What it looks like when the Kingdom comes near

A sermon for the fourth Sunday after Epiphany given at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH on January 29, 2012.

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

Psalm 111

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

Mark 1:21-28

Jesus and his disciples came to the town of Capernaum, and on the next Sabbath Jesus went to the synagogue and began to teach. The people who heard him were amazed at the way he taught, for he wasn’t like the teachers of the Law; instead, he taught with authority.

Just then a man with an evil spirit came into the synagogue and screamed, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Are you here to destroy us? I know who you are – you are God’s holy messenger!”

Jesus ordered the spirit, “Be quiet, and come out the man!”

The evil spirit shook the man hard, gave a loud scream, and came out of him. The people were all so amazed that they started saying to one another, “What is this? Is it some kind of new teaching? This man has authority to give orders to the evil spirits, and they obey him!”

And so the news about Jesus spread quickly everywhere in the province of Galilee.

Jesus is powerful.

Powerful in word. Powerful in action.

We join with the people in the synagogue in amazement.

What did he teach there? What were his words?

We can imagine based on other places in the Bible what he might have said.

It went something like this: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

What does it look like when the kingdom comes near?

We live in an time and place where evil spirits are the subject of films and books and ghost stories not realities of our daily perception. We may be suspicious that there is something like an evil spirit in our computers at times, but we don’t find ourselves seeing someone convulsing or behaving strangely and thinking immediately: They have an evil spirit! Rather, we think immediately, “call 911.”

Whereas former cultures have understood diseases, emotional and physical as spiritually brought on – our culture looks for answers in biology and brain chemistry. We don’t exorcise, we medicate.

We have developed a schema by which we judge events in the world and that schema, that framework, does not include intrusions of the demonic sort. So when we hear about magic or spirit possession in far-off cultures we assure ourselves that those people are just describing as demon possession what we sophisticated Westerners know to be medically explainable.

While I congratulate and celebrate the advance in medical technology and understandings of disease emotional and physical – I do think we should be a little more cautious than we are when we presume to know that all that happens or could happen is explainable or will be explainable by our medical sciences.

As Hamlet says to Horatio:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

So we read of Jesus’ driving out of the evil spirit in the synagogue. Let us not take this text and make it safe and comfortable for our modern ears and modern minds. Let us not say that Jesus is just doing what we’ve now got medications for. Let us not say that the man’s “evil-spirit” is just their primitive way of diagnosing what we know now to be an imbalance of brain chemicals.

This man had an evil spirit. We don’t know exactly what that means but let us not lose its power in our effort to make it familiar to our experience.

This man had an evil spirit.

So I asked the question, “what does it look like when the kingdom of God comes near?”

When the kingdom of God comes near there is a confrontation between the forces of good and the forces of evil.

When the kingdom of God comes near the demons, the destroyers, the agents of decay in this good earth begin to tremble and resist.

Jesus announces in that place that God’s new creation is being born in the midst of this old one. The time is ripe. God’s new way is approaching.

And the power of the proclamation effects a conflict with the power of evil.

“What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Are you here to destroy us? I know who you are – you are God’s holy messenger!”

The man had run into the room and immediately the evil spirit within him began to confront and resist Jesus’ presence, Jesus’ proclamation.

Perhaps Jesus had just preached the kingdom of God is present. Perhaps he used a famous scripture from Isaiah like he did in a similar account in Luke’s gospel.

“The Sovereign Lord has filled me with his spirit.

He has chosen me and sent me to bring good news to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to announce release to captives and freedom to those in prison. He has sent me to proclaim that the time has come when the Lord will save his people and defeat their enemies…”

Perhaps Jesus had just announced the good news to the poor, healing to the broken, and release to those enslaved by forces out of their control.

Whatever he preached, it immediately provoked opposition from a force of evil within a man in the town of Capernaum.

What does it look like when the kingdom comes near?

Demons, those who delight in enslavement, destruction, those parasites find it repulsive and a great threat to their power, their control.

The demon recognizes that the kingdom’s nearness spells its own defeat: “Are you here to destroy us?”

Jesus does not even entertain the questions for a moment nor responds in accordance with how the demon wanted him to.

Instead, “Jesus ordered the spirit, ‘Be quiet, and come out of the man!’”

