Without An Ending

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Mark 16:1-8:

Have you ever been watching a movie when it just suddenly ends? That is there is no resolution, or perhaps you want to know a lot more information then was presented, and you’re like, wait, what? You can’t end it like that. There has to be more story there, what happened after that? I need more; give me more. The gospel of Mark is just like that. Our earliest and best manuscripts end at verse 8a with the women fleeing from the tomb in fear and not telling anyone. And so our desire to wonder if that is it and expect a little more, is nothing new, because at some point later scribed or editors added in more stories to make it match closer to what the other gospels contain. To have post resurrection appearances and to have Mary tell others of the resurrection. And so if you open up the pew Bible, for those in the sanctuary, to page 55 in the New Testament and those watching online I encourage you to open your Bible to the end of Mark in chapter 16, and you will see there that you have what is called the shorter ending starting at verse 8b, and then the longer ending starting at verse 9. You will also see they are in brackets and there is a footnote saying that these ending are not original to Mark, although they are part of the tradition and so the translators are not removing them, at least not yet. Now part of the problem is that the Greek actually ends very strangely, as it there might have originally been more. That has led to speculation that perhaps Mark was arrested or otherwise stopped from being able to finish, or perhaps the last page of the manuscript was lost, although those seem extremely unlikely. And the other theory, and the one I subscribe to, is that it ends exactly the way that Mark intended it to end. Because, in my opinion, if you pay attention to the story Mark tells, and why he is telling it, his abrupt ending makes total sense, and I’ll tell you why, although not quite yet.

Last week when we looked at chapter 13 and the little Apocalypse, I said that it is believed by most scholars that Mark was written sometime around the year 70 during the time of the Jewish revolt, and is the first of the gospels to be written. It’s also speculated that it was perhaps written in Rome, although there is not a consensus on that, where the church had also been facing persecution under the emperor Nero and his fiddling. Perhaps it was the fiddling that was the torture. And while the gospel has also traditionally been attributed to Mark, a partner of Peter, there is nothing in the gospel supporting that attribution and it does not claim to be written by Mark. I say all that first to note that the reason the gospels were even begun to be written down was because the second coming had not yet happened, as the early church it would come shortly, and therefore there was no reason to record the stories, but when it didn’t happen, they didn’t want to lose the story. And so these stories are being recorded to start around 40 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, and so the community first hearing Mark would have known about the resurrection, and later appearances, which gave Mark, as I have argued, greater latitude in telling his story. He didn’t really need to tell us about Mary passing on the story to the disciples because people already knew that she had done that. They had heard Paul’s stories of post resurrection appearances, including to him. And so as I said in the first week, Mark is not writing history or a biography, he’s writing a gospel, which is theological, and Mark can leave out some stories because they are not crucial to his particular story.

The Little Apocalypse

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Mark 13:1-9, 12-13, 21-26, 32, 35-37:

There are just some passages from scripture that at the end it’s a little hard to say, this is the good news of Jesus Christ, or even this is the word of God for the people of God. And the passage we heard from Mark today, and even to a degree from Daniel, is one of those passages. Pain, war, destruction, suffering, “yea, God.” Or as I overheard one of the choir members say one time, if that’s the good news, what’s the bad news. That passage we heard from Mark is known as Mark’s little apocalypse, although it’s not technically an apocalypse at all. But a little prelude and postlude for this story so that we can better understand not just what Jesus is saying, but also what Mark is doing with this story it its construction. Last week we heard Jesus’ third passion prediction which was given as he and the disciples and others were making their way to Jerusalem. Mark then has the story of the transfiguration, which we will come back to next week, then Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem, which we celebrate on Palm Sunday. The Jesus spends a few days in and around the Temple grounds, which is where the passage we heard picks up as he is leaving the Temple. But, Jesus is not just being a tourist there, he’s also engaging with the religious leaders on various questions, and then he makes a judgment against the Temple its leaders.

