Taking It One Day at a Time

Our texts for this first Sunday in Lent are Zechariah 9:9-13, Psalm 25:1-10, and Mark 11:1-11. You may read them here.

The change of seasons is not just palpable in the spring-like temperatures outside this morning: last night, we marked a change of church seasons as we gathered together to observe Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent. Lent is the 40 days leading up to Christ's death on the cross, a time traditionally used for self-examination, repentance, making a new start with God, and being immersed in the story of Jesus.

This year, we are going on a particular Lenten journey together as a congregation. Since Christmas we have been focused on Mark, the Gospel assigned to this year of the lectionary. In Lent, we will be sticking close to Mark as well--but instead of covering one chapter, as we have done over the last few weeks, we will be walking through Mark's last several chapters. Mark is the shortest of the Gospels--only 16 chapters long (by comparison, Matthew is 28 chapters, Luke 24, and John 21), but a whopping 40% of Mark's Gospel--chapters 11-16--is devoted to the events of what we now call Holy Week--the last week of Jesus' life.

Why would Mark, who has rushed through the first three years of Jesus' ministry in a scant 10 chapters, screech almost to a crawl and devote 6 chapters to a span of 8 days? Whereas Mark raced through stories with minimal elaboration before, now we are given rich detail--almost a play-by-play and definitely a day-by-day account of Jesus' final words, actions, and interactions. You cannot believe this is accidental--Mark wants us to slow down and really, really pay attention to every detail of Jesus' final week. Apparently, it is not just Jesus' death in Jerusalem that teaches us about the shape of our salvation--the choices Jesus made, the reactions of people around him, the things he chose to teach about and enact...all of these are worthy of our careful attention.

And so we will attend to this last week during Lent, focusing on one day of Holy Week each Sunday--beginning with Jesus' entry into Jerusalem on this Sunday. Why did Jesus choose the way he did to enter the city? Why go at all to a city that would only want to kill him? Why now? Join us this week as we begin journeying with Jesus through his final week, day by day, that our days may be more fully shaped by the life he chose to live.

A Transfiguring Turn

Our texts this week are 2 Kings 2:1-14, Psalm 50:1-6, and Mark 9:2-9, which can be read here.

The attentive reader of Mark’s gospel could experience déjà vu this week. In one sense, Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain is unlike anything we have seen thus far…I mean, glowing like he’s been bleached bright? Chatting up Moses and Elijah, two long-gone heroes of the faith? This is a whole new ballgame that Peter, John, and James are privileged to witness. Yet the voice they hear…the voice strikes us as familiar, both in its timbre and its content. “This is my beloved son,” the voice speaks from the cloud, repeating the very words spoken over Jesus at his baptism. Here is another defining moment where Jesus is learning his identity and his identity is being revealed to others.

But then the speech takes on new content. The second thing spoken over Jesus at his baptism had been directed to his ears alone: “With you I am well pleased.” But the second thing spoken over Jesus now is directed to the disciples: “Listen to him!” is the cry. We must pay attention to this change in the message, to this new instruction. Why in this moment must his core of disciples be instructed in such a dramatic way about who Jesus is, and reminded so vehemently to listen to him?

This story takes place at a hinge point in Mark’s gospel and Jesus’ ministry. To this point, he has been a healer, a teacher of parables, a preacher, a miracle worker of great power. Now, however, Jesus is no longer going to display power in such a traditional, crowd-pleasing way. Only one more healing will take place in Mark’s gospel; there will be more teaching, but the content of the teaching will be heavier—about suffering, about days of trial to come. Jesus has just told them about his impending death for the first time, and he will repeat this prediction twice more in the next two chapters over the cacophony of the disciples’ disbelieving cries. This ministry of Jesus is about to take a sharp turn—a turn from power to weakness, from glory to suffering. Yet in all this, the disciples are told to do one thing: “Listen to him.”

The transfiguration is a perplexing story to me in so many ways, but it comes at a hinge in our church year—on the Sunday where we move from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry to its end (not until summer will we return to fill in the gaps in the middle), from the brightness of Epiphany season to the more difficult pilgrimage called the season of Lent. Jesus will be leaving the seashores of Galilee behind and travelling a long road to Jerusalem and all its voices of condemnation. Amidst all this transition, will we listen to him? Will we continue to believe who he is, even when he looks nothing like what we’ve grown to expect?

Bring on the Controversy!

Our scripture texts this week are 2 Kings 5:1-14, Psalm 30, and Mark 1:40-2:12. You may read these here.