The Spirit of God is upon Jesus and with the power and authority of the creator of the world, the one who made all things whole and good – with that power Jesus announces the kingdom in action and the demon screams.

IN the presence of Jesus, by the power of the Spirit, oppression and violence are dethroned and driven out.

What does it look like when the kingdom of God comes near?

The oppressed spiritually, the oppressed socially, the oppressed physically, the oppressed politically, the oppressed economically, all of those weighed down by evil in all of its manifestations are given hope of liberation.

Walter Rauschenbusch once wrote that it is possible to hold the orthodox doctrine on the devil and not recognize him when we meet him in a real estate office or at the stock exchange.

We must be careful of seeing the kingdom as having only a “spiritual” significance. Something very big is happening in Jesus’ presence and it is threatening much more than the spiritual world, it will eventually so threaten the powers of his day that he will be a victim of Roman capital punishment.

But we must be equally careful of denying the powerful spiritual reality that lies behind all of our social, spiritual, and physical evils. God’s world is not easily divisible into spiritual and physical. There is spiritual in the physical and physical in the spiritual and when we seek healing for our spirits we must realize that our bodies are going to have to go along and change too. And when we seek healing for our bodies, we’re not leaving our spirits behind us.

What does it look like when the kingdom of God comes near?

It is a reality that drives out the force of decay from within our souls, from within our minds, from within our bodies, from within our communities.

The kingdom of God is Jesus saying “Be Quiet!” to the present evils of our age – spiritual and physical.

And when Jesus says “Be Quiet!” the evil in this world SCREAMS.

The man convulses and is freed.

Liberation never comes easily. God’s healing in our souls will be an experience as painful as surgery. God’s healing in our relationships will require painful truth-telling and owning up to our wrongs, restoration and forgiveness. God’s healing is not the absence of pain – God’s healing is through the pain to a new reality. Avoiding the pain only results in a half-healed, half-broken reality like never walking on your wounded leg.

Liberation never comes easily. The evil spirit, the evil force will scream in opposition – but the Spirit of God will be victorious and this is the hope that we look to with St. Paul who writes that “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”

What does it look like when the kingdom of God comes near?

Evil will lash out and pain and difficulty will come to those who seek God’s liberation, God’s healing.

As Stanley Hauerwas remarks: “peace is not the name of the absence of conflict.”

Peace is the road toward healing that is marked by such conflict. Seeking God’s peace is to seek to live in the reality of God’s healing and forgiving power. But the road to the realization of that reality is marked by suffering and great opposition from the evil powers of this world.

What does it look like when the kingdom of God comes near?

We recall the story in the gospel of Luke of when John the Baptizer’s disciples were sent to Jesus while John was in prison

“‘Are you the one who is to come,’” they ask Jesus, “’or are we to wait for another?’ When the men had come to him, they said, ‘John the Baptist has sent us to you to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” ’ Jesus* had just then cured many people of diseases, plagues, and evil spirits, and had given sight to many who were blind. And he answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.’”

The kingdom of God comes near and good things start happening – better yet, bad things begin to recede.

Our God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Our God is still a healing God, our God is still a threat to evil in this world.

May we seek God’s healing in our own lives and may we recognize that God’s healing is not just a spiritual thing, that God wants to heal our whole selves, our spirit in the context of our body, our body in the context of our community, our community in the context of our nation, and our nation in the context of the many people of this earth.

And all of this liberation will go nowhere-- it will be a futile noisy clanging cymbal if the God of love is not in it.

A good part of this fight will need to take place on our knees.

So let us seek God’s mercy, God’s healing, and the power of God’s spirit within us to overcome oppressions within and without and realize that evil does not leave without a fight – but God is victorious. God has conquered the death and evil of this world.

God has given us the promise of making all things new.

“‘Where, O death, is your victory?

Where, O death, is your sting?’

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:53-58)

Amen.

God’s kairos and our chronos

A sermon for the third Sunday after Epiphany given at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH on January 22, 2012.

Jonah 3:1-5, 10

Psalm 62:5-12

1 Corinthians 7:29-31

Mark 1:14-20

We live in the midst of two kinds of time.

The time of day-to-day schedules, routines, and hours to clock in.

