A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — January 11, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts: Genesis 1:1-5;  Mark 1:1-15 — Baptism of the Lord

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth… — Genesis 1:1

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God. — Mark 1:1

Mark is in such a rush to get the story of Jesus out!  In just 15 verses he arrives to the same point in Jesus’ story that Matthew and Luke each take all of three or four chapters to get to.  We need to listen a lot faster to Mark, for every word seems to count double or triple.  For instance, both Matthew and Luke take two full chapters to get Jesus on the scene, with wonder-filled birth stories and detailed genealogies.  The Adult Sunday School class has spent the last six classes looking at the spiritual, and political content of Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives of Jesus.  Two chapters each—but for Mark, twelve words are enough, just seven words in Greek.

 

“The beginning” (a single word, arché, in Greek)—the very same word that begins the Greek version of Genesis, so here Mark is echoing the divine creation.  “Of the good news”—tou euangeliou in Greek.  From euangelion we get words like “evangelical” and “evangelism.”  But in Jesus’ day, this word was not some “nice church word” or a label for a particular kind of Christian.  No, euangelion was deeply rooted in the cult of the Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus.  Throughout the empire a euangelion—a good news announcement—proclaimed significant events in the emperor’s life:  his birth, his coming of age, and finally his ascension to the throne as both Caesar and god on earth.  The last four words, Iesou Christou huiou théou, “of Jesus Christ the Son of God,” declare Jesus to be the “anointed one,” the Christos or Messiah, the long hoped-for savior of the Jewish people as well as the divine “Son of God,” a common title for Caesar Augustus.  What all these claims mean—that’s what the rest of Mark’s gospel is about.  And Mark is in a rush to get the story told.

After so compact an introduction, Mark’s initial three stories just whiz by, almost without leaving any distinct impression of their own.  We know them better perhaps from Matthew or Luke.  Both of them give us a lot more information about John the Baptist as precursor to Jesus, and Matthew lets us listen in as Jesus and John stand in the River Jordan debating who should baptize whom.  In Mark, John baptizes Jesus without a single word passing between them.  Matthew and Luke both tell long stories of Jesus in the wilderness as Satan tempts him with three forms of worldly power.  Mark just says Satan tempted him.  Finally, Luke takes a chapter and a half to give examples of Jesus preaching the Good News in Galilee before calling his first disciples.  Mark simply says “Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God,” and then for the very first time in Mark’s gospel Jesus speaks, saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

There’s a sense of urgency throughout Mark’s storytelling.  He’s in such a hurry.  I wonder if that explains why the traditional symbol for St. Mark is not just a lion, but a lion with wings.  Mark fairly flies through the story.  One of Mark’s favorite words throughout the gospel is “immediately”—euthus in Greek.  Things keep happening immediately.  “And immediately the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness.”  We need to listen faster, remember, for every word counts.  If we pay close attention, we will hear a faith story, a testimony.  Who drives Jesus into the wilderness?  The Spirit of God.  Who waits on him while he is there?  “the angels” [God’s messengers].  They serve him and minister to him.  The Greek verb here is diakoneo—the word from which we get our word “deacon.”  God’s messengers are deacons, servants to Jesus.

The storyteller makes sure that we know these things by telling them to us outright.  But how did he know?  It seems unlikely he was there as an eyewitness reporter… or that he would have seen the Spirit of God or even the angels with his own eyes if he was.  Did Jesus tell his followers what happened there?  None of the gospel writers report him doing so.  Maybe he did.  But I suspect he didn’t have to for the author of Mark to tell the story the way he does.  “And immediately the Spirit drove [Jesus] into the wilderness… and the angels waited on him.”  That’s a testimony by the storyteller, declaring that Jesus was never on his own in the wilderness, that he never faced hardship and temptation alone.  For he was on God’s business, and the Spirit and God’s messengers were always there to support him.  The author of Mark believes this, and in telling this story he is sharing his faith.

I think that sometimes it’s really hard for us to wrap our minds around the implications of a relatively obvious fact—namely, that the gospels, and indeed all the books of the entire New Testament, were written after the resurrection.  Mark wasn’t jotting events down in a diary as they happened.  The stories of Jesus were recorded after the resurrection.  So they are filled with phrasings, comments, and interpretations rooted in experiences of both the living Jesus and the ongoing presence of the resurrected Jesus.  Last week Susan said something about us hearing “the rest of the story” during the coming months up until Easter.  That’s true.  But it’s important to realize that the “rest of the story” finds its way into the beginning—“the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  The Spirit and God’s angels are always present with Jesus, especially in times of trial.  Here is the storyteller’s testimony, each story meant to plant and nurture faith in us—faith that God is indeed present with and for us in our “wilderness times.”

