Something is different. We are marking the transition.
Each week we see a snapshot which leads up to a long awaited arrival.
We are looking to the horizon and wondering what is on its way.
The author of the Gospel according to Mark tells us we are hearing the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ. But he starts with the words of Isaiah.

It had been a long time since the voice of a prophet was heard in Israel.
Isaiah said the day would come again. Malachi had promised it too.
But hundreds of years passed before John the baptizer stood in camel skins in the desert.
John lived in an inhospitable place commonly know as The Devastation.

The air there was scorchingly hot, water was scare, and visitors unlikely. John wore the simple scratchy garb of a prophet, and ate the same food as the simplest and poorest people of his day.

John did not march into town and sit in the temple to speak.
He appeared in the wilderness and proclaimed the need for repentance.
He offered a ritual in the river ­ a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
Then John waited.
What made him think that anyone would show up?

A ribbon of water in the desert is like a magnet.
The promise of redemption touches the deepest thirst that human beings have.
We want to be made clean ­ to have a new beginning. We want to be made right with God. We long to be free of the accumulated sins of our past which obscure our vision, and mask our true appearance.
A ribbon of water in the desert is like a magnet to those who are thirsty for a new life.

So, John did not go into town. He stood by the water and he waited.

If you traveled on the trade routes of the desert, in John's day, you would become a child of the dust.

The color of your flesh would gradually be buried under the dust that had been kicked up by the passage of your caravan.

All that you were and all that you had would begin to look like the landscape through which you were passing.

A people's passage through the culture of their day is like a journey on a desert road.

A fine deposit of viewpoints and assumptions settle out of the air.

We are changed so gradually that we do not even realize that we have all become children of the dust of our age.

One's vision becomes limited by the contemporaneous haze. One's true image is altered by the dusty accretion of values and understanding that seem to have fallen out of the very air and covered us all.

The individual, and collective, desire for a clearer vision and an unsullied soul is a connecting point between us and the people who walked out to see John at the Jordan.

They, and we, long for clarity and a new beginning.

The accumulation of the ways we have always done things and the ways we have always seen them do not always add value.

John saw that life was less than it could be and he offered a ritual way of washing away the dust.

There was something about John that drew people.
But in the dusty travel on the road to the river,
people might have mistaken who was really standing there and what he was offering.

So John was as clear as flowing water.

"The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me;

I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals."

The one who removed sandals from road weary feet was a slave. With few words, John sets himself lower than even a slave in his relationship with the one who is to come.

Even in a cloud of dust this voice is clear. John is not the Awaited One.

What about this powerful cleansing ritual which he offers?

That is exactly, and only, what it is.
It is a ritual, with ancient roots.
The flow of water removes actual dust and thereby symbolized a deeper cleansing.
But John proclaims that there is more to look forward to, just down the road.

"I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."

This Baptism which is to come will not simply symbolize the possibility of new life, it will provide it.

At the end of this Gospel reading the image on the screen freezes.
John is standing in the river, as though he will stand there forever.
The dust suspended in the air and the water coming from John's hand hang motionless.
The crowds are still ­ some have been washed, some remain covered with dust.

And we are waiting by the river
for the one who is to come.