The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God

Scripture Lessons: Psalm 91: 9-12 and Mark 1: 1-20 Sermon Title: The Beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God Preached on June 14, 2020 This is a strange time for me as a preacher. I say that, not hoping for sympathy, but because what I’m feeling now may be something close to what you’re feeling. Maybe like you, my relationships feel like their suffering because without seeing people I care about, physically, I can’t really tell where things stand, and I fill in what I don’t know with too much negative stuff. They say most of communication is none verbal. That’s why phone calls are imperfect, and emails are even worse. We understand and process between words which we hear with what we see. If we see them smile back at us, we know they’re happy. Or by watching as tears well up in their eyes we know more about what their feeling than words could ever tell us. Plus, we feel close to people when they touch us. We know we’re being understood based on all kinds of cues, but I’m here in this pulpit and I do an awful lot of talking. Only I’m talking without knowing how what I’m saying is being received. You might know how strange that is, or how less than ideal. What I typically do is I preach, and I look at your faces. I can tell when I’ve gone on for too long because someone has fallen asleep. I can tell when I’ve gone too far or not far enough because I’m reading your faces while I’m talking. You do the same thing. I wonder if the number one thing we all are missing, it’s certainly the number one thing that I’m missing right now is face to face. Face to face at the grocery store so we don’t have to tell people when we’re smiling beneath our facemask. Face to face with grandchildren. Face to face with our church family. Face to face is a human need and so, that’s what God does. We just read a long Scripture passage from the Gospel of Mark. Rev. Cassie Waits and I are the preachers for this month and next. She suggested we focus on the Gospel of Mark and I agreed. This is the first in a series six. Six sermons, six readings from the Gospel of Mark covering about the first half of this Gospel. We’ll cover a lot ground in these next several weeks and we just did today. The Scripture Lesson began with a clear title: The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. What we all know about Jesus is that he is God in flesh in blood, walking around, moving into our neighborhood, taking on the mortal coil, experiencing our joys and fears, suffering even. He’s not bystander to human existence, but in Christ our God takes human flesh. I don’t want to rush past this miracle though I know you’ve heard all about it many times before, because it’s just so earth-shattering and nearly unprecedented. There’s just not much else like it in the world of religion. Much of what we know of the religion of the Ancient Greeks is quite different. Did you ever see those old Greek myth movies? Jason and the Argonauts? A bunch of guys in beards and animal skins fighting off Claymation monsters? The way I remember it, just as in the ancient myths, the god’s in those movies had this place up in the clouds on Mt. Olympus and they could look down on the earth to watch the human dramas unfold. According to the myths, occasionally they’d come down, but what sticks with me from the movies was this portal they had to look into our lives. It was like their TV. It was reality TV before there was reality TV. Their window into our lives was on the floor. They moved the clouds to watch and be entertained, but how much could they really know of humans when watching from a distance? How much can anyone really know about anything when watching from a distance, so what does God do? God comes close. Incarnate in human form. Walking the earth in our shoes. Do you remember those stories inspired by this kind of incarnation? There’s the Prince and the Pauper where these two boys who look alike switch places. The prince finds out how hard it is to be a pauper and the pauper finds out that being the prince isn’t all sitting around eating cake. They’re both better for it. Why? Because when assumptions drive us, we get all messed up. A couple older gentlemen back in Tennessee once told me about the first time they met a yankee. When they were just young boys having never met one before, they threw rocks at him. Now, why would someone do that? How could someone do that? But when we don’t see people, we make stuff up, and what we make up is nearly all the time far worse than the truth. These two probably thought he had come to town like the Carpet Baggers they’d heard from their parents and grandparents. Imagine if we based all our impressions of people not on what we learned after meeting them, but on what we’d heard. I went to college with a Tennessean named Will who went to school up in Maine. The first people he met up there were surprised he wore shoes. Why? Because if your opinion of people from Eastern Tennessee is based on the Beverly Hillbillies, you’ll think all kinds of crazy stuff, so what does God do? Does he take someone’s word for it? Does he come to understand the human condition, based on what he can see through the clouds? No. Again and again, God draws near. God draws near to get to know us, and we must constantly allow our assumptions