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Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Today, we are thrilled to be starting a series on the Gospel of Mark. Actually, we're going to be doing a portion of the Gospel of Mark here before Advent and then we're going come back to it again during the season of Lent in the spring. So we're gonna get this ball rolling here today. And as we do, I'm gonna invite us to pause from all the different strands of human experience that we bring with us. This room is full of different experiences, and we acknowledge that.
Speaker 2:And I invite you to just pause for a moment. Let's pray together. Loving God, we do center ourselves in this moment, in this space. We can sense our bodies here in the room. We can sense a community gathered around us.
Speaker 2:Perhaps it's been a long week. We can feel a little bit of exhaustion. Or maybe our mind, maybe even our body, our shoulders are occupied with some difficulty we're facing. Perhaps too, there's, for some of us, some gratitude for some change that we're experiencing, for some connection that is new and exciting. We're grateful for that.
Speaker 2:And we pause and we name these, knowing that you are present to them, to the great mystery of who we are. And we know that you sustain us in all things. Today, as we turn to a world of ancient story, a world of ancient words, we ask that you would be a guide toward new perspective. That you guide us toward the kind of openness that you know we need, that you would guide us toward and into an intuition and clarity that maybe we've brought with us today. And for this beautiful world that's caught up in violent dispute, we pray for peace.
Speaker 2:And for the innocent and the grieving, for the guilty and the offender, we ask for mercy. We pray all these things in the name of Christ, our hope. Amen. Alright, well today we're going to explore just some opening phrases in this gospel and to do that along the way we're going to discuss what it means to see together, what it means to begin again, good news as alternative, and what it means to tell time. And to start, quick digression because who doesn't like digressions?
Speaker 2:Some of you, right, some of you are aware that I was away a little bit this fall. My wife and I celebrated twenty years of being married by touring in woo. Was that my wife? That'd be hilarious. We toured in we toured in Turkey together.
Speaker 2:It was an absolute blast, lots of slow travel, lots of resting, lots of adventuring and this included and some of you may have seen my post about this but we went paragliding for the first time. Check out my face in these photos, also check out what I'm doing with my hands. They keep taking pictures and you're like, what do I do with my hands? I don't know, anyways, this might stretch your imagination of what common staff do when we're not at work on Sundays, right? This is Sunday morning exactly three weeks ago and full disclosure, I was a little nervous before we jumped off a mountain but not unlike preaching a sermon, once you get off the ground it's actually pretty fun, so I recommend it.
Speaker 2:The paragliding, not the sermon parts, that would probably terrify some of you. I only mention this, it's a digression, I only mention it because this recent trip was actually a return to Turkey for me. I was there in 2001 as part of an educational tour and that tour is actually when my relationship with the Gospel of Mark became a thing in my life or at least a thing I was conscious of. See, the itinerary of that tour took us to a library on the Greek island of Patmos, some of you might be familiar with that name, and in that library I got to see one of the earliest manuscripts we have of the Gospel of Mark. It actually dates to the sixth century, some scholars estimate it's like a third copy which is just craziness and in this library I had this unexpected emotional moment.
Speaker 2:It was actually kind of overcome and I didn't see it happening. Just sat there and I registered the concrete physical reality of parchment and writing and an author and intent, this ancient building block of scripture. My fascination with Mark grew from there to the point that I actually wrote my MA thesis on the social and cultural boundaries that are embedded in this particular narrative, clear confirmation of my status as a bible nerd. It's also part of why I'm so excited for us to be in Mark together. See, this gospel has played a role in my personal and my professional engagement with Christian faith, but it's also just foundational to the Christian tradition itself.
Speaker 2:See Mark along with the gospels of Matthew and Luke, they're referred to as synoptic gospels. That word synoptic, just a combination of the Greek preposition sin meaning along or together with and then the Greek verb optuo which just means to see. So consequently, we refer to these texts as synoptics because you can look at and examine them kind of as a whole together. They have a lot of similarities. But another way to think about this is that these texts look at Jesus, at his story, at his chronology of death, life, resurrection.