It is a shame, in some senses, that Lent comes on the earlier side this year (we move into this 40-day season of repentance and preparation in advance of Jesus' death and resurrection on February 22). This means that our journey through Jesus' early ministry in Mark will conclude early in chapter 2 here, and when we pick it up after Pentecost again in the lectionary we will have leaped all the way ahead to the end of chapter 3. That may not sound like much, but in the intervening two chapters we miss something crucial to Jesus' ministry in Mark: CONTROVERSY.

Jesus returns for a time to Capernaum, his new adopted hometown, in the second half of our Gospel reading for today, and in Capernaum Jesus is faced with some powerful folks who are not so happy with the kingdom Jesus is announcing through his teaching and healing. The scribes--those who have devoted their lives to the study of God's word and religious practice--have started hanging around Jesus to see what he'll do, and controversy begins to erupt.

What's all the controversy about? In this week's reading, it's the fact that Jesus says the sins of the paralyzed man lowered through the roof have been forgiven. This sparks an uproar--who does this guy think he is? Only God can forgive sins--and nothing in our scriptures speak about a Messiah with power to usurp this particular privilege of God!

More controversy follows this initial one: there is a great stir among the scribes when he associates with tax collectors and sinners (2:16), and their dismay increases when they discover that Jesus' disciples do not fast (2:18). Later, Jesus is doing all sorts of things that go against their Sabbath practice, eating and walking and healing (2:24, 3:2). Who does this guy think he is? Why is he threatening everything? The controversy is becoming so heated that by early in Mark 3, the Pharisees are already plotting to destroy Jesus--his fate is being sealed by his controversial choices even at this incredibly early point in his ministry.

All this got me to think about the role of controversy in proclaiming the Kingdom of God. Bringing the message of who God is and what God's reign looks like, Jesus' early ministry seems to indicate, will inevitably lead to conflict and controversy. Christians today still find themselves controversial figures in many situations...but what usually sparks the controversies we are part of? How do the things we choose to be controversial about compare with the things that made Jesus dig his heels in? And what do you think Jesus wishes that we, as his body now on earth, were doing to spark controversy with the powers that be around us?

Food for thought on this cold Saturday...join us tomorrow as we look at Jesus' controversial decisions to heal the excluded and offer forgiveness, even at great expense to himself.

Jesus' Big Secret

As we continue our journey through Jesus' first days in the Gospel of Mark, our texts for this week are Isaiah 40:21-31, 1 Corinthians 9:16-23, and Mark 1:29-39. Each of these passages can be found here.

True confession time: when I am out and about in social situations, I often try to keep what I do for a living a secret as long as possible. It's not that I'm ashamed of being a past0r--I love what I do! It's just that, as soon as I tell someone I'm a pastor, I know what is going to happen:

1) They will assume I will be/behave like pastors they have known before; they'll say, "I thought women couldn't be pastors...or someone as young as you couldn't be a pastor" and look at me like I must be mistaken or joking about my identity.

2) They will apologize for the off-color word they just said or the fermented beverage in their hand or the fact that they "haven't been to church in a while", assuming I will judge them for these things because they've had Christians--especially Christian leaders--judge them for this in the past.

3) They will assume I have some sort of added holy powers or answers to great cosmic questions that I don't.

When I reveal that I'm a pastor, people begin to assume things, and their assumptions about me will outweigh and overshadow their ability to hear what I actually am like and have to say.

This makes me have compassion for Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. In Mark's Gospel, Jesus constantly tries to keep his identity a secret from the crowds. This has been called Jesus' "Messianic Secret": whenever someone realizes who Jesus is in Mark's Gospel, he immediately urges them not to tell anyone.

The first clear instance of Jesus' secret shows up in this week's Gospel: "And he...cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him" (Mark 1:38). This odd theme resounds again and again through Jesus' earthly life:

• "Don’t tell this to anyone," Jesus tells the leper he cleanses (Mark 1:44)
• "He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this" to the synagogue leader whose daughter he raised (Mark 5:43).
• When Peter finally got Jesus' identity right, "Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him" (Mark 8:30).
• After the transfiguration revealed more of who Jesus is, "Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead" (Mark 9:9).

Why all the secrecy? If Jesus is the one they've been waiting for, why not shout it from the rooftops?

There have been many theories about this "messianic secret": maybe Jesus was just showing humility. Maybe it was some sort of reverse psychology: if you tell someone "don't tell," aren't they more likely to spill the beans?

