reflecting: Mark 6:53-56

Amidst all the commotion of Jesus walking on water (and rightfully so, I mean he WALKED ON WATER!), we may have totally skipped over the healing in Gennesaret that Mark records afterwards.

This little episode shows the crowd’s immediate (a great Markan word) recognition of Jesus and how they flock to him for healing.  What ensues is the oddest kind of mayhem.  Jesus gets rushed by all sorts of people, misfits and outcasts, wherever he goes.  If they can but “touch the hem of his garment they’ll be made whole.”  This is the same desperation we saw in the interruption in Chapter 5 (Mark 5:21-43) as Jesus was en route to Jairus’ dead daughter.

I’ll go ahead and out myself…I’ve probably been to hundreds of concerts and, Lord willing, will go to many more yet, but the first concert I ever attended was at the Daytona Beach Ocean Center in 1992.  Two as yet unknown acts, TLC & Boyz II Men, opened for MC Hammer’s 2 Legit 2 Quit tour.  My best friend in third grade and me rushed out of our seats, leaving his chaperone mom in her seat, desperate to try and get a hand on those famous parachute pants as Hammer moved freely about the arena flaunting his brilliant new wireless microphone headset technology.  We elbowed and vied, only to get boxed-out by some screaming girls, who needless to say, hit their growth spurt before we did.

All joking aside though, I’m indicted by the fact that my most diligent attempt to get to somebody in a crowd, that I can remember, was not, and tends not to be, me getting to Jesus.  In these gospel stories, I’m most struck by how Jesus is the obvious hope for these people’s hopelessness.  

This is not obvious to me most of the time.  

I go through most of my days trying either to ignore the hopeless moments or areas of my life, drowning them out with shear busy-ness, or attempting to solve my own problems so that I don’t have to go through the hassle of having Jesus heal me.

Jesus, make me desperate for the healing that I need and that you offer.  

Show me the ways I clutch at other things and people that aren’t you and can’t do what you can do.  

Let me recognize you immediately in my life and in the lives of others who are hurting.  

Amen

A bit better musical accompaniment to Mark 6:53-56.

reflecting: Mark 6:30-44

Have you ever seen one of those “hoarder shows” on TV?  

They’re kind of fascinating, but they’re also kind of upsetting.  

Reality television is largely a case-in-point that truth, or at least “real life,” is stranger than fiction.  When I was watching, I was about to totally disengage with the lives on the screen, till a behavioral psychologist came on.  It seems that these professionals’ main role is to get to the bottom of some fundamental problem of “enough-ness” in their patient.

I can connect with this issue.  The old man on the program hoarded because, in his estimation, there was a good chance that at some point there just was not going to be enough.  He held onto things and food and memories because he didn’t believe that the future will be so kind to him.  

The sad irony was that this holding onto resulted in him being threatened with losing his home because it was dangerous, losing his relationships because he had alienated the people closest to him, and losing his own possessions because of rust, corrosion and rot.

Sunday we’ll explore a famous passage in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 6:30-44), but common to all four accounts, about Jesus feeding more than 5.000 people with just 5 loaves and 2 fish.  Sounds suspicious given the lack of “enough-ness” in Jesus’ camp.

We get the privilege of not only hearing the good news about how Jesus manages this, but we also get to participate in a meal of communion together, remembering another dramatic moment when Jesus fed his disciples with bread.  Look forward to seeing you then.

reflecting: Mark 4:21-34

This Sunday we'll continue on in chapter 4 of Mark's Gospel.  This chapter is laden with stories and teachings by Jesus on the Kingdom of God.  I can't help but remember, when I read this chapter of farmers and mustard seeds, when I was called on to preach one of my first sermons to a rural North Carolinian congregation two years ago.  It was pretty intimidating to drive to work everyday that summer past fields and barns and then try to explicate how the Kingdom of God is like something that they knew far more intimately about than I do.  

But maybe that's the point.