When we looked at the Parable of the Sower, I said that New Testament scholar Mary Ann Tolbert said that there were two parables which described not Jesus’ ministry and mission, but also the entirety of Mark’s gospel. One of them, and the most important was the parable of the sower, and the second is that of the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. In that Parable, which comes at the beginning of chapter 12, we are told that a man plants a vineyard, and builds a watchtower, and prepares everything then leases it out to tenants. Then, when the time comes for the landowner to collect what’s do to him he sends servants, but they are rejected and beaten, and insulted and some are killed, and so finally he decides to send his beloved son, his only son, and they too kill him so they can claim the land. So what does the landowner do? He comes and destroys the tenants and gives the vineyard to others. And so this parable we should be hearing the owner as God, the tenants as the religious leaders, and a watchtower is a common metaphor used for the Temple, and of course the son is Jesus. And so really this could be seen as a potential fourth passion prediction, although the purpose is to make judgment against the leaders of the Temple.

Give Us Power

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Mark 10:35-45:

Exactly two weeks before he would be assassinated, martyred for his work for racial and economic justice, and calls for peace, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., educated at a United Methodist school, preached his last sermon. Entitled “The Drum Major Instinct” it was based on the passage that we just heard from Mark. And what King said was that there is a natural tendency in most people, and maybe all people, to want to be out front. And in being the one out front it also give us the glory, people applaud us directly, even if it’s meant for the whole band, but we are separated from them as well, leading the way. And yet that’s the opposite of what Jesus has called us to in the life of discipleship, and we see that in the audacious request, or perhaps we might even say brazen request, that James and John make to Jesus. And yet we shouldn’t be all that surprised, because as we have encountered several times already as we have made our way through Mark, the disciples continue to not get or understand what Jesus is telling them and teaching them about discipleship.

As I’ve said before, Mark likes to group stories and themes together, to sort of serve as a framework of emphasis. And so two weeks we heard Jesus’ first passion prediction, which was then immediately followed by a teaching by Jesus about discipleship. And why was that teaching necessary? Because Peter rebukes Jesus for the passion prediction. And so Jesus tells them ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” That’s chapter 8, and as a reminder that happens after Jesus heals a blind man. Then in chapter 9, along with the story of the transfiguration, which we will come back to in two weeks, Jesus gives his second passion prediction, and this time we are told specifically that the disciples don’t understand what he is saying and they are afraid to ask him to explain it. And then to show us how much they don’t understand, they begin arguing amongst themselves about who is the greatest, and in overhearing this Jesus tells them “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Now the truth is that there is a hierarchy within the disciples, that there are three who seem to be in positions of prominence, or at least preference, and those three are Peter, James and John, although it’s not clear what part they play in the argument about greatness or if there is jealousy amongst the other disciples for their position. But, we have two passion predictions, two examples of the disciples not getting it, and then correction and teaching from Jesus about discipleship. So surely they must be starting to understand right?

The Confession

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Mark 8:27-38:

For those who study the literary structure of scripture, some have argued that the gospel of Mark is circular. Not that he is making a circular argument but that the stories that happen at the beginning of Mark are paralleled at the end, so that there are rings to the story. If you accept that argument then the center of the gospel can also be found, the story around which everything else centers. But, even if you don’t accept that theory, and I’m not arguing either for it or against it, in Mark there is a clear center of the story. A clear place in which everything leads up to it, and then everything leads away from it, and that is the story we heard this morning of Peter’s proclamation of faith and the first passion prediction that Jesus makes. It also happens to be conveniently enough, basically right in the center of the gospel as well. There are 16 chapters in Mark and the story is found in chapter 8. It also represents a break in time. There are three years of Jesus’ ministry encapsulated up to this point, and he begins making his way to Jerusalem with 3 passion predictions in the next two chapters, and then the remaining five chapters tell the last week of Jesus’ life. That delineation is why Mark has sometimes been referred to as a passion narrative with an extended introduction. And it is this passage that begins that passion narrative especially with Jesus’ passion prediction. I’ve already talked a little about how Mark structures the story around grouping stories or common themes. And this chunk of text is also bracketed by two healing stories, that also happen to be the healing of blind men, and we’ll come back to why that is important.

