Friends, grace to you and peace from Jesus the Christ who calls you now. AMEN.
I thought I had something earlier this week, and then yesterday a small handful of us (along with a few members of 3 other churches) gathered on a glitchy Zoom call and survived our way (and much more) through the entire Gospel of Mark!
It’s something I like to do every new year with the congregation, at least, whoever is up for a very different kind of Saturday morning: reading the Gospel of the year aloud in its entirety, taking turns chapter by chapter. And of course this year, it had to be virtual. Our time “together” started very fragments, by trying to figure out how to hear and see each other. A flurry of texts to get the meeting code again, computers muted, or not muted, video on, or not able to be on — I think even our most tech-savvy can relate to those days...At one point I as the host got bumped off the call, I thought I lost everyone, a few folks came in after we had started. Somehow we managed it all. There are definitely many worse things happening in our nation and our world right now, but to be honest, this felt like a little bit of a virtual storm, out in the sea of ministry.
And then Jesus found us, and called us.
As we got into the chapters, I was again swept up by the narrative of God’s mercy, as different voices among us came through my speakers one way or another. It was quite beautiful actually and incredibly powerful (pic).
I shared with a friend yesterday afternoon, that every year, to be honest, I drag into this endeavor at the last minute. I am deflated at that point where we start reading, all tangle up. I try to build the event up, in the weeks before, but always when that Saturday morning actually rolls around, I envy everyone who is opting out of this, to be honest, as a small group is climbing with me into the saddle of another gospel reading. This year was no exception...
And then, every year — every year, the Gospel is enough, the words are enough, more than enough, and I leave the experience always inspired, challenged, filled. This year was no exception.
And it’s changed my direction as I preach on this early section from Chapter 1, where Jesus shows up (out of the baptismal waters) and calls the disciples, where Jesus calls you and me.
The Gospel of Mark is the gospel of exorcisms. That’s what jumped out at me again and again as we read yesterday.
Jesus — not just in stories where he casts out demons, of which there are many — Jesus is calling out and driving out the evil and the brokenness in the world and in the hearts of people all throughout the Gospel of Mark! It is the Gospel of exorcisms!
The reading from Jonah today...is God having to send Jonah again. After that whole dramatic whale episode that I imagine many of us learned in Sunday school — you know, God sends Jonah to Ninevah, he doesn’t want to go, jumps on a ship in the literal opposite direction, asks to be thrown overboard in a fit of guilt, gets swallowed by and lives in the belly of a giant fish for 3 days, then is spit up onto the shore and finally goes to Ninevah. After all that! He still doesn’t learn, he doesn’t think the people deserve God’s mercy, he still tries to run from it, and here in our OT text God is sending him again! All that to say, we, like me in our online reading event yesterday, need God nudging us, calling us, sometimes dragging us, fishing us out from our own nets, and sending us too again and again and again.
Why? Because “we are the ones through whom our God is seen and heard.”
And the demons are not just overtly evil actions and intentions...like the terrorists we witnessed rushing up the steps and attacking the capitol on the Day of Epiphany, 3 weeks ago now. That was pure evil, violence through word and deed...more and more stories of the brutality and sheer hatred are coming out. The demons are not just that. Nor are they just cruel words and back-handed comments, vengeful thoughts, secret schadenfruede (you know, the “pleasure derived by another’s misfortune”).
The demons — as I realized in myself — are also our anxiety, our fear, our obsession with perfection, and our distrust that God’s got us now and always. The demons are many and various and need an entire Gospel narrative to be named and finally cast out by Jesus.
Yeah, I said perfection! I want everything (and always want everything) to go perfectly. Are you like that too, high achievers? Mending nets that are broken, constantly so that, not only do they work, they also look good, present well, function most efficiently! Jesus finds us there. “Hey, follow me instead,” he says. Let go of those nets.
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I am currently in our annual Bishop’s Academy — which is this year of course a Zoom call (for like 5 weeks on Wednesdays) — and we’ve got Dr. Ryan Bonfiglio of Cantler School of Theology — deep-dive-lecturing us on Sabbath. This week he was reflecting on what it is we need sabbath, i.e. sanctuary, from:
productivity, efficiency, perfection, technology and orthodoxy. Perfection really jumped out at me. He talked about one (of 39) of the Old Testament Sabbath prohibitions is driving a hammer...and while that looks pretty easy on the surface to keep, the rabbis have taught for centuries that hammering a nail is clearly symbolic in Jewish tradition of finishing a job well.
And I don’t know about you, but finishing a job right and well can absolutely possess me. It can make me crazy. Make me miss my own children’s needs, right under my nose, make me angry unfairly with my spouse, make me self-medicate, made me sleepless, make me dangerous on the road because of fatigue and distraction. Make me say and do things that aren’t me, the list goes on...and that’s starting to sound like a demon. Are these the nets from which Christ’s mercy calls us too, friends? Perfection?
There’s a lot tangled in those nets: fear, anxiety, and finally that stumbling incompetence at entrust all this to God. That’s what the deep spirituality of the Offering is, every Sunday. That’s the disciples and us, dropping those nets and starting to take our first steps behind the Savior. Try to trust. Trying to walk free.
The Gospel of Mark is life-saving.
It happened again yesterday: I thought I was drowning and yet Christ found me. I thought everything was falling apart, and yet Christ calls us.
As Amanda Gorman proclaimed from those same capital steps on Wednesday:
We've braved the belly of the beast
We've learned that quiet isn't always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn't always just-ice
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we've weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn't broken
but simply unfinished
Friends in Christ’s inauguration, in Christ’s call to discipleship, we begin our journey again. And Jesus is the one who finishes the brokenness, the driving nail: Christ, the one who loves, who forgives, and who saves us all from the demonic nets. Thanks be to God. AMEN.
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