And, if we are lucky, occasionally a different kind of time will break in to our schedules and routines.

If we are lucky, we’ll find ourselves interrupted by a visit from a friend or loved one, a special gift from someone, or invitation to something.

We go on day after day in some ways hoping for that in-breaking of a different kind of time into our monotonous, flattened, tedium.

While the day-to-day time of calendars and alarm clocks, of deadlines and punch-clocks the Greeks called chronos, they had a different term for the higher time, the opportune time which breaks in to our normal day-to-day experience. This they called kairos.

Eugene Peterson comments on this kind of time.

“Time. But not just time in general, abstracted to a geometric grid on a calendar or numbers on a clock face, but what the Greeks named kairos, pregnancy time, being present to the Presence.” (Peterson 2011, 7)

We read in our pew Bibles: “The right time has come” (GNT)

A more literal version speaks of the time as being fulfilled, or filled up, or full. In other senses this same word refers to being pregnant. New possibilities are being born.

Jesus’ announcement that “the right time has come” is a call to wake up from our chronos schedules and routines and day-to-days and to become alive to the new pregnant, opportune time of God’s new way in Jesus.

So we have in verse 15 Jesus announcing the facts and the acts. The facts of God’s actions and the expected acts of our reponse.

The fact is that God is doing a new thing with human beings. A new time has entered in to our time. And the reign of God of bringing new life, reconciliation, of liberating humanity from the bondage of individual and social wrongs and of creating a new way of relating to God and to other people – the reign of God has come near.

Jesus announces the kairos time breaking in to our chronos time and calls us into that new sense of what’s significant, what’s real, what’s enduring, what’s worth our very lives.

The facts are announced, followed by the acts.

Jesus’ call to “turn away from your sins and believe the Good News!” is a call to enter into God’s time, God’s reality and live as if the normal chronos time doesn’t matter or is secondary at best.

Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians recognizes the priority of God’s time over our own. “the appointed time has grown short…let those who deal with the world [be] as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.”

Jesus and Paul are both calling us to realize that our time (chronos – the present form of this world) is a secondary reality to the time (kairos) of God.

The kairos time of the good news of Jesus Christ calls for our participation, heart and soul.

In our pew Bible the Greek word metanoite is translated as “turn away from your sins” – while this is part of what metanoite would entail, it does not capture its full implication. Many translations of the Bible translate this word as “repent.” And N. T. Wright comments that for the first century Jewish hearer, repentance would indeed mean turning away from sin, but it would also mean two different things:

“First, it meant turning away from the social and political agendas which were driving Israel into a crazy, ruinous war. We can imagine someone saying that today in a country where ideologies are driving half the population into violent behavior. Second, it meant calling Israel to turn back to a true loyalty to YHWH, their God….The call to repent is part of the announcement that this is the time for the great moment of freedom, of God’s rescue.”

We are to turn away not only from our sins, our absorption in our own ways of being, our selfish preoccupations, our anxiety over money or security or stability. But also from our partisan politics and economics which drive us to hate and slander our opponents and those who are associated with them. We are called to turn our loyalty to God and God’s way – our true foundation, the more real reality, and the only hope that will not disappoint.

And so we hear the Psalmist saying,

“[God] alone is my rock and my salvation,

my fortress; I shall not be shaken.

On God rests my deliverance and my honour;

my mighty rock, my refuge is in God.

Trust in him at all times, O people;

pour out your heart before him;

God is a refuge for us.

We are to turn from our preoccupation with our chronos time and embrace and believe the good news of God’s kairos time breaking-in in Jesus.

Today’s gospel reading helps us to see what this might mean when Simon and Andrew hear Jesus’ call and drop their nets and follow and John and James similarly leave their father and hired men in the fishing boat and jump up to follow Jesus.

The example of the four first followers of Jesus is the example of four people who realized God’s time was knocking at the door of their time and the call was not worth resisting.

Their lives show that they see the kairos time breaking in to their chronos time in the person of Jesus, in the call of Jesus to a new way of being, a new way of living.

And what is this new way of being?

“Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.”

Or as Eugene Peterson puts it, "Come with me. I'll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I'll show you how to catch men and women instead of perch and bass."

