A sermon on Mark 1:1-6 preached by Dr. Dwight A. Moody
John the preacher finished school and took a position where he could get it. It is described as “in the wilderness.” Some of you have worked in the wilderness; some of you will have that opportunity in the near future. There were other preaching posts in Israel at the time: in synagogues—every little village had a synagogue; or in the temple courts—that was in Jerusalem, the center of power and influence, where things were happening, were careers were made, where important people gathered. But John was in the desert, that barren, rocky, stretch of land that connects the hills of Judea with the Jordan valley. It blooms in the spring and survives the summer, waiting for the early rains in the fall. Not many people live there; it is not much of a location for somebody with something to say and a desire to make a difference in the world. Perhaps John did not have the right credentials; perhaps he did not have the right connections; perhaps he did not have the right disposition toward those who could influence where he went and what he did.
Not much has changed in ministry; and it is not easy to predict where any one of us might end up. So John took his preaching post where he could find it: in the desert, in the wilderness, where the people were few and far between, and where the road to ministerial stardom was a long way off. But you never know who might show up in church. Our story says the whole Judean countryside went out to hear him preach and all the people of Jerusalem. You never know who might show up in church, when a person has something to say and says it well. John must have qualified for that.
All of the early disciples came to church where John was preaching; at least that is the implication of a story in the book of Acts. It is the first chapter; Judas has defected from the Jesus movement; and the leaders are searching for a replacement. The one requirement was that he be a man “who had been with us the whole time, beginning with the baptism of John.” So it is likely that in John’s congregation were familiar names: Peter, John, James, Andrew-and of course Jesus.
I am sure John must have muttered to himself, “Well, look who is coming to church!” Jesus went out to hear John preach; and Jesus fell under the sway of John the preacher. Jesus said of John, “There is no greater prophet.” Jesus said to John, “Baptize me.” Thus began the most powerful, grass-roots movement in history.
Could it have happened some other way? Perhaps; but it didn’t; and as we remember during this holiday season the earlier history of these two men, let us not forget that the real action began when one preacher took a post a long way from power and another man showed up to hear him preach.
Such unlikely things have happened more than we think. One man finished his college on the east coast about the time I was graduating from high school. He went on to complete a master’s degree from a prestigious university and later a doctorate. This man was well-credentialed, and yet all he could find was a post in the wilderness. It was an inner city wilderness, full of dilapidated houses and abandoned businesses, with a congregation of 89 souls. It was March of 1971, when I was trying to decide which was more important: graduating from college or getting married.
But this young minister had a bit of John-the-wilderness-preacher in him; he had a bold vision that blended the spiritual with the political; he attracted a crowd. And one day in 1986 a stranger walked first into his office and then a few months later in the sanctuary. He was a young college graduate, with a heart for social justice. He came to church to recruit people to help his crusade against all the evils that he saw around him.
Not everybody comes to church to worship God or study the Bible. When we gather in the sanctuary week by week we come with mixed motives. All of us some are attracted by the music; some are seeking to woo a woman; some come because they are starting a business and are looking for customers or running for office and looking for votes.
Remember Augustine. He was a doctor of rhetoric, you recall. He left Rome in the year 385 to take a position in Milan. Milan was not Rome, the center of things, but it was not necessarily the wilderness either. Augustine was at this time about 30 years old, living with a mistress, and walking a fine line, one shoe stepping into a pile of Roman paganism, the other shoe covered with Christian heresy.
“You want to hear rhetoric the way it ought to be done?” people around town told him; “go listen to Ambrose preach.” So he did, at the cathedral; with mixed motives. Ambrose, the great and influential bishop, must have said to somebody, “Look who’s coming to church!” Much later Augustine wrote of listing to Ambrose: “I was not anxious to hear what he said, but merely to hear how he said it.”
Who knows what brings people to church? What searching, what suffering, what self-interest, what outright silliness, what professional ambition. The pews are full of half-believers, former saints, would-be disciples, descent folk looking for meaning, for purpose, for release from guilt, shame, grief, and sin, looking for forgiveness and joy, and sometimes just escape from loneliness.
So it was with Augustine. He came to study the style of the famous preacher. But what began as a worldly attraction to a clerical celebrity soon took a surprising turn. Augustine began to listen: to what the preacher said, to the message he preached, the ideas he promoted, the Christian life he described.
He later wrote the most famous autobiography of all time and said: “At the same time with the words, which I loved, there entered into my mind the things themselves, to which I was indifferent. I was not able to separate them from one another, and when I opened up my heart to receive the eloquence with which Ambrose spoke there entered also, by degree, the truth that he spoke.”
