Sermon from January 16, 2000
What memories and emotions do the following statements evoke for you? "A city set on a hill." "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." "Give me liberty or give me death." "Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a nation..." "Remember the Alamo!" "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask rather what you can do for your country." "I have a dream." "That's one small step for man; one giant step for mankind."

If I were going to teach high school American history, I would organize my year around those and other statements. I would not be teaching my students how to be historians (an honorable calling), but I would be teaching them to be citizens by passing on the meaning of our nation (an even more honorable and more pressing calling). I believe you have to teach the young history from the inside.

I do not know how I might teach Navajo teenagers Native American history, because I do not know Native American history from the inside. I would be willing to bet dollars to do-nuts that every Native American people has its own memorable quotes that capture the meaning of its history; but the history of each turns on ignominious defeat and humiliation. Now, I do not know, but I would not be surprised if among their cherished quotations we found some that prophesied a reversal of fortune and the return of a glorious age of Indian ascendancy.

My confidence to say such a thing arises out of our Christian story and its early chapters about the children of Abraham. We know that history from the inside by the stories that have been passed along from generation to generation. Those stories tell of David and Solomon, Israel's golden age. They tell of a long and terrible decline from that golden age. They tell of a day when the Babylonian armies of King Nebuchadnezzar came against the city of Jerusalem and destroyed it and deported the flower of the Jewish nation into captivity. The kings were gone; the nation was gone; Jerusalem was gone. There begun a long and sometimes tragic succession of nations that ruled Israel, even after some Jews returned and rebuilt Jerusalem.

During the long and terrible delcine from Israel's golden age, voices spoke out that foretold the long and tragic history to which the decline would lead. But those voices also prophesied a reversal of fortune and the return of a glorious age of Israeli ascendancy and worldwide blessing to follow. Such hopes came to be invested in a figure that did not yet exist. The Jews called him Mashiach, Messiah.

Memorable language expressed their hopes. "I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to give you hope and a future," – Jeremiah. "I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten ... You will have plenty to eat until you are full ... And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people ... And everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved," – Joel. "Then suddenly the LORD you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," – Malachi. But no one expressed Israel's hope like Isaiah.

The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom ... they will see the glory of the LORD, the splendor of our God. In the last days the mountain of the LORD's temple will be established as chief among the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and all nations will stream to it. For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time and forever.

Lines and snippets of lines like these put down deep roots within the soul of a nation that refused to die. Whether Israel wandered among the ghettoes of Poland or the bazaars of Arabia, the words of the prophets sustained not only their life but their hope for a better day for Israel; and there came to be the annual prayer, "ha shanah ha baah birushalayim;" "Next year in Jerusalem." For those Jews who went home from captivity or to what was left of home, the words of the prophets sustained their nationalism. They negotiated with, coexisted with, made war with, feared, hated, and resisted first the Persians, then the Greeks, then the Romans.

When the Greek sovereign, Antiochus Ephiphanes, sacrificed a pig in the rebuilt temple of Jerusalem and then ordered Jews to give up their religious observances, a Jewish patriot killed his representative and fled to the hills of Judea to foment a rebellion. Under their great leader, Judas Maccabeus, the Jews drove Antiochus out of Jerusalem, and many wondered if Mashiach had come. He had not. That became apparent, as the descendants of Judas Maccabeus succumbed more to palace intrigue than to messianic aspirations and the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy.

The Romans came under General Pompey, and like the Greeks before them, treated the Jewish temple as just another building, and a crisis was precipitated.

A strange thing happened. As those five centuries of occupation unfolded, they did not break the spirit of Israel. Rather, Israel came to believe more strongly than ever that the words of the prophets were nearing fulfillment. God's kingdom and God's king were coming to vanquish, first the Greeks, then the Romans. Pretenders arose, who said they were Mashiach. But their failed attempts at liberation and the occasional, gruesome row of crosses that gave the lie to their pretensions only made Jewish hopes of deliverance more fervent.

In this violence-tinged, revolutionary atmosphere a Voice spoke that said, The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near. Could the moment have come when the promise of the prophets came to pass? Could this man be the Man who would bring it to pass? Only if we read the gospels against this background of revolutionary fervor and national hope can we appreciate the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Against this background the opening words of the Gospel of Mark begin to make sense.

The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God
It is written in Isaiah the prophet:

"I will send my mesenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way" –
"a voice of one calling in the desert,
'Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.'"

The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Ears that heard this line would either sneer or never rest until they heard further. If they heard further, they would not hear a reasoned exposition of deity and incarnation. They would hear instead a story, whose starting point was the long-harbored, long-frustrated, prophet-fed dreams of Israel. They would hear Mark say, It is written in Isaiah the prophet.

