Believe the Good News – Mark 1:9-15 – March 1, 2009

Mark’s gospel has an internal structure, these big concentric circles.  He will begin with a theme or statement and then develop it.  He might even move on to another topic, but he always loops back around to touch that point one time after another.  In music we hear this all the time.  A hook line or melody that is revisited over and over.  A refrain that comes back around after each verse. A theme chord that restarts the verse.  It is how song lyrics get stuck in our heads.  You hear them so much, they are repeated in so many ways that you internalize them.   They become as familiar to you as your drive home or to work. You could do it in your sleep.  Same thing with music.  The other day I was watching a movie I had not seen in ten years.  One of the songs from the soundtrack came on in the background of the movie.  I remembered every verse.  I even remembered the guitar solo in the middle.  I remembered them because they repeated the same melody, the same notes again and again like a giant loop rolling back over itself.   Mark is going to use this same technique in a special way to develop our understanding of Jesus Christ and his message.

The process starts from the very beginning of Mark.  1:1 “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”.  We know what that means.  At least we have an idea.  We have read Mark before.  We have heard the other gospels.  And even if we had not, we could have picked up a basic understanding by listening to those around us. If you came to this gospel with fresh eyes, however, you would know nothing from that first verse.  And that is the way Mark planned it.  What is the good news? Who is Jesus? What is a Christ? And what in the world is a Son of God?  Mark has not told us yet.  That is the refrain. It is the first time we have heard it. So Mark begins to tell us.  He begins to fill in the detail, to play the rest of the song.  Well, Jesus is the one about whom Isaiah prophesied.  He is the one John the Baptist made the way for in the desert.  And as Mark goes along, he begins to fill in the details more, but he always returns back to that refrain in the first verse, “The good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”.

By the time we get to the end of the passage Janet just read, we still know very little in the big scheme of things.  We still do not have much of a clue of what that first verse really meant.  Jesus has now been baptized.  The heavens have been torn apart and the Spirit descended upon him.  We hear again that Jesus is the Son of God.  He spends some time in the wilderness.  And then goes to Galilee proclaiming good news.  Still just a brief glance at the big picture.  Still just events that have no commentary or explanation. And that is what is so remarkable about Mark’s gospel.  With so few details, so little back story, the last words of the passage we just heard are, “believe the good news.”  Believe the good news.  Jesus and Mark’s gospel have given us the briefest of thumbnail sketches of what the good news is before asking us to believe.  How remarkable is that?  Could you do it?  Would you even buy a car like that?  ‘Well the outside looks good.  I’ve kicked the tires for whatever that is worth.  No I do not think I need a test drive or even to look under the hood or even look inside.  I’ll buy this car right now.’  That is used car salesman dream situation.  Could you do that?  Could you believe like that?

This reminds me of that old television game show “Name That Tune”, they do an abbreviated version sometimes on radio stations during the morning commute.  The idea of this game is to name a song by hearing the fewest possible notes.  So the contestants bargain back forth, “I can name that tune in five notes.”  “I can name that tune in four notes.” “Prove it.”  So the contestant hears a brief part of the song and guesses the name.  Simple enough.  For the people who are good at it’s quite impressive.  When they do a similar game on the radio during my morning commute, however, I am little less than impressive; actually I fail pretty much every time.  Then they play a little bit longer version of the song and I am like “oh yeh, I knew that.”  Jesus is giving even less than the first few notes.  Jesus is saying after one note “Believe the good news.”  Our response might be, “hum a few bars.” Give me a hint at least.

Often we have trouble believing after knowing the whole story.  We hear the whole gospel and say “well I do know if I believe all of that.” And that puts us at an even greater distance to understanding this passage.  We know that there is more.  In fact, we cannot even read these stories at the very beginning of the gospel without reading into them all the facts we do know from later in the gospel.  We have heard the song before.  And because we do that, an astonishing occurrence is lost on us.  Some people just believed.  All they had was Jesus saying to them “believe the good news”, they did not know what we know, they did not know what Christ knew, they had a note or two at best of the music and they believed.

We look back on them and think “oh well, it was simpler time and simpler people”, “we are too smart for our own good now”, or “Jesus was right there so part of the plot had been given away, they knew what it all meant.”  And some of that might be true, but how much of that, how much of our disbelief over this story serves as an excuse for our unbelief?  That we have to know the whole story, hear the whole song played out before we believe. We forget that it is the refrain, not the verses.  We will come back to it again and again.  We will hear it more.  This is the start of something bigger of Mark’s loops circling around to touch on the same point time after time.  It will all be filled in, but there is Christ with his refrain “Believe the good news”.

One of the beautiful things about music and I do not mean your rock or hip hop or country music, but music of a higher order, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, when it is good it draws you in.  You connect with it.  You can become emotionally entangled.  You invest yourself in it.  I remember hearing Shostakovich’s First Symphony and feeling swallowed up by it as if I had fallen into the music somehow.  And it begins in a suttle way: a note, a melody, a chord, they invite you in. They serve as a hook. And when they do, you do not know how the rest is going to be.  It will fill in.  More will be added.  All you get in this briefest of encounters is a note, a melody, or a chord, but an invitation is there, the beginning is there.