Speaker 2:They look at this story with a lot of similarities. Most biblical scholars think these similarities stem from a couple of historical facts. The first is that Mark is the earliest of the narratives that we have that was collected from the oral traditions and stories being told by Jesus's earliest friends and followers and then secondly that the writers of Matthew and Luke come along later and they appear to have used or copied or plagiarized, if you want to use a modern term, they used Mark's text as they composed and expounded their own story about Jesus and one of the ways that you could conceptualize this is that if you take the gospel of Mark, you divide it into a 105 little segments, Matthew includes 93 of those segments in his story, it's about 88% and Luke takes 81 of them, roughly 77% and when you consider that only four of those a 105 aren't in either Matthew or Luke, it's easy to understand then why we say that these gospels see or conceptualize Jesus together. This doesn't mean that there aren't differences however. For example, Matthew is fascinated with Jesus's rabbinic sermons so he images Jesus preaching all the time and Luke fills his story about Jesus with the largest and most unique collection of parables, the stories that Jesus told himself and Mark, well in this gospel Jesus teaches more with actions than with words and in this fall series and then again in the spring when we come back to it, we're going to see a Jesus that's far less inclined to sit beside the sea and up on a hill walking through his talking points.
Speaker 2:See Mark's Jesus gets out there and gets after it. He moves to a particular place in the countryside or somewhere and then quickly immediately moves on from there. Sometimes it feels like we're watching a top 10 plays list, it's a bit overwhelming at times and here's why gospel uniqueness and perspective matters I think because here baked into the recipe of Christian meaning making is this need to hold and maintain some difference. This actual intuition guided the collection and the collation of scripture where the unique perspective and agendas of each gospel writer, they weren't reduced into a single book, a flattened monomyth, No. It was their difference of perspective that the early mothers and fathers of the tradition believed together we could catch a glimpse through this diverse lens.
Speaker 2:We could catch a glimpse of who Jesus was and maybe even who Jesus is. And at times it can feel like we've lost some of our capacity for the assumption of difference. I'm sure somebody here in the room has encountered a community of faith that was inflexible or harsh with those who didn't share their theology. Maybe you've had a loved one or a friend who just sort of inexplicably pulled away from you because you seem to want to explore some perspectives about God that they weren't comfortable with or maybe you just walked around for a while wondering if anyone else asks the questions that you're afraid to say are rolling around in your head. We know that so many of us come to our community with these kinds of experiences and to be clear, our aspiration to be a curious and honest community in our teaching, in our groups, in all our conversations, this conviction is rooted in our understanding that the scriptures that guide us, those scriptures actually invite and inspire varied perspectives And quick note, if this idea intrigues you, we're actually going to deep dive it some more in our great tradition course on Tuesday nights in November.
Speaker 2:We're going to talk a little bit about how the poignancy of Christian faith is not based on a singular view of Jesus, How Christian tradition and theology and hermeneutics and mysticism, these things have all changed and how this diversity helps us see Jesus more clearly. The truth is right here in the way the gospels shape our imagination in different ways, how they help us see together without demanding that we all see the same. With this in mind, let's turn to Mark's gospel and its opening line which is this, the beginning of the good news about Jesus, the Messiah, the son of God. And on first pass, that doesn't sound like a verse, just sounds like a heading. It's actually in the following verses that we learn about John the Baptist who was kind of like an opening act for Jesus.
Speaker 2:We see Jesus baptized and we see Jesus spend some time in the desert being tested, which makes this phrase here the literary equivalent of someone clearing their throat to signal that they're about to start telling a story. But there's actually some significant theology, some ideas wrapped up here, and I think that this is theology that can help us throughout this series. It might even be helpful in the middle of this coming week because the gospel opens with the Greek noun, arche, which is just translated as beginning. And there's wide agreement among biblical scholars that this is an obvious echo of the opening lines of the Hebrew scriptures way back in the book of Genesis, which in its Greek translation reads, n r k or in beginning, which meant that the ancient author of this particular text was positioning the story of Jesus that they intended to tell as a continuation of sorts of an older tale. But actually, I think I think we can even extend that idea a little bit.
Speaker 2:I think it's bigger than that. I think this in line with what scholar Chet Myers argues, and this is that the mark and author by invoking the story of divine creation way back, the beginning of all things, the Markan author is suggesting a fundamental regeneration of salvation history was about to take place. And some of you are like, fundamental regeneration of salvation history, it is Sunday morning, Scott. Break it down. What does that mean?
Speaker 2:Well, it means that this isn't just the start of Jesus' story. And that Jesus' story isn't just an episode, episode number two in a continuing series. No. The Markan author imagines that you are about to see God's creative redemptive work start again. And if you take this perspective with you into Mark, if you take it with you into life, it shapes the theology you use and you build with because Mark will show you Jesus acting within the fabric of everyday ancient life where people are making choices and career changes, where rumbling stomachs are filled, where bodies and minds are restored along the way.
