December 5, 1999

Pastor David G. Mullen

Mark 1:1-8

This is the beginning of the story of the garden of my father. Around 1950 Dad built our new home on what was then the eastern edge of the town of Bloomer, Wisconsin. (What a name for a town–but that’s another story!) Along with the residential lot came two acres of land. Good soil, most of it, and so it we had a garden. A huge garden. A garden that caused my brothers and I to be sold into slavery every summer–at least that’s how we felt about it as all the neighborhood boys our age went riding by on their bikes to the swimming hole, or to a softball game, while we, sentenced to weeks of slave labor were left sweating under the hot sun, hoeing infinite rows of corn, potatoes, cucumbers, and beans.

But that, too, is another story. I want to tell you about the beginning of the garden of my father. Come spring, soon as Dad figured the frost and snow were done, he announced he was going to drive out to the dairy farm of Cousin Herman. And we all knew what that meant. Sure enough, in a couple of hours came the sound of a tractor grumbling up through the residential area of 17^th Ave–Dad driving. And as he neared our place, where the street began to rise on a hill, the tractor engine groaned and moaned, because it was pulling an ugly trailer-like thing called a manure spreader, heaped with the stuff it was named for, that odiferous gift of the gods produced by a winter’s worth of milk cows doing what comes naturally.

This strange liturgical procession incensed the neighborhood in more ways than one. In fact, it got worse, because what you do with a manure spreader is exactly what its name implies. Dad drove the tractor up and down the garden plot, the manure flying out the backend and layering the earth. Thus the whole neighborhood was treated to a more intense experience. Women out hanging up the winter bedding on the backyard clothesline glared at Dad and then fled indoors to escape the stench. Kids playing across the street took two whiffs and went screaming to their mothers. And grown men took off for Barthen’s Bar to escape. Well, I exaggerate a bit here. But it did stink. Two acres of manure spread like a blanket across the warming land was bound to have some effect as the spring breezes carried the message of Dad’s hope far and wide.

Of course that stench of manure lasted only for a short while, for Dad soon used the same tractor to plow the manure under, preparing the land, with beautifully straight furrows ready to receive the seeds for the garden that, come fall, would provide all the potatoes and vegetables our family needed for the whole winter. And that is the beginning of the story of my father’s garden. And here is a truth for us to think about: in order for life to thrive, someone has to look to the future and raise a stink. Dad was in fact lovingly caring for the land, as each year’s gift of the cows added to the humus of the soil and provided essential nutrients, preparing the way for the garden that was to come.

A dream of rich harvest, plowing straight furrows, preparing the way for a garden to thrive–all this sounds like Mark’s take on John the Baptist. For Mark’s gospel begins, not with a sweet birth story, but with the camelhair-wearing, grasshopper-eating wildman raising a stink in the desert. What did that mean? It meant John had the courage to tell the truth.

In order for life to thrive, someone has to look to the future and raise a stink. Have you heard of what is called, "an intervention"? An intervention is what can be tried when every other effort to get an alcoholic sober has failed. In an intervention carefully prepared family members sit down with the alcoholic, often on the day after a binge, and with loving, but honest words, share the hell he or she has caused and is causing in their lives. They raise a stink in the hope that new life will thrive in their family! They hope that their honesty will help the drunk to hit bottom, to move beyond worthless alcoholic remorse to a realization of his or her desperate need to change.

John the Baptist crying in the wilderness was doing an intervention on the people, calling them to turn their lives around and be baptized. The way the leaders laid heavy burdens of religious obligation on the people was wrong. The way they turned their backs on the poor was wrong. Most wrong of all was the way the whole nation was losing its fear of the Lord. Turn your lives around, get baptized for the forgiveness of your sins, because the Messiah is coming. The poor, troubled people heard this as good news and came from all over the countryside in the hope of beginning new lives. And their baptism in the River Jordan was the sign of it.

The beginning of Mark’s gospel is for us still the beginning of the good news of Jesus. Whenever someone gets through to us, showing us our denied reality, raising a stink, you can bet God’s behind it, working new life into us! And our baptism is the sign of it!

Nothing is better for any of us than to have to look honestly at our lives, and be confronted with our sins and the false comfort we seek from the way things are–or were. I would say a sure sign of losing sight of God is the current preoccupation in America with nostalgia, looking back, toward supposedly better times, instead trusting God with our future!

I might have shared this little story before, but it’s well worth telling it again. When I serving a church in Eureka, it became obvious that the life of the community was deteriorating rapidly. I joined other community leaders in the hope of helping the people, especially the young men, thrive with hope for the future instead of diving into the hell of gang life. At one meeting a middle-aged white man complained loudly, "I don’t know why we just can’t go back to the fifties, to those good old days of family values and all that." Across the table from him sat a younger African-American who asked with considerably passion in his voice, "Oh yeah? The good old days for whom?" Right then and there a stink was raised at the table–truth was told about the nostalgic illusions comfortable people live with in a country that even to this day continues to scar too many lives with the ugly sin of racism.

By beginning the story of the good news of Jesus Christ with that wildman in the desert, Mark is telling the Church, remember your need of repentance, and remember just as much your call to raise a stink in the world, not to merely bless the world’s sins. There are times when the church itself needs to be like John the Baptist, causing trouble for the sake of Christ’s gospel of justice. And we need to exalt baptism into the powerful sign of our conversion from cynicism and despair into a daring belief we are and all people can be included in God’s wonderful future!

In order for life to thrive, someone has to look to the future and raise a stink. Every spring my Dad of the manure spreader had to risk the wrath of neighbors for the sake of his vision of a future garden of thriving life. Likewise, dear church, let us be a people of vision, and help our desperately needy families, neighborhoods, workplaces and world to see and believe in the future God has waiting for them: to be forgiven, loved unconditionally, and knit together into the new community, the Church, the body of Christ on earth and in heaven forever.

It’s worth raising a stink if we’re preparing the way for that. Amen