The Kingdom of God is like a seed, even like a mustard seed.  Small, but when nourished and come to fruition, yielding great and surprising things.  Mysterious at its core.  We rely on seeds and their fruit everyday (ie "our daily bread"), but can we really explain them, can we totally domesticate or control them, or do we, at some point just have to sit back and relish in the mysterious bounty and sustenance they provide us?

I look forward to meeting this Sunday to learn more about, to participate in, and to continue to imagine this mysterious Kingdom of God with you.  I thank God that his kingdom resists mine, or ours, or really anybody's attempts to control it.  I thank God for the mysterious, manna-like provision with which He keeps us and pray for the faith and patience and awe to really appreciate a loving God that works that way.  Finally, I pray that I get used to that kind of Kingdom, which looks and feels so different from any kingdom I would imagine on my own or try to make for myself.

Here is the manuscript for the sermon given (sorry there's no audio, but if you were there you'd understand why there is no audio!)

reflecting: Mark 2:18-28

This coming Sunday we’ll keep moving through Mark’s gospel (Mark 2:18-28) and catch Jesus in a couple of encounters with observers trying to figure out what following Jesus entails, and Pharisees, the good Jews who know what being in relationship with God requires and looks like.

First, the question is put to Jesus about fasting, essentially asking, “John the Baptizer’s followers and the Pharisees are taking this whole thing seriously, bending their wills and their bodies in order to worship God, why don’t you teach that to yours?  Why instead do you hang out late with these scoundrels?”  Keep in mind the major contrast that’s happening here, considering the previous scene shows Jesus wining and dining with Levi and Co (Mark 2:13-17).

Jesus’ response is a deeply theological one.  One that tells what time it is (not time for fasting, but rather feasting!?), and understands what’s going on not as anything less than a sacred event like Marriage (“how can the guests of the Bridegroom fast?”)  

This frames Jesus’ call to and hang with Levi not as something periphery, but as the main event to Jesus’ ministry.  If Jesus had just identified himself as a Doctor (Mark 2: 17), now he describes his coming as a Bridegroom looking for a bride.  In the Levi feast, we get a glimpse at what it looks like when Jesus finds one.  And celebration is in order; diet starts Monday, because today it’s time to party (ie Luke 15’s story of the Prodigal Son that we studied in last fall)!

The next encounter about the Sabbath again shows this reckless perspective.  It features a Jesus who does not seek to abolish the Law but to fulfill it.  It reveals a God walking amongst us that is so full of Grace that He and only he is Lord, only he has the authority (a big word in Mark’s gospel that keeps popping up…), to interpret what such a grace-full thing as the Sabbath means for God’s people.

What it means is that the Sabbath is a time for feasting; a time to understand the freedom and joy in God.  That God-with-us (the definition of Emmanuel) means abundance (John 10:10) and revelry.  But not just a party for partying-sake, but a party that celebrates when Jesus looks for his long-lost Beloved, often the least-likely looking bride in a soiled dress, and as the Bridegroom Lord, finds and claims her for His own!

reflecting: Ash Wednesday

Growing up going to Catholic school, it never really occurred to me how odd it is that so many Christians show up at work or school on some seemingly random Wednesday with a dark smudge on their foreheads. The more I think about it the stranger it is. It can certainly remind us of our mortality (the whole “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” thing). It marks off a season of penance for that hard-partying during Mardi Gras the night before?

Ash Wednesday is a pretty enigmatic holiday for Christ-followers. Historically, it marks off the beginning of a Lent season, a lean period before Easter, which in itself is wrought with paradox. The word “Lent” comes from the word meaning “Spring.” This is a season of longer days, abundant flourishing, and a brilliant turn of seasonal weather. But it is also during this change that we’re asked to stop for a second and consider where we’ve come from, and who we are. 

Perhaps its only by having a big, sloppy smudge placed right between our eyes that we are stopped from jumping into the feast of spring by observing a period of fasting and repentance. It is this forty day period of hesitation and evaluation that slows us down enough to see where we are, what we depend on most, who we are becoming, and where we are headed.