Under the influence of the preaching, Augustine submitted to baptism, embraced this calling as a theologian and bishop, and became the most influential Christian, perhaps, in the history of the movement. Look who is coming to church!
They must have said it when the young man starting coming to church in 1986. His father was an atheist; his mother indifferent to church. “She grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion,” he wrote many years later, “and so did I.”
The young man had no attachment to the church or her Lord. He came to church only to solicit assistance in his campaign to right some wrongs and defeat some evils. But shades of Augustine: look who is coming to church!
Something happened to the young man with a vision for change. The words of the preacher began to reshape his imagination. Years later, he wrote: “I woke up at six am that Sunday. It was still dark outside. I shaved, brushed the lint from my only suit, and arrived at the church by seven-thirty. Most of the pews were already filled. A white-gloved usher led me past elderly matrons in wide plumaged hats, tall unsmiling men in suites, children in their Sunday best. “Where’s God?” I overheard a toddler ask his mother.”
“The associate pastor, a middle aged woman with graying hair and a no-nonsense demeanor, read the bulletin and led sleepy voices through a few traditional hymns. Then the choir filed down the aisle dressed in white robes and Kente cloth shawls, clapping and singing as they fanned out behind the altar, “I’m so glad, Jesus lifted me. I’m so glad Jesus lifted me! I’m so glad Jesus lifted me, singing glory Halleluiah, Jesus lifted me.”
“When the collection was over, the pastor stepped up to the pulpit and read the names of those who had passed away that week and those who were ailing. ‘Let us join hands,” he said, ‘as we kneel and pray at the foot of an old rugged cross.” The pastor began the sermon that morning with a passage from the Book of Samuel, the story of Hannah who, barren and taunted by her rivals, had wept and shaken in prayer before her God.”
Thus began the sermon on Hope. It is this world,” the fiery young preacher said, “where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere. That’s the world on which hope sits.
It was a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin the pastor spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy-makers in the White and in the State house. As the sermon unfolded, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate. He spoke of the hard times that the congregation would face tomorrow, the pain of those far from the mountaintop, worry about paying the light bill. Like Hannah, he said, we have known bitter times. Daily, we face rejection and despair.
People began to shout, to rise from the seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the pastor’s voice up into the rafters. As I watched and listened from my seat, I began to hear all the notes from the past three years swirl about me. And in that one single note, hope—I heard something else at the foot of that cross: inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and pharaoh, the Christians in the lions den, Ezekiel in the field of dry bones. Those stories—of survival, freedom and hope, became our story, my story.
As the choir lifted back up into song, as the congregation began to applaud those who were walking to the altar, I felt a light touch on the top of my hand. I looked down to see the older of the two boys sitting beside me; he face slightly apprehensively as he handed me a pocket issue. Beside him, his mother glanced at me with a faint smile before turning back to toward the altar. It was only as I thanked the boy that I felt the tears running down my cheeks. ‘Oh Jesus’, I heard the older woman whisper softly, ‘thank you for carrying us this far.”
So it was that Barack Obama recalls the sermon. It was entitled, ‘The Audacity of Hope.’ It was the turning point in his journey from self-centered observer at church to God-centered believer and disciple.
Little did his pastor, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, know he was preaching to the future president of the United States. Little did he know, when he took that despondent congregation in a dilapidated building on the south side of Chicago, who would show up for church. Little did he know he would spend a full two decades, preaching into the mind and imagination of the president-elect words of hope and salvation. You just never know who might show up at church.
In his 2006 speech on religion and public life, Obama, said: “It wasn’t until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma. I was working with Christians. They saw that I new their book and shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me remained removed, detached, that I was an observer in their midst….
In time, I came to realize that something was missing. …as the months passed in Chicago, I found myself drawn, not just to work with the church, but to be in the church. …I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active palpable agent in the world, as a source of hope….[I came to see that] I needed to embrace Christ precisely because I have sins to wash away, because I am human and need an ally in the difficult journey.
It was because of these newfound understandings, that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street in the south side of Chicago one day and affirm my Christian faith….Kneeling beneath that cross on the south side, I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to his will and dedicated myself to discovering his truth.”
It was John the preacher, out in the desert, who said, “I must decrease and he must increase,” speaking about the one who came to hear him preach; Ambrose could have said the same. Certainly Jeremiah Wright found his own ministry decreasing even as the journey of his famous parishner led straight to the white house.
Just look who came to church!
