IS IT TIME TO TURN AROUND?
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

December 7, 2008

Isaiah 40:1-11            Mark 1:1-8

When I am on a road trip, I rarely take a map. I look at a map before I leave and then I get to where I am going. If I have been somewhere before, even if it was twenty-five years ago up in some far corner of northern Maine , I won't even look at a map before I leave. Here's my problem, well one of my problems: ninety nine times out of a hundred, I easily get to where I am going, but success breeds contempt. On those times when I am seriously lost I am stubborn about admitting it, until I am so lost, it takes an army of Garmin advisors to get me back on track. My dear partner in life, Lynn , is so patient with me and will often ask, “Hon, is it time to turn around yet?”

On this second Sunday of Advent we are given in our lectionary spiritual journey through our Holy Scriptures two well known stories—one we like a great deal, and the other makes us very uncomfortable and even a bit grouchy and perhaps even a tad bit defensive. The first one is from Second Isaiah. You know it mainly from its use from Handel's Messiah, “Comfort, comfort my people, they have served their time in prison, their penalty is paid, they have received a punishment double for their sins. Now turn them around, make a highway straight through the desert, lift up the valleys, lower the mountains and send my people home on a new multi-lane expressway to Jerusalem .”

Now if you go hunting for 2 Isaiah in your Bible you will not easily note it, in fact you probably will never find it. Only ridiculously boring people like myself even care about the reality that the Book of Isaiah, which is huge, incidentally, really had three different authors, minimum. Each phase of the Book of Isaiah reflects three different time periods in Israel 's life and this one book scans more than one century of time.  

First Isaiah talks about the reality before the Jewish people were taken into captivity in Babylon by old King Nebuchadnezzar. The Israelites were warned repeatedly in 1 Isaiah, “Turn around from the way things are going in your country. You are being unjust toward each other and especially so toward the poor. You are not observing God's laws about living at peace, with justice toward not only each other, but toward your foreign neighbors.” Isaiah warned them and told them it is not too late to change, to turn around .

II Isaiah is written after the Jews had been in Babylonia for nearly seventy years. The reign of King Nebuchadnezzar is nearly over and they will have an opportunity to choose whether to go home. Now this is around five hundred years before Jesus. Five hundred years before the current era. At the time of Jesus the average person lived to be thirty eight years old. How many people would that eliminate from this congregation this morning? If we were the exiles in Babylonia , well over half of us would be dead and the memory of home from a few old survivors would be what most have to work with.

What was happening is that the first generations of Jewish exiles forcibly taken from Israel were nearly all gone. Their kids, second generation, were doing what all second generation kids did; they are assimilating into Babylonian society. Babylon was a city counted among the seven greatest wonders in the ancient world. It was probably a phenomenal place to live. II Isaiah's task was to ignite a movement back home to Jerusalem , which lay in rubble, populated by the poorest of the poor who were merely existing hand to mouth who had no time to remember Israel 's sacred dreams of being a proud nation. 

Here is II Isaiah's basic message: Folks it was sin, it was living life the way it came easiest, not following God's dreams, God's commandments that got your parents' sacred homeland and lives destroyed in the first place. Now, you're getting settled into the life of luxury and well being in this foreign land. Do you want to be punished by God again or will you turn around, live courageously and faithfully, and go home with your children and rebuild the Promised Land of Moses? 

A large group of Jewish folks went home to war-torn, economically ravaged, religiously impure Israel . They were a purist group that went home and it is one of the ugliest times in Israel 's history that you can read about in the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah. It was either their way or the highway as they rebuilt Jerusalem and the Holy Temple to Yahweh. They were Jewish fundamental literalists times ten. They built a system that was ritually pure, but it still most probably lacked the compassion and justice and righteousness of which God was dreaming. It was an oftentimes mean spirited and narrow political group that sought to reestablish a very narrow view of Judaism that tore apart families and never did reestablish a free and autonomous Israel .  

A lot of times after a serious national trauma, like being taken in captivity or some horrible terrorist attack, like 9/11, nations do lose their balance. If you have been following the news out of India following last week's terrorist attacks, one of the greatest worries is that a more vastly conservative national backlash might seek to move India toward re-engaging in war with Pakistan . It is always easier to blame others than deal with our own problems. Have we lived enough centuries and observed human behavior long enough to realize that war is not the answer? War is not the answer even for us.  

If you ever go up to greater Detroit and visit the Henry Ford Museum which contains an absolutely phenomenal collection of Americana , I hope you take the opportunity. Ford collected so much of early industrial America while it was still available, cheap. Among his collection of stuff, is the workshop where Thomas Edison invented the iridescent light bulb. Ford and Edison were fast friends and he had Edison come back to that early laboratory and take pictures of him replicating the experiments. 

Ford's crew went to New Jersey and took not only the buildings that Edison worked in, but they dug up all the dirt by railroad car load and repositioned the soil around the building in its new location. Edison threw out the window all his failed work. He threw out some nearly eight hundred light bulbs that failed before discovering the one that worked. Edison is on camera saying he was not overly discouraged in the process because he remembered and catalogued all his failures. He said, “I knew from all that didn't work, that eventually I”d find something that did.” By taking and remembering his failures he was not doomed to repeat his mistakes. War is not the answer, it never has been and I would love it if we were amongst the first generations to turn around and to seriously learn from the failures of war and not repeat our mistakes. I grew up and no longer hit my brothers and sister, nor my children or my wife. Violence is not the answer and knowing what does not work is sufficient unto itself. We could go the next many centuries doing serious exploration of alternatives and throw war out the window on the heap of things we know do not work. 