We cross paths with this passage at the beginning of Lent.  Lent is the forty day period from Ash Wednesday to Easter.  For those of you counting, that is forty days not including the Sundays.  Lent is a time of preparation.  We are getting ready for Easter.  And during this time, the readings for Sunday morning will run the gamete of Christ life from the beginning of his ministry to his resurrection.   The next forty days and six Sundays are a journey which makes today’s passage a fitting start.  So little of the story is known.  So few of the details have yet been filled in.  It is almost as if there is a note of the melody that caught our ear that has invited us in.  A familiar song has caught our attention. We have been moving through life family, children, job, retirement, swimming in our ordinary lives, when from the distance, we hear an old familiar refrain.  This is the starting line on which we are standing here at the beginning of Lent.

It also fitting that Heather, Tom, and Rachel are joining our church today after this passage has been read.  That as they start a new chapter of their faith lives as members of Greystone Presbyterian Church, that they affirm their faith in the good news.  And we will do likewise when say the Apostle’s Creed.  For all of us, it is moment to go back to the beginning.  To return to the refrain and sing it once again.  And whether it is the nearly the first time or whether this particular refrain has been caught in your head for a long time, we all say it together.  We all believe the good news.

But more than that there is an opportunity before us this day.  To approach our faith, to approach the good news with fresh eyes.  To read Mark’s gospel and live out this Lenten season much the same way they were originally intended.  Not to come to this time or this passage with all the answers, but instead to set aside that we know how the story ends.  To enter into the story, like getting lost in the music and almost being there in first century Galilee as Jesus is coming around,  hearing him proclaim the good news, and not really knowing what that means but being willing to stick around an figure out how the song ends.  As we go through Lent the story will be filled in.  Week after week we get a little more about what this good news means, about who this Jesus Christ, the Son of God is.  So join with us this Lenten Season and hear the whole song and get hooked on the refrain.

Glimpses of Another World – Mark 9:2-9 – February 22, 2009

Our passage for the day comes to us in midst of a remarkable section of Mark’s gospel.  Peter has just confessed Christ to be the messiah and then turned right around and showed he had no idea what that means.  No sooner had Peter said to Jesus (snap) “You are the messiah” then we get that famous episode where Jesus tells Peter “Get behind me Satan” after Peter rebukes Jesus for predicting his own suffering, death, and resurrection.  It is also packed into this section that Jesus gives the disciples the invitation that “If any of you want to be my followers, deny yourselves, take up your cross, and follow me”.  Swirling around these exchanges are the essential questions of Mark gospel and our Christian faith: Who are we? And who is Jesus Christ?  And for better or worse we see Peter trying to answer these questions. “Messiah?” But then not knowing, not having the knowledge to fully comprehend what that even means.  Peter and the disciples have been with Jesus for some time.  They have seen glimpses of who Christ is.  They have even seen glimpses of who they are as followers of Jesus, but only glimpses. Enough to confess “You are the messiah” without knowing the depth and power of that confession.  Little bits have been revealed until the Transfiguration.

When I was youngster, I was musician, at least as much as a musician as a drummer can be.  At Sapulpa Middle School where I started my music education, if you wanted be cool a drummer by junior high or high school, which was my goal, you had to start off playing the xylophone.  The idea being that you needed to learn to read music and basic techniques before you got to the rhythm of a snare drum. To a 12 year old wannabe drummer, a xylophone pales in comparison to the coolness of playing the snare drum.  It especially pales after weeks and months of slow progression and particularly so if you were to have a large hand-me-down xylophone that is as big as you are,like I did.  Sensing our growing frustration our music director was playing his snare drum one day as we entered for class.  We walked down the hallway and heard the drumming coming from the band room, peeked cautiously in and were motioned to come in and set up.  And he just kept on playing.  Another ten minutes went by until the point was really driven home.  You can play like this too, if you just keep with it. He was motivating us, giving us a glimpse into the future, maybe our future, if we buckled down, worked hard, and stop being quite so frustrated.  From that date forward not only did we know what was possible, we saw our practicing, as rudimentary as it was, as preparing us to be like that.

Before our passage for the day, there is a promise that Jesus makes to the disciples.  It is at Mark chapter 9 verse 1.  Chronologically it seems to go along with the end of chapter 8 more than chapter 9, but in a way it just seems like an island of a verse.  One verse floating around that does not really connect with the stories around it.  The verse reads, “And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”  Then Mark 9:2 where we started is six days later. This has always been a mysterious verse in Mark, not simply because of its placement, but because so many believe that all those people standing there did die before seeing the Kingdom of God coming in power.  They witnessed the suffering and death and resurrection and everything afterwards, but was that really the Kingdom of God coming in power?

