St. Mark’s Lutheran

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Mark 13:1-13

We are contingent creatures. That is a fancy way of saying we depend upon other people and things. Some of those people and things are big foundation stones that if a crack showed up in them, we’d just not know what to do. And that is the problem. When society seems to be falling down around you, when those big foundation stones are crumbling, is your whole life overturned…or are you able to stand in spite of the loss.

In the Holy Spirit we are made to stand. We aren’t promised that our stones won’t be toppled over. In fact if we’ve been listening to Jesus following him probably makes that more likely. What we are promised is one standing with us. Jesus Christ on the throne has poured out his Spirit.

Tags: Mark, Sermons by Parson Brown
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Text: Mark 12:38-44

I got to deliver this sermon to two different audiences on the same day – the congregation here at St. Mark and the student mission at RIT. The full copy is the congregational delivery whic some things were modified for the RIT community, but it always amazes me that what preaching and the gospel best talk to is universal. The form of the questions and the searches might appear different, but the core concerns are the same – purpose, guilt, acceptance, love.

We like to ask questions that quantify those things. When we do that, we always end up in the red. We can never find enough of any of them. Instead we need to aks who. Who has has the power and love to accomplish those things we so desperately need. Who have already given all? That man on the cross. That is the Gospel – everything really needful has been supplied in full.

Tags: Mark, Sermons by Parson Brown
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As a congregation we spent two Sundays on Mark 10:17-22 and then Mark 10:23-31 – the Rich Young Ruler and the aftermath explanations. [The LCMS three year lectionary cycle very closely follows the one used in most churches, but this is one of the places where it was modified. Instead of treating all that material in one week, and then reading the following request of James and John, we spend two weeks on the story itself and Jesus' explanation.] The impression that is given at the end of the story is that the Rich Young Man did not follow Jesus – or that is the traditional take either being the example of seed falling among thorns (Mark 4:7) or just his walking away sad.

This link has a slight expansion using later parts of Mark to say that things might not have ended so sad for the rich young man. For some good counter arguments read the comment by Kim Fabricius in the chain.

Both are good close readings of the text.

Tags: Mark by Parson Brown
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The gospel texts are sparse. What I mean by that is they relate just enough information to tell the story and expect you the reader to fill in the gaps from your knowledge and experience. We do this type of stuff everyday of our lives. The closer the person is to us, the sparser our communication can be. Husbands and wives often fall into this trap thinking that one fills in the gap correctly when they don’t. I’ll let you fill in the gap of the example. In the process of fleshing out the story, a peril for a preacher is preaching on the gaps. To preach or pull the main lesson for the text from what the reader has filled in is usually bad. At its best it is an orthodox sermon because the person in the pulpit has the Spirit and the gap filling in pious, but even then it usually has the effect of being distracting as the fill-in does not naturally fit the text. At its worst, the gaps are filled with stuff that contradicts the plain text and lessens or overrides its teaching. The sermon on the gaps becomes a sermon straight from probably the worst places of the preacher.

This sermon has one fill-in that in my studies for the week I could not find another who took it this way. That would usually mean that I would not use it to try and avoid preaching on a gap. I struggled with this because Peter’s reply to Jesus in the text – “look, we’ve left everything…” just did not make sense within the text as it is normally read. The typical reading is to see this as Peter comparing himself to the Rich Young Man and expecting that he will come out looking better. Jesus says is it hard to enter the Kingdom. We’ve already given up everything, so we must have merited entry. Here is why that makes no sense to me. First, if it was really Peter expressing a claim to merit, Jesus would have immediately struck it down. One does not merit the Kingdom. That is a doctrinal point, but one so basic that if you find your reading of a text going against it you’ve got a wrong reading. Second, Jesus has just said that with man it is impossible. Would Peter really respond to with man it is impossible with an assertion of his own work? Third, Jesus’ response is a blessing and a very confusing one as it gives a whole bunch in this time. Eternal life is an afterthought. Something else is going on here.

