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We recommend you begin your worship service and sermon with a focus on Advent. The theme of the Second Sunday of Advent is Peace. You might include focusing on the theme, reading Scripture, lighting the second Advent candle, and offering a prayer of gratitude for the comfort we receive from Jesus’ peace. See our Advent Church Hack here.

Psalm 85:1–2, 8–13 • Isaiah 40:1–11 • 2 Peter 3:8–15a • Mark 1:1–8

This week’s theme is the God who comes to comfort. In our call to worship psalm, the psalmist recalls God’s past forgiveness and restoration and looks ahead to the day when righteousness and peace embrace as God draws near to his people. In Isaiah, God commands that comfort be spoken over weary exiles, promising that the Lord himself will come — arriving with power, yet gathering his lambs gently in his arms like a shepherd. In 2 Peter, the apparent delay of the Lord’s coming is revealed to be his patience, for God does not want any to perish but all to come to repentance. And in Mark’s gospel, the promised coming arrives in person, as John prepares the way for Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in whom all of God’s comfort has finally come to us.

Reminder: This introductory paragraph is intended to show how the four RCL selections for this week are connected and to assist the preacher prepare the sermon. It is not intended to be included in the sermon.

How to use this sermon resource.

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God Comes to Comfort Us in Jesus

Mark 1:1–8 NIV

On this second Sunday of Advent, our journey continues from hope to peace. Advent reminds us that the peace we long for does not begin with our ability to make everything right. God comes into our restless and wounded world to meet us himself. And as Mark announces the beginning of the good news, we discover that God comes to comfort us in Jesus.

Advent is also a season of waiting. Everyone knows what it’s like to wait for a word that does not come.

The phone that stays quiet as you wait on the test results. The child who grew up, moved away, and slowly stopped calling. The prayer you have prayed so many times that you hardly want to pray it anymore. Advent season is a season of waiting and anticipating. Waiting is one of the most human things we ever do, and it is one of the hardest, because waiting always carries a question hidden inside it: Have I been forgotten?

Israel knew that question well. By the time our story opens, God’s people had not heard from a prophet in over four hundred years. Four hundred years! Whole generations were born, lived, and died without one fresh word from heaven. They still had the old promises, scrolls full of them, but the silence had grown so long that many wondered whether the promises still held. Whether God still remembered. Whether he was still coming at all.

Maybe you know that silence. Maybe you are living in it right now.

If so, this sermon is for you, because Mark wrote his Gospel for people in the silence. His very first sentence is an announcement spoken after four hundred years of quiet: the waiting is over. The God who comes to comfort has arrived.

Into that long silence, Mark writes his opening line. Listen to how the good news begins.

The beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet: “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way” — “a voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.'” And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. And this was his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Mark 1:1–8 NIV

The Good News Begins with God, Not with Us

Notice how Mark begins. Not with a command. Not with a list of things we must do to get ready for God. He begins with an announcement:

 “The beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Mark 1:1 NIV

Before anyone in this story repents, believes, prays, or prepares a single thing, God has already set everything in motion. The first move belongs to him. It always has.

The phrase “good news” was not originally a Church word. In Mark’s world it was the word for a public announcement, the kind a runner would carry from a battlefield or a palace: a victory has been won; a new king has taken the throne.¹ The people who heard it had done nothing to make the news true. It was simply true, and now it was theirs to receive and to celebrate.

That is exactly how Mark wants us to hear everything that follows. The gospel is not advice about how we might climb our way up to God. It is the news that God has come down to us. Before we lifted a finger, before we cleaned ourselves up, before we even knew we were waiting for him, God decided to come. Good news begins with God, not with us.

And that means the weary person in the pew, the one who feels they have nothing left to offer, is in exactly the right position to hear this story. You do not need to bring anything to an announcement. You only need ears to hear it. Mark calls verse one “the beginning” of the good news, and in a real sense the good news that began there has never stopped. It is still being announced. It is being announced to you right now.