I’ve witnessed something similar happen in meeting after meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous as people share their stories.  The pattern for telling one’s story in A.A. is “what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now.”  And invariably the latter parts of the story—“what happened” and “what it's like now”—find their way back into the first part and, maybe, plant a little hope in those listeners who are still caught up in their own wilderness of “what it was like.”  Each time I look back recall my own story, I see new ways God was with me and at work in my life long before I had any conscious awareness of it.  At times it’s only that I survived certain horrors against all odds… but it’s more than that.  “Wilderness experiences” can end up being pathways of grace.

An example…  Psychiatrist Rachel Remen tells of a young man who had one leg removed at the hip because of bone cancer.  Having been a football player, he was consumed with the “unfairness” of what had happened to him and felt a deep sense of rage and injustice.  Remen worked with him through his grief and rage and pain for more than two years, using painting, imagery, and deep psychotherapy.  With time the young man began coming out of himself, and he started visiting other people who had suffered severe physical losses.

Once he visited a young woman in the hospital who’d lost both her breasts to cancer and was so depressed she wouldn’t even look at him.  He’d been running in shorts, so his artificial leg was visible.  Hearing music on her radio and desperate to get her attention, he took his leg off and began dancing around the room on one leg, snapping his fingers to the music.  Finally she looked at him in amazement, burst out laughing, and said, “Man, if you can dance, I can sing.”

A year later Dr. Remen and the young man were reviewing his file and came to one of his earliest drawings.  It was of a vase that represented the man’s body.  He’d drawn it while grinding his teeth in rage and had used black crayon to scrawl a jagged crack to show it as a vase that would never again hold water.

“Oh, this isn’t finished,” he said when he saw it.  He picked up a yellow crayon, put his finger on the crack, and said, “You see, here—where it is broken—this is where the light comes through.”  And with the yellow crayon he drew light streaming through the crack in his body.

“Sometimes,” says Dr. Remen, “we can grow strong at the broken places.” ¹

 

In coming months as we continue listening to Mark’s urgent telling of Jesus’ story—which is also Mark’s own testimony of faith—we can reflect upon our own life stories.  In doing so we should remember that we already know the rest of the gospel story.  In the light of Easter resurrection, we trust that we live ever surrounded by and enfolded in the saving grace of God.  So we should not only remember and reflect upon our own stories.  In the light of Easter, we should share them, for our stories are all part of the One Story—the Story of Creator and new creation, the Story of God and those made in God’s image, the Story of the One God who so loved the world and gifted the world with such amazing stories.  Our stories are for sharing, even as our faith is for sharing.  We need to tell our stories.  And very possibly someone somewhere needs to hear them even them more.

Some years ago at a Christian educator’s workshop, a public school teacher told of sharing part of her story one day at school.  It was lunch hour and she found herself talking with an eleventh grade boy and telling him how sad and shy she had felt when she was in eleventh grade.  She told him of feeling unwanted and incompetent.  And as she was speaking she wondered if this student would understand what she was sharing.  She concluded her story by telling him how she had been so depressed she had wanted to do away with her life and kill herself.  The boy nodded, as if he understood.  Then the teacher smiled and added, “Now I’m glad that I did not.”

Before she went to bed that night she wondered why she had told the boy that story.  Why then?  She had not thought of that time of her life for many years.  Now suddenly it had come into her consciousness and out of her mouth.

It wasn’t until a year later that the teacher learned from the principal that the boy had had a gun in his dresser drawer at home and that very day was planning to kill himself.  But when he heard her story, he changed his mind. ²

Sharing of stories shares faith—sometimes just enough faith to keep on for the time being.  There is a kind of healing in the sharing of stories… and that healing is not always limited to the listener.

Martin Buber used to tell an old Hasidic story about an elderly grandfather who was paralyzed.  One day his grandchildren asked him to tell them about his teacher, the famous and holy Baal Shem Tov—the “Master of the Good Name” who had been the founder of the Hasidic Jewish movement.  The grandfather replied by telling how the Holy Man used to jump up and down and dance when he was praying.  And while he was reciting the story, the grandfather stood up and the story carried him away so much that he too had to jump and dance to show how the master had done it.  And from that moment the grandfather was healed. ³

Just so, we tell stories—the old, old Bible stories of Jesus and his love, as well as our personal stories, stories that only we know, deep in our hearts… wilderness stories, miracle stories, bewilderment stories, and stories of wonder… “what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now.”  Shared stories.  Stories of faith.  Stories of hope.  Stories that point the way to the healing and wholeness that God desires for each and every one of us.  Thanks be to God.  Amen and amen.

 

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¹  Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., Stories of the Spirit, Stories of the Heart, ed. by Christina Feldman & Jack Kornfield [San Francisco,: Harper, 1991] pp. 28-30.

²  Told by Elaine M. Ward, “Story and Sharing Our Faith With Others,” Christian Educator, Vol. 22, #2 (February 1997).

³  Related by William J. Bausch, Storytelling: Imagination and Faith [Mystic, CT:  Twenty-Third Publications, 1984] p. 54.