Yet the theory I like best is this: Jesus didn't want to be held captive to their assumptions about what a "Messiah" should be. Jesus did not want to be seen as some sort of celebrity miracle worker, or someone who was going to mount up the troops and finally lead a military rebellion against Rome; perhaps he did not want these expectations foisted upon them. Rather, he needed who he was--who he had come to be--to unfold...unfold all the way to a most unlikely Messianic ending. As Scott Hoezee aptly observed this week, "Jesus knew that for him to accomplish the work he came to do, he could not let people too quickly seize on him lest they turn him into what they wanted him to be as opposed to what he knew his Father would have him to be (and for that to happen, he’d have to trek all the way to the cross)."

It all makes me wonder...in what ways do we try to "seize on" Jesus and try to turn him into what we want him to be rather than what his call is to be? In what ways is Jesus' true identity still a secret to us...and how might we come to discover it first hand?

Must we talk about exorcism?

Our texts for this Sunday are Deuteronomy 18:15-20, Psalm 111, and Mark 1:21-28, which can be read here.

I've been dreading this week for a while--for it brings me to face a topic I would prefer to avoid, a component of Jesus' ministry that I would find it far easier to gloss over or write off as belonging to a past era rather than working to figure out how to apply to our life as modern-day disciples.

Yet this week, we cannot avoid it: it's time to talk about exorcism.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus does many "works of power"--healing the sick and injured, raising the dead, calming the storm. Yet one of the most frequent ways Jesus displays his power as one filled with the Spirit of God is through casting spirits out of tortured, afflicted people. In addition to today's story of Jesus casting an unclean spirit out of a man in the synagogue, Jesus casts a whole legion of spirits out of a man and into a herd of pigs in Mark 5:1-20, relieves a little girl of a demon in Mark 7:24-30, in Mark 9:14-29 casts a demon out of a boy whom the disciples had failed in their efforts to exorcise (you can read these three very interesting stories here).

Perhaps even scarier than the fact that this is something Jesus did repeatedly--at least scarier to someone like me who admittedly doesn't quite know what to make of exorcism stories--is that the power to exorcise is something Jesus said those who followed him would possess. In Mark 6.7, Jesus "called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits."

What on earth does that mean for we who are sent by Christ today? What is this power Jesus has--this power Jesus has now entrusted to us?

Is this a power that's even valid anymore? In our rational, modern day scientific society, many people write off the "demons" of the New Testament as things like seizures and neurologically explainable mental illness--things better treated with medicine than any sort of holy authority. Unfortunately, this has placed a terrible stigma on those who suffer these things over the centuries--a stigma that I hope, at last, is being removed. It has also led to a restriction of exorcism to faith healers who can lay a hand on a tormented person and leave them writhing on the floor--acts that are often all spectacle and no substance.

The question is: is there something else Jesus is talking about here? Are there other spirits lurking among us today that we are called to play a part in casting out as followers of Jesus--voices that compete with and oppose the Spirit of God within us, hidden tormentors of our souls? What *could* it look like for us to claim this power to exorcise these things that destroy us in the way Jesus intended--and to let Jesus have this sort of power over us?

Response Time

Our texts for this week as we continue our Epiphany journey through "Jesus' First Days" are Jonah 3:1-10, Psalm 62:5-12, and Mark 1:14-20. You may read them here.

This week, our church council has been preparing to go on a retreat together. As part of our preparation, we have all been instructed to take the Myers-Brigg Temperament Indicator to help us learn more about how we're wired, how we react, process and respond. As I took the inventory this week, I was asked to respond "Yes or No" to things like the following: "You are usually the first to react to a sudden event: the telephone ringing or unexpected question"; "You prefer to act immediately rather than speculate about various options"; "Your decisions are based more on the feelings of a moment than on the careful planning." My answer to each of these questions was a definitive NO. Though I have learned to adapt to abrupt shifts or the unexpected, at heart I am about as far from a reactive, spur-of-the-moment, sudden change person as you can get. My reactions are slow; it takes me a while to process; if you ask me to do something suddenly, it's usually not going to go well.

And so it is as I look at today's two stories of people responding to God's call,I find myself much more "in the boat" (to use a bad pun) with Jonah in response to God's call than with the Ninevites or the disciples we meet in Mark. Earlier in Jonah's story, God had instructed him to go to Ninevah--the hometown of his enemies--and proclaim God's word to them. Jonah has spent his whole life trending away from those gross people in Ninevah; turn around now and go preach to them? Not a chance. And so Jonah puts himself on a boat headed in the opposite direction, then ends up in the belly of a great fish at the bottom of the sea. There he has time to reflect on his decisions and finally, begrudgingly, say, "OK--I will go."

