2nd Sunday of Advent Year B 7.xii.

2008
(Isaiah 40.1-11; 2 Peter 3.18-15a; Mark 1.1-8)

It‟s tempting this morning to preach a sermon on the perils of

punctuation. Our Old Testament reading from Isaiah chapter 40 refers to
“a voice” which “cries out: „In the wilderness prepare the way of the
Lord…‟” And in just the second verse of the Gospel which bears his
name, St. Mark relates this voice to that of John the Baptist. Mark sees
John foretold by Isaiah. John is a “messenger” preparing the way for
Jesus, because the Gospel writer reads Isaiah as referring to “the voice of
one crying out in the wilderness: „Prepare the way of the Lord…‟”

Only that‟s not actually what Isaiah says. Or at least not if we read Isaiah
and Mark as their words appear written in black and white on a printed
page with the benefit of modern punctuation. You might want to take a
look at how those passages appear on our pewsheet today. In Isaiah the
position of the colon and the quotation marks makes it clear that the voice
is saying that the way of the Lord should be prepared in the wilderness.
Isaiah is speaking about the return of the Jewish people from exile in
Babylon, across the desert, back to their own country - Judaea. In St.
Mark‟s Gospel, the punctuation is different: now the voice belongs to a
speaker who is himself to be found in the wilderness, and from that
location he calls out that his people should “Prepare the way of the Lord.”
You can see how Mark comes to the conclusion that John the Baptist - a
man who lived and preached in the desert to the east of Jerusalem - must
be the voice of which Isaiah wrote. But look at the punctuation, and Mark
has probably made too many assumptions. Isaiah is writing about an
event in a specific location hundreds of years before the time of John the
Baptist. John‟s message would have been the same wherever he had
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preached: the urgency of his message is that people should prepare
themselves to encounter God - whether they‟re in the wilderness, the city
or the countryside. And it‟s a message which is relevant in his time 2000
years ago… and now.

But the point that has to be made is - of course - that the books of the
Bible which bear the names of Isaiah and Mark were written without the
punctuation we now use. Mark could read Isaiah chapter 40 verse 3 in the
way that he wrote it down in Mark chapter 1 verse 3. And when he wrote
these words, he wasn‟t able to use the punctuation we now have. What
seems clear to us wasn‟t clear at all 2,000 years ago. Modern punctuation
makes things much clearer for us. But because quotation marks, commas,
colons, semi-colons and full stops didn‟t exist in the time when the books
of Scripture were composed the danger is that our rules of grammar
introduce new meanings which might not have been intended by the
original writers - and they in turn might not be clear about what writers
before them had meant.

So when you read the Bible, what are you supposed to believe? The
answer, I think, is that it‟s there so that you can believe. It‟s not there as a
text book to give you the answer to every problem, every question, every
dilemma of life. If it were, you‟d have problems with things like the
punctuation, and you couldn‟t always be certain that you‟d got the right
answer. But the Bible is there to enable belief and to tell the story of how
God‟s people came to faith and to an understanding of their relationship
with him. Faith is to be found not in the words themselves, still less the
punctuation, but in the journey - and in the lives of those who make it. So
much of the Old Testament is literally travel - Isaiah is writing about that
journey back to the Promised Land, and the hope that once there his

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people may be able to live faithfully in relationship with God. And John
the Baptist calls his hearers to a journey of faith: prepare God‟s way;
recognise what is wrong in your lives; be baptised; see where you should
be going and how you can get there.

We can believe not just because of words in a book or words that are
preached, but because of lives lived to show how God has been active in
them. Over the last few days I‟ve found myself thinking about two
particular people - not in the Bible - whose lives have done much to
encourage others to grow in holiness and, still more basic, to grapple with
the issues of life. One of them is Nicholas Ferrar, who is remembered in
the Calendar of the Church of England on 4 th December, the day he died
in 1637. We commemorated him here in St. Cuthbert‟s at the Eucharist
last Thursday. The other is Thomas Merton, who lived nearer our own
time - the 40th anniversary of his death in 1968 is on Wednesday of this
week, 10th December. Ferrar was an academic turned businessman and
politician who gave it all up to be ordained deacon and to devote himself
to prayer in a tiny hamlet in an out-of-the way corner of Huntingdonshire.
Merton was the child of an American mother and New Zealander father
who grew up mainly in France and England, suffered the loss of both
parents as a child and of his brother in early adulthood, barely survived
his experience of academia and found a vocation as a Trappist monk,
though he then questioned that vocation for much of the rest of his life
before being electrocuted getting out of the bath while taking part in a
conference in Thailand.

