Mark: The Story of God’s Rule

Friends, today's post is an assignment for my New Testament class. Enjoy! I might actually do something similar for the other gospels, so let me know if that is appealing or appalling.  

When you think about the gospels, do you differentiate much among them? What does it mean to you that we have four different versions of Jesus’ story? I’m finishing up my first semester of New Testament in seminary, and even after reading them many times on my own, I am amazed at how different the gospels are. Mark stands out as particularly divergent from what we might think of as Christ’s story if we are familiar with it. There are several ways Mark has shocked me during this class.

First, the beginning and ending are shortened basically not there, at least not in the forms we find in other gospels. Mark has no birth narrative (meaning this time of year no one wants to read it!). No mention that Mary was a virgin, no shepherds, no barn full of animals, no wise men/kings, no angels. The story starts with a brief introduction of John the Baptizer, and Jesus first appears when he comes to him to be baptized, as an adult. The ending, too, is abrupt and seems to leave out a lot if you expect a resurrected Jesus to appear. Even if I hadn’t been studying the history of the gospels, I think it would be pretty easy to see why people think Mark was written first. It’s a very basic, straightforward version of the story. It feels like there’s no time for details—even if the writer believed there were angels and a virgin birth and such, which is doubtful, he deemed them non-essential and decided to make his point without them.

Second, as you may have discerned from the lack of birth narrative, Jesus is remarkably non-divine in Mark. God does say, “You are my beloved son. I delighted choosing you.” But the idea of being a son in this story is not supposed to mean Jesus is godlike. It means Jesus gets God, understands what God is trying to do, and wants to help God do it, presumably more than anyone else. It’s like on The West Wing when Jed Bartlet refers to Josh Lyman as his son (in the episode “Two Cathedrals”). Not a blood thing, but a sense that in his gut, Josh understands Jed’s purpose just as well as Jed himself does, and he is all in, willing to go anywhere with him to pursue it. The idea that being God’s son makes Jesus divine came later, as Matthew and Luke built on Mark.

            

A third mind-bending trick of Mark is not necessarily intrinsic to the text itself but is a compelling reading I found in Mark As Story by David Rhoads, Joanna Dewey, and Donald Michie. The authors say Mark, like other gospels, is often read as a story of Jesus’ execution (at the end) with a whole heck of a lot of exposition, introductory material. They choose to read it instead as a story of God’s rule breaking into the established world (at the beginning), with a lot of d­énouement. They make a really convincing argument for it, and I recommend the book to anyone who’s interested in this stuff. Much of what I say in this post comes from it. Anyway, it’s Jesus’ baptism, just a few verses into chapter 1, that inaugurates the rule of God, and the rest is the story of how that plays out. This reading changes how we pay attention to the story. If we think the important part is at the end, we’re likely to rush through a lot of the scenes and just get the gist so we can move on. If we think the main part happened at the very beginning, we have new eyes with which to read the rest. So we can see Jesus perhaps not as a doomed, tragic figure but as a person—as we established earlier, not a divine character—whose faith in God is so central to his life that he overcomes fear and pain because he believes his death will serve God and others. Still pretty tragic in some ways, but for me there’s an awe in this second reading that isn’t there in the first, as well as a loud and clear call of encouragement and challenge to the original listeners.

That brings me to a fourth point, the way the context shaped the meaning. Those who listened as Mark’s gospel was performed, at least some of them, would have been facing persecution and death not just because they followed Jesus but because they wanted what we would now call social and economic justice, and they believed in power that is expressed not in force but in service. Sometimes I think it’s not hard to picture how threatening this was to the people who had power at the time, because it’s still so threatening now. But then I think about how much worse it was. They had no such thing as political correctness and not even a reason to appear to care about people. It was pretty acceptable, as I understand it, to look out for yourself and your friends and act in your own interests. That definitely still happens, but when it does, other people sometimes find out and speak out. At the time this was written, there was no accountability like that. Mark came soon after the Roman-Judean war in 66-70. It was a peasant rebellion against Roman and Judean elites, and boy, did it not end well. The Romans destroyed towns and farms throughout the whole area of Galilee and Judea, and they burned the temple in Jerusalem. That’s what happened when you tried to speak out against anything powerful people were doing. Sometimes I’m angry with congress or other people in control, but I don’t run the risk of having my entire city destroyed if I say something. The people this story was written for felt like they had to choose between doing what was right and saving their own lives. Jesus’ story no doubt gave them something to cling to.

