Mark 1:29-45

07/27/11 Mark 1:29-45 GUMC Youth

Last week, we took a break from Mark to talk about some big picture issues about what it means to be a Christian. We took a look at the Nicene Creed and broke it down so we could see some really concrete things that it teaches us that we should listen to and learn from. However, we are back tonight to the Gospel according to Mark and we are finishing up the first chapter. Have you ever spent this much time on just one chapter in the Bible? It's a great way to take time and see how the story builds up and see how themes develop. By the time we are done, if you come most of the time, you are going to know the gospel of Mark better than you ever thought you would. Even though I've spent quite a bit of time in Mark, even I will learn a lot through this journey because I have never spent as much time and energy thinking about it as we are going to here.

Once again for the third time in a row, we have three stories in our passage for tonight, three different things that may or may not seem like they are all that connected with each other, but, once again, they actually are deeply related and are very important. Let's take them in order, because it is fascinating what we see in them.

First, we have Jesus healing Simon Peter's mother. Simon Peter, by the way is the guy that people are talking about when they just talk about "Peter" in the Bible, or "St. Peter." He ends up being something of a representative for the disciples and was one of the most important leaders in the first generation of Christians. One of the things we will see about him throughout the course of the gospel of Mark is that Peter can also be a complete bonehead. He often will say and do things that make us want to hit our head against the wall. At one point, Peter will get his name changed from Simon. However, at the beginning, he is still called Simon, but you need to know that Simon and Peter are the same person.

So, last time we were looking at Mark, we saw Jesus preaching in the Synagogue and casting out an unclean spirit, who yelled at him, calling Jesus the "Holy One of God." We need to remember that, when Jesus sees demons and unclean spirits, they immediately recognize him for who he is. This is important because, when most people meet him, they don't understand at all who he is. There is one moment when Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah, or Christ, but when we look carefully, we realize that Peter has absolutely no idea what it really means to be the Messiah or Christ. We will spend more time later on what is known as the "Messianic Secret," but I just want to point out here that the demons know who Jesus really is, and his disciples don't yet get it.

After Jesus gets rid of this unclean spirit, they leave the Synagogue and go to Simon's house, where his mother is sick. Jesus simply takes her by the hand and lifts her out of bed and, at a moment's notice, the fever is gone and she gets up to serve them, that is, she gets lunch ready for them, which is what a mother-in-law in 1st century Israel would normally have done. Jesus took this woman who was so sick, she could not function like she was expected to, like she expected herself to, and healed her in a moment.

This miraculous healing was not just a one time thing. We see in our passage that, when the sun went down, all kinds of people were bringing their sick or demon-possessed people to Jesus to be healed. There was such a crowd that we read that, "The whole city had gathered at the door. And he healed many who were ill with various diseases, and cast out many demons." Listen to this at the end of this story. "And he was not permitting the demons to speak, because they knew who he was." Imagine that! Jesus would not allow the demons to speak. Why? Because they knew him. What would they say if they spoke? Well, according to the unclean spirit in the last passage, he would say something like, "What business do we have with each other, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are - the Holy One of God!" It seems that Jesus does not want these demons to tell everyone who he is. This is something of a puzzling thing, and we will come back to this because it is a theme that comes up over and over again in Mark, in fact, it comes up more strongly in Mark than in any of the other three Gospels.

The next story is what I really want to focus on. This is what we read, "In the early morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house, and went away to a secluded place, and was praying there. Simon and his companions searched for him; they found him, and said to him, 'Everyone is looking for you." Let's stop there for a moment, because here we have, for the first time in Mark, a crowd forming who is following Jesus. Mark has not yet used the word for "crowd" yet, but he will, even at the very beginning of chapter 2, but the crowd is going to be mentioned so often that it almost becomes a character in its own right.

So Jesus, early on in his ministry, starts being followed by a crowd of people. Now, today, this sounds like a pretty good thing. After all, when you think about churches that are successful, you think about churches that have so many people on a Sunday morning that you could say that there is a whole crowd there to worship. When we think about preachers and teachers who are successful, we tend to think of people who have written books that have sold a lot of copies, or people who have lots of hits on their YouTube page, or things like that. The bigger the crowd, the more successful you are. To say there is a crowd following Jesus could mean something like this: "Wow, look at all the people who are following Jesus and going wherever he goes to listen to him and be healed by him. There sure is a crowd of people, that's amazing."

However, that isn't the only way we use the word "crowd," is it? Sometimes, a crowd isn't a good thing. What if you are at an amusement park and there is a crowd? It doesn't mean that you will have any more fun at the park, it just means that you will have to stand in line for longer. Sometimes a crowd isn't a good thing at all. When we are surrounded by people, and the people are more of a hindrance than a help to what we're trying to do, we will say that we feel "crowded." At this point, looking just at this passage, we can't tell for sure which of these two ways we are to take the crowd. But let me give you a hint, its the second way, the way where a crowd is a bad thing. If you don't believe me, if you are convinced that the crowd following Jesus should be seen as a good thing, stay with me as we move through Mark, and we will see if you still disagree with me by the end.

Alright, so Simon and the other disciples, and there are probably only four of them at this time, come and find Jesus because a crowd of people have gathered to listen to him and be healed by him. As you can imagine, if you live in a world that does not have very good access to medicine, and the medicine you do have access to isn't very good, you can imagine that people would react pretty positively to finding out that there is a man who heals people miraculously in town. You could imagine that this is pretty big news. Now your friends and family members who have been sick for a long time can be healed. We will read later about a woman who was sick for twelve years and doctors couldn't help her, so she was just sick all the time and Jesus heals her.

But when Jesus is told, "Everyone is looking for you," he responds, saying, "Let us go somewhere else to the towns nearby, so that I may preach there also; for that is what I came for." This is absolutely amazing to me. After all, Jesus is told that he has a huge crowd of people, all of whom have come to be healed by him, and what does he do? He leaves! If we look at this in terms of how we usually look at leadership, it seems that Jesus is making a terrible decision. After all, why would you as a leader, if you are surrounded by people who want to listen to you, who want to follow what you have to say, want to walk away and go somewhere else? After all, you know that there are people who will follow you where you are, but you don't know if people will follow you somewhere else. If you know already that you can have an influence on a group of people in one place, and you don't know for sure that you can have the same kind of impact somewhere else, why go? It seems that if you wanted to make a difference, whatever you might do, you certainly don't leave the people you are impacting and go somewhere else. And yet this is precisely what Jesus does.

Now, why does he do this? I said just a moment ago that, if he were hoping to set out on a campaign of healing miracles, it would be silly to leave so many people who needed miraculous healing. But what if that wasn't his goal in the first place? What if Jesus wanted to do something far greater than just heal people of their disease? This might sound odd to us, because we have been so conditioned to think of the miracles of Jesus as being the most important things that he did. As exciting as the miracles might be to us, they did not seem to be the most important thing to Jesus. He said, "Let us go somewhere else to the towns nearby, so that I may preach there also; for that is what I came for." For Jesus, preaching is more important than healing, though we see him doing both.

We need to understand this. It means that, according to Jesus, if someone remains physically sick and broken, but understands his message, they are far better off than if they are healed bodily, but do not understand his message. This idea, of being physically handicapped in some way being better than not knowing Jesus, might be hard to grasp, especially if you are involved in some kind of sports. However, more and more, I would have to say that I would rather give up things like arms and legs than give up what I have come to know in Christ.