Many find it weird that such a violent image as catching fish is the one that Jesus uses to talk about attracting people to the vision of the kingdom of God.

But we have to understand that this image was a common one in both Greek and Jewish culture. In Greek culture, “to be caught in the net of the gods or God was a metaphor for salvation. It was to be safe from the nets or net of the evil one or evil ones. (Dowd 2000, 17)

In Jewish culture, they understood God’s fishing of people as a way of bringing them back from the state of being lost sheep to become again partners in YHWH’s way and full enjoyment of God’s love.

There’s an uncomfortable aspect of being caught in a net, though I can’t remember the last time I experienced that I can only imagine. But if the catching is being done out of a way that was toward meaninglessness and death and into a way of true fulfillment and life – the pain is worth the new life that it brings.

And to turn away, to leave all and break out of the chronos of our schedules and comfortable routines, our connections to employment, family, partisan politics, our cozy well-established identities. To break out is painful. But it is a pain worth experiencing to join in to God’s new reality that is being born in the new time of the good news we hear Jesus announcing.

We are not called to leave the cows to milk themselves or the maple trees to tap themselves or the students to teach themselves. We see the first followers doing this, forsaking family and career, status and wealth to follow in Jesus’ way and we mustn’t feel that this is necessarily God’s call upon us.

But we must see the connection between their radical choice and the good news breaking in to their world in Jesus’ announcing of the nearness of God’s reign.

They recognized the priority of God’s kairos time over our chronos time.

We can rather hear Paul’s words as relevant to our circumstances. Live according to the true reality, what’s really important. “Deal with the world as if you had no dealings with it.” Deal with the world as if you are an ambassador, a representative of a greater reality – the reality of God’s life-giving, peace breeding, liberating work.

And recognize that just as God’s call went out to the disciples to be fishers of people, we are to recognize our own vocation as being those who seek to rescue others, to be their helper, their guide to the safety of our God who is a rock and refuge.

In this time of party politics both at the national level with these Republican primaries and at the town level with the nearing Town Meeting I am calling everyone here to vote and participate in the town’s affairs.

But please remember that God calls us to see that our identity is not with either political party with any faction or clique in town– our identity is as followers of the one who loved all especially the least of these and even his enemies.

Our goals politically and economically are not the goals of one or the other political or economic agenda, but to see that God’s reign of truth, of love, and of justice is able to be carried forward.

As we deal with the town affairs, let us be as those who have seen and live to see a higher reality of love and mercy and justice break in to this present reality.

Our lives are comparatively short. To live for ourselves, for our own security, for our own prosperity at the expense of others or for an agenda that is for the interests of one group at the expense of another group -- to forsake the greater realities of God’s mercy and desire for all to experience his love – to live as if God’s kairos time has not broken in to our world – is to perpetuate the reign of pride, of selfishness, of death.

We must search our own souls and invite God to give us a new vision for how we might live our lives and how we might relate to others around us and to the town and to the nation – how we might live in God’s kairos time and forsake our allegiances which keep us from the ability to love people and pursue what’s best for others on a personal, town, and national level.

These are tough questions, there is no easy way forward. Jesus calls us to God’s reality breaking in to ours. His rule is love and peace and justice – how that makes us vote, how that makes us act and relate in town will be made known to us. We must listen to God’s call and allow God’s spirit to awaken us to the reality bigger than our calendars, our deadlines, and our own personal or partisan agendas. Whatever happens in the politics of town and nation, we know our call to live out God’s new way and to be those who fish for people – so that many might know God’s love for them and God’s loving care through the community of God’s followers.

In a speech given the day before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. helps us see what it might mean to live for God’s kairos time over our own chronos time.

“Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.

And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!” (King 1968)

Ina Ogdon, the author of the hymn, Brighten the Corners Where You Are, lived in Toledo, Ohio and saw the building of the Toledo Harbor Lighthouse in 1904. The refrain of her song,

“Someone far from harbor you may guide across the bar;

Brighten the corner where you are!”

speaks of the Christian as being a lighthouse to help others come into the safety of the harbor.

Let us be that kind of light, that kind of help to those who need it. And let us remember that we are called to live according to a different time. And this is good news.

Amen.

Come and See

A sermon for the second Sunday of Epiphany given at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH on January 15, 2012.