Alongside the potential encouragement in the story, there is an unmistakable challenge, point #5. As I studied that abrupt, unresolved ending, I kept thinking of the parable that is often called the story of the prodigal son. It doesn’t appear in Mark, so it’s not entirely academically appropriate of me to mention it here, but the connection is this: the parable ends with the father telling his older son that his brother’s return is something to celebrate. The gospel of Mark ends with three women fleeing from Jesus’ tomb. In both cases, the story acts as a question to the listener or reader. When something is left unresolved like that, we get to be the decider and think about how we want to respond, how we will respond. In the parable, we think about the older brother’s options. In the gospel, ideally, we see ourselves as the ones who now have the opportunity to tell what the women didn’t tell at the time. Especially in the original context, that ending was an invitation to pick up where they left off.  

That’s it for now. Hit me with comments. What do you think of all this?

Hurry Up and Wait. Sermon for December 1, 2013

Hi friends, here's the sermon I preached today at Ashland (VA) Presbyterian Church, where I'm doing my internship. I've never posted a sermon before, but I understand it is a thing people do! The texts were Isaiah 2:1-5 and Matthew 24:36-44. Advent, y'all! Enjoy.

I’d like to start by wishing all of you a happy new year! 

Even after all the Advents I’ve experienced, I didn’t quite put it together until this time that this right here is our new year’s day. It’s good to celebrate the other one, especially since JANUARY FIRST IS MY BIRTHDAY!, but the first Sunday of Advent, today, is the beginning of the church year just like that’s the beginning of the calendar year. 

So let me ask you, what does the new year mean to you? What is special about that time? 

For me, it’s a balancing point where we look back and forward at the same time. I like to take a little time around the new year to think about what happened in the last year, how I’ve grown and changed, things I want to remember and carry with me as I move forward. I don’t usually make new year’s resolutions, but when I look back like that, it does make me think about how I might like to do things differently in the future. 

I also like to clean the house really well and watch the Rose Bowl parade, but I don’t see those rituals reflected in today’s readings, and we do have some good words about looking back and looking forward.

It’s easy to talk about the looking-forward part. Advent has a lot to do with that. Getting ready for Christ’s coming, preparing, waiting, straining our eyes toward the future we so eagerly desire. The Isaiah text today is all about how great it’s going to be. God’s mountain will be taller than all the others, and not just Israel but all people will stream to it because they want so badly to hear God’s word and instruction. Also, no more war! The weapons are going to be turned into tools of nourishment, sustainability, community. We won’t have to get by on our scraps and fading memories of spiritual moments, because we’re all gonna be with God, together! 

I don’t know about you, but I can’t get enough of this. Apparently I’m not the only one, because the bit about the swords into ploughshares shows up four times in the Hebrew Bible. There is something really powerful about those images and the feelings they give us.