I think one hint we get is what happens in the text next: The Transfiguration.  That there is an essential connection between Christ’s promise of the Kingdom of God and this vision of the transfiguration.  In the midst of all these questions about who Jesus is and who we are, there is a revealing that takes places.  Sure Peter and the disciples have been fumbling around and sure they are still working on the basics, but Jesus jumps ahead and shows them what it could be, what it will be like.  Transfigured on a high mountain with Peter, James, and John looking on, Jesus’ clothes became a dazzling white, whiter than anything on earth, and Moses and Elijah appeared with him. “Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”"  Scholars and preachers alike have acknowledged that this scene is like fast-forwarding through a movie.  We have been watching along for an hour or so, we want to know how it ends, whether a particular character makes it all the way through or not, so we cheat a little, we hit the forward arrow on the remote to see how it turns out.  It has even been noted that the way Jesus is described after the resurrection is strikingly similar to way he is described here.  These three disciples and by extension us, get to see the way it is going to be.  That in the midst of fumbling around to figure out who Jesus is and who we are supposed to be, we get a glimpse of the answer.

And to go back for a second, we get a glimpse of the coming Kingdom of God.  Because at its root, Peter’s difficulty is not that he does not know that Jesus is the Messiah.  He has already confessed that.  The problem is that he does not know what that looks like.  And for the people who say that the Kingdom of God has not come perhaps the lesson applies for them too.  Jesus does not say, as he does elsewhere, “the Kingdom of God is like this”, he shows it.  The messiah is to usher in the Kingdom of God.  John the Baptist laid the foundation.  Jesus is showing it forth and here it is.  In the Transfiguration, the Kingdom of God touches this world.  The expectation might be for something else, for chariots and horsemen and armies of angels. They might be expecting something like Charlton Heston at the beginning of the movie the Ten Commandments coming into the Egyptian capitol with an army behind him and crowds cheering, but here is a glimpse of something else.  Here is a glimpse of the Kingdom of God breaking into this world.  We are on the outside; briefly looking through a window at the other side, but there it is right in front of us.

Even after seeing Christ transfigured, Peter and the others still do not get it.  In the fullness of time it will all make sense, but in this moment they just do not get it.  They offer to build tents.  They want to stay in that moment.  They do not realize that this glimpse is fleeting.  They do not realize how this moment fits in with that moment just days before, where Jesus said he must suffer, die, and be raised up first, before the Kingdom of God comes.  They do not get it.  But they get a glimpse and that glimpse will make sense soon.  All will be revealed in time.

Kati told me a story the other about a teenager on a basketball team.  The teenager had just lost his mother to cancer after a long battle.  The teenage son had been by her side when she died and the basketball coach had even come to offer his support.  That night, the team had a basketball game.  The coach left to go to the game, but was late for the start.  The other coach, knowing the situation, knowing that one of the players’ mom had died, said take your time, get the kids warmed up, do whatever you need to do,  and we will start when you are ready.  So they did and ended up starting late.  Unknown to them, the boy who had lost his mother had driven from the hospital with the intention of playing.  His mother would have wanted him to play the game he loved so much and that she so loved watching him play.  He arrived at the game and at halftime told the coach he wa ready to play.  Well, he was not on the roster.  If he played it would be a technical foul.  So the coach talked to the other coach and they agreed wholeheartedly that he should play.  As he checked in, the referee was forced to call a foul.  The other team would get to shout two shots and then get the ball.  As the player made his way to foul line, received the ball, instead of shooting the shots, he rolled the ball across the floor, once and then again.  The boy got play that day.  He was able to fulfill what he knew his mother wanted for him.  And the other team show more compassion and good sportsmanship than we have learned to expect these days.  It was remarkable.  They knew that the moment they were in had the power to change a life. It may not be Christ transfigured in dazzling white robes, but I think for the people at that court that night it was special, almost miraculous.  And I know it was beyond expectations for others, because this local story that began in a hometown newspaper ended up being celebrated in the national media.  It is as if, we are looking around, wanting, craving, hungering for stories like this that defy our expectations so that we can celebrate them.

In Matthew and Luke’s gospels, when the resurrected Jesus is encountered by the women and then the disciples, they worship him.  They know then who he is and what has taken place.  They know whole story and significance.  They sense the two worlds colliding, that the Kingdom of God is here, so they celebrate in worship.  In this remarkable moment, they celebrate.  Because you see our passage for today is not just about encountering the transfigured Christ or even seeing a glimpse of another world, our passage challenges our response.  That when you come face to face with the miraculous, the holy, when you come face to face with God incarnate, what are you going to do?  Are you going to try to stay in that moment at all costs?  Make your own little tents, only to see the glimpse of something else disappear?  Or will you celebrate that glimpse? Will you worship God in that moment?  Will you worship God with us in celebration of that moment? When you are miraculously healed in the hospital, will you give thanks there and celebrate it with us later?  When you are shown unexpected and great kindness, will you recognize it as coming from God and find joy in it?  When you are forgiven for the greatest wrong you have ever done, will you see that the Kingdom of God has come?  In so many moments, we are like Peter and the disciple stumbling around not knowing who we are, not knowing who Christ is, but in those moments when we do know, when it is as clear as a transfigured Jesus dazzling in white right in front of our face let’s gather together a worship that.