But Jesus and the disciples have left Galilee and are traveling to the cities, or the area of Caesarea Philippi. Now this is a town named for two Roman rules, first for Caesar Augustus, and then for Herod Phillip, Herod the Great’s son who is the ruler, the tetrarch, of the area. And so there is a clear roman presence and political importance to this town. Additionally, depending on when Mark was written, and we’ll address that in a few weeks, Vespasian, before he becomes Emperor, rested his troops in the city before going forth to crush the Jewish resistance in Galilee during the Jewish Revolt, and his son Titus, before he too becomes emperor, celebrated his victory over Jerusalem in the city by executing captives and holding a victory games. So there is a lot of significance to where this is taking place for those who first heard Mark’s story. But, Jesus is not in the city, he is on the way there. Instead he is in that in-between that is so important in Mark; he is in the wilderness. And he asks the disciples “who do people say that I am?”

Seed and Soil

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Mark 4:1-20:

In the synoptic gospels, which are Matthew, Mark and Luke, called that because they have the same synopses of Jesus’ life, there are around 30 parables. There are none found in John. And I say there are around 30, because there is great debate around what a parable is and isn’t. We tend to have a much narrower view of parables now than how they were understood in the first century, when they included not just the stories we are sort of familiar in thinking of being parables, but also included narratives, proverbs and other sayings or teachings that have a deeper religious significance then just a straightforward meaning. But, of the 30 or so parables, five to eight are found in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and while we might argue about significance, the parable we heard this morning, which has come to be known as the parable of the sower, might be the most important of those that we have multiple times. This is especially true for the gospel of Mark and for its understanding and overall story telling. 

Indeed, in her book, Sowing the Gospel, which can give you some indication of where this is going, New Testament scholar Mary Ann Tolbert says that the parable of the sower in particular, and matched with the parable of the wicked tenants found in chapter 12 of Mark, as well as also in Matthew and Luke, “present in concise, summary form the Gospel’s view of Jesus: He is the sower of the word and the heir of the vineyard. The first emphasizes his task and the second his identity; together they make up the gospel’s basic narrative.” (122) That is to say that these two parables orient us to not only what the gospel is about, and what Jesus’ message is about, but about how to identify the characters in the story and what is to be expected if we truly understand and follow Jesus’ message, although she argues that the Parable of the Sower is the more important of the two.

Don't Tell Anyone

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Mark 1:40-2:12:

In 1901 William Wrede, who was a German New Testament scholar, published a book which came to be known in English as The Messianic Secret. Although there was initial rejection of his theory, it later became prominent in Markan scholarship. What Wrede was trying to wrestle with in Mark was two problems: The first is that Jesus never claims that he is the messiah and the second is that Jesus has this strange habit in Mark of telling people not to tell others who he is, or what he is doing. Jesus does this with the disciples, with those he heals and others and with demons he encounters. And so what Wrede argued was that Mark created this story of Jesus hiding his identity by asking people to keep quiet about it in order to overcome the tension in the early church between their belief that Jesus was the messiah against Jesus never claiming he was the Messiah. And so he postulated the idea of the Messianic secret that Jesus knew he was the Messiah but didn’t say so in order to be able to do his work, and that the disciples knew it all along but didn’t say it until after the resurrection because Jesus told them not to. Now I think Wrede is correct about one thing, and that is that Mark probably made up Jesus telling everyone not to say anything, and before you freak out about that I’ll explain why in a moment, but he is wrong about the reason, and there is no messianic secret. And although Wrede’s theory has largely fallen out of favor, if you read commentaries you will still find people tying themselves into knots to try and explain why Jesus is trying to keep everything secret, and in my opinion not only don’t their ideas make any sense, they are missing the most obvious thing, and that’s about what Mark is trying to teach us about discipleship and the cost of discipleship and what proper discipleship looks like.