What we should take from this is a change in how we prioritize things. If you see Jesus walking away from people who are in need of healing, who have gathered to be healed by this great man, all so he can preach in other towns, and it makes perfect sense to you, then the challenge is not that great. However, if Jesus' behavior strikes us as odd, as something that we question, the Gospel invites us to rethink things from a different point of view. It invites us to think that, though the body is important for we only have embodied souls, it is not the only thing that we need to take seriously, that it is more important to know the truth, in both our minds and hearts, than it is to be able even to walk. If we would rather have a perfectly working body than follow Jesus, it means that we still have not quite understood how important Jesus really is.

That's the real meat of the passage and, if you don't understand anything else, make sure you ponder that seriously, not just at youth group, but at other times in your life as well. When we listen to the Bible and take it seriously, we might just find that the things we used to think were pretty important, aren't nearly as important as we thought, and there are other things that we never thought were important that turn out to be really important.

The last story in our passage is about a man with leprosy. Jesus doesn't go up to him and offer to heal him, the leper comes to Jesus and begs him to make him clean. We need to understand how serious this is. In ancient Israel, if you were unclean, and you were unclean if you were a leper, you had to stay outside of the camp, you could not touch anyone, or even get near to anyone. If someone got too close, you had to yell "Unclean!" so they would know you are unclean. For someone like this to actually walk up to Jesus, a Rabbi, would be unbelievably socially inappropriate. However, Jesus does not reject him for this. In fact, he does not reject him at all. His response is, "I am willing; be cleansed." Even when Jesus says that preaching is his main purpose, not healing, and even when he is willing to walk away from a community of physically sick people to preach the good news to new people, he does not simply abandon people who come to him in need. Even though healing is secondary, it is not unimportant.

But notice what Jesus says to the man after he heals him. "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." Jesus heals this man, then asks him to keep quiet about it. Again, this question as to why Jesus wants people to hold back from telling everyone about him will come up again and again, and we will spend plenty of time on it; but the point now is that, in spite of the fact that Jesus healed this man and was worthy to be followed to the end, the man simply can't do what he was told to do. He wanted so desperately, to share with everyone he met that he had been healed from a disease that, at the time, people thought was uncurable, that he could not keep quiet, even though he was specifically told to. We read, "But he went out and began to proclaim it freely and to spread the news around, to such an extent that Jesus could no longer publicly enter a city, but stayed out in unpopulated areas; and they were coming to him from everywhere."

The question that we need to ask ourselves is, Have we been touched by the power of Christ in such a way that we cannot help ourselves but spread the good news? Have we been convinced that it is more important to know Jesus Christ than anything else, so we feel a deep desire to share it with others? These are the kinds of questions we should ask. And if the answer is "no, we don't," don't give up there. God knows that we are not able to just get ourselves excited and force ourselves to be faithful; in fact, if we try to do so, we will burn ourselves out faster than we ever thought we could. Instead, if we find that we are not as passionate as we know we should be, go to God in prayer. Pray that God would transform you, that God would fill you with a mighty passion for him and for others. For it is only when God equips us and sends us that we can go and be successful. And God will do these things if we ask. So, let us take a few moments and pray that God would renew our strength and would meet us here, that we might be empowered to truly be faithful disciples. Let us pray.

AMEN

What is Grace? (1 John 4:7-21)

07/24/11 What is Grace (1 John 4:7-21) Spencer GUMC

It was back in January of this year that I got a call from the District Superintendent here in the Northwest District, telling me that I was appointed to Grace United Methodist Church in Spencer, pending a positive meeting with the SPRC. I will tell you something, there is nothing quite like getting appointed to a church whose name is Grace to make you start to ponder, as deeply as possible, the nature of grace as we receive it from God and we are taught about in the Bible.

So what is grace? More and more, I am convinced that the way that most people talk about grace is that it is, simply, "Getting what you do not deserve." This is good, so far as it goes. After all, when we get redemption in return for our sins, or when we get life in exchange for our death, and when we receive blessing from God when all we have given him were curses, are we not receiving what we did not and do not deserve, and is this not grace? Clearly we cannot speak of grace unless we include the fact that, when we receive grace, we do indeed receive something that did not belong to us before that time and that we could never have acquired for ourselves. However, can grace really be boiled down to getting what we do not deserve?

I think that grace is a far deeper, far richer, concept than just this, as important as it is. This is why I love this text from the first letter of John. He says, "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love." Now I want to point out what you may or may not have noticed when this passage was read for the first time a few minutes ago. The word, "grace," is not mentioned anywhere in this passage. Instead, we see the word "love" an awful lot. In fact, if you look carefully, you will find that the word grace is not anywhere in the first letter of John. That isn't a problem for this sermon on grace because the reality of grace is on every page.

Listen to how John speaks of the love of God. "By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent his only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." The word that John uses here is love, but the point he is making is grace from beginning to end. When John talks about love in its most absolute sense, when he wants to make it as clear as possible what it means that God loves us, he speaks of Jesus coming among us, God entering into our world of space and time and meeting us where we are. What love is, in its fullest sense, is not to be defined by our love of God or our love of other human beings, even our love for our parents, spouses, or children. Love is not defined by our love, but by God's love of us.

This love of God is not an abstract concept. It is not something that we could come up with if we just sat in a room in an ivory tower and thought a lot about love in detachment from what God has actually done for us in Christ. For others, love might be a abstract concept that can be applied, willy nilly, to anything that makes us feel good, but for Christians, love is not a what, it is a who. The fullest and final expression of love is the person of Jesus Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us. We do not, as Christians, develop a concept of love independently of God's self-revelation in Christ and then try to see how Jesus does or does not fit into that concept. We cannot do this, for love is not, as John says, determined by our love, but by God's love. God's love is made known to us in the fact that God has not chosen to remain on his own, but has chosen to take our created existence upon himself, to live in our broken world, and to bring healing from outside of the universe that does not seem capable of cultivating healing from within it on its own.

This is what love is. If someone were to ask us, "What is love?" the answer we would have to give is, "Jesus Christ." If there is anything else we can call love, we do so in a secondary way. Every other love takes its place behind Christ the Lord, the one who loves us with a love that will not let us go, with a love that is greater than the love we have for ourselves or could ever have for another. Our love for God and our love for others is real love to the degree that it reflects and manifests in our own creaturely way, however indirectly and brokenly, the love of Christ toward us.

This understanding of love brings about a radical change in the way we consider it. We could say that, when we realize that love is not something that we understand through abstract speculation but from the investigation of something very concrete, that is what it is and not something else, we come to understand that Christian thinking is not a philosophy, but a science. There is an objectivity of the love of God in Christ. We are not free to say whatever we like about love, but must stay close to our source of knowledge, the actual concrete reality of Christ. Everything we say and think about love is judged to be true or false in the light of God's actual self-revelation and in no way else.

Ultimately, this is not all that different from how Jesus taught us to think. After all, in John's gospel, we read that, when Thomas said to Jesus, "Lord, we do not know where you are going, how do we know the way?" Jesus responded, saying, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the father but through me." Whatever we may mean when we say that anything else is true, for instance, we mean something different than when we say that Jesus is true. Jesus is truth, and Jesus is love.