to die lest we see the world as full of enemies rather than brothers and sisters. After the girls are in bed Sara and I watch TV together. Right now, we’re watching a show called Poldark. It’s one of those Masterpiece Classics that also comes on PBS like Downton Abby. I find some of the Masterpiece shows to be a little slow, but that’s OK. I just take a nap while Sara watches. Poldark put me to sleep just a couple times, but only a couple times. The main character in this show is a British veteran of the American Revolution. This redcoat goes home to Cornwall to manage his family’s copper mine, and he gets into all these adventures. He’s like an 18th Century Rambo with a British accent, exceptional manners, and an enlightened mind. On the subject of war, Poldark tells his wife Demelza: “It’s horrible what men can do to other men once they’ve convinced themselves that their enemy is less than human.” I think about how police officers are being talked about today. Now I do stand with those who march peacefully, knowing that some bad officers have treated those in their care as less than human. And I don’t just know it. I’ve seen it. But any crowd or politician whose been convinced that all police officers are evil are promoting the same prejudice they’re protesting against. It’s horrible what people will do to each other once they’ve convinced themselves that their enemy or opponent or subject or family member is less than human. What if we all took the time to say to ourselves in the midst of our anger or frustration, “I don’t agree with this person: this liberal, this conservative, this protestor, this police officer and I wonder why they think the way they do?” What we all too often do instead, is assume we already know, saying to ourselves, “Oh, I know. They must be stupid.” What’s different about Jesus is this: He could have sat up in the clouds making assumptions. Instead, he took on our flesh to really understand. He just kept drawing closer and closer to us until he understood why we are all so broken and confused. Because he understood us all and why we do the things that we do, even from the cross he called out: “Forgive them father for they know not what they do.” In this Scripture Lesson from the Gospel of Mark he even got baptized. Why? For what? “What sins did the Lord need to have washed away?” we ask. Only, that’s not the point. He’s taking on our condition. He’s baptized to be as we are and to do as we have. He just keeps coming closer and closer. He didn’t even keep his distance from Satan. Now that’s important, isn’t it? Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark doesn’t include any details of what this encounter was like. Typically, I would say that being “in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan” sounds graphic enough, only now, after three months of isolation we might say: forty days? That’s nothing. Only, consider what happens to us after forty days or three weeks of isolation. What has happened to us after three weeks of only looking out on the world through our television screen or Facebook feed. Consider what happens to our view of the world when we aren’t apart of it? Consider what happens to how we think about people when we can’t see them or hear them or be with them face to face. How hard it is to get to know a person through email! How hard it is to ease a troubled relationship or work out a disagreement if you can’t see their face and really understand! For the past three months, we may as well have been up in the clouds, looking down, having no real understanding of the people we’re looking down on. When that’s the case it becomes all too easy to give up. Yet, Cindy Buchanan (member of our church and mother of my oldest friend, Matt) said it better than anyone: “The zombie movies convinced us that after months of a viral pandemic we’d all be eating each other. Only, when I actually see people, I see how much kindness there is in the world.” The tempter whispers in our ears: just give up on them. They’ll never get it. They’re not worth it. Jesus never did that. I just know he never did. Even after 40 days in the wilderness tempted by Satan himself, Jesus never gave up on the world or on us. After the temptation our Scripture Lesson’s last few verses described what he was doing. John had been arrested and he started proclaiming good news. Then, “he passed along the Sea of Galilee.” That’s all it says: “he passed along.” What do you think that means? I imagine he was whistling. Or enjoying the waves as they hit his feet. Then he looked up and saw two fishermen: Simon and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the sea – for they were fishermen. I imagine Jesus thinking to himself, “I’ve always loved watching fishermen cast their nets into the sea. I wonder what else those two could catch… Follow me and I will make you fish for people,” he said to them. And immediately they left their nets and followed him. A few years ago, I got caught reading the Bible in a doctor’s waiting room. A man said to me, “I love to read the Bible too. It tells us what God is like and how we should be.” What is God like? God is like Jesus. Longing to know us. Always loving us. Saving all his harsh words for those religious authorities who cared more about rules and status than people. And how should we be? Not like them. Like him. Amen.