1 Samuel 3:1-20

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

1 Corinthians 6:12-20

John 1:43-51

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

--Robert Frost

“You come too.” I love the spirit of free enjoyment and invitation that this poem expresses. It’s free from any nagging obligation or fear of offense – it simply wants to invite the hearer into the enjoyment of the spring, the calf.

I want us to see this spirit of free invitation pervading Jesus’ interaction with his first followers here in our reading from John’s gospel.

Andrew and a friend of his had become followers of John the Baptizer. John had made it clear that he was out to do nothing less than proclaim the coming of God to his people.

In a moment, seeing Jesus and telling his followers ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ John gives the first call to the first followers who immediately responded by following Jesus. Their curiosity piqued, their hope strengthened, their desire to know the one who will save them from their sins leads them on to seek him out – who is this guy that John proclaims?

As we recall from last week, Mark begins his telling of Jesus’ life by saying this is the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, son of God. Mark was saying that the good news is this life that Jesus lived, the good news is not just that Christ died for our sins and rose again. The good news is that Christ lived a life that we can follow. A life that we can imitate and experience a kind of present experience of salvation, a kind of liberation.

Here in the beginning of John’s telling of the good news we find people like ourselves who are profoundly curious of who this guy Jesus is. And so like us they begin to follow him. And as they enter into that life as live with Jesus, they experience God’s salvation as a present reality – an enlightenment, a challenge to a new way of living, and a transformation to a new hope and faith.

Throughout the church year we follow the story of Jesus from its beginnings to its gruesome climax and on to its glorious and triumphant end.

Here we find ourselves with the disciples on the road with Jesus, encountering God’s new way.

When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said “What are you looking for?”

The two asked a question which may seem odd to us: “Where are you staying?”

Jesus’ response to them is his response to our curiosity about God’s call to us:
“Come and see!”

Come and see.

Whatever the two experienced or heard at Jesus’ home was significant enough that when they left the next day, Andrew was eager to tell his brother Simon. And he says to his brother: “We have found the Messiah.”

As they are walking the next day, Jesus and the three followers see Philip. Jesus says “Follow me.” And Philip joins the growing number of followers.

Philip himself is so excited that he goes and tells his friend Nathanael.

Nathanael is skeptical: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

Philip responds with the words that Jesus used in response to Andrew and the other follower: “Come and see.”

And Nathanael meets Jesus and his wonder and curiosity are piqued --so he follows too.

One by one, the one who encounters Jesus, goes to others and says like Frost’s farmer in the poem: “You come too.”

Many people here can think of friends and family members who for a variety of reasons are not interested in being involved in the church. And a lot of those reasons that are keeping them from joining us or other congregations are really good reasons. And I think one of the worst things Christians can do is to ignore those good reasons or discount them.

Evangelism, witnessing to the good news of God’s salvation, has become an embarrassing part of the Christian life in many communities and I want to venture an explanation for this.

There are two kinds of extreme examples of Christian evangelism.

There are those who feel compelled to get someone else to believe in God or to come to church. This inner desire for others to come to know the good news of God’s salvation is wonderful. It is borne out of personal experience of the grace of God in one’s own life. But there can be a vast divide between intention and result. When this inner desire for someone to experience the freedom of God leads you to coerce another into entering into that same experience of freedom, there is a fundamental problem. God’s freedom must be freely obtained. Sometimes, like an anxious salesman, people can get so impatient to have someone agree with them or come to church that they devise all sorts of manipulative methods. Televangelists have mastered this union of faith and market.

And then of course with every extreme pendulum swing to the right, there will be an equal and opposite swing to the left.

There are others who think of evangelism as inescapably coercive. They want nothing to do with a method that seems to try to make another person over in one’s own image. They pride themselves on being cultural relativists and pluralists. They live by the dictum: “I’m ok, you’re ok.” And this too is borne out of personal experience of the grace of God of the freedom of God– a God whose burden is light and does not coerce people to think, feel, or act a certain way in order to be loved. It is also borne out of a moral reaction to kinds of evangelism that have gone right along with a kind of cultural imperialism.
The kind of cultural imperialism that goes like: “I’m right – you’re wrong and you’ve gotta be just like me in order to be right.”
Rather they feel we must respect and tolerate one another’s differences and that means we let the friend or family member “be themselves” and not try to get them to feel, think, or act the way that we’ve come to feel best – they have their own journey.

