“Why John the Baptizer won’t be appearing in the next Hallmark movie…” 

            I like to try to get down to my parents’ house on the family farm every few weeks.  And it’s funny, almost every time I get down there on late Sunday afternoon, I come walking in the front door and there my parents are, relaxing in the front living room, feet kicked up in their lazy boy chairs watching a hallmark movie.  Every time. 

            Now at first, when I would see them watching a Hallmark movie, I would just roll my eyes and every bit of my 17 year old cynical and critical teenage goth personality would come roaring back down to life and I would sit down and playfully critique the film in a way that would make the two cantankerous old guys from the Muppets, Statler and Waldorf extremely proud.

            But you know what, lately when I’ve been going down to visit with my parents and I come rolling in through the front door and I sit down and watch the hallmark movie, I’m actually starting to like it…. I know, crazy right?  But I mean, what’s not to love?  After all, these movies typically involve a specific cast of very attractive characters — bakers, widows, small-town business owners, writers, and the like — who live in equally cozy, quaint towns and who fall in love unexpectedly, learn the true meaning and value of family, life, love, and community, and all of this just in time for the holidays so they can live happily ever after.

            And I mean, how can 80 million people be wrong?  Yeah, that’s right!  Last year, during the Christmas season, more than 80 million people tuned in to watch at least a few minutes of a Hallmark movie, according to Nielsen.  And most weeks in November and December, Hallmark ranks as the No. 1 network among the highly coveted advertiser-friendly demographics of women ages 18-49 and women 25-54.

            And believe me, advertisers have taken notice.  With Hallmark being able to offer that consistent draw of people from year to year -it’s a huge boon for advertisers. Previous estimates have found that the Hallmark Channel generates a third of its annual ad revenue just from Christmas movies alone, which equates to more than $350 million annually.

            So there’s no denying that a lot of people love Hallmark movies — they’re cheerful, corny, and predictable in a way that often feels very comforting.  In fact, clinical psychologist Dr. Cree Scott told North State Journal that watching Hallmark movies can actually be good for your mental health.  She has observed that “Hallmark movies, after all, are all about love, empathy, compassion, and kindness,” and that “When you watch an uplifting movie, especially when they include acts of kindness, it [actually] releases what’s known ascortisol — the stress hormone — in the brain, followed by dopamine, which produces feelings of pleasure.”

            But you know, even beyond the pleasure principle, the thing is about Hallmark movies, like a lot of good entertainment, let’s face it, is that they offer us a kind of escapism.  We want to forget what is happening in our lives and in our world.  For some of us, especially at this time of year, maybe it’s from all the stress -early mornings, late nights, impossible work situations, meals on the go, shopping, laundry, party planning, getting the house in order, arranging from the kids and grandchildren to come over.  All of which is enough to make us want  to sit down for a few minutes and just shut off the brain with something light, and fluffy, and non-challenging.

            Or maybe for others, it’s an escape from those things that we fear or are unknown.  Again, it’s not lost on advertisers that during the initial outbreak and lockdowns of Covid, Hallmark saw a 40% increase in viewership during the first half of 2020.  So Immersing yourself in a Hallmark world where Covid doesn’t exist, along with any other disease, or a world without protests or riots or political unrest, or a world without warring factions or war period, that—is an attractive world. 

            But perhaps the greatest escape that drives plenty of us to the sunny shores of Hallmark is the absence of evil.  Because have you ever noticed, evil doesn’t exist in the world of Hallmark, at least not in any overt fashion. There are no child abductions. No sexual assaults. No murders (except on their designated mystery channel).  So whether you like Hallmark movies or not, who doesn’t want to live in that world?  So, while some might say that Hallmark films are shallow, the need that they meet isn’t. But equally true is the fact that they don’t really meet that need. They just help us forget it for 120 minutes.

            You know in our gospels, while it wasn’t quite 80 million people we’re told that  people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem, they too, like us were living in great need and they we’re equally trying to escape from a lot of the very real pain and suffering of ordinary living, as well as all the corruption going on in say in the city and in the temple complex because of the politics of the day and in their great need, they were escaping from the city.