All of this is to show that it is not all that unusual that we should conclude that, at the end of the day, Jesus is grace. If this is so, then the title of this sermon that has been on the sign all week is just a little bit misleading. After all, it poses the question, "What is grace?" when, in reality, that question is altogether a wrong question. Strictly speaking, there is no real and solid answer to that question as it is asked, for Jesus Christ is grace and Jesus Christ is not a what at all, but a who. The answer to the question shows us that our question itself needs to be questioned. We ask what grace is and God gives us the answer, "Jesus Christ." By doing so, God shows us that our question should have been "Who is grace" in the first place. And, seeing that this is the case, if we then were to try to force God to answer the question precisely as we have stated it, saying, "No, I will not accept a person as my answer, I demand that grace not be a who, but must be a what," we will never understand God. No amount of stamping our feet will change the fact that grace is a who, a person who confronts us in majesty. But when we realize this to be so and allow who Jesus is to shape our understanding of grace, we also realize that grace has not been cheapened by it, but is far greater, far more glorious, and far more challenging than we ever imagined it could be.

Indeed grace is challenging; it is, perhaps, the single most challenging concept that we have to learn as Christians. It is challenging because it goes against all our instincts that come naturally to us as human beings. It is challenging because it goes against all our training that is bred into us as Americans, since we are a very self-sufficient people. In Christ we see that grace something that is absolutely radical in nature. God did not wait for us to get our act together before he came among us. Paul reminds us that it was while we were yet sinners that Christ died for us. John says in our passage that "We love, because he first loved us." It does not matter how good of a life you have lived, it does not matter how young you were when you became a Christian. Even if you have been a Christian for as long as you can remember, the fact remains that you did not take the first step. Before you could make decisions for yourself, before you could speak, before you were even born, God was at work. God always makes the first move. If there is ever a moment when we think that we might be able to get ahead of God, the very fact that that thought crossed our mind shows that God has already been working in our lives.

But grace doesn't just come first. The Galatians were behaving as if God started the work, but then they had to work really hard and finish it. This is what Paul says in one of his most feisty letters. "You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit are you now being perfected by the flesh?" Christ is not merely all in all at the beginning of our Christian life, but is all in all every step of the way. The moment we say to Jesus, "Thanks for all you've done, but I can handle it from here. I really needed you back then, but now I need to prove to you that I can do it," we have turned our back on grace.

After all, isn't the fact that we need grace at all proof that we can't do it on our own? Do our problems with sin only go skin deep? Does sin not rather have all too strong a hold on us, a hold that nothing short of the blood of Christ can release? The radical nature of grace can be best understood in light of the Christian doctrine of substitution. Since the days of the very first disciples, the work of Christ has been understood, at least in part, as being a substitution for us who are sinners. It seems as though everywhere you look, you will find sermons and songs that all make the point that, even though it is us who have deserved death and that Christ did not deserve death, Christ died for us on our behalf and in our place, so that we would not need to suffer the condemnation for our sin. It is not as though God simply pretended that we never sinned, but that God came among us and suffered the penalty that we deserved in our place. This is a key idea of the Christian faith.

But we almost always hear about Christ's substitution for us only in terms of his death. Is that all there is to it? Can we simply reduce the concept of grace to a kind of legal transaction, that is, we have a debt, then Christ pays it, so we are free? Again, that is part of it, but is that really all we believe as Christians? I have met many people who would say this is indeed all that Christian faith has to say, but I am more and more convinced that there is more to it than this.

Do we only need a God who dies for us, as amazing as that is? Is our need for grace really so limited that, so long as we have Jesus die for us, so that we do not need to suffer spiritual death, we are alright with the rest of our lives untouched? There was a debate in the early church as to whether, when God became a human being, he took on a human mind, like the one you and I have. Some said that he did not, since the human mind is the source of all kinds of evil in our hearts and lives. This evil was so great, they argued, that Jesus would be tainted by our evil and this was unthinkable. There were others, however, who disagreed. They pointed out that, when Jesus touched a leper, he did not become unclean, as the law said he should, but that he cleansed the leper by his touch. Jesus was not made less God by becoming a human being, rather, he cleansed and sanctified humanity by what he did. They pointed out that, if Jesus did not take on a human mind, then our human minds remain unredeemed and unsaved, that such a position would force us to say that there is some part of our sin that not even God is powerful enough to overcome. If only part of our humanity fell, then Jesus could be only part human, but if the whole of our humanity is fallen, then Jesus had to take on our complete humanity. The unassumed, they said, is unhealed.

It seems to me that the message of grace shows us that we do not only need a God who dies for us, though we do need it, but we also need a God who lives for us, who is faithful when we are faithless, who worships in spirit and in truth, while we get distracted by the liturgy and music and our own problems, who, by the power of the Holy Spirit, implants his own life into our lives. It is as John says in our passage for this morning, "By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given to us of his Spirit." And he does all this before we ever asked, before we even realized there was a problem. In fact, we never really understand just how big a problem we have until we see how much grace does.

Grace tells us that, on our own, we are not good enough, but grace also tells us that we are not accepted in the eyes of God based on whether we are good enough or not. It is grace that tells us that, as John says, perfect love casts out all fear. But whose love is it that casts out the fear? Surely it is not our love, which is weak, broken and fickle, but it is God's love, God's perfect love that casts out all our fear; for as important as it is, it is far less important that we loved God than it is that God loves us.

Grace tells us, "Come," not because you have your act together, because if grace waited for us to be worthy, we would never come at all. Listen to these words of John Wesley about the soul being awakened to God. "The Spirit or breath of God is immediately inspired, breathed into the new-born soul; and the same breath which comes from, returns to, God: As it is continually received by faith, so it is continually rendered back by love, by prayer, and praise, and thanksgiving; love and praise, and prayer being the breath of every soul which is truly born of God. And by this new kind of spiritual respiration, spiritual life is not only sustained, but increased day by day, together with spiritual strength, and motion, and sensation; all the senses of the soul being now awake, and capable of discerning spiritual good and evil." Wesley urged the Methodists to think of the grace and Spirit of God as being like the air that we breathe, the natural response to taking it in is to return love, prayer, and praise.

In Jesus Christ, grace has transformed our lives, has overwhelmed us with a mighty love that casts out fear. It has come before we knew we needed it and so is available the moment we turn to God, and grace covers every aspect of life, from now until the end of our days. And so, let us go into the world as people who know, not what grace is, but who grace is. Let us pray.

AMEN

Nicene Creed

07/20/11 Nicene Creed GUMC Youth

What exactly is a Christian? There are some who would say that a person is a Christian because they live a certain way; some would say that a person is a Christian if they have particular opinions about issues like homosexuality and abortion, not to mention a bunch of other political issues; some other people would say that Christianity is all about love and that anyone who loves (in a way that the culture defines love), must be a Christian. Perhaps more people would say that a person is a Christian if they go to church with some regularity at all. But is that what it means to be a Christian? I think that the way our society talks about what it means to be a Christian misses the point altogether.

The reason why I think this is because, when we look throughout history, we see that a Christian is not someone who does particular things, but one who believes particular things. Lots of people can care for the poor and the oppressed; lots of people can think that love is important; lots of people can do good to all they meet, but a Christian does all these things because of what they believe about God, about humanity, and about the relation between the two. To a Christian, love is not a goal in itself, it is not something that we can detach from God and define however we want to. For a Christian, love is something that is defined by God's love; we love because Christ loves us. This means that our love for others is not based on what they have done to us, nor on what we think they deserve, but on the fact that we have been loved; God loves us and loves them, so we love them, too.