Go Jonah does--yet still begrudgingly. He goes halfway into the city and proclaims a half-hearted message to the people. The people, however, are immediately ready to respond--suddenly, abruptly, unexpectedly. They clean up their lives and change their hearts to trust in God so quickly that those of us who like deliberate decisions may look at them and say, "Is this for real? This can't be real. No one just changes like that."

I feel the same way in hearing about Peter, Andrew, James, and John. Jesus utters simple words--"Follow me"--and immediately they drop everything--their livelihood, families, stability. They just take off after this guy that, as far as we know, they've never laid eyes on before. Is this for real? Are they insane? You can't just drop everything and follow!

These stories, then, hit upon the question of our response time. All the people in these stories, eventually, responded to God's call; for Jonah, it involved a trip to the depths of the sea. For Ninevah, it was good they reacted quickly because it was just in the nick of time. For the disciples, they heard the urgency in Jesus' voice and something there was enough to make them respond--to compel them to drop those nets and follow.

It makes me wonder: how do we react when God suddenly breaks into our lives--by hiding in fear, or following with abandon (and, likely, a little fear as well)? How do we recognize God as the thing to which we are called to respond immediately amidst all the world's options? How do we know when God is calling us to leave our careful plans aside and follow the rush of a Spirit we cannot explain? And is it okay, sometimes, if our response time lags a bit?

But perhaps the question underneath all our responses is this: do we believe God has the power to change us quickly, suddenly, forever?

Meet Mark, This Year's Gospel

Our texts for this Sunday, January 15, are 1 Samuel 3:1-20, Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18, and Mark 1:9-13. The Old Testament readings can be found here; to read the verses from Mark, go here.

NOTE: During these 5 weeks of Epiphany when we are moving verse by verse through Mark's first chapter, I would encourage you to read the entire first chapter of Mark every week (linked above) sometime before coming to worship--straight through, just 45 short verses from start to finish. What sense of who Jesus is do they give you?

This blog (and our next few weeks in worship) will act as your very own introduction to Mark, the Gospel we will be reading for most of the coming year (that's right, friends--with the exception of a few weeks after Easter, we will be reading Mark more or less from now til Thanksgiving!).

What does this mean for you? Well, you will like Mark if...

1) You have a touch of ADD and/or like people who get to the point: Because Mark does, too. He often begins a story, then gets distracted and tells another story, then comes back to the original story. Mark is the shortest of the four gospels by far. He does not waste words, but tells many of the well-known stories of Jesus life with incredible succinctness. He only tells the stories that he wants us to know, and tells them in an almost Twitter-esque brevity.

2) You love action movies: Because Mark moves FAST. His favorite word is the word "immediately", which appears about 43 times in the Gospel--11 times in the first chapter alone. Especially in his first 10 chapters, Mark is booking it at a pretty fast tempo through the ministry of Jesus, and he doesn't like to waste time. This story is urgent.

3) You have a thing for mystery and/or think actions speak louder than words: In Mark's Gospel, the reader and Jesus know who Jesus is almost from the outset, but most of the characters in the story remain rather clueless. This is largely because of what has been called Mark's secrecy motif--Jesus is constantly telling people not to tell who he is. He wants to show this for himself with the life he lives.

4) You want to get a sense of who this Jesus guy is and what he's about: Mark wanted to paint a picture with quick, clear strokes of who Jesus is--Son of God, Messiah, one with great strength and authority yet who would suffer and die. This is the earliest written account (we believe) we have of Jesus' life, and as a result brings us close to the core of this figure who has changed the course of history. If you want to get a quick introduction to Jesus' ways, Mark is an excellent place to start.

As we start with Mark, we'll be spending the next month or so on the beginning of Jesus' ministry, moving almost verse by verse through chapter 1. In this chapter, Jesus appears, is baptized, is tempted, begins to teach, calls disciples, performs his first miracle, heals, prays, travels, and breaks all sorts of rules and conventions--all in the span of about 36 verses. This first chapter is a good place for us to dwell, for in the beginning of Jesus' ministry we learn a LOT about what his life is going to be about. There is no better place for us to start.

We begin this week with the first appearance of Jesus in this gospel: not in a manger, but in a river, where he suddenly appears to be baptized by John. Why do you think this is the first visual of Jesus that Mark gives us? What does it mean that this is how the story of Jesus in this Gospel begins--with Jesus joining the pilgrims at the Jordan, seeing the heavens turn open, and hearing a voice that had to both comfort and confuse?

Join us on Sunday as we begin our Markan journey by asking these questions together!