Revealing Character – Mark 1:40-45 – February 15, 2008

As my second year of seminary began, a new class of incoming seminarians replaced us as the low men and women on the totem pole around Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.  The new class was a night and day difference from the class that preceded them.  We were young professionals, business people, teachers, and former service men.  The incoming class was made up of very recent college grads, a 70 year old retiree and great-grandmother, a Starbucks barista, vocalists, artists, and actors, a woodworking craftsman/ snowboarder, and several former missionaries.  They were an eclectic group.  From then on, the seminary had a right brain/ left brain issue, as the A-type personalities marveled at the menagerie of other personalities.

The test kitchen for this melting pot was Currie Dorm, where I lived: Thirty seminarians living in a dormitory roughly the size of this church… with one small kitchen.  It actually worked better than it sounds.  And the incoming class had a lot to with that.  The character of my class was such that we studied first and only rested when we were done with our work or at the breaking point.  The new class was more communal in nature.  They studied, but would schedule a fellowship meal even when it clashed with a test.  The dorm became famous in the seminary community for our Thursday evening community meals.  Few classes met on Friday, so Thursday was the de facto end of the week.  The tradition began, I think, when my friend Ryan, who had been a missionary to Africa, decided to make chili one cool fall night.  So at the beginning of the week, he wrote on the chalkboard in the dorm “Chili Thursday Night 6pm”.  Late in the afternoon Thursday, he was in the tiny kitchen with his giant stainless steel chili pot making enough chili for an army.  Either we were going to eat it all or he was set for a month.  The chili was not what you expected either: a Texas chili with flavors and roots in Kenya, Africa and Los Angeles, California, the three major places he had lived in his life. And then there were the baking pans with a half dozen blue boxes of Jiffy cornbread sitting next to them.  This was a feast from a good friend to a community.  That night we ate and ate and ate.  It was good, different but good.  The dinner that really began about 6:30 lasted all the way to 8pm and started the other dorm tradition which was watching Grey’s Anatomy together every Thursday night.  Good times.  At the end of this night of great fellowship and love, where we almost felt like those five thousand hungry believers who gather around Jesus to be fed, a strange thing happened.  A goodhearted classmate insisted on helping pay for the cost of the dinner, at the very least her part.  It was a reasonable request on the surface.  The chili and cornbread had fed about twenty folk.  It obviously cost pretty sizeable amount of money to prepare.  So the idea was to help offset the cost, to lighten the burden on the chef.  Sounds sensible.  Ryan would have nothing to do with anybody’s money.  This is that left brain versus right brain clashing.  It got the point where he was almost offended.  It was a gift, a generous gift of himself.  It did not have to be paid for.  It was not a transaction like at some restaurant where you get what you pay for.  It was a free grace, the only kind of grace that truly exists.  He had given of himself and all that we were required to do was enjoy it, to feast and be happy.  In the end, five dollars ended up sitting on the dining table for the better part of a week until the woman decided that my friend the chef was serious about not taking it.

I do not know whether it was his time in Kenya, Los Angeles, or just being in the seminary community in Austin, Texas, but it was a part of Ryan’s character to give without any thought of receiving anything in return.  His character would not allow this gift of food to be quantified into some number that would “help him out” or even “offset the cost”.  This simply was who he was.  It was in his character to give and to give without receiving in return.  This was not a transaction.  It was pure gift.

I have a hard time reading this Mark passage and not falling into the trap of turning this into a story about a transaction.  My mind seems geared to reading this story as if the leper comes begging and pleading to Jesus to be cured and Jesus cures him because of this great effort in seeking him out.  And because Jesus made such a great effort, the poor, now cleaned, leper will go out and tell people about Jesus now. That is to make this all into some sort of transaction.  As if, Jesus would not have made him clean otherwise.  As if, it was not in Jesus’ character or God’s character for that matter to heal and give without us making an effort in the first place.  Or that the leper would not have preached Jesus and his message had he not been cleaned.  We make a transaction out of it.  This happened, so that this would happen, so that this would happen.  The leper made the effort to come to Jesus, Jesus saw his effort and rewarded him, and now the leper is working even harder to deserve the “gift” of healing.  The leper is trying to help out, trying to give Jesus his five dollars, trying to help offset the cost.

Is that how we think this whole faith thing works?  We do something and then God does something in response.  A little too much of our modern American culture might have slipped into our faith lives if we do.  We do live in a transactional society after all.  What I am going to do for you is often dependent upon what you are going to do for me or what you can do for me.  “Sure I will perform a quadruple bypass surgery on you that you desperately need, as long as you can afford it.”  The reverse is the expectation that if we do receive something that is free, it really has some hidden cost or expectation attached to it.  In Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn’s recent movie “Four Christmases”, Vince Vaughn’s character gives his father, played by Robert Duval, a free DirectTV satellite dish.  As Duval opens the box, he sees the gift and immediately starts in with the questions.  “How is this better than my antenna?”  “Well there are a lot more programs you can watch and it is clearer.”  “This looks expensive.”  It really was not that expensive, you’ve just got to pay the monthly fee to see the shows.”  “Wait, wait, wait.  You got me a gift that cost me money.” It was free except for the sixty dollars a month it costs to actually watch programming.  Whether it is costing us on the front end or whether it is the dreaded hidden fee, we live in a society where you never get something for nothing.  So when we walk through the doors of the church, when we hear a text like Mark this morning, when we are praying at home, there is an almost built in expectation that I will do something, so God will do something, so I will do something.  I want to push back on that this morning.