These are two extremes and with every extreme they have great motivations but have a lot to learn from one another.

There is a third way – a middle way that I see in today’s gospel text.
Notice that Jesus didn’t say to Andrew and his friend: “Believe x, y, and z and then come and hang out with me.”
Equally Jesus did not say to them: “you guys just need to go and do what you’ve been doing, follow your heart and stick to your own personal journey.
Jesus said these beautiful words: “Come and see.”

I think the way between coercive soul-winning and hands-off pluralism lies in these words: “Come and see.”

The gospel of God, the good news of God’s salvation, is in this life, this man’s actions and teaching. We encounter Jesus in this text just as the earliest followers did and Jesus says to us: “Come and see.”

The burden is light – we don’t have to be, think, or feel x, y, or z in order to begin to encounter Jesus.

We must simply come as we are and see.

And so within a few verses we see this way of speaking about Jesus already taking effect. Philip goes to his friend Nathanael and says we’ve found the Messiah in this guy from Nazareth. Nathanael says “Nazareth? What good could ever come out of there?” Philip’s reply: “Come and see.”

“Come and see” is a result of our having already come and seen – we have found something beautiful and life-changing in this story, in this community that follows in God’s loving example. Out of our enjoyment we find ourselves praising the good things we have come to know in encountering Jesus. So, naturally, organically, we invite others to freely come and experience the Jesus we have seen.

This is not a call to abandon one’s own spiritual journey. It’s call to a person on their spiritual journey to consider stopping in Nazareth for a bit.

Neither imperialism nor relativism lies in the words “Come and see.”

What lies in those words is an invitation, a non-coercive invitation into a blessed experience, an adventure of encountering this one Jesus and the good news he claims to have.

We invite because God has already invited all people into this experience of salvation and liberation.

We say “Come and see” as an echo of Jesus’ “Come and see.”

And there are no strings attached. We don’t say “Come and see” and THEN try to make them see what we want them to see.

We know the God who freely reveals himself in beauty and love and we trust that God to be made know through our encounter with Jesus in church, in scripture, in our lives.

Maybe you’ve been hurt by one or the other extreme kind of stance in evangelism.
I suggest three steps forward:

1) Get to know Jesus himself – not just truths ABOUT Jesus that you may pick up – get to know his way – how did he relate to those around him – was he out to win people for his political agenda through manipulative add campaigns or mudslinging of opponents? Or did he say, “Come and see”?
2) If that way becomes attractive to you – if that way indeed breeds grace in your life, if it leads you to a kind of liberative posture of love, then don’t be ashamed or embarrassed to tell someone about it. Only let it be for the sake of telling about it, not for some other agenda.
3) “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.” These words from the letter of James go a long way in helping us find a way forward that is neither fearful and silent nor obnoxious and loud. Let us become listeners who share our own enjoyment of God’s way and invite others into it. “You come too.”

So let us not go out and feel like we need to pressure our family members or friends into coming to church or feel like we have to speak about what we heard in church.

All of this “have to” “need to” stuff is not gospel.

God has invited us into an encounter with Jesus which is our salvation and liberation. This invitation becomes an invitation to others as we, enjoying the fruit of God’s good news, can’t help but tell others: “come and see.”

The End in the Beginning

A sermon for the Baptism of our Lord, the first Sunday after Epiphany, given at the United Church of Acworth, Acworth, NH on January 8, 2012.

Genesis 1:1-5
Psalm 29
Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-11

Mark’s gospel is a story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
But Mark’s gospel is not just another story. It is a gospel.
Literally good news.
Sometimes we want someone to give us just a brief synopsis of what the good news is. But Mark won’t do that, because the good news is not something that can just be summed up into pithy statements. The good news IS Jesus of Nazareth – we cannot separate the good news from the story of Jesus.
So Mark doesn’t give us some brief synopsis of what the good news is. Mark gives us Jesus, up front and in person.
The point is not to understand some idea about who Jesus is, but to follow Jesus and the way that he marks out.
One commentator puts it this way: “…Mark does not invite us to decide what the Gospel means, but to find our place in the unfolding good news.”
(Kernaghan, 38)
It is through our living engagement with the living Jesus that we learn what it means to be followers and why being a follower of Jesus is good news.