When people talk about it being important that people believe certain things, it is easy to get the feeling that we aren't dealing with the real issues. After all, what stops people from saying that they believe something and then living however they feel like living? History is full of examples of people who have claimed to be Christians but have done absolutely terrible things, sometimes even in God's name. If it is so clear that someone can believe in Jesus and then be a horrible person, what good is it to talk about what a Christian is in terms of what they believe?

I am more and more convinced that, when someone says they believe and then goes and treats other people cruelly or hatefully, the problem isn't what they say they believe, but in what they really do believe. If you want to know what someone really believes, deep down inside, don't listen to what they say, but look at what they do. You will get a much clearer picture of what they really believe from their actions than their words. The same goes for us, too. If you want to know what you really believe, look at how you live and what you do, the choices you make. You may be surprised that the things you really believe in are not what you thought they were.

I want to show you what I mean by telling you a story. It is a true story, though it didn't happen to me. I had a professor in seminary who was an important mentor in my life. He got his Ph.D. from Boston College and he had a good friend who was in seminary there at the time and who was a fairly new Christian. You need to know that people from Boston can get very feisty and argumentative. This seminary student was on a plane and sat down next to a businessman, who was also from Boston. It came out that this friend was a seminary student, so the businessman made it clear that he was a committed atheist. They then began to get into a loud argument, with about half the plane listening in. They went back and forth about all kinds of things until they finally got down to root of the issue and realized that the thing that divided them was their view of humanity.

The businessman claimed that human beings were basically good while the seminary student claimed that human beings were created good but had become tragically flawed. They went back and forth and back and forth on this issue until the seminary student said, "You don't really believe that and I can prove it." "No you can't." "Yes I can." "No you can't." "Yes I can." Finally the seminarian said, "Show me your keys." "What?" "Show me your keys." You see, there is a lot of crime in Boston, so you lock everything. You even lock the wheel lugs on your car because, if you have nice wheels and they aren't locked up, they will probably be stolen. So this businessman, who said that human beings were basically good, had a whole bunch of keys so he could lock up all his valuables so they wouldn't be stolen. You see, although he said that people were basically good, but he behaved as though at least a certain portion of human beings could not be trusted and must be guarded against. It turned out that this man did not really believe what he thought he believed.

Anyway, back to the question, "What is a Christian." If there were anything in history like a definition of what a Christian is, it is the Nicene Creed. Some of you may be familiar with it. Others might be more familiar with the Apostles' Creed. They are very similar, but the Nicene Creed has been held up by more churches throughout history than any other statement of faith. I want to go through the Nicene Creed, statement by statement, and make some comments on it. I think that if we actually listen to what the Creed declares, we will find that, if we really believe what it talks about, it means some pretty concrete things and we find that we can't just say it and then go out and do whatever we want. You can't take what I have to say about the Creed and say its a true paraphrase of it, but I think that it will highlight some key issues. It is entirely possible to have a whole message on every one of these points, (and who knows, we might do that some day), but I'm going to try to summarize some main points.

"I believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible." What I think we need to get from this is that God is always, always first. Before there was anything else, there was God. This is why I think that a Christian does not necessarily have to reject the Big Bang Theory. It seems to be to be fully compatible with this conviction. There was a time when there was no universe, then, the universe came into being. All a Christian needs to do is stress that this universe is not self-generating and that God was the one who finally created it.

But what this means is that whatever we think about, whether it is the love of God, the power of God, or anything else, God always comes first. God loved us before we ever loved him. Nothing we can do can ever get before God; whenever we make a move, we find that God was there already. The Psalmist writes, "Where can I go from your Spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in the grave, behold, you are there. If I take the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea, even there your hand will lead me, and your right hand will lay hold of me. If I say, 'Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, and the light around me will be night,' Even the darkness is not dark to you, and the night is as bright as the day. Darkness and light are alike to you." God always comes first.

"And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father; by whom all things were made." I want to draw your attention to what is probably the single most important phrase in this entire Creed. If you don't get anything else, make sure you understand this. Jesus Christ, who came among us and that we are learning about in Mark, is "of one being with the Father." Do you know what that means? It means that the man, Jesus of Nazareth, is God!

If Jesus is God, what does that mean? It means that Jesus needs to be the source and norm of all our thoughts about God. If we believe something about God and it doesn't line up with what we actually see in Jesus, it means that we need to rethink what we believe. This doesn't seem like that big of a deal. However, it is incredible how much this matters. Lots of people will talk about God as if Jesus had nothing to say about it.

Once, when I had the chance to give a talk to a bunch of college students, we split them up into two groups and gave each group a piece of paper. On one, we wrote the word "God" and asked them to come up with all the words and ideas they associated with God. On the other, we wrote the word "Jesus" and asked them the same thing. It was absolutely amazing how different the two papers were. The God paper had lots of words like "Powerful," "Majesty," "Authority," and things like that, while the Jesus paper had words like "Love," "Compassion," "Mercy," and things like that. But if Jesus is really God, and if there is no God other than the God who came among us as Jesus, how can those two ideas be so far apart? Jesus is the way we know God, he is God in flesh, God with us, God coming among us so that we might know who he really is. As Christians, we are not interested in abstract speculation about what God might be like, but about the concrete revelation in Jesus Christ of who God is. I could go on all night about this point, but we will unpack it as we go through Mark, so, in the interest of time, I will move on to the rest of the Creed.

"Who for us and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was made flesh by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; from thence he shall come again, with glory, to judge the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end."

This part of the Nicene Creed teaches us that it is finally the Bible that we need to turn to if we want to understand God. Now, you might be thinking, "Wait a minute, the Bible wasn't mentioned anywhere in that passage. It's on the screen and I can see that the word 'Bible' or 'Scripture' isn't up there at all." That might be so, but the big point we need to take from this is about the Bible nonetheless. You see, when God became a human being, he did so at a particular time and at a particular place. Jesus actually lived in first century Israel and actually had particular disciples who followed him and did what he did. And at some point, Jesus ascended to heaven and was no longer on our earth in the same way. Because God was actually physically present as Jesus Christ in that time and place, in a way that he wasn't at any other time and place, it means that we need to understand that time and place as set apart in a special way. We cannot take any other time and place and substitute it in for the actual time and place when and where God came among us. Basically, what I'm saying is that, unless you know of another book where we get to see, not only Jesus in his first century context, but the whole history of Israel leading up to it, then we can use that instead of the Bible. However, since no such book exists, we are stuck with the Bible whether we like it or not.

"And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets." Being a Christian really, really makes a difference in our lives. Again, you might wonder how we get from this statement in the Creed, but it isn't that odd. After all, we are saying that the Holy Spirit is just as much God as the Father and the Son. This Holy Spirit is given to the people of God, so that God himself sets up residence inside of us. Paul even writes to the Romans, saying, "If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him." If we are not people in whom the Spirit lives, we do not belong to Christ. And if God himself lives inside of us, surely our lives must change.

The last part of the Nicene Creed is this, "In one holy catholic and apostolic Church; we acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen." This statement has been debated over and over again throughout the history of the church and you can find lots of books that try to explain this in one way or another, but the point I want you to take from it is this: We absolutely cannot be Christians on our own. I know that we live in America and you don't find the individualist spirit stronger anywhere in the world than in America, but, whether we like it or not, you can not be a Christian without me, and I cannot be a Christian without you. You and I are bound together by the blood of Christ, and we are bound just as strongly to every other Christian in the world. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we are the body of Christ here on earth throughout history.