One of famed poet T.S. Eliot’s most renowned poems reflects on Ash Wednesday and Lent’s ability to do just this, letting him re-center himself. When he starts to till this ground, he turns up all sorts of mis-directions that require acknowledgement and repentance: from false hopes, to distorted love and vain wastes of time. Eliot’s prayer starts the Lenten season by entreating that God may “Teach us to care and not to care, Teach us to sit still;” that we may be reoriented in our wants and needs and freed from anxiety enough to be present to God.

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is
nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgment not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
[T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday, 1930.]

Let us take this time to realize where our loves lie, where our time goes, who and what we are dependent on, and where we are headed.

Let us see the new creation of the springtime through the smudged realization of our own brokenness, mortality, and lack.

Let us follow Jesus through this season, to the cross and into the resurrected, free, and abundant life he made possible for us and gives to us.

           

reflecting: Mark 1:40-45

I don’t envy the folks that do bible translation and scholarship. I’m in the second semester of my second biblical language and am tired of it. Most days it’s incredibly tedious. You spend essentially a whole semester learning language and syntax, vocabulary and verb conjugations, and only get to the gratifying stuff way later. With this in mind, it’s puzzling to me when I actually come upon a verse or word that these really smart academics can’t boil down.

So we find at the end of Mark’s first chapter in Jesus’ dealing with the leper. A man suffering from leprosy, a terrible disease where your flesh rots even though you’re alive, comes to Jesus in order to be healed. Rather than asking earnestly, “Can you heal me? Can you stop me from being the living-dead? From being a social, religious, and physical outcast? Can you make me whole?” Instead, with desperate confidence he states, “If you want, you can make me clean.”

It is in Jesus’ response that the translators and commentators make their money. If you pick up ten bible translations mostly likely seven will say something along the lines of “being moved with pity and sympathy” (Amplified Bible), “moved with compassion” (NLT/KJV), “moved with pity” (ESV/NRSV/RSV), or “Deeply moved…” (The Message). The greek word that yields these translations has to do with the human bowels (splangknidzomai). His guts; the very depths of the Jewish understanding of the person. His compassion is literally sympathetic, it makes Jesus sick to his stomach. It churns his insides to see this man in this state.

The other three bibles will say something along the lines of “Jesus was indignant” (NIV 2011/TNIV) or “Jesus was incensed” (CEB). What is ticking Jesus off and why? Is he upset at the presence of this man’s brokenness before him, his deadness? Put off by the gross display of depravity? What gives?

Readers of Mark’s good news have long tried to marry these two emotions of Jesus. Based on what’s just happened (the speaking with authority and confronting demons in Mk 1:21-28), both give us a valuable insight into how Jesus encounters and overcomes evil. Jesus has just cast out an unsettling and unclean spirit from a man at the synagogue and his fame is spreading. Mark scholar Joel Marcus helps us understand that, “Jesus’ rage at the disease or at the demon that has caused it is mixed with his compassion for the man whom it has attacked, and by his gesture of touching the man he even risks contracting ritual impurity himself. But instead of impurity passing from the man to Jesus, the purity of Jesus’ holiness passes from him to the man, and the latter is cured” (from Marcus’ Anchor Bible Commentary on The Gospel of Mark, Vol 1).

Jesus doesn’t merely rage at the evil that is singling this man out and ravaging his body. Neither does Jesus’ healing good news handle his broken, dirty death with the kid-gloves of disinterested pity. He takes it on. He feels and risks. He gets angry at the right things (because this man’s sickness isn’t what it means to be human) and responds in the right ways (because of his authority, things can be different). 

This is good news that reaches down to his guts.

reflecting: Mark 1:21-39

I want to rethink job descriptions a little. It seems like most job descriptions should instead be called “job prescriptions.” After all, you get them at the beginning of your work, they prescribe to you what you should do, what your responsibilities are, and how you should spend your time. We all know that these job prescriptions don’t always indicate what you actually do. Maybe they call for you to do more work (Slacker!), maybe, for the work-a-holic, far less. Job prescriptions prescribe the task ahead. Job descriptions describe what’s actually happening, and what should continue to happen…

It’s with this frame of mind that we stumble onto a pretty odd job description for Jesus in Mark’s gospel. Verse 39, in chapter one, states, Jesus goes around “preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons.” Wait, what?! Preaching and exorcising?!