Recall with me those opening words of II Isaiah; comfort is to be spoken, God says, to my people. They may have repeatedly rejected God's dream of what their society should be like, preferring dominating power, greed, accumulation of wealth, creation of a large body of the destitute, and turning a highly relational faith into liturgy and rote and ritual devoid of compassion. They may have said in God we trust, but thoroughly rejected God as king over them. (I Samuel 8:7) They may have had to have gone through being destroyed as a nation and their leaders taken away into captivity because of their disobedience of God and their rejection of God's intentions for their society. But they were still “my people.” They were still loved by God. And God would not disown them.  

Now fast forward with me five hundred years from the time of II Isaiah leading his people back to Jerusalem in rubble to the time after Jesus' death and resurrection, to the year 70 of the current era. Guess what has just happened? Yes, Jerusalem and the temple and the people of Israel have just been destroyed, again. The Romans not only killed Jesus, they went on in the decades to follow to kill nearly a million Jews in an attempt to rid them of what they considered the Jewish political menace. Those Jews just kept demanding to be a people free from outside interference.  

It is five hundred years later and Mark's gospel begins by sounding forward the ancient hope embedded in the words of Isaiah. Mark says that this story is about Jesus Christ, the Son of God and “I will send a messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way, a voice of one calling in the desert, Prepare the way of the Lord, and make straight paths for him.” Mark's gospel begins with John the Baptist saying to the faithful followers of Yahweh, “Look it has happened again, but God has told me to bring comfort to God's people, it's time to turn around and begin again and God has moved again fully in Jesus Christ. Let me tell you and show you how God has moved in Jesus” and the rest of the gospel is tha t story. 

Mark's gospel was a very political one. It is only because we are not always good students of history that we think that the gospels are all religious. Mark, who is writing and using the equivalent term for “gospel” for the first time in the Bible , was putting himself in political opposition to Roman Imperialism. The reason that the word gospel has never been used before in the Bible was because when that term got used it was used by the winning Roman General or Caesar to proclaim the news of a great military and political victory. If you were on the winning side, then the news to you that the war was won by your side was gospel, good news. That is how the word was used in the Greek/Roman/ Jewish contemporary world.

Ched Myers, an outstanding commentator on Mark, writes, “Mark is serving notice that he is challenging the apparatus of imperial propagation. Mark is taking dead aim at Caesar and his legitimating myths. From the very first line of Mark's Gospel, Mark's strategy is revealed as subversive. Gospel is not an appropriate title for this story, for Mark does not herald yet another victory by Rome 's armies; it is a declaration of serious opposition to the political culture of the empire.” 

Mark is letting his people know, his people are all Jewish followers of the way of Jesus and survivors of the Roman onslaught of political hatred, who are crying in despair that once again history and political and military power have moved against the Jews. But the gospel that Mark proclaims, the Good News is that God is still caring and that God is still asking for God's people to turn around from what has not worked and try God's way. Mark, like Paul before him, believed that God was moving powerfully to comfort God's people by the presence of Jesus both while he walked this earth and in his resurrected form.

Now fast forward two thousand years and here we are this morning. God probably, along with us, despairs and cries and gets depressed and wonders, “Will the faithful followers of mine ever, ever risk my way, rather than the ways of war, the ways of destruction, oppression, bipartisan poisoning, rabid nationalism and degradation of each other and the environment that is struggling to sustain us?” 

Mark says this morning in his gospel reading to us that there is a voice calling from the desert. What that meant in Mark's day was from out in the sticks, from the fringes of society, from the boondocks, a voice is calling prepare, make straight a path in the wilderness for the arrival of God's ways in this world. You see John the Baptist had to go out from the mainstream to get a hearing. The dominant structures of his day were every bit as oppressive as they are today. I understand at the University next to us that there are some oppressive structures. 

My daughter tells me that in our move from Chicago that I have brought our family to the sticks, to the country, to the tobacco-chewing boondocks. I wonder, what if, seriously now, God is seeking to move powerfully through this congregation, through you and me individually and as a group? What if the time is ripe, the moment of new birth is now and we are the new birth of God into this world? What if we opened ourselves to the full reality of God like Jesus did? (This may be the time, incidentally to get up and run out of the sanctuary.) 

I'm not preaching like the barn burner preachers of old asking you to come forward and accept Jesus—you have already have. What I am asking you is to open up and risk allowing yourself not to put all your eggs of hope and ambition in Barack Obama or in the opposition to him. The world will crash and burn again if we just play politics. We would do well to throw that way of operation out the window because by the time politicians are finished, if they play status quo, the world could well be in shambles.  

It is time to begin and be the people who are working for the shalom of God, the peace of God, working to build up not America , but the Kingdom of God on earth. We are to be at work in the world declaring, “Comfort, comfort my people.” We are to be at work in the world proclaiming the coming of the new ruler over this planet and working for that empire by seeking justice within the political system, the elimina tion of poverty and the equitable sharing of wealth in the economic system, and the building of a truly relational culture in which all peoples are caring deeply about one another and in love with God who is in love with us.

That is the mission of Christmas, giving birth to the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is the good news which can only be broadcast through the living lives of you and me, living our faith in the ways of God out in the real world, bringing comfort and reminding people that God loves them and wants a better world and is working through us to make it so. That is the Christmas joy that we have to share. It is time to turn around and go forth and share the comfort of God with the people of our lives.

Amen.