This is really important. We need to understand that the Creed is saying what modern psychology is only just now catching up with. We are not who we are independently of our relationships. I don't just mean that boyfriends and girlfriends have an influence on us, but that they, along with other close friends and family, and even, sometimes, brief acquaintances, play a role in who we are as human beings. If it were not for the relationships in our lives, we would not be who we are today. If our relationships are good, that is a good thing, but if our relationships are bad or destructive, they will have a destructive impact, not only on our lives, but on who we are.

I've thrown a lot at you tonight. If it is helpful to you, I post all my messages online so you can read through them again. We will come back to these points over and over again. If we take these things that the Nicene Creed teaches us seriously, and I mean really seriously, the power of God will transform our lives and we will become more and more like Jesus, which is precisely what we, as Christians, are called to do. I will be glad to talk about any of these points with any of you at any time, and we can have a question night about things like this if you let me know that is what you want to do. As it is, I think we should wrap this time up and let it sink in. let us pray.

AMEN

Mark 1:14-28

      07/13/11                          Mark 1:14-28                       GUMC Youth

    Tonight we continue on our journey through Mark and we again have three things going on that, at first glance, don't seem like they have much to say to one another.  The first thing that we have is Jesus starting his preaching ministry in Galilee, then we hear about how Jesus called four of his disciples and they dropped everything and followed him, and finally we read about how Jesus went into the synagogue where he taught and both amazed the people and greatly upset the unclean spirits.  Let's take the stories one by one and then see how they all fit together.

    First, after John the Baptist is put into prison, Jesus comes to Galilee and begins to preach.  Now, for most of us, if we don't know where the Jordan River, where Jesus was baptized is and if we don't know where the region of Galilee is, this statement doesn't really make a lot of sense.  But I've got a map to kind of show you what this means.  Down here is the Jordan River.  Way up at the top of the nation of Israel was the region of Galilee.  John was captured and put in prison in Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, which is down here and then, only after that took place, did Jesus go north and start his ministry.  We are going to come back to the map of Israel over and over again because Mark uses geography theologically in a way that the other gospel writers don't.

    So Jesus goes about as far away from Jerusalem as he could go without leaving the country, and begins to say, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel."  This has puzzled a lot of people.  After all, what does Jesus mean when he says that the time is fulfilled and that the kingdom of God is at hand?  Lots of people have pointed to passages like this and then to the two thousand years that have passed since Jesus was crucified and say, "If the kingdom of God was so darn close and if the time was fulfilled, why doesn't it seem that the kingdom of God is here?"

    You know, we can't really find too much wrong with this kind of reasoning, since we would be hard pressed to say, when we look around and see what's going on in our world today, that the kingdom of God has really come in fulness.  After all, there are wars, people are dying, some people don't have enough to eat.  It seems that everywhere we look, we see brokenness.  And here is Jesus, two thousand years ago, saying that everything is fulfilled and that we need to repent and believe the good news.  It can sometimes seem like a bit much to do that, especially when we look around and things don't seem to be getting any better.

    I think part of our problem is that it is very easy for us to be confused as to what the "kingdom of God" really is.  A lot of people, when they think of the kingdom of God, think of it as perfection on earth, where everything is just as it should be.  For some other people, the kingdom of God is understood as heaven, where we go when we die, and has next to nothing to do with how life on earth is.  If we think like this, then the only way we will believe Jesus is if we can look through history and see, in general, heaven on earth.  But we don't see that, do we?  We see strife and sin and anger and bitterness and destruction, just about anywhere we care to look.  Does that mean that Jesus is completely wrong?

    I don't think so, and the reason I don't think so is because I think that we need to look at Jesus' words in a very different way.  The Greek used here to say that the kingdom of God is at hand has the sense, not only that the kingdom of God is right at the door and all we need to do is to open it and it will come in, but also of the sense that it is already here, right here and right now, right in front of your faces.  On the one hand, it doesn't seem like that would help, because we can see that the world was still broken when Jesus said that.  However, maybe Jesus isn't talking about an event or a series of events.  Maybe he was talking about himself?  Maybe Jesus himself is the kingdom of God that is at hand.

    It seems to me that things would make a lot more sense if we thought about the kingdom of God as Jesus, rather than trying to invent beautiful scenarios that we pretend are what the kingdom of God is like.  Jesus is the one from heaven who came down to earth to be with us, and Jesus is the king of heaven.  If this is what is going on, then Jesus is saying, "Hey everyone!  Repent and believe the good news, because I am here; God has come among you and this is a good thing!"  To see how good a thing it really is, we need to remember all that Jesus said and did.  He healed the sick, he raised the dead, he restored sight to the blind, he calmed the seas and he fed the hungry, to say no more.  This is the kind of stuff that Jesus is telling people about.  This is why they should believe the good news.  This is why they should repent.

    But what does it mean to repent?  What does it mean that one of the first words that comes out of Jesus' mouth in his ministry is to repent?  In our society today, we tend to think of "repent" as an angry kind of word, one that is trying to tear people down and make them feel bad.  This isn't helped by the fact that we tend to hear the word most often when angry people who are picketing one thing or another have it written in huge letters on a sign while shouting terrible things at people. 

    In the secular Greek word, the word translated as "repentance" meant "to realize too late," that is, to have regret, or to change one's mind.  When it was used in the Jewish communities, including when Jesus used it, it had a much stronger meaning.  It didn't just mean, "change your mind" or "feel bad about what you've done."  Instead, it had the much bigger meaning of "change your entire life."  It isn't really enough to just change what you think, though that is important.  You can change what you think about a particular thing or situation and yet never do anything about it.  To repent means to be converted, to not just stop doing certain things or to stop thinking certain things, but to stop being a certain way.

    But what are the kinds of things that Jesus is asking us to repent of?  I have met people who are convinced that, when Jesus asks us to repent, he is trying to get us to live with an unhealthy restriction on the good things in the world, that he simply takes things that are no problem and then labels them "sin" so that we feel bad by doing perfectly normal and healthy things.  But what are the kinds of things that Jesus is asking us to give up, or rather, who are the kinds of people that Jesus is asking us to stop being?  He wants us to stop being the kind of people who hate God, who define good and evil by what we feel at the moment, who engage in destructive practices and relationships, who have, for one reason or another, gotten ourselves so that we hate ourselves and others.

    And what does it mean to repent of those things and to believe in the gospel, in the good news?  It means that we finally stop believing the lies that the way things are are the way things will always be, that they are how things are meant to be.  It means that we become the kind of people who believe in our hearts that living lives that are characterized, at every moment, by love for God and neighbor, is better than living consumed by hate and suspicion.  And, when I say "better," I don't mean just that it is better in the same way that good is better than evil.  I mean that it is simply a better way to live, a way of living that brings more joy and more fulfillment.

    The point is that the kingdom of God is not something that just dropped out of heaven for us to enjoy or even something that we work really hard and establish for ourselves.  The kingdom of God that has drawn near is Jesus Christ himself.  There are some who make fun of the church for still believing in the coming of the kingdom of God when it has been two thousand years, and God has not brought his work to completion.  And yet, it seems to me that the amazing thing is not that God's kingdom has not been brought to completion, but that God came among us so long before he brought it to completion.  The fact that God didn't keep away, even until now, is an amazing sign of God's grace.  In fact, when we look at what Jesus says, 'The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the good news," it seems that we can't really repent or believe until we have been confronted by Christ.

