is just a symptom of a deeper problem, & let's just call it what it is: SIN. Sin – all of those things that keep us from putting God first, that's what clutters up our lives. And it's hard to think in all that spiritual clutter, to remember that company is coming, and we need to prepare. And what I learn from this story is that a surface cleaning isn't enough, like I used to think when company was coming to our house. It's not enough to spot clean and hope that Jesus won't see the dirt that we've tried to sweep under the rug, or hide in a closet, or dump in the junk drawer.

The people of Jesus' time had the same struggle we do: how to prepare the way of the Lord, how to make his paths straight. That's why Mark tells this story of John the baptizer who appeared in the wilderness, calling people to prepare. He went out there with a message to the people to repent, to be baptized. This wasn't baptism the way we as Christians understand it, but it had the same idea of being made clean, of washing away sin.

Hordes of people came out to hear him, and they heard the call, “Company's coming! Time to clean house!” They heard John, and they responded, they went down in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. They didn't settle for just tidying up the counters and putting away the shoes. They got down deep in the hidey-holes of their lives, clearing out all of the clutter, so they could be really clean. Confessing their sins, they started over, getting rid of the obstacle course and making a level path in their hearts and lives for Jesus to come.

The trouble is, clutter is sneaky. No matter how many times we sort through it, and organize it, and put it away, or give it away, or throw it away, somehow we turn around, and there it is again! And I know it's not just me! Every year when we have the Harvest Festival, I marvel at how much Bric-A-Brac people bring in, and I wonder: Where does it all come from? We just cleaned out our houses last year! How much more stuff can we have? And yet there it is, enough to fill up the auditorium. Clutter has a way of coming right back into our lives, no matter how hard we try to control it.

Sin is like that too. On our best days, we heed John's call; we try to clear a path through the clutter so Jesus can come straight into our lives. We want to have our house ((our lives) ready for our most important guest. And so we follow the example of this story: we come to church, & we confess each week that we have sinned against God in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. Hopefully that attitude of confession & repentance, of turning back to God, is a part of our daily prayers too. But as soon as we confess & receive forgiveness, we turn around & see the clutter of our sin piling up again. Clearing out the clutter is an on-going challenge, something we can't ever take care of all on our own.

But John reminded his listeners when they came out to repent, to confess, and be made clean that the one who was coming after him was more powerful than John himself was. John could baptize with water, but the one whose coming he was announcing, Jesus, will baptize them with the Holy Spirit. And that promise is for us too! When we are baptized, it is not just with water, but with the Holy Spirit. We are sealed with the Holy Spirit as a life-long gift. In a way, the Holy Spirit is like those cleaning and organizing gurus you see on shows like Clean Sweep or Oprah. People on those shows have become overwhelmed; their clutter is overtaking their lives. And in come the organizing experts, with fresh eyes for the situation, and a vision for how life could be, a life lived in freedom from the weight of all their stuff. They see the patterns that got the guests into that mess to begin with, the habits that got them into trouble. And then they set about the hard work of cleaning it up... They guide and direct their clients, working along side them as they dig in to get rid of the clutter, helping them to start over, to start fresh.

The Holy Spirit is kind of like that. She comes in to our lives and sees things we can't see. She identifies the patterns of sin that have taken over our lives, that have blocked the path for Jesus' Coming. The Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see our sinful ways for what they really are, and then inspires us to want to change, to start over, to start fresh. And then that same spirit gets to work right alongside us, coaching us about what we need to get rid of, what we can keep; guiding us to confess and to turn to Jesus for new life. The Holy Spirit works in us, with us, to set the house of our lives in order so that Jesus will have a straight path.

The clutter of our sin will always be more than we can conquer on our own, but the Good News is we don't have to go it alone. Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to help prepare the way. Thanks be to God!
Amen.