Cindy Rigby, one of the great theologians of our time, told the story once of an episode with her mother when she was a young teen.  They were a loving Christian family, but on occasions as many of you know, teens can be a handful.  One particular day, Cindy was fighting with her mother.  She did not remember about what, but it was big, big enough for the fight to have lasted from the night before to breakfast the next day.  And it was full of the typical teenage fighting tactics: sarcasm, rolling eyes, back talk.  In the morning, Cindy’s mother prepared her breakfast like she always did and placed it on the kitchen table like she always did.  And her teenage daughter responded the way a teenage daughter might in that situation.  “Thank you so much mother.”  The condescension was oozy off her tongue.  And Cindy’s mother whipped around and said “Don’t you ever say thank you to me for making you breakfast.  I am your mother, I love you, that is what I do.  I do not need your thanks.”  You see what happened there.  The breakfast was not about Cindy owing her mother thanks for the meal.  The breakfast was an expression of her mother’s love that day and every day before.  It was not a transaction. It was a gift.  It was the gift of a mother living out that identity, living into that character.  Whether Cindy was thankful or not, whether Cindy had even come to the breakfast table that morning or not, her mother’s loving breakfast would still be sitting there.

And so would Christ’s gift of healing be there for the leper because it was not dependent upon the leper’s effort or ability either, but upon Jesus’ love and compassion.  That is who he is.  That is his character.  Ultimately, whether the leper made it to Christ or not, it was and is his will for him to be cleansed. And he will be. But that does not mean that the leper can sit casually by and wait because the leper has a character that he too must live into.  And we get a glimpse of that character in Mark’s text.  First, the leper seeks Christ out, frailly and imperfectly, because he does not yet know that Christ wants to heal him, wanted to heal him even before he came, and that he will him.  Second, after he is healed, he goes and preaches Christ to all he meets.   He does not know the whole gospel only a small piece, but he goes and preaches anyways.  It is in the character of a broken person to seek out healing and wholeness.  So that is what the leper does.  It is the character of a cleansed and healed person to spread the good news of that healer.  So that is what the leper does.  When one of you is sick, you seek out a doctor or a drug or a treatment that will make you better.  When it works, any time the name of that doctor or drug or procedure comes up, you are the first one there sharing the wonders it made in our life.  Do you see what I am getting at here? What is happening in this passage is not a transaction, but an interaction of two distinct persons living out their character, living out who they are.  Not quid pro qou, give and take, but two people living in community with each other truly as they are, one as broken and then healed, one as gracious and loving.  They can do no other.  They can only be and act as they are.

In the modern church this sneak into our practice in new and old ways.  Many of you have had the experience of the Christian summer camp at about 12 years old where you were asked to accept Jesus Christ and be saved because you did not know if you would end up in hell the next morning.  Just a little walk down the aisle, because Jesus dying on the cross was not good enough or effective enough.  What about the 12 year old who does not go up at that altar call and does die?  Is it outside of God’s character revealed to us in the bible to save that one?  Or is it perfectly a part of who God is, of who Christ is to save the one who cannot save themselves because that is exactly what has happened?

Throughout the week, The New York Times has been running an article and then opinion columns about the revitalization of the Catholic practice of indulgences.  And this caught my attention.  Most Protestants and Catholics, at this point, are unfamiliar with exactly what an indulgence is, but in a nutshell, an indulgence reduces the amount of time necessary for a person to spend in purgatory following death but prior to arrival in heaven.  In the Roman Catholic faith system, the idea is that even after confessing and being forgiven of sin the penitent Catholic still requires polishing before entering heaven.  The polishing can happen on earth through spiritual works and good deeds or in the afterlife in purgatory.  Two distinctives, by the way, between the Presbyterian/ Reformed faith and the Roman Catholic faith is that we do not believe in Purgatory or indulgences.  Both of these examples highlight what I believe to be the great difference between other Christian faiths and ours and how various other Christian groups continue to understand God in the world today.  There is sentiment inherent in the thinking that says, “If I do X, I will be good enough for God.”  If I go work in the soup kitchen, God will love me.  If I am a really good boy, God will forgive me for stealing the cookie.  If I give to this building project, maybe I will have little better relationship with God.  As one man responded to the New York Times article about indulgences, “When I do something dumb in my marriage I might bring my wife flowers or chocolate to shorten my time in the doghouse. If my daughter has done something to anger me, she will sometimes give me a big hug and say, “I love you SO MUCH, Daddy.” She might not be aware of what she is doing or why, but it is clearly an effort to shorten the length of time I am mad at her.”   Is that really how we think God works? That God needs to be bought off or appeased?  Are we standing there with our five dollar bill in our hands trying to make it a little easier on Christ?