            And they were going out some 40 km into the dessert to tune into this strange-looking man proclaiming that he was, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness…Prepare the way of the Lord, [and] make his paths straight..” He said.   This man, of course was John the Baptizer, the first real prophet to turn up in Israel in over 300 years.  And he’s dressed in camel’s hair with a leather belt, the exact same outfit Elijah the prophet wore some eight hundred years before him.  His hair and his beard look like they have never been cut and if it’s true as the gospels of Matthew and Mark states that all he ever ate was locus and wild honey, he’s as a skinny as a cactus.

            And you got to wonder why would people being going to all these extreme lengths to go and listen to a sermon.  It’s gotta be a good sermon, right?  But I mean going 40 km’s out of your way and out into the desert where there are bandits and extreme heat so you gotta make sure you bring enough water, and for especially all the people coming from Jerusalem, which was where the temple was, and the rabbis, and all the accumulated wisdom of the religious establishment.  If someone wanted to hear from God, why not stay right there, maybe attend some extra services or make an appointment with one of the chief priests?  Anyone who would turn away from all that the city and the temple had for them to set off for the wilderness must have been looking for something else, something that the temple and their culture at large wasn’t delivering to them.

            Because apparently, John had it, whatever it was.  And even if it looked like he came from another planet, still whenever he spoke about the one who was coming, it was as if he were repeating what God was saying to him right that moment, one sentence at a time, testifying to what John states is the light, the true light which enlightens everyone and was coming into the world.  And although  He may not have had many details.  He did not know the name of the one who was coming, for instance, or what he looked like, but what he did know was that the old world that he had inherited and have been living in all his life, was about to come to an end and a new world was spinning toward him, carried in the arms of God’s chosen one.

            It was a world that would be built out of new materials, and not out of all the rearranged stones of the old religion and his culture.  The Holy Spirit had gotten all but covered up in Jerusalem, with pretend piety and temple taxes and priestly hocus focus.  The flame was all but snuffed out under the weight of all that artificiality, so God moved it -out into the wilderness, where the air was sharp and clean and where even the priests and Levites of the temple where interested in knowing what John the Baptizer was saying  -what Mark says was the beginning of the good news, that someone was coming, someone so spectacular that it was not enough simply to hang around waiting for him to arrive.  It was time to get ready, to prepare the way, so that when he came he could walk a straight path right to their front doorsteps of their houses…

            And It’s a message that frankly we need to hear again today.  Because frankly, while it’s true that I love Hallmark movies and I understand the need to escape from the world for a little while, still there will  come a time when the Hallmark movie will end, and we will have to shut the tv off, and then we’ll have to return whether we like it or not to reality.  Because the truth be told, especially at this time of year, all of us must face the many stresses, the fears, the pains, the darkness, and the very real evils of this world which no Hallmark movie can’t make sense of because it can’t acknowledge any of it exists.

            Again, I’m not saying Hallmark films are a waste of time at all, or don’t have a place, or they don’t make us feel good because they do.  I don’t think that Hallmark will hurt a heart that needs to heal, but it can’t heal a hurting heart.  Because only a much Higher source than Hallmark can do that—and that Source is the real reason we celebrate Christmas in the first place.  Where God came to earth in the figure of Jesus Christ and suffered every stress, fear, pain, and evil we encounter in this world, with the hope that we might start doing something about it and where someday we can hope to live in a perfect world with God.

            Because in the end, I think that’s the reason why our lectionary always has John the Baptist preaching to us at the beginning of Advent, because I think John wants us to realize that we need to do something about the way we’re living our lives and the way our world currently works. 

            I think that’s what John the Baptizer was offering that no one else around him could, which was a real clean break and escape for people who wanted to come clean.  For people who don’t want to just go asleep and inhabit a fantasy land called Hallmark but instead who realize “they don’t want to live in a land where love is so easy and life is so shallow.  Or a land where there aren’t any real struggles and pains and real people facing real obstacles and pressures.  Or as well in a so-called secular paradise where there isn’t a God and there isn’t a Saviour and where there isn’t any need for redemption because according to it there isn’t anything to be redeemed from and there isn’t the promise of something much better to come. 

            But instead one day as our bibles tell us, we will all live in a land that really is perfect, a land where God will dwell among mortals, where Death will be no more, where mourning and crying and pain will be no more as The Book of Revelation puts it -the kind of perfect that would make a Hallmark film look like a cheap carnival ride. But until that time, each of us we are told in our own acceptable way must begin by preparing the way for the Lord and so let it begin again with us today.  In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.