It was Isaiah who spoke about "a  voice of one calling in the desert, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.'" Isaiah never gave a name to the voice crying in the wilderness. He only said it only called for a way to be prepared and said that on that prepared way the glory of the LORD will be revealed, and all mankind together will see it (Isa. 40:5). Every Jew would remember that it came from Isaiah 40. Every Jew believed that it promised the restoration of the golden age of Israel.

Mark opens his gospel by seeming to say, "The fulfillment of our dreams has come at last, and we are to look for that fulfillment in Jesus Christ (Jesus Mashiach), the Son of God." For those words to get about in Jesus' day was to stir revolutionary dreams as well as revolutionary skepticism. Yet right here Mark, preparing us for the story of Jesus' life, has introduced something unexpected into his story by introducing something unexpected into his snippets from the Old Testament prophets.

He draws our attention to the unexpected first by the unexpected fact that the quotation he attributes to Isaiah did not all come from Isaiah. The part about a voice calling in the desert came from Isaiah 40. It was the first part of the quote that came from somewhere else.

"I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way."

That snippet came from the last book of the Old Testament. Look at Malachi 3:1. "See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," says the LORD Almighty.

The phrase prepare the way links Isaiah 40 and Malachi 3, and Mark has knit them together so that you would think they had always been together. Isaiah was the greater prophet, so perhaps Mark attributed the complete thought to him. That is idle speculation compared with a second unexpected twist to the story that Mark is telling. According to Malachi 3:2 the Lord says, But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner's fire or a launderer's soap. There was to be something unwelcome, even abrasive, about this coming.

Malachi gave a name to the messenger that would precede the Messiah. In Malachi 4:5 the prophet writes, "See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes." Jesus will later interpret this as applying to John the Baptist. The name Elijah had an unwelcome, even abrasive sound to it. Not everyone would welcome it.

But how does this unexpected twist fit into the age-old dreams of the Jews? How could the coming of Mashiach be unwelcome to the very people who had anticipated Him for generations? The Isaiah passage focuses on the preparation of a way and on the splendid One who will use it. Malachi puts a face on the messenger and charges him with the task of unwelcome preparation. Isaiah focused on the splendor of the coming King; Malachi on the possibly unwelcome nature of His coming.

By putting these quotations at the very beginning of his gospel, was Mark preparing us gently, unobtrusively to grasp the meaning of the story he was about to tell? Is his story a story of how the long expected King of the Jews had showed His hand right down in the jungle of life? Did Mark mean that Jesus was the long-expected King? If so, did Mark focus on the splendor of the King, like Isaiah, or was there something unwelcome about King Jesus, as in Malachi? Could it be both?

Also to the point, Mark starts his readers off in verse 1 with this magnificent title statement: The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God. How could there be anything unwelome in the gospel, the good news? We who know the story, even the outline, know its terribly mixed quality.

He healed the sick, made the blind to see, the lame walk. He relieved suffering, and He raised the dead. The splendor Isaiah had foretold shone in His compassionate acts. But He also ran afoul of the authorities. They question His authority. They accused Him of being demonic. They plotted against Him. Ultimately, they contrived His death at Roman hands. His own family found His behavior erratic, not to say abnormal. His closest disciples not only disagreed with Him at times, but at the crucial hour they abandoned Him.

Just knowing what we know of the story, we know that Mark's use of Isaiah and Malachi fits the profile of events that were yet to come. Yet he calls it good news, gospel. How can we call this story of splendor and abrasiveness good news? That is Mark's story to tell, and we should let him tell it in his own way and in his own time. But there is something in the opening line of the quotation from Malachi that points to good news.

Go back for a moment to the first line of Mark's Old Testament quotation. "I will send my mesenger ahead of you." Malachi wrote those words half a millennium before Christ. Mark quotes them as though they had been spoken for the first time only yesterday. That is because the purpose of the speaker was as firm in Mark's day as it was 500 years earlier. After all, who is the I who said, "I will send m messenger ahead of you?" It is the God of Israel.

The plans of the LORD stand firm forever,
the purposes of his heart through all generations, (Psa. 33:11).

Don't you wish you could step in front of His purposes, as in front of a large wave, and let them carry you all the way to the place on shore He has planned for you? I said last Sunday that many of us have discovered that the little stories of our journey through this world need to be part of some larger story, which does not swallow up our little stories but infuses them with deeper meaning.

That is what the Gospel story does for us. Jesus' story, the story of His journey on this flawed jewel we call earth, draws our little stories into itself, and meaning washes into our lives, rising like water finding its level, because a purpose greater than our own and greater than all ours put together has begun to direct our path.

"I will send my messenger ahead of you," says the Lord, and 500 years later He sends him. Time has met its match. Here are purposes that endure through vast ages and across many cultures. The One whose purpose prevails carries along those who have become part of His story. They embody His enduring purpose, even in times and places when, as we like to say, nothing seems to be happening. Our faith is not for nothing, my brothers and sisters on the journey. We are moving toward the transformation of all things. His purpose has caught us and is bearing us toward the shore and home.