The Coming Was Promised by a God Who Never Forgot

Mark’s second move is to quote Isaiah:

“I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way — a voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.'” Mark 1:2–3 NIV

Those words come from Isaiah 40, and it helps to remember who first heard them. They were spoken to Israel in exile, a people dragged off to Babylon, far from home, convinced that God had washed his hands of them. And the very first words of that chapter are these:

“Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.” Isaiah 40:1 NIV

Not “shape up, my people.” Not “explain yourselves, my people.” Comfort. God looked at his weary, guilty, far-off people and the first thing on his heart was their comfort. Then came the promise: a voice would one day cry out in the wilderness, because the Lord himself was coming to bring his people home.

Centuries passed. The exiles returned, but the promise in its fullness still hung in the air. Then came the four hundred years of silence. And here is what Mark wants us to see: the silence was never absence. All that time, God was not ignoring his people. He was keeping his promise, moving history toward the day when the voice would finally sound in the wilderness.

Peter says it plainly in his letter:

“The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” 2 Peter 3:9 NIV

What looks to us like delay is, from God’s side, patience. He waits because he is unwilling to leave anyone outside. The God who comes to comfort had never stopped coming. He was on his way the whole time.

And notice how the whole family of God is at work in this promise. The Father is the One who spoke it through Isaiah and never once forgot it. The Son is the One now on his way to keep it in person. And the Spirit of God is the One who kept hope alive in waiting hearts through the long silence, keeping the old words alive until the day they came true.

If you have been waiting on God, this is your verse of the sermon: his silence is not his absence. God in keeping his promise to Israel has shown us his faithfulness once and for all in Jesus. Even when we cannot see what he is doing, we can trust the God who has come to us and will not let us go.

 God Picks Up the Story Right Where It Left Off

Then it happens. After four hundred years, a man appears:

“And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” Mark 1:4 NIV

Mark gives us two details about John that are easy to read past, and both of them are deliberate. They tell us that God is picking up the story exactly where it left off.

The first detail is the place:

The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. Mark 1:5 NIV

John baptizes in the Jordan River. Of all the rivers and pools in Israel, why the Jordan? Because the Jordan is where the story of God’s people reached its turning point long ago. After forty years of wandering in the wilderness, Israel passed through the waters of the Jordan and stepped, at last, into the promised land (Joshua 3). The Jordan was the doorway between wandering and home.

So, when John calls the people back out into the wilderness and down into that same river, he invites them to step back into their own story. To go back to the doorway. To confess that they have wandered, that they need to begin again, and to pass through the waters one more time, trusting God to bring them home again. Only this time, what waits on the other side of the water is not a piece of land. It is a Person. The true promised land was about to walk up out of Galilee, and his name was Jesus.

And then there is John’s strange wardrobe: camel’s hair and a leather belt. Mark’s first listeners would have recognized it. That was how the Old Testament prophet Elijah was described. And the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, had promised that Elijah would come before the day of the Lord.

So, picture it. Four hundred years of silence, and suddenly a man dressed like Elijah stands in the wilderness and announces that the Lord is near. Everything about John was God saying: I have not forgotten a single word I spoke. God kept his promise right down to the wardrobe.²

And here is the part we must not miss. John preached repentance, and the people confessed their sins, but their repentance did not make the Lord come. He was already on his way. The King was coming whether or not the road was ready.

Repentance does not cause God’s arrival; it makes room to receive him. It is not anxious performance, as though we could earn a visit from heaven by feeling sorry enough. It is joyful return, turning around because someone wonderful is coming up the road, and we do not want to miss him.

He Comes with Power — and Gathers the Lambs

So, what will he be like, this One who comes? John tells us:

“After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.” Mark 1:7–8

More powerful. Untying sandals was the job of the lowest servant in the house³, and John, the greatest prophet of his age, and the one Jesus said was the greatest born of woman, says he is not worthy even of that. Isaiah had said the same thing about this day: the Lord comes with power, and his arm rules for him.