Mark begins:

Mark quotes the prophet Malachi who wrote: “I will send my messenger ahead of you to open the way for you.”
And then Mark reminds us of our prophet of exile and return, Isaiah: “Get the road ready for the Lord; make a straight path for him to travel!”

God’s new way is coming as it was foretold and hoped for by many generations.
And this new way comes not as a set of rules or profound new ideas, but as a person who shows us how to live and shows us God’s love.

John goes out to the desert, speaking about God and about God’s coming deliverance to all who listen, and baptizing in the Jordan river all who want to be baptized.
John is the voice in the wilderness, calling people to prepare for God’s new way.

The desert, the wilderness, the wasteland, is a place in the Biblical story where people come to grips with who they are before God.

After the Israelites leave Egypt, they follow Moses into the desert and remain there for forty years. But it’s there in the desert that God creates out of an enslaved people, a new liberated community, it’s there that God gives them the law and the promise of blessing.

In the wilderness, God creates a way.

And John proclaims that way and says if you want to be able to receive this new way of God you’re going to have to come to grips with who you are before God. You’re going to have to be honest about your own life.

To tell the truth about our lives itself can seem like a desert, a painful and lonely reality that we most often just try to avoid. But it is when we are truthful before God about our own sins and failings that we can be prepared for the new life, the new calling God has for us.

And so often we realize that telling the truth about ourselves is the most freeing experience we can imagine. God hears us as we confess and with open arms responds with grace and love like the Father of the prodigal son.

We need confession because we need to stay in touch with reality. We all like sheep go astray and follow our own ways and stray from what God would have us do and who God would have us be.

And John calls all, the poor, the rich, the strong, the weak, the ones who have it all together and the ones who can’t seem to walk the line – all are in need of the reality check that is confession and forgiveness of sin.

And then baptism. Baptism purifies – it’s a washing symbol –all cleaned up and ready to move on. But it is also most importantly an initiation into a life of service to God. Baptism is only the beginning of the life that seeks to follow God’s way.

The first time we see Jesus in Mark, he is going out from Nazareth in Galilee to be baptized by John.

Jesus’ baptism was the beginning of his public service of God. Jesus goes down to the waters of baptism.

And this act, this act of being baptized by John is an act of both dedication to God and solidarity with all of the people that God loves.

Jesus was baptized in the same water as all of those who John had baptized before. Jesus was to be among fellow human beings and to be with fellow human beings, especially the weak and the poor, the prostitutes and the tax collectors. Jesus is baptized in solidarity with all those who came before him and all those who come after him, leaving the old behind and pressing on toward the new.

As it says in the book of Hebrews: “he had to become like his people in every way, in order to be their faithful and merciful High Priest in his service to God, so that the people's sins would be forgiven.”

And Jesus is baptized in dedication to God’s purposes. As we move into the time of sharing the Lord’s Supper, I want to reflect upon the meaning of the words that are said about Jesus in the baptism story. These words begin his ministry and foreshadow what is to come in the events of his ministry. Even here, in this celebratory moment, we can feel the shadow of the cross. But ultimately we see here the hope of God’s redemption and healing through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Let’s take a look.
I like the way Eugene Peterson renders this episode in his translation, the Message.

“At this time, Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. The moment he came out of the water, he saw the sky split open and God's Spirit, looking like a dove, come down on him. Along with the Spirit, a voice: ‘You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.’”

The sky splits open. N.T. Wright comments that “it doesn’t mean that Jesus saw a little door ajar miles up in the sky. ‘Heaven’ in the Bible often means God’s dimension behind ordinary reality. It’s more as though an invisible curtain, right in front of us, was suddenly pulled back, so that instead of trees and flowers and buildings, or in Jesus’ case the river, the sandy desert and the crowds, we are standing in the presence of a different reality altogether.”

The tearing of the sky brings to mind the words of the prophet Isaiah: “Why don't you tear the sky open and come down?” God has come down and Jesus will bring us out of the exile of our sins.