Merton is the better known of the two these days. I knew about Ferrar
first, because he was a member of Clare College, Cambridge, where I was
also an undergraduate - and he is portrayed alongside the Church at Little

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Gidding where he ended his days in a stained glass window in the
College Chapel. I remember visiting Little Gidding with other students
from the College and the impression it left upon me as a place sanctified
by prayer. The poet T.S.Eliot famously wrote about Little Gidding in his
collection, Four Quartets:

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

Day in, day out, with prayers through the hours of the day and the night,
Nicholas Ferrar and the community which gathered around him marked
out the time which God had given them. They had withdrawn from the
busy-ness, financial prosperity and academic and political influence
which might have served them in order to serve God. After their
community was broken up by the Puritans during the Civil War, most of
Ferrar‟s writings were destroyed. And yet from the obscurity which they
sought over 450 years ago, they are remembered still - if only rather
quietly and in a strangely English way. As Eliot wrote:

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

I said that I learned about Ferrar first because he‟d been a member of my
college. I really only started to read Thomas Merton’s writings after I was
ordained. And it was then that I found that he too had been an
undergraduate in the same college - though he‟d survived there only for a

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single rather dissolute year. When he wrote the story of his life up to his
profession as a monk, much of what he got up to in Cambridge was
expunged including the likelihood that he had fathered a child there. The
real tragedy must be in what he was not able to record for the sake of
propriety. Because his legacy is in his Journals where he is able to face
his doubts, his fears, his falling in love after years as a monk, his
encounters with other world religions and his concern for peace-building
in a broken world - all within the context of a faith which he practised
day-in, day-out. Like Ferrar, Merton had withdrawn from the usual ways
of living… and still more radically as he had entered into the silence of
the cloister. But there he had found himself touched all the more
profoundly by the world. Merton shows us that withdrawal - silence,
prayer and contemplation - is not escape from the pressures of the world
but a means of recognising still more clearly our responsibility to the
world. And that entailed challenging his own religious assumptions. So,
on this day, 7th December, in 1967, Merton recorded how he had
experienced a celebration of the Eucharist with some nuns who had come
to his hermitage:

All of them… real contemplatives, and they were really human…

completely simple, honest, authentic people. I have never before
had such a sense of community with any group…

Sitting together in silence after Communion with the rising sun

shining into the cottage was indescribably beautiful. Everyone so
obviously happy… I do feel very close to all of them - with each in
some special way. A sense of awe and privilege at being able to
come together with such people

Can we value what we find in the practice of our faith? Can we go

beyond the words we use in worship and the ritual to allow them to shed
light on our paths and to direct us in loving relationships with others? We

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need to ask again and again, what are we looking for, what is the world
looking for, and what is God looking for in us?

John the Baptist strikes me as a bit fierce. What would he make of all our
preparations for Christmas? Things seem a bit muted to me this year. I
suppose we have to put it down to what the government and BBC are
calling the “Downturn.” I wouldn‟t mind a few more bright lights and a
bit of glitz. So I was glad to find last night that the Magic Digital TV
Music Channel was running its 50 top Christmas Hits. Number 1 was
Slade‟s “Merry Christmas Everybody,” and Number 2 was John
Lennon‟s “So this is Christmas (War is Over if you want it)” which is still
appallingly relevant all these years later. But I went into the room at
Number 14 with Frankie goes to Hollywood singing The Power of Love:

The power of love

A force from above
Cleaning my soul
The power of love
A force from above
A sky-scraping dove

Flame on burn desire

Love with tongues of fire
Purge the soul
Make love your goal

And all of this to a video of the Wise Men journeying to find the Christ-
child in Bethlehem. Perhaps the band sang the song with irony and
subversive intent. But take the words and the images themselves and you
can see what so many people are looking and longing for. I wonder how
well we do as a church in declaring a language of love, desire and the
soul which can resonate for them?

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As Thomas Merton wrote, meditating on his life‟s journey:

In one sense we are always travelling,

Travelling as if we did not know where we were going.
In another sense we have already arrived.
We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life:
That is why we are travelling and in darkness.
But we already possess God by grace.
Therefore, in that sense, we have arrived and
Are dwelling in the light.
But oh! How far I have to go to find You
In Whom I have already arrived.