Jesus says that this is why he’s come. Sure it’s at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, this statement is definitely a sign of more to come, but it is descriptive of what Jesus is doing. The two prongs of his controversial mission: preaching a message of God and confronting evil head-on.

These two facets are important for us not to separate, nor to privilege one over the other.

Jesus is not just a gifted speaker, wooing crowds with his religious knowledge and oratory polish. Though he was not afraid to encounter folks in a religious arena with the uncomfortable possibility that connection to and life with God might look different than what they thought.

Jesus is not just a social worker, activist, or community organizer, dead-set on eliminating personal and societal ills. Though he was certainly not afraid or ashamed to leave the synagogue and enter into the spaces of turmoil, ambiguity, darkness, suffering, and fear.

Mark sets up Jesus’ job description in a way that forces us to realize that Jesus is reordering things. Jesus exhibits authority to teach, because he’s the Word being taught. Jesus has authority to still the turbulent spirit in the man on the church house steps because he is “the Holy One of God.”

For us who are “in Christ,” receiving the authority and healing of Jesus, but also participating in it and offering it to the world, we better pay attention to this job description. Does it describe what we know? Is it descriptive of who we are on a daily basis? If not, let us continue to rethink, and by the Holy Spirit, relearn who Jesus is and what his authority means in our lives, our families, our community, and our world.

reflecting: Mark 1:12-13/Luke 4:1-13

As we’ve previously seen in Mark’s gospel, Jesus’ coming marks the beginning of a reign.  The names and lingo surrounding Jesus are regal and politically charged (“gospel,” “Anointed One,” “Son of God”).  And we all know that the whole point of having a king is to concentrate authority in one place.  In short, Jesus comes onto the scene and anyone (or thing) who has had dominion is threatened to have that power toppled.

In a world with violent political unrest in the headlines on a daily basis (Egypt, could be Haiti next…), we assume what it means for Jesus to do this.  When the “heavens are torn open” we might imagine some sort of theme music being cued, fanfare, etc.  But then, almost inexplicably, the Spirit leads Jesus into the dessert.

The writer of Mark’s gospel briefly alludes to this, but leaves the details out.  However, we can supplement our understanding with Luke’s account.  In chapter 4 in Luke, he narrates the three temptations Jesus faces in the wilderness.  These temptations and how Jesus meets them show what his kingdom and Kingship are going to be about: not just the ends but also the means.  In doing so they assault the ways we might be accustomed to think.  They show us a clear picture of who’s the real King and who’s not.

The hungry Jesus is challenged to make bread from stones.  Something he no doubt could have easily done.  He resists this temptation, because, while his kingship will meet needs in the most complete and sweeping way possible, drawing from a bottomless supply of resources, he will not turn the stuff of creation into a commodity.  Eugene Peterson mentions in his brilliant book The Jesus Way: “ The devil wants us to [give into this temptation]: follow Jesus but then use Jesus to fulfill needs, first our own and then the needs of all the hungry people around us.”  King Jesus won’t do it.  Instead he’ll go hungry.  He’ll suffer in order to bring his kingdom into being.

The second temptation is to throw Himself off the highest point so that a band of angels may catch him.  The devil challenges Jesus to dazzle.  To show off a bit.  To compensate for the, up until this point, anti-heroic shape his kingship is taking.  Jesus resists.  He will not be used as a “hedge against boredom.”  He will not be just another thrill to be sought, or cause to be rallied for.  Jesus’ kingdom campaign doesn’t need pyrotechnics or viral advertising.