    I want to spend the rest of this message thinking about the other two stories in this passage.  First we have Jesus walking up to some poor fishermen on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and calling to them.  We know they are poor because they have to stand on the shore to cast their nets.  The Sea of Galilee is big enough that, if you could afford a boat, you used it.  Jesus calls out to Simon and Andrew and says, "Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men."  They immediately drop their nets and follow.  He then went and did the same thing to James and John, who were probably wealthier, since they had a boat and some hired servants.

    Why did they leave and follow Jesus?  There are lots of reasons, not least is the fact that they are being given a chance to follow a Rabbi, which was a respected position and because Rabbi's, in general, didn't call their disciples, the disciples picked their Rabbi.  Clearly, Jesus was an amazing person and they had never seen anyone quite like him before.  But I want to look at what he says.  He says, "follow me."  That sounds pretty ordinary, but, when we understand it in its first century context, we realize that it doesn't just mean "follow" like "following the leader."  It meant, "Come behind me and follow in my footsteps; go where I go, do what I do, think what I think, and say what I say."  When Jesus, like the other Rabbi's spoke of following and discipleship, it was a radical thing.  Discipleship is not just something you talk about, not just something that you do halfway, it is a total commitment, something that impacts absolutely every aspect of your life.  Jesus was asking these men to come and be a part of something that was so big a deal that they simply could not continue to do what they had always done.  They had to break ties with friends and family and follow this teacher to the very end.

    The other scene we have is Jesus teaching in the synagogue.  The people were amazed, for Jesus as one who was authoritative, and not like the others who taught.  However, in spite of the fact that he was well received, there was a man with an evil spirit, who started screaming at Jesus, saying, "What business do we have with each other, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are - the Holy One of God!"

    I don't want to try to explain all the details of a theology of exorcism.  However, what I do want to do is highlight the different reactions between the four men who became disciples and the evil spirit.  We need to always remember that, when Jesus says something, makes a statement or commands someone or something, he isn't casting a spell, as if there were something magical about his words.  When he says something, if something happens, it isn't because they had absolutely no choice but to do what they did, but because Jesus Christ is who he is, the Son of God made human flesh.

    Jesus, the kingdom of God drawn near, provokes responses from everyone he meets.  What those responses are depends on who he encounters.  Simon, Andrew, James and John, when they meet with Jesus and at the sound of his voice, drop everything they are doing, and walk away from their jobs, their friends, and their family, in order to follow him.  When the unclean spirit came into contact with Jesus, his only response that he could make was to cry out and be in conflict with Jesus.  From the very first moment, the disciples knew that they were going to follow this man to the end; from the very first moment, the unclean spirit knew that he and Jesus were on opposite sides and nothing could reconcile them.

    What this means is that Jesus is a line in the sand, a line that divides people into two groups:  those who follow him and love him, and those who are hostile to him.  Now, it is important to remember that I did not say that Jesus' words were the line in the sand.  Jesus says a lot of things that all kinds of people can get behind.  He tells us to love one another and to help those who need help, and things like that.  Lots of people say things like that, and all kinds of other leaders make some of the same things the center of their teaching.  What I mean is that Jesus, being who he is, the Son of God among us, the personal presence of God in the midst of his people, the Creator in the middle of his creation, is the line in the sand.

    The question that we need to ask ourselves is, "Which side of the line that Jesus makes are we on?"  Are we people who would drop everything, even the things that are the closest to our hearts, to follow him, whether it is easy or hard to follow him?  Or are we people who will insist on our own way against his way, who are determined to set ourselves against God's grace and mercy, who know just who Jesus is and who reject him anyway?  This is a serious question.  Jesus Christ will be first in our hearts and lives or else we have nothing to do with him.  God has come to meet with us, to release us from our captivity to the things that destroy life, and to bring us good news.  Let us take a few moments and reflect in silence and in prayer.  Let us pray.

    AMEN

John 1:1-18

07/10/11 John 1:1-18 Spencer GUMC

Jesus Christ is the answer. Jesus Christ is the incarnation of the Word of God, the incarnation of God, the ultimate gift of God to human beings, the one through whom we come to the Father, the one who laid down his life for us that we might be delivered from our flesh of sin and reconciled to God, once and for all. Jesus Christ is the full and final word of God to humanity and the full and final word of humanity to God, the great high priest and the ultimate sacrifice; offerer and offering. By being who he is, Christ is the absolute hinge that holds our faith together, the linchpin upon which everything hangs. It is because Jesus is who he is that we believe what we believe. It is truly because of this God made flesh that we call ourselves "Christians."

This is my first opportunity to share the word of God with this congregation as a whole, so I wanted to spend this morning sharing with you some of the things that are absolutely pivotal to who I am and to what I believe. One of the things you need to know is that I absolutely love to study theology. I get really excited about what people have said about God over the centuries and I love to see how our ideas today have developed from those in the past. Sometimes that development has been good and faithful; sometimes it makes me scratch my head and wonder what on earth we were thinking. I emphasized theological studies in seminary, taking every theology course I could sign up for and even doing some independent studies so I could go beyond what the school offered. Over the past four years especially, I have read thousands of pages and written dozens of papers, largely about what other people have believed.

The reason why I bring this up is because I want you to know that I take the task of thinking hard about God and what God has done very seriously. With all that said, I want to try to lay out for you, in only one sentence, what my theology is. Here it is: Jesus...really. What I mean by this is that I try to make Jesus the center of absolutely everything; everything I say, everything I do, and even everything I think. When I try to make sense out of some issue, I do my best to always go back to Jesus and see what I have to learn from him about it. This sounds simple, but I have found that, if we really take it seriously, if we really let Jesus be the source of all our thinking about God, about humanity, and about the relation between the two, it has astonishing consequences.

I want to give a somewhat complicated illustration of what I mean from the world of science. When Albert Einstein published his theory of Special Relativity in 1905, it caused something of a sensation. It seemed to throw out all kinds of ideas that scientists had held so dear for so long; it seemed so counter-intuitive from the way they had been used to seeing things. Just about everyone who I've ever known who has tried to understand Relativity Theory, including myself, has had a hard time because it seems, at first glance, to be extremely complicated. However, it only seems complicated. It is actually very simple.

The reason why Relativity Theory is simple is because it is largely based on one central conviction: The speed of light is constant for all observers. That is, when light is observed, regardless of whether you are moving or standing still, light always seems to be traveling about 186,000 miles per second in relation to you. Now, that doesn't sound all that revolutionary when you first hear it, but what happens when we take it seriously? Let's say you are on a train and you fire a bullet in the direction of the train, how fast is the bullet going? Well, it's going the speed of the train plus the speed of the bullet. However, let's say the train is going into a tunnel, so they turn the light on. How fast is the light going? We want to say that it is going 186,000 miles per second plus the speed of the train, but we would be wrong. The light is still only observed as going the original 186,000 miles per second. Nothing in the universe travels faster than the speed of light. This one basic conviction forces us to redefine concepts, like space and time, that we used to think were obvious and understand them in terms of light.