Power like that could be terrifying. If the Almighty is finally coming, should we run and hide? But listen to what Isaiah says this powerful One does when he arrives: “He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart” (Isaiah 40:11). All that power, and what does he do with it? He stoops down. He gathers up the weak ones. He carries them against his own chest.

This is the God who comes to comfort. His strength is not aimed at us; it is spent for us. The hands strong enough to shake the heavens are the hands that picked up lambs. When Jesus steps into Mark’s Gospel a few verses later, this is exactly what we see: power used for healing, for feeding, for forgiving, for raising the dead, and finally for carrying a cross. On that cross, Jesus carries more than wood. He carries our sin, our estrangement, and everything that separates humanity from God. And in his resurrection, he brings our humanity home to the Father.

His might and his gentleness are not two sides of God. They are one thing. He is mighty in the way he is gentle, and gentle in the way he is mighty.

And he does not come empty-handed. John told the crowd that he would baptize them with water, but Jesus will baptize them with the Holy Spirit.

John could get people wet. Jesus gives people God. This is the gift beyond all gifts: God not only coming to us but coming to live in us. See again how our Triune God is at work: the Father sends his Son into the world; the Son arrives and gathers the lambs in his arms; and the Son’s own gift to us is the Spirit, God making his home inside his people.

This means the comfort of God is not a mood or a moment. It is God himself, given to us, dwelling in us, closer to us than our own breath. And people who carry that kind of comfort inside them were never meant to keep it to themselves.

Conclusion — Included in His Coming

So, we end where Mark began — with Jesus.

The God who spoke into four hundred years of silence has spoken his final and best word, and that word is his Son. The promise was kept down to the smallest detail, down to the river and the camel’s hair. The waters have been crossed; the promised land has come to us in a Person. The Shepherd has come, and he has gathered his lambs. The God who comes to comfort has come.

And here is the wonder of it all: when Jesus baptizes us with the Holy Spirit, he does not simply visit us and move on. He draws us into his own life. His Father becomes our Father. His Spirit becomes our breath. His mission becomes our joy. The comfort of God is not something we admire from a distance; we live inside it now, the way a lamb lives inside the shepherd’s arms. And that means his work of comforting the world now runs through us. Like John, we get to be voices in the wilderness. We don’t cause the Lord to come to us; we announce that he already has.

So here is the invitation this week, which rises straight out of this story. Somewhere in your life there is a person living in their own four hundred years of silence, waiting, weary, wondering if God has forgotten them. A neighbor sitting alone with a diagnosis. A coworker going through a divorce. A family member who quietly stopped hoping a long time ago. What would it mean for us to become a congregation known as a place of God’s comfort? What if weary people discovered among us that they did not have to hide their grief, pretend they had answers, or clean themselves up before they belonged?

This week, be the voice that breaks the silence for one of them. Visit them. Call them. Sit with them and listen. Speak a word of kindness that says, out loud or without words at all: you are not forgotten. You are not alone. Not to bring God to them, for he is already nearer to them than they know, but to announce the good news that he has come, and that he is gentle.

Comfort, comfort, his people. The God who comes to comfort has come. He has gathered us into his arms and carried us close to his heart, and his comfort will never end.

Going back to the Jordan imagery: Israel crossed the Jordan but wandered again. Jesus enters Israel’s story and faithfully completes humanity’s journey home.

Jesus does not merely come to tell us how to return to God. He comes as one of us and makes that journey for us. He takes our lost and wandering humanity all the way into his own faithful life, through the cross and death, and into resurrection. In Jesus, God does for us from within our humanity, what we could never accomplish for ourselves.

God comes to comfort us in Jesus.

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1. Did Mark borrow the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ from the beginning of the gospel of Augustus Caesar? – Biblical Criticism & History Forum – earlywritings.com
2. Commentary on Mark 1:1-20 – Working Preacher from Luther Seminary
3. John 1 Commentary: The Word and the Witness, Verse by Verse

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Small Group Discussion Questions