And so last week as we began this series on Mark, and we looked at the beginning verses I commented on the fact that we get an early example of the cost of discipleship demonstrated for us in John the Baptist. That Jesus’ ministry begins when John is arrested and that he will then later be executed by the state as well, just as Jesus does. And so we already can see what discipleship means before we even get into the story of Jesus. And then when Jesus does begin his ministry he too has a call to repentance, just as John did, although he does not yet talk about forgiveness, that comes in the passage we heard today, but he also says that the Kingdom of God has come near. And I said that Jesus will then begin to show what that Kingdom looks like, or what God’s will is for the world, and that begins with healing. Because the first healing story in today’s passage of the healing of the leper, which ends the first chapter, is actually the third healing story to take place in Mark. The first healing takes place in a synagogue where Jesus heals a man who we are told has an unclean spirit, that is he is possessed, but the demon knows who Jesus is, calling him “the Holy One of God.” and Jesus silences him and casts it out. They then make their way to the home of Simon Peter, where Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law, before he goes to a deserted place, remembering the importance of wilderness, which will come back in a moment, before then moving into the region of Galilee to preach and cast out demons, which is where he encounters the man with leprosy.

The Gospel

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Mark 1:1-14:

We get the English word gospel from the old English word gōdspel. Now spel means to report of to tell news, and so with the prefix it looks like it could mean to tell news about God. Except that the prefix actually isn’t god, but instead means good. And so gōdspel, just like gospel, means the good news, or proclaiming good news. And that is the message that starts the gospel of Mark, “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Now we could probably spend our whole time just unpacking that single line, but we’re not going to, except to say that the Greek word for good news there, is the word that the old English gōdspel was trying to capture and that is euangelion. In looking at that word, I’m sure you can see some antecedents of some English words, like evangelist and also angel, which is appropriate as those who bring good news. But it had broader meaning than that as well. It was the news that was brought, it was the person who brought the news and it was also the word used for a reward given to the person bringing the news. So we still have the expression don’t kill the messenger, which would sometimes happen, but the opposite of that was that a reward would be given to someone who brought good news. Same word. And so we have reference to this in several famous Greek works, including Homer and Plutarch and Cicero. And yet, it appears that Mark is doing something very different here with this word. Mark is saying is that this good news is not just about the message, but it’s about the messenger himself. That Jesus is not just the bringer of the good news, but the good news himself and that appears to be unique.

Now Paul, who is responsible for the earliest Christian writings that we have, had also used the term euangelion as good news, but he was primarily referencing to the death and resurrection of Jesus. And although Mark has been said to be a passion narrative with a long introduction, he appears to be the first to be making not just the connection that he is, but also possibly creating a new genre of literature, the gospel. There is lots of argument of whether that is what Mark is doing here, as he doesn’t actually call this work a gospel, and there is speculation of whether he was building off of other works already in existence that we no longer have access to. But, this is a different type of work than what we know existed at the time, such as the works about great men, thinking things like Plutarch’s Lives. Luke’s gospel is very similar to that type of work, but Mark is not. He is doing something different, and again that’s encapsulated in this opening line “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” 

Carry Out Kindness

Here is my message from Sunday. The texts were James 1:17-27 and Luke 6:27-38:

After last week’s message on practicing praise, I had a lot of people coming up to me to give me thanks, and so then I had to decide whether it was just everyone working on practicing praise, especially the injunction not to let people assume you are appreciated, but to tell them, or if there were lots of people who decided to practice the kindness challenge on me. But, since one of the things we are working on is assuming the best of intentions for others, I am going to go with the first answer. Today we conclude in our series on the Kindness Challenge, which is based off a book by the same name by Shaunti Feldhahn, and so a quick recap of the three rules of the kindness challenge. The first rule is to nix the negativity, that is we are not to say anything negative to the person we are doing the kindness challenge for, not to say anything negative about them to someone else. The second rule is practice praise, that is as we start to stop focusing on the negative we instead look for positives and to give one piece of praise or affirmation about someone else every day, and tell someone else what you praised them for. If you missed either of those messages, I would encourage you to go back and listen to them, which then leads us into the final rule, which we cover today, and that is to carry out kindness, or to do a small act of kindness or generosity for the person you are doing the kindness challenge for every day, and to do all three of these steps for 30 days, although you don’t have to stop there.

Additionally, while the kindness challenge asks you to do each of these things every day for 30 days, and really you can practice these for anyone and at any time. And the truth is if we want the world to be a kinder place, then it has to start with us. If we want people to be kinder, then we need to be kinder. And what’s more we shouldn’t be doing any of these actions with the expectation that we will get anything in return. We do them simply because they are the right things to be doing, the way that we should be living. And we of course hear that quite a bit in scripture. As we heard in James today, he says that we are to be doers of the world, not just hearers, which is a preview of him saying that faith without works is dead.