Speaker 2:And in these things, the beginnings are tangible. You can see them in the world, which invites us to read Mark as a story of beginnings. And then to reimagine your faith, whatever state it's in, as the practice of beginning again. And maybe you need that as you try to grieve well and move on. Maybe you need that as you're practicing forgiveness, finding new rhythms with somebody that you're trying to love.
Speaker 2:Maybe you need it as you've gone through recent failure, and you're gonna get up tomorrow and you're gonna try. You're gonna try again. You're gonna. Or maybe it's just as simple as you're trying to reconcile yourself to a faith that you thought you knew. Now it's different.
Speaker 2:Now it's changed, and you want it to grow. These beginnings on many more find their source in the story Mark tells us now. Now there is another observation we need to make about this opening statement, and it's rooted in some social commentary that we miss because here we are, we're sitting in the twenty first century. It's found in this language of good news that the author uses. For many of us, if you've been around a Christian community, you may have heard this, it might sound familiar, good news.
Speaker 2:This is because the Greek term here euangelion, it's another compound word, it's built from the prefix eu, which means good and the noun euangelion, which means message or news or tidings. The term actually made it into old English as godspell, good news, it's where we get the word gospel and over time that word gospel came to refer to the texts that tell us stories about Jesus, it also came to represent the central truth or the defining message of scripture in general. I don't know about you but I think for lots of us, for modern ears, gospel and good news feels a little tired, feels a little overused and this is because we aren't aware of the overt social and political meaning this language had in the ancient world. See in the Greco Roman contemporary culture around the writer of Mark, the term euangelion was used in announcements of the birth or the ascension or the victory of the emperors, such as the notable paeaan inscription that spoke of Augustus just a few decades before Jesus' life and the inscription read this, the birthday of the God began for the world the announcement of good news.
Speaker 2:But was it good? Roman imperial good news was a carefully constructed project where history and myth, the media of coins and inscriptions and images, they were used to deify the ruling power and to celebrate the power of Rome, the glory of Rome, glory that was always secured on a battlefield and enslavement and occupation. These were the circumstances that the Marcan audience knew, which is why they they didn't miss it when the Markan author claims to be telling them good news of a different kind. Good news as a challenge to the apparatus of empire, its myths and practices of violence. Good news that in the following chapters, as the story unfolds in the embodied, unassuming, humble way of Jesus as he walks into the world, this is what Elizabeth Mellon, a biblical scholar, calls a revisioning of power.
Speaker 2:And I am sure that in a world where we are watching violence unfold and the elimination of enemies is celebrated as good news by all sides, We need a different story. In a world where so many of us seek success and security and we celebrate acquisition and accomplishment as good news without being honest about the cost to our souls, our bodies, our minds, our relationships, we need a different story. In a world where you daily receive news about who others think you are and you take in the messaging about who you have to become to be okay or to be good. When deep down you're struggling to know or to want to believe or to hold on to something deeper than that, that you are gift, that you are valuable, that you have voice, we need a better story and Mark offers us an alternative in his telling. We're going to see this in the coming weeks Because in Jesus unfolding life, in his compassionate care for others, in his friendships and his willingness to love, we hear the good news of what being human can look like.
Speaker 2:And we hear the rumors of a future that we all desperately need. So maybe you're sitting here this morning, and you feel like maybe by this point, we should have explored more than the background and theology of one phrase if we are gonna get through Mark in just a few weeks. It's a legitimate concern. I understand it today. But I assure you, the pace of Mark's narrative, it's gonna move us along.
Speaker 2:Don't you worry. Before we jump into the action though, I want us to look at one phrase right at the end of this prologue that we're looking at. See, after Mark verse one, which we've been looking at, the author takes about a dozen verses to give some snapshots about what happens before Jesus goes public. And then finally, we hear Jesus speak. We read that after John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee and proclaimed the good news of God.
Speaker 2:The time has come, Jesus said. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent. Believe the good news. I want to zero in on where Jesus says, it's time because his declaration that the realm of God had been extended and come close, his invitation to his friends and followers to turn, that's all that word repent means, turn, come in a different direction, take a different path, choose an alternative way.