Or at the end of the day, do we believe that the debt has already been paid, that Christ saved us before any of us were even born or able to muster our little five dollars?  That what is happening in our faith lives is not some giant accounting ledger with pluses and minuses in opposite columns.  That what is happening here is God being God and us being us.  God saving and loving and caring and redeeming us because that is who God is.  And all of us, living into that gift, taking hold of it, enjoying it, and sharing it with one another the way the leper does, not because we are afraid or think we can earn these gifts, because that is who we are. We are meant to worship God and enjoy God forever.  It is impossible to pray hard enough or work hard enough to repay what has already been done for us in Christ.  It is possible and who we are, to enjoy it and share it.

A New Teaching – Mark 1:21-28 – February 1, 2009

Before the church was the church, they acted like the church.  That is to say that, Jesus and his merry band of disciples had a less than perfect ability to get along as they wondered through Israel.  Simon Peter always thought he knew the right thing to do.  Judas always wanted to “save money for the poor”.  Thomas doubted.  James and John came to Jesus to make sure they would be on Jesus’ right and left side in the glory to come.  (I actually like Matthew’s version of this story better because it is James and John’s mother who comes and asks Jesus to place her sons ahead of all the other apostles.) Many of the apostles had multiple offenses.  They were one big dysfunctional family.  Jesus led them and everything turned out okay in the end, but it was not the smoothest ride, especially if you were Jesus.  With that as the origin of the church, it seems almost fitting that the church today is just as dysfunctional. Often time the slightest problem, the slightest argument or disagreement, the smallest difference is grounds for division.  And that goes for the local church as much as for the larger sense of the church.  We do not play nice with one another.  The fact that there is so many individual churches sporting so many unique denominational and even non-denominational monikers on their signs is a testament to this inability to be united together. But with all that, there is hope.  Jesus was fully aware, as he gathered all of those fragile and broken people together that they would be like that.  In fact, whether it is Jesus himself or the church, we only gather together people for whom there will be times when they think they know everything, that they think they should be on the right side of Christ, that will doubt, and might also stab you in the back.  Sad, but true.  But like I said, there is hope.

The hope comes in the context of the passage for the day.  Jesus is in a synagogue teaching.  As he is teaching, the crowd is amazed and more than that a man who has an unclean spirit speaks out and interrupts Jesus.  He knows Jesus is the Holy One of God and is afraid that Christ has come to destroy him.  He has not come to destroy the man, but he does call the unclean spirit out of the man and amazes the crowd.  The crowd is amazed because Jesus actually has power to command the unclean spirits and change people’s lives, unlike all the other folk they have been around.

At first glance, the passage appears as another story of Jesus removing an evil spirit from a poor possessed soul.  And this does happen, but on a deeper level more than just that is happening.  The unclean spirit had infected more than one man, he had invaded the synagogue, a holy place of God, and needed to be removed, but the priests and the rabbis were powerless to change anything.  And here comes Jesus full of power.  This unclean spirit had been in and around this faithful gathering of folk for who knows how long.  The people who gathered there knew that something was amiss, but neither they nor those who were supposedly in power were powerful enough to do anything about it.

In Augustine’s book, The City of God, there is a lengthy discussion of a similar phenomenon in the early church. Augustine is writing in the early part of the 5^th century and already by then he and others had noticed that the church had been invaded by what Mark’s gospel might call unclean spirits.  Once the Christian Church began to grow in power, popularity, and wealth, a greater diversity of people began to clamor to join the church.  And sure there were tests and catechisms, but ultimately the good and bad, both, ended up sitting in those pews.  Good people who wanted to communion with God and save their souls alongside the evildoers who wanted to make business connections, steal from the good, or simply corrupt the innocent.  The Latin word Augustine used to describe this situation was mixite, this great mixing of the good and bad in the church.  There was a way in which Augustine bemoaned this mixing and impurity in the church, the way the people in the Capernaum synagogue must have sensed and lamented the presence of this unclean spirit.  But Augustine also knew the secret, the new teaching, that the people at the synagogue were only then learning: Jesus has the power to make the unclean clean.  Jesus has the ability to change the heart of the evildoer and make him anew like saint sitting at the other end of the pew.  More important, since we all fall someplace in between these opposite polls of saint and sinner, Christ has the power to work to change us and call us out of the unclean lives we are living.

Last week, I pointed to God’s character to create and recreate over destruction.  Listen to the words and see the action of Jesus as he deals with the man and his unclean spirit.  “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”  But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!”  And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him.”  The unclean spirit says “us” there because of the difference between the man, himself, and the spirit that inhabits his body.  Together they are an “us”.  But Jesus sees this division in the man’s body and does not destroy “us”, but calls out and destroys the unclean spirit alone.  Instead of destroying the whole man, Jesus only destroys the evil and works to recreate the man without this unclean spirit harming the man’s life.  I doubt any of us would characterize the bad things we do as coming from an unclean spirit working in us, but with Jesus Christ, a similar action takes place for us.  Jesus works in our lives to separate us from the evil we do, to call us out and away from that life, and joyful invites us into something new.  I pointed to that phenomenon in last week’s sermon as Jesus called Phillip and us into new lives.