It is not altogether different with the utter centrality of Christ. To say that Christ is the center and source of all our understanding of God, humanity, and the relation between the two does not sound all that revolutionary at first. In fact, it sounds pretty ordinary. And yet, when we take it seriously, it transforms our understanding of things like good and evil, power, love, mercy, compassion, and many other things that we thought we had a pretty good grasp on before. In fact, if we make up our minds to make Jesus Christ, whom the church has proclaimed since the very beginning to be truly God and worthy of worship and is declared in the great creeds to be of one and the same being as God the Father, the ultimate standard about what we believe about God and allow all our convictions to stand or fall based on how well the conform, not to what one leader or another says, but to who Christ is, we find that there are many things that seemed so difficult before that are revealed to be obvious in light of Christ.

For almost all of my Christian life, I have considered the first passage in John to be one of the most outstanding and beautiful passages of the good news of Jesus Christ. John tells us that this Word of God, this one who was with God and who is God is the one who came among us as Jesus Christ. In Christ, God himself has come to meet us. When we hear the words of Christ, we hear the very words of God; when we see the works of Christ, they are the very works of God in our midst. When we look into the face of Christ, we see the face of God, a face that we have never seen anywhere else and we could not have seen in any other way.

In Christ, we do not only hear that God loves us, we see it in concrete majesty. We see that Jesus is not just another prophet, just another human teacher with some kind of link to God, but God in flesh, God with us. In Jesus, we do not experience God in man but God as man. We see the Lord of all, who created the universe with a word from his lips, who, as the Psalmist says, laughs in unconcern when the nations unite to rage against him, who does not need us in order to be God, coming among us, sharing in our broken condition, and being willing even to die for us and our salvation. It is something so astonishing that Charles Wesley could write: "'Tis mystery all, the Immortal dies! Who can explore his strange design? In vain the firstborn seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine. 'Tis mercy all! Let earth adore; let angel minds inquire no more."

But what kind of world did God enter into? We are told that, when Jesus came, he did not come into a foreign world, a world that had no connection to God, but a world that he himself had created, that he had moulded and shaped long before he came in human flesh. With the birth of Christ, the Creator entered into his creation, took creatureliness upon his own eternal self, and joined us in our hurting world.

It would seem that, if God himself were to come among his people, in the world that he created, it would be a cause for great rejoicing, that everyone from all over the world would be so excited that God himself had come that they would give him their loyalty, as grateful people who were being visited by their God. However, no such thing was the case. When Jesus was born, some shepherds visited, some rulers from other nations brought him gifts but, in general, not many people took notice. The Lord of the universe entered our world of space and time, not in a palace, but in a stable, with a feeding trough for a bed. The people of God, who had been marked out for hundreds of years as God's people in a special way, who knew him better than any others, practically ignored him. It is as John tells us at the beginning of his gospel, "He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him."

If we wanted to, we could be filled with nothing but regret because the people rejected God when he came among them. And yet, our primary emotion when we hear of Christ being born in a stable is not regret but joy. The joy we feel is not because there is no regret. It is not as though we can pretend that it would not have been better if the people showed more compassion and hospitality toward that young woman in labor, the bearer of God in their midst. We are not joyful because it is somehow a good thing that God's own people did not accept him. Rather, we rejoice that, in spite of the mistreatment that Christ suffered at the hands of his own people, in spite of the trials he went through, in spite of the betrayal and abandoning at the hands of his closest friends, God did not keep away, but came among us anyway.

I don't know about you, but the things in the Bible that are most amazing to me are not the miracles. It isn't particularly amazing to me that Jesus can heal the sick, calm the sea, and even raise the dead. If Jesus really is God among us, the Creator personally entering his creation, those are precisely the kinds of things that we would expect him to be able to do. What is more amazing to me is that Jesus is so unlike us in the way he shows compassion.

For example, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman by the side of a well and, in the middle of their conversation, exposes her sinful lifestyle, revealing to her that she is an adulterer and even he, a perfect strangers, knows it. That is hardly what most of us would call particularly compassionate ministry. And yet, what do we read? We read that she goes off and tells all her neighbors and the people who live in her town and says, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?" When Jesus confronts the woman with her sin, she wants to tell everyone about it because it is the best news she has ever heard.

Why is this? I am more and more convinced that, if Jesus had not pressed the woman, had not exposed her for who she had been and what she had done, she would never have been able to take his forgiveness seriously. She would always have been able to say, "Well, that's a nice thing to say, but he doesn't really know me or what I've done. I can't really be forgiven." As it was, Jesus revealed that his word of forgiveness was not being directed to someone that he thought didn't need it, but to one who had sinned mightily. Jesus knew just what kind of sin the woman was guilty of and forgave her anyway.

That is what John means when he says that, in spite of the fact that the people we would expect to accept Jesus did not do so, he gave everyone who does receive him "power to become children of God, who" are "born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of a husband, but of God." That is why we are told that "we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth." That kind of radical forgiveness and transformation that we receive in Christ is why John declares that "From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace."

The last verse of our passage for this morning is so very important. It has changed my life and my whole way of thinking and I truly believe that it can transform the lives and thinking of others as well. "No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known." If we want to know the answer to the question, "How do we come to know God?" Here is our answer. We do not need to go up to the top of a mountain to find God, we do not need to hide in a cave to await enlightenment. We do not need to speculate based on our own feelings or cultural convictions about who God is and what God does. God the only Son, Jesus Christ, who is close to the Father's heart, has made God known. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we are made to know God because of what Christ has done for us and our salvation.

God has come among us, God has drawn near. It is the very most amazing thing in the whole history of the world and it has the power to transform lives. God is always greater than we can imagine, but God has refused to remain a total mystery to us. God has had compassion on us weak and broken human beings and has graced this world of ours by entering into it. God has revealed himself in Christ in a way that only he could do, has stepped down to be among us, to speak our language, to eat with us, to live with us, and to save us from ourselves and from the evil that so often surrounds us. Let us now and always focus on the amazing gift of God, Jesus Christ, where the giver and the gift are one. God has spoken, his Word has been made flesh. Let us listen to it with open eyes and ears. Let us pray.

AMEN

Mark 1:1-13

07/06/11 Mark 1:1-13 GUMC Youth

Tonight, we start a journey through the Gospel according to Mark. We won't spend every single week looking at Mark, but we will spend quite a bit of time in this book, looking, passage by passage, at this particular account of the life of Christ. You might be wondering, "Why do we need to go through and hit every passage? Couldn't we just skip around and just do a few?" There are lots of reasons why we are going to cover, over time, the whole book of Mark.

First, it gives us a chance to really dig into a single book, something that most people just don't take the time to do. Second, it is really easy to take what the Bible says out of its context and make it say just about anything you want it to. If we go through passage by passage, we will have the chance to understand the Gospel as Mark presented, and not just how I feel like picking and choosing. Third, there are some very tough passages in the Bible, some passages that might be a bit uncomfortable, but that doesn't mean they are any less important; in fact, they are probably even more important because of that. By forcing ourselves to look at every passage, we force ourselves to really listen hard to God, to really wrestle with what he has to teach us and that will help us to understand what God has done and is doing better than we would otherwise.

Alright, so that is why we are taking a whole book and looking at it bit by bit, but you might be wondering, "Why Mark? Why not some other book?" One of the things you will hear me say over and over again is that, since Jesus is God, if we want to understand God, we need to look first and foremost at what Jesus tells us and shows us about God. In order to do that, we need to really know the story of Jesus. So why Mark and not Matthew, Luke or John? On the one hand, there isn't a reason; we could just as easily use those other gospels. There is much to learn in each of them and any of them would be helpful. However, Mark is a good place to start for a few reasons.