The final temptation leveled against Jesus is to be co-opted.  The devil offers Jesus something he already has: authority.  Jesus resists.  He knows what he has and who he is.  He knows he doesn’t have to “sell-out” in order to “make it.”  He trusts his Father to accomplish his mission.  Perhaps “the devil wants us to use Jesus in the same way.  Use Jesus to run our families, our neighborhoods, our schools, our governments as efficiently and properly as we can, but with no love or forgiveness.”

Jesus, by establishing his Kingship in the wilderness, a Kingship that withstands these worldly, by-the-book measures, really exposes other kings (lowercase “k”); exposes them in the sense that they can’t rule like he can, nor are they willing to.  The very trials the devil put to Jesus, which he withstood, are the very trials we pray against in the Lord’s Prayer.  Because we know they’re tempting, but we also know who the Real King is.

I can’t help it, I’m a Disney-phile, but perhaps if coming out of the baptismal waters and heading towards the wilderness Jesus had a theme-song, it might have sounded a bit like one from the 1973 animated Robin Hood.

Living in an England ruled by Phony King John in a phony way, Robin Hood exposes him for who he is, a fake unfit to wear the crown or receive the people’s trust and obeisance.  Jesus not only announces this, but is the alternative: the real King pronouncing a “pox on the phony kings” who do things in phony ways.

reflecting: Mark 1:9-13

When the heavens above Jesus open in Mark 1:10, we are treated to a glimpse, a momentary peek, into the dynamic life of the Triune God.  Christians throughout the ages have come to know and describe their God as both three-in-one and one-in-three; one God in three Persons.  Thinking about this can wrack our brains, but it can also ignite our imaginations…  This means that our God lives in love and unity: with Himself.  That each Person of his being is distinct, but vitally connected, inextricable from the other Two.  That the God of the bible is a Community of Love in and of Himself.

When the bible says that God is love (1 John 4:8), it means that God’s very being is love and that this love happens within Himself.  God can love and dance (the best way early theologians knew how to describe this playful dynamic) without creation or without us.  So when the heavens are “torn open,” when the Spirit hovers over the baptismal waters and descends upon Jesus as a Dove (think Genesis 1:2 or maybe Genesis 8:6-12), when the Father commends Jesus as His Beloved Son (ie John 3:16), it is as if we are standing on sidewalk looking through a lit window to see the fullness of God residing.  This sets the table for the rest of Mark’s good news.

The wonder of Mark’s gospel, the reason he’s so intense, urgent and sometimes even impatient, is that he’s talking about God coming onto the human scene in a decisive and powerful way.  Jesus bursts into the world not as a mere Messiah (though that would satisfy plenty of expectations in itself), or not as a messenger bearing a good word for people to accept (after all that was sort of John the Baptist’s job), but as the very image (Colossians 1:15) of the God who creates, redeems, and loves, not because he has to but because that’s who He is and that’s what He does.

Mark documents this baptism scene in such a way that braces us for a HUGE perspective on the events of Jesus’ ministry, death, and resurrection that further unfold who God is, what God has done, and what God can be about for us now!

reflecting: Mark 1:1-8

As I start to read Mark in preparation for a lengthy sermon series at the Gathering Church, I’m arrested by the opening scene.  Mark cuts right to the chase, not softening us up with any genealogies or birth (/pre-Creation) narratives.  Mark’s “beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, Son of God” is only prefaced by a messenger.  Preconceived by the prophet Isaiah and actualized by a strange bird named John.  John, preparing.  John, pointing.  John (as we find in the evangelist John’s gospel), decreasing that Christ may increase.  I can’t help but recall Karl Barth’s comment on this scene as visually portrayed in the center panel of Grunewald’s Isenheim altarpiece (which a print hung above Barth’s desk for more than fifty years).  He offers in Church Dogmatics, “…one might recall John the Baptist in Grünewald’s Crucifixion, especially his prodigious index finger.  Could anyone point away from himself more impressively and completely?”  What a challenge!  What a vocation!  To  prepare.  To point.  To decrease that Christ may increase!

Come Holy Spirit!  

Let us remember our baptisms that we may live into this life of witness to which we are called.  

Let us point to Christ, who is the image of the invisible God.

Amen.