Speaking of powerful images, I don’t think it says in the book of order or the book of common worship that I have to talk about consumerism and materialism now because Christmas is coming, and I’m pretty sure we’ve all heard about and experienced how difficult it is to be a faithful follower of Christ, focused on the important things, when there are advertisements for toys and jewelry and sparkly presents and indulgent foods everywhere we look. Actually, I didn’t want to bring that up because I’ve heard sooo many sermons and read so many devotions about it. But, wouldn’t you know, there’s a time for every purpose under heaven. What I want to say about the Christmas-industrial complex is this: the images in advertisements, and in the songs and stories and movies that are sometimes little more than thinly-veiled advertisements, they draw us in for a reason. They show us things that God made our hearts to want: togetherness, generosity to strangers and loved ones alike, peace, healing of wounded relationships, and a childlike sense of wonder at the mystery of Santa Claus or God.  In fact, if you take out the plug for a particular product, lots of those messages are really similar to the things we see in Isaiah and elsewhere in the Bible. So what is it that makes this passage different from a well-done, heartwarming commercial for God?

There are a lot of things, and since I can’t have your ears all day to talk about them, I’m focusing on one: looking back. We don’t see it very explicitly in this passage, but Isaiah was written for a people with history. Their relationship with God is, to say the least, complicated. On-again, off-again, will they, won’t they? The Israelites were, let’s be honest, they were not so great. Let me be lightning-quick to say we are a lot like them, as a people and as individuals. Along with them, we betray God and worship idols. Along with them, we hedge our bets out of often-unspoken fear that God will not come through for us, that when it comes down to it we are our only hope. Along with the Israelites, sometimes we just forget about God altogether and hum along as if we were never chosen, called, or saved, as if our lives are small and insignificant. This history, and so much more, is the foundation for what Isaiah says.

If we look at the perfect family from any commercial, those images are unreal and meaningless partly because we don’t know the back-story and it’s assumed that there is none. If the commercials lasted a few years and let us get to know the people, maybe I’d believe the love and peace they conveyed. If I knew that the kid in the footie pajamas with the perfect hair had just spoken words of true repentance and reconciliation to his sister after an argument, maybe the image of the two of them smiling with their arms around each other would mean something. If I knew that one of the parents had slept on the couch the night before but then the other spouse had embraced them with real forgiveness, maybe their on-screen embrace would mean more. If I knew that the college-age daughter had contemplated spending this holiday away from her family because she had been doing drugs or she had a girlfriend or her boyfriend was of a different race, but decided to come home and be honest with them and been welcomed, perhaps with some hesitation or confusion but with the same open arms as always, her smile would make it so much more than an advertisement. It would be a story, a real story about real people who mess up and give up and then try again at the surprisingly hard task of loving each other. It’s only when we look back that we can know what is really happening now and what could happen next. After all the fighting and killing that’s gone on between Israel and other nations, the images of all nations streaming toward God’s mountain together are so much more powerful. They have sometimes been horrible neighbors, but God promises to set things right and that God’s word will overshadow—not erase, but overshadow—all of those divisions and hurts.

This type of looking back happens more explicitly in the Matthew passage. In telling us that no one including himself can know exactly what to expect, Jesus reminds us of Noah. Actually, not Noah himself but the people who lived at the time of the flood and didn’t know it would happen. They kept on living their lives as usual, not knowing that each day brought them closer to the end of the whole world as they knew it. Jesus says we don’t have to know the day or hour to be prepared for God’s kingdom, at least more prepared than they were for the flood. But that’s not an easy thing to try to do. How do we hold ourselves in readiness if we have no idea when it’s happening or even what exactly to be ready for? Well, here’s one idea that kind of helps me when I’m trying to think about this.

There’s a composer named John Cage. He was basically contemporary, he died in 1992, and he’s known for what I like to call crazy music. He composed music for the prepared piano, which means he would put various objects like bolts and screws on the strings to alter the sound. I heard a piece by him once that involved several people sitting in a row with radios tuned to different frequencies and turning them on and off at set times. The piece that he is probably best known for is called 4'33" [pronounced "4 minutes and 33 seconds"]. Here’s what happens. Any instrument or combination of instruments can perform it. The performer goes to the piano, or puts her violin under her chin, or they raise their wind instruments to their mouths, and then they don’t do anything. They just stay that way. Poised to start playing, but with no sound. The audience at first is expectant, then probably uncomfortable. As they start to realize they’re not going to hear music in this piece, they can’t help but pay attention to other sounds in the environment. Creaking auditorium seats, shuffling feet, rustling programs, coughs, whispers. And that’s John Cage’s point. He wrote 4'33" to call attention to those sounds. To say, this is a kind of music, and I hope you will hear the beauty in the common sounds you rarely notice. He puts the audience in an expectant and ready place, and then he points to a kind of music they probably never thought of. This is how we can be ready and not know what for or when. We can try to pay attention to the things and people we usually pass by, because God composed that crazy music for us to listen to.