Practice Praise

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Thessalonians 5:12-23 and Luke 17:11-19:

Two weeks ago when we began talking about the kindness challenge, I said that I had originally planned on doing this series later, but felt called that we needed to be doing it now. That decision has been reinforced not just by those of you who have commented on the need to have this, and the arguments you all are having about kindness, which maybe sort of kind of defeating the point. But it was also reinforced by an email we got from the principal of the middle school this past week telling parents that one of their key emphasis to students was to be kind to one another, and then a meeting with the athletic director for the school district who said that she has a hard time retaining coaches because of the grief that they receive from some parents. And what she then basically said, although she didn’t know the language that we are using was to nix the negative, stop criticizing everything they do, give them a break, and instead start practicing praise and supporting them, and so that covers the first of the two rules of what we are being challenged to do in practicing the Kindness Challenge.

And so as a quick reminder this comes from a book of the same name written by Shaunti Feldhahn, and while the ultimate goal is to practice kindness in all areas of our lives, the challenge is to pick one relationship which you would like to improve, it could one that is only hanging on by a thread, or maybe one that’s going okay, but could be better, and then for 30 days to do three things. The first is not to say anything negative to them or about them to anyone else, and a reminder because someone asked me this week, that also includes all the non-verbal ways we express negativity or our displeasure. And there is a supplement, or another option for that rule that is really for men who are doing the challenge for their spouse, and you can hear about that or the other ways to avoid negativity by listening to last week’s message, which is available on our website and our Facebook and YouTube pages. The second rule, which is what we are talking about today, is to practice praise which is to find one positive thing that you can sincerely praise or affirm about the person you are doing the challenge for and to tell them and tell one other person, and do that every day for 30 days. And then the third rule, which we’ll conclude with next week is to do a small act of kindness or generosity every day for your person. And so while removing the negative comments is important, practicing praise, having to look for and talk about positive things in order to give praise is the catalyst to kindness because it then causes you to have to change what it is you are focusing on and paying attention to.

Nix the Negative

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:21-24 and James 3:1-12:

When Charles Darwin was originally formulating his idea of evolution, he said that one of the things that almost undid it for him was the idea of kindness and altruism, let alone sacrifice. After all, if it’s about the survival of the fittest and making sure that your genes survive for future generations, taking care of your own makes sense, but why would you ever want to help others, especially strangers. But later on, according to Dr. Dacher Keltner, a professor at UC Berkeley, he says that Darwin actually came to believe that our need to be social and caring may actually be stronger than our desire for self-preservation, and it’s ingrained not socially learned. Indeed, Dr. Keltner says, “evolution [has] crafted a species—us—with remarkable tendencies toward kindness, play, generosity, reverence and self-sacrifice, which are vital to the classic tasks of evolution—survival, gene replication and smooth functioning groups.” That is, kindness is ingrained in us, and we can see this even from the earliest age.

In a study done with six-month-olds, they were shown a round piece of wood that had eyes glued onto it and it was struggling to climb up a felt mountain. After seeing the circle struggling, a triangle piece of wood, also with eyes glued on it, came along and tried to help push the circle to the top. But then along comes a square piece of wood, with eyes, that tries to push the triangle and the circle down so they can’t make it to the top. What experimenters wanted to know was how the infants would respond, and while they couldn’t verbalize how they felt about the pieces of wood, they could express it by which blocks they played with, and which do you think they refused to play with? The square. The block that wasn’t kind. They even introduced a neutral observer block who did nothing to hinder or help, and the children still preferred the triangle to the others. So, even before we know what’s happening, we have a natural preference for those who help and are kind over those who are unkind. And what scans of the brain have also found is that when we participate in acts of kindness that the pleasure centers of our brain are activated, and so kindness in and of itself can be its own reward. And so with that we continue in our series on the Kindness Challenge, which is based upon a book of the same name by Shaunti Feldhahn.