First, because it is the shortest of the four Gospels. By picking the shortest, we can cover the life and teaching of Christ quicker than we could if we used the others, and we can move on to other books, like the letters of Paul, which, if we read them carefully, we find that the problems that Christians had two thousand years ago have not really gone away, that we do the same dumb things that they did a long time ago. Second, because Mark is probably the most unified of any of the Gospels; that is, Mark's story is less broken up into pieces than the others are, so we can really see how he connected things together more clearly than we can in some others. And Third, because there some fascinating themes that come out so clearly in Mark that matter to us today. Mark highlights the problem of whether we are disciples and real followers of Christ or whether we are just part of the crowd that follows him around, but who have no real commitment. Mark also emphasizes the question of who is on the inside and who is on the outside, and we will find that the people we might think should be on the inside or the outside are often the other way around. Mark is probably the most direct and, at the same time, most challenging of the four Gospels.

So let's turn to the passage itself and see what Mark has to say. Now, if you compare Mark's beginning with that of Matthew, Luke or John, you get the idea that he is rushing through stuff to get right to the story. This first passage tells us about John the Baptist, the baptism of Christ, and the Temptation of Christ. Matthew and Luke, for example, take four chapters to get through all that, and tell us the story of Jesus' birth, too. Mark seems to want to get past those early events quickly, but he still thinks they are important enough to include them.

The first thing we need to notice is that John the Baptist was not just a guy who started preaching one day. He stood at the end of a long line of prophets sent by God to deliver the word of God to the people of God. Whenever we say that, in Jesus Christ, God himself came among us, we need to remember that he didn't just drop out of the sky, with no context, but God was preparing the way over thousands of years. In fact, if Jesus came with no John the Baptist, no nation and history of Israel, no preparation, we would have absolutely no idea who he was or how to understand him. What I want to point out is that the prophets often have a lot of tough things to say to the people. They were constantly reminding people that they couldn't follow God and be just like all the other nations, but they were called to be different, set apart for God.

However, in spite of the fact that the prophets were often critical of the people, sometimes even quite harsh, we need to always remember that God wasn't just beating up on the people. Israel, as the people of God, had a special relationship to God. At any time, when Israel sinned, God could have turned his back and walked away from them. They had broken the agreement and God would have been well within his rights to abandon them. But he doesn't abandon them; he comes back over and over again. It is true that he sometimes punished them, but only because they were his people and he wasn't going to let them go. He loved them and wanted them to not run away from the God who created them and loved them.

When God sent a prophet, like John the Baptist, it was never because the people were already great people who were doing just fine on their own. God sent prophets precisely because the people weren't who they were supposed to be and didn't do what they were supposed to do. Every time a prophet came, it was a sign that God had not forgotten his people and was still reaching out to them.

This was especially true when God himself came among us as Jesus. When Paul the apostle points out how radical God's love for us is, he points out that most of the time, people don't die for righteous people. In fact, lots of righteous people have been assassinated in the last hundred years or so, which is the opposite of people dying for them. He points out that maybe, just maybe, someone will die for a particularly good person. However, God's love is not like human love, where we only die for people who we think are worth dying for. Paul reminds us that it was while we were still sinners that Christ died for us and that shows us just how much God loves us. God didn't wait until we got our act together before he came to save us. He came and did what he did long before we ever even thought of turning to him, precisely because we couldn't do it until he died for us.

So, when we see that Jesus came and that his ministry overlapped with that of John the Baptist, we need to remember that God came to a sinful people, a people who needed saving, a people not all that different from you and me. We need to remember that whenever we think about what Jesus says or does. All the people, whether we are talking about the crowd or the disciples, the people who seem to be on the inside or those who seem to be on the outside, need Jesus and all of them were sinners, just like you and me.

The next thing we see is that Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist. Remember what John's baptism was. We read that it was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. I was baptized at sixteen and I clearly remember having sins that I needed to repent of and be forgiven for. You may have been baptized as a baby, but that doesn't mean that you don't have sins that you need to repent of and be forgiven for. What's amazing is that Jesus is baptized. Why does he need to be baptized? Paul tells us that Jesus was the one who knew no sin; the book of Hebrews says that he was made like his brothers and sisters, that is, you and me, in every way, but without sin. Why does he need a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin?

Matthew spends a bit more time than Mark does on this. He tells us that John didn't want to baptize Jesus for precisely this reason. And yet, Jesus insists. Why is that? Whose sins did Jesus confess when he was baptized? Yours and mine. Jesus didn't just come to die so that we could be forgiven; he also came to repent on our behalf and in our place. After all when we repent, it isn't always like it should be, is it? We say we're sorry, and we sometimes really mean it, but then we go right back to doing the same things again. Jesus repented for us, not so that we don't have to, but so we can join him and his real repentance so we can really be forgiven.

Think about what this means. Jesus is the one who takes our sin upon his own shoulders and deals with it from the inside out. When God deals with our sin, it isn't by snapping his fingers, it isn't by waving a magic wand, but by being made poor, by becoming one of us and overcoming sin as a human being, the very thing that we cannot do on our own. Our God is a God who willingly takes on the problems of others and overcomes them.

The last part to this is that Jesus was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness where he was tempted by Satan for forty days. Again, Matthew and Luke take much more time to describe just what this temptation looked like, but Mark just tells us it happened and moves on. However, think about what this means. You know what it is like for you to be tempted, right? What in the world is it like for the Son of God to be tempted? And yet, the Bible tells us over and over again that Jesus was tempted just like we are; the only difference is that, while you and I usually give in to temptations pretty quickly, Jesus never did. In fact, we could say that Jesus actually was tempted more severely than we are, because it doesn't take much for us to give in. We read that, on the night he was betrayed, Jesus was in the garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood because he was in so much agony over the temptation he was under to not follow through and give himself up for us.

Jesus is the God of the universe who came among us as a human being. There is no reason why he would ever have to be tempted like you and I are tempted. And yet, he chooses to be tempted, to overcome the temptations that you and I so often give in to, so that we might become people who join in that victory over sin and temptation by the power of the Spirit.

Mark blows right by a bunch of details and wants to get right to the meat of the actual life and teaching of Jesus, but we need to remember, every step of the way, who this Jesus is that Mark is telling us about. Jesus is, above all, the grace of God, the one who comes to save us while we need saving and not when we've gotten our act together. Jesus is also the one who takes our burdens and makes them his own, not because he has to, but because he loves us. And finally, in Christ, we see that, when God steps into our world of space and time to transform us and make us whole, he does not ignore the fact that we are tempted, often with temptation that is stronger than we are, but enters into it, enduring the temptations that we experience and even worse temptation than that, but does not give into it. He does not try to avoid temptation, but confronts it, face to face, because he is powerful enough to overcome it, even as a human being.

As we work our way through Mark and as we look at the big picture of our faith and as we tackle the tough questions that you have to ask, we need to always remember who this Jesus is that we worship and trust. He is not merely a great human teacher; in fact, he says some things that many great human teachers would never say. He is not merely someone who wants to encourage us like a motivational speaker. In fact, he might say some things that don't seem like wisdom at all the first time you hear them. In Christ, we see that our God is a God who loves us more than we love ourselves, who, in a sense, since he laid down his life so that he might not be without us, loves us more than God loves God's own self. This is the Jesus who we praise and sing to; this is the Jesus who gave himself for us and our salvation; this is the Jesus who transforms people's lives and who wants to transform ours. Let us pray.

AMEN