I had another church internship a long time ago, and one of the first things the pastor said to me was, “Do you like to read? Because you should probably have a book with you most of the time. It’s a lot of hurry up and wait.” He was saying that like it was a bad thing, and yes, that can sometimes be very annoying. You get yourself all ready to do something important, something big and exciting, and then you end up standing around for minutes or hours, sometimes years, waiting for the go-ahead, waiting for the right time, waiting for someone to hire you, we might not even know what we’re waiting for. 

But I’ve found that, especially when it comes to ministry, there’s really not such a big divide between those big important moments and the time we spend looking for them. When I went on mission trips with my youth group in high school, the van ride was sometimes the highlight of the trip. We were waiting to get to the place where we were gonna do God’s work, but in the meantime, we got to know each other better and goofed off and made memories and shared snacks pretty much like the early church--nothing belonged to any individual but it was all communal property, the pretzels and the Twizzlers and the Skittles and the granola bars. I think that counts as God’s work, and I don’t think we knew it at the time. 

More recently, the experience of being in seminary is occasionally very frustrating, and sometimes I just want to graduate and get a call to a church and start my ministry already! But then I think, isn’t that shortchanging my life now and kind of an insult to everyone who’s not ordained? Have we really spent almost three years in a holding pattern, not doing ministry because we don’t have a degree yet? Wrong. My classmates and professors minister to me and each other all the time! And we have internships and committees and all sorts of ways that we are doing ministry, even if on some days it feels like we have hurried up just to get here and wait. 

That’s just my experience; everyone feels at times like they are not doing anything important, like they are just waiting for the next big thing, sitting in that auditorium seat waiting to hear the music start. But we can listen to people like John Cage who say, hey, this other stuff is worth listening to. It doesn’t have to be a big production. We can learn and grow and serve while we wait, and it might turn out we’ve been right where we belong. We can believe when Jesus says the kingdom of God is among us. Maybe that means it’s already here, but it’s so subtle or so common that we ignore it. Maybe our call is to perk up, wake up, and see what has already been going on: the acts of mercy and justice that occur every day.

They are smaller and often deemed less newsworthy than the painful stories we are used to. But a friend of mine had the stranger in front of her pay her toll on the Jersey Turnpike when she was traveling for Thanksgiving. Another friend is going to start not one job but two this week after a long and frustrating search. Countless people this past week at family gatherings played games they didn’t like so that children would feel loved and important. People who’d never imagined anything but a traditional turkey dinner learned to cook vegetarian dishes, or vegan or gluten-free, for the sake of loved ones. 

These happenings, and so many others, they might not look like much, but neither does a mustard seed. 

When Isaiah says, “Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord,” he’s been talking about the future for the whole passage, but that line is in the present. "All this is going to happen," he says, "and here’s what I invite you to do together now." 

The light might be as faint as the light that shows at the edges of a door, just barely illuminating our own space, but we know it is bright on the other side, and we can see enough to get there. 

Or the light might come only in brief flashes and then leave us in darkness, but it’s enough to take the next step, and we know it will come back when it’s time to move again. 

One day we will be where God is, and we will not need or want to go anywhere else. But right now, we walk in the light because we are getting closer to God’s mountain, little by little, together, starting with this first day of the new year. 

Amen and amen.