The new reality that is opened up in the tearing of the sky is the reality of God’s deliverance beginning to be made real in the life of Jesus who is in his baptism dedicating himself to God’s service.

And this reality is a reality of promise – the promise of restoration and of new creation – shown in the descent of the Spirit of God like a dove.
In the story of the creation of the world we read that “the Spirit of God was moving over the water.” The Spirit of God like a dove was moving over the waters of Jesus’ baptism, empowering him for the work that is to be done, and signifying the NEW creation that will be a result of his life, death, and resurrection.
And just as the dove gave Noah the sign that there is dry land, the Spirit of God gives us the promise of restoration.

And we who have since been baptized and received the Holy Spirit can take great encouragement from the remembrance of the newness of life that was offered to us there and breathe in again God’s promise of continual restoration and healing and creating anew when we find ourselves in ruts or on paths that we never wanted to tread or perhaps just adrift in a vast sea. God’s Spirit once again points us to Jesus and to look at Jesus’ life and the work of God’s deliverance through Jesus’ death and resurrection and find hope again for a new start.

So we have the skies split open, the Spirit descends, and “along with the Spirit, a voice: ‘You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.’”

And it is with these words that we see the beginning and the end of the gospel all at once. Here in the baptism we celebrate the beginning of Jesus’ ministry just as we remember the beginning of our own new life of following Jesus in our baptism or confirmation.
But here in the baptism with these words we see the full story of who Jesus is and who Jesus is to be for all humanity.

The three parts of the voice’s statement tell the story: (1) “‘You are my Son,”
(2) “chosen and marked by my love,” and (3) “pride of my life.’”

“You are my Son” – this part looks back to Psalm 2:7 which is called an enthronement Psalm. This Psalm was said by the Jewish community in hope of a new king who would come and restore their nation. Jesus is being addressed as that new king who would establish a new reign. But this reign would not be what people expected.

“chosen and marked by my love” – this part looks back to Genesis 22:2
Isaac, the son that Abraham loved was to be given as a sacrifice to God. In the last moments, we recall, God tells Abraham to sacrifice a lamb rather than his son Isaac and God tells Abraham that on account of his faith all nations would be blessed through his children.

Jesus, God’s beloved, will be the lamb that will die in place on humanity and will rise again in order that humanity might be blessed through him.

“pride of my life.’” – or “I am pleased with you” – this part recalls Isaiah 42:1

“Here is my servant, whom I strengthen— the one I have chosen, with whom I am pleased. I have filled him with my Spirit, and he will bring justice to every nation.”

Here is a direct reference to the suffering servant that we read about in Isaiah chapters 40-55.
In chapter 53 we read the famous poem about the servant:

“he endured the suffering that should have been ours, the pain that we should have borne. All the while we thought that his suffering was punishment sent by God. But because of our sins he was wounded, beaten because of the evil we did. We are healed by the punishment he suffered, made whole by the blows he received. All of us were like sheep that were lost, each of us going his own way. But the Lord made the punishment fall on him, the punishment all of us deserved.”

Jesus is baptized, the skies split open – looking to coming restoration of justice and peace among humanity
The Spirit descends as a dove – promising new creation
And “along with the Spirit, a voice: ‘You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.’”

God proclaims his great affection for his Son but we also see in this words a foretelling of the end as we recall the prophecies – God’s son, the promise to Abraham, the suffering servant will be light in the darkness and the darkness will refuse that light.

But by his wounds humanity is healed.

As we turn to the Lord’s Supper and remember Christ’s death for us, let us remember that it is this Christ who died for us, the one who was baptized and dedicated to God’s service, the one who sought to live a life of love in solidarity with the outcasts and the down-and-outs, and the one who was addressed by God: ‘You are my Son, chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.’” This same one became the sacrifice for sins, in place of all and rose again that all might receive new life, a changed nature through faith and eternal life in the world to come.

By Jesus’ death and resurrection we have new life and a new relationship to God whereby we hear the same words of God’s great love and grace: So we have the skies split open, the Spirit descends, and “along with the Spirit, a voice: ‘You are my [children], chosen and marked by my love, pride of my life.’”

Let us hear those words spoken to us, the words of God’s love as we eat the bread and drink the cup – God’s love for a broken world, God’s love for each of us.

Amen.