I leaned on Matthew to fill in the gap a little. The synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) all follow a similar outline. (If you want more on that ask me.) Often you can look at the others to get a clearer view of what is happening. Matthew also records the encounter with the Rich Young Man and right after it records the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard. My filling in the gaps to make sense of Peter’s response and Jesus’ response to that in this sermon was:
1) The disciples ask who can be saved
2) Jesus says everyone – because God is doing it, with man it is impossible
3) Peter’s response is that’s not fair (The NLT has a good translation from Matthew – We’ve given up everything to follow you. What will we get?)
4) Jesus promises stuff here in this life – the stuff he promises is a new community the church
5) In Matthew Jesus follows this teaching up with the parable of the workers in the vineyard which ends with the saying ‘the first are last and last first’ that Mark just tacks onto the end of Jesus’ response
I filled in the gaps I think in a way that makes more sense than the typical Peter trying to justify himself reading, but since I went out on a limb so to speak and it does play a role in the general outline of the sermon I add wanted to point out from where and why I filled in the gaps.

Tags: Mark, Sermons, grace by Parson Brown
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Jesus interacted with a bunch of people, but primarly two groups – the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Pharisees it could be said shared a basic understanding and worldview with Jesus. They believed in the Scriptures, and God and the comming messiah. Jesus argued and castigated them for their blindness to their sin and called them to repent. He did that with passion you can read in the gospels. The Sadducees we don’t know as much about, but the general construction is rich and powerful religious/political elites who didn’t believe in much beyond their power. The story in Mark 12:18-27 records an exchange. I can’t read it without reading disdain dripping from the Sadducees. The were not so much asking Jesus a question or entering into debate with him as mocking him and his understanding. Jesus’ answer to them lacks the passion of the Pharisees. He mocks back in a way and simply claims – “You are badly mistaken.”

In the past the church would interact with the culture and cultural leaders as if they were Pharisees. It would be very heated. It would call for repentance and even engage with it. The Christian left would trumpet the social gospel and the christian right would try to build the Kingdom or the Shining City. Maybe both errors in their way, but passionate engagements with the larger culture that shared a belief in at least scriptural morality. Has not our culture turned into the Sadducees? The church no longer shares a common worldview or set of presuppositions as the culture. Will not church and culture interaction turn more toward the cooler – “you are badly mistaken” forms of interaction? Of course the Sadducees ceased to be in AD70. Sadducee parties have a tendency to cease to be. Good news for the church, but bad news for the West?

Tags: Culture, Mark by Parson Brown
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Text: Mark 10:17-22

As one congregant said – “reading a little Plato were you?” The presenting question was what do I do to inherit eternal life. In our culture today I don’t think that is even a question people ask. Eternal and the man’s address of Jesus as Good Teacher imply something that our culture denies. That concept of the good which is the intuitive way we are drawn to things that are true or that are beautiful and not in our culture’s highest goods of utility or aesthetic pleasingness, is what is denied. There are no eternal or good things in our culture. We have so much and settle for so little.

In a Lutheran law and gospel structure the man’s question is one of a second use of the law. It shows us our sin or a mirror to our soul. But it also implies a first use of the law – a simple description of the way things were made. We were made with eternity in mind. There are things that are beautiful – even though they may not be aesthetically pleasing or pass the culture poobah’s 5 star ratings. There are things that are true, even if you don’t believe them. In many ways talking to our culture is more like talking to the Sadducees than the Pharisees. The pharisees inhabited the same mental world as Jesus. When Jesus talked to the Sadducees he would say things like “you are badly mistaken.” (Mark 12:27) With Pharisees Jesus called them to see that they couldn’t carry the law. He was so visibly upset with them because they were close to the kingdom. He looked at them and loved them. With the Sadducees it was a call to something more fundamental, a call to examine presuppositions about the world.

Don’t settle for happiness – or the things that wealth can buy temporarily. Seek the Kingdom, the good things, the things eternal. Then you will have treasure in heaven.

Tags: Mark, Sermons by Parson Brown
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That is the start of a pithy saying of Jesus. So pithy it found its way into the Synoptic gospels (Matt, Mark and Luke) in at least four places – Matt 13:11-12, Matt 25:29, Mark 4:25, Luke 19:26. And those 4 places represent