Speaker 2:These statements seem to flow out of a personal realization. I think the hints are there in the narrative if you look for him. See, after his cousin John was put in prison, maybe Jesus clued in to the fact that his message and convictions were going to cost him. Maybe he was getting a little tired of watching people who stood up for justice being silenced and maybe he started to recognize his personal responsibility to his community so Jesus leaves Judea. Beginning of the story, we see Jesus down near Jerusalem in Judea, this area of Southern Israel.
Speaker 2:He leaves there. He leaves the circles of influence. He leaves the swirling debates. He steps out of the spotlight. He gets off Twitter.
Speaker 2:He goes away from the personalities and the influencers and he goes north to Galilee, to the obscurity of his home stomping grounds, to the places, to the social networks, to the communities where perhaps he thought he could make a difference. And there, he makes this declaration that the time has come. Now that word that's translated here as time, it's actually the Greek word kairos. That's a value laden description of time. See in Greek definition and imagination of time, were different conceptions and words for time.
Speaker 2:One of these of course was kronos, which as you can infer for how this ends up in English, this is a reference to clock time. Right? To passing time, to time's quantitative value. What what time is it? Do you have time?
Speaker 2:How much time is left in this sermon, Scott? Right? Do you understand? Kairos, the word used alternatively, described the qualitative nature of time. That is, is this the right time?
Speaker 2:Is this a crucial or important time? Is this a good time to end this sermon? Makes sense. Right? And what I find striking is the way that the action of the gospel, the action of God's redemptive work in the world, it seems to begin again out of this realization that Jesus had where for whatever reason and through circumstances and experiences we don't fully understand or see in the text, Jesus became aware and then he became settled.
Speaker 2:He decided and he started to announce and embody this resounding truth. Now, now is time to act. And in the chapters that follow, we're going to see him gather his friends, he's going to invite them to act two. We're going to watch him confront systems that were wounding the dispossessed in his culture and the those who are around him. We're gonna hear him raise his voice in frustration when religious conviction restrains people's capacity for compassion, and we're gonna observe as he gives his life and along the way, transforming our imagination of what it looks like for God to work in the world.
Speaker 2:And in light of all this, our tradition has long affirmed that Christ's action in it, God entered time in a unique way. But what the prologue of Mark's gospel uniquely invites us to consider is how in following the way of Jesus, we enter time too. We're invited to grow in our awareness that perhaps, and I don't know where you are today, what you're facing, but maybe in some relationship, in some area of your responsibility, the ways you lead and shape others. Maybe in some issue that's facing your community, the time has come. There's such a need for good news.
Speaker 2:And maybe we can bring it. Where with every attempt to listen to those you don't understand, the world becomes a little more gracious. Where with every effort you make to be self aware, the world becomes a fraction more patient. Where with every touch or with every heartfelt word, every gift or generosity that you express and extend, the world becomes warmer and more welcoming. Or with every time you decenter your need and your desire and the fear that cripples you sometimes, the world finds a little more peace.
Speaker 2:Let's pause and pray together. Gracious spirit, we are present to now in this gift of some quietness. No need to rush. We're present to this opportunity that I think comes to us in all of life. This invitation to imagine the world as you thought it could be.
Speaker 2:This invitation to consider how Jesus' humble way is better for us. It's better for our neighbor. It's better for our enemy. And where we can sense maybe our imaginations have been a bit narrow, we ask that you would forgive us. Where our hurt, maybe our shame, maybe our fear, maybe these things have hemmed us in, maybe they've restrained us.
Speaker 2:We ask for grace today. We pray that you would give us courage to begin again, trusting your goodness to go ahead into all of the places of our action. We pray for courage to trust your attempts to create, to protect, and create a place of welcome in the world. And even now, knowing that we will not do this perfectly, we ask that when we feel like we lose hold or we lose sight, we ask that you would hold us and teach us to trust a better story. Pray this now in the name of Christ, our hope.
Speaker 2:Amen.
Speaker 3:Hey. Jeremy here, and thanks for listening to our podcast. If you're intrigued by the work that we're doing here at Commons, you can head to our website, commons.church, for more information. You can find us on all of the socials commonschurch. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel where we are posting content regularly for the community.
Speaker 3:You can also join our Discord server. Head to commons.churchdiscord for the invite, and there you will find the community having all kinds of conversations about how we can encourage each other to follow the way of Jesus. We would love to hear from you. Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Have a great week.
Speaker 3:We'll talk to you soon.