A significant difference from last week is that this episode takes place in the context of a larger community.   The unclean spirit damages the particular man and the entire community and so the message from last week is expanded.  In community, there will also be brokenness and dysfunction that is expressed and happens in community.  This unclean spirit might have spoke out and disrupted the synagogue’s services in the past.  The man might have sown distrust and enmity in the group.  He might just have had a negative attitude.  Whatever it was, his actions affected the lives of everybody there.  So when the unclean spirit asks, “Have you come to destroy us?” the question takes on a different edge in context of community.  “Jesus, have you come to remove us from this community? Are we banished?”   Christ’s action and answer back is “Yes and no, unclean spirit you are, but the man whom you possess, I still have work for him.”  And so the man gets to stay.  He gets to make amends for the things he has done wrong, live with the consequences, and hopefully grow from the experience.

In the church, ancient or modern, it is easier to remove yourself or be removed from a situation without fighting, than it is to stay and struggle to be together with people with whom you disagree.  It is a million times more difficult.  The easy path is to break away, start something new, and forget those people you left behind.  It is easier to form little groups with people you like to the exclusion of everybody else.  The really difficult task of the church is to be one body of Christ together.  And the way we know it is so difficult is because of how much we have failed at it.  The Capernaum synagogue knew this problem too.  Pharisees, Sadducees, Essennes, all divided against one another.  Synagogues here, there, and everywhere that were about as united as all our little churches are.  And ultimately, all of them were powerless over this division and its cause, unclean spirits like our man in the Capernaum synagogue.

And that is what makes Jesus’ new teaching so powerful: Christ has authority over the division and the things that divide us.  If we believe in him, we can truly and finally be one.  As he calls us out of our old lives into something, that new thing we become a part of, unites us once again together.  There will be problems and disagreements and there will be days when we do not want to talk to one another, but there is hope now that this One who does have authority will work in us to overcome these difficulties and divisions.  That in the context of community no matter how painful the divisions, Christ can banish the things that divide us and work with the people who are left to build up the gathered community of faith.

We are a big dysfunctional family in our worst moments, but in our best moments, in Christ, we are a new creation, united in Christ, working to change the world for the better together.  We are a group that in any other situation might forever be at each other’s throats or at least very vocally disagreeing with one another, but in the context of the church and community we are something better and more.  We are broken, sinful, saintly beings working to live together.  And we can do this only because of the grace, power, and authority of Jesus Christ alone.

What We Leave Behind – Mark 1:14-20 – January 25, 2009

One of the most attractive elements of the Christian faith is the promise of newness.  That when you become a Christian the old life falls away and a new life begins.  That we can be born again fresh into the world.  This promise is so attractive because on one level or another we sense that we need to be made again.  Our lives are not what we wanted them to be.  We have done things of which we are not proud.  We need to be made anew.  In the first century, people from every walk of life joined the early church because of that promise.  In a society so divided by power and privilege, Christianity offered the rich and poor, Hebrew and Gentile, city dweller and farmer, Pharisee and prostitute, all, the same opportunity to start again.  As Paul said, in Christ all these distinctions went away.  If you were unhappy with yourself or your place in society, Christianity offered the promise of new life.  Very tangibly in the early church, the difference between the old life and new life was shown as this great diversity of Christians gathered together.  In the modern church, the new life in Christ is almost exclusively framed as an escape from sin.  Whether at an altar call or through a lifelong process of betterment, Christian faith seeks to guide us into a better life, a new life.  In the waters of baptism, our lives begin again.  We are now sinless before God.  We are a new creation.  And that is when the trouble hits.  How new are we?  How new do we want to be?

In the reading today, Christ calls Simon and Andrew away from their nets.  He calls them into a new life of faith and away from a previous life of fishing.  Our call into faith is supposed to mimic their call.  Christ bids us to follow him and so we drop whatever it is we are doing and go.  Our new life has begun, but like the fisherman often we want to return to our nets.  We leave the new life of faith and fall back into the old habits of sin.  Even as lifelong Christians, we will sin.  Every week we confess it. In thought, word, or deed we have fallen short of the will of God.  Does this mean that we really were not new after all? Or perhaps does it mean that our understanding of newness is inadequate?

When we talk about a new life of faith, what we often suggest is a clean break from the past.  A black and white difference between the life we are currently living and life we left.  And moreover, that this distinction must stick forever.  For many good hearted people, this is where a life of Christian faith becomes unbearably impossible.  Fresh from the waters of baptism, they are now sinless and sense they must stay that way.  And they simply cannot.  Even as new creatures they will sin.  And we will sin.  One the main reasons I am in ministry is because I have seen too many wonderful people come to faith and then be given this heavy burden of perfection, only to drop it, the church, and ultimately God.  And that breaks my heart.  So what we mean by new creation, new life, fresh start, being born again, must change or at least expand.

Here is where I think we go wrong:  As you all know intuitively, when we are made new in Christ the past does not magically go away.  The waters of baptism are not fairy dust. You do not forget your past.  History does not forget.  The people we sinned against do not forget in that instance.  The things that we did before for worse or for better all still happened and they are still a part of who we are. When the death row murder turns to Christ, his past does not change, his future does.  What I mean by that is this: We are not new creations wholly by subtraction and being turned into something entirely different. We are new creations by addition.  (We are new creation by addition.) We are new creations in that grace has been given to us.  We are given a fresh start in that now we have a relationship with God that we did not before.  We are born again into a new life of service, purpose, and hope.  And as far as sin goes, we are sinless because Christ and his work on the cross has been added to us.  To paraphrase Karl Barth, we are justified because when God looks at humanity he sees us through Jesus Christ.  Christ’s redemption has been added to us.  It is the baptismal image of putting on the fresh garments of Christ.  Almost as if we are wearing Jesus Christ around.  We are bathed and cleansed in those waters as we enter into the Christian life, but I guess what I am saying is that what is being added is greater than what is being taken away.

I want to show this characteristic of God to add instead of subtract in two ways: one looking backward and one looking forward.  First, looking back through the history of God’s dealing with humans, God has shown two major ways of dealing with us: creatively and destructively.  Go back to the story of Noah and the ark.  God’s purpose in sending the great flood was to destroy the earth, to destroy creation and all the evil humans living in it.  God was literally destroying the past as the waters flowed across the earth.  There is a baptismal image in there.  But once he is done, God says never again.  From then on, God’s destructive dealing with humans is much more limited.  God chooses instead to work more creatively in creation to guide and bring us into the better life. To punish us when we need it, but also to force us to learn and grow from our mistakes.  To hopefully grow in relationship with God and each other. The history of Israel, loving God and falling away, only to find God again and again is a prime example of this creative dealing with humanity.  Like a parent, lovingly with a child, God deals with his beloved creation not by wiping them off the face of the earth, but by allowing them to grow and most importantly by directing that growth.  Through life experience and miraculous grace, God adds and builds us up in faith through our lives.  He works in us not to wipe away everything that we were before, but to hopefully redeem all of that in history.  As Augustine writes and our confessions affirm a God “who is good would not permit evil to be done, unless, being omnipotent, he could bring good out of evil.”  Not by wiping it all away, but by redeeming it.

The second example comes from the future, from the resurrection.  We do not know what the resurrection will be like.  Only Christ has been resurrected so what we know will happen is only based on him.  But what we know is that the new creation we become then is not wholly different from what we are now.  In Christ’s example, we know we will die.  That on cross, in a car accident, because of cancer, or old age we will die. This mortal flesh will fail us.  But, God who is good can redeem it.  As we see in Christ, we will come back as new resurrected creatures.  Like Christ, we will be recognizable and fleshy, in a way, but we will be full of a new life that the frailty and sin of this world cannot overcome.  Instead of dumping this body and starting over again, God adds to this body… something…. we do not know, but something changes, call it grace, and there we are.

Being a new creation by addition, instead of wholly by subtraction means for us that our past does matter in who we become in Christ.  Notice Jesus’ words in our passage.  To Simon and Andrew, he does not just say “follow me”.  He says “follow me and I will make you fish for people.”  Their experience as fisherman will help them in their new life.   Christ wants to you use their past, away from God, for this new thing God is doing in their lives.  And that is remarkable to me.  Too long in the Christian church we acted as if people’s lives prior to our meeting them was meaningless.  “That is your old life and this is your new.”  As if God was not Lord of their old life too.  They might not have known God, but God knew them. And whether they knew God or not, God was preparing them for this new day.  And that work counts too.  So if you were a business man….. if you were a advertiser…. If you were a baker….if you are divorced….. If you were a drunk in a bar…. If you grew up outside the church, on a farm, and then worked nights a convenience store….

The new life in Christ is not about leaving the old life behind entirely, you should avoid your old sin, but is instead about what Christ adds to your new life.  Before, you chased after your desires.  Now, you have been a given a heart that knows God and knows God’s will, a new direction has been added to you.  As a Christian, you have a whole new family.  If you are an only child, single, or older and alone, that is a pretty big addition.  Most impressively though, each one of you because of your individual lives and individual experiences, has been prepared in a unique way to follow God’s purpose for your life.  None of that goes away when you come to Christ.  All of those good experiences and even all of those bad experiences, will be remarkably used by God with the addition of his will and grace in your lives.

I do not mean today to upset all your thoughts about the new life in Christ being about cleansing and washing away.  It is still an important emphasis.  But as Jesus calls Andrew and Simon and Jesus calls each one of us, in a way he is calling us to use all the old experiences of that previous life, but now in the service of God.  In Christ, the old is made new and the new creation uses a lot of parts from the old.  But Christ’s adds to the old and wonderfully redeems and reuses it.  What we leave behind is great, but what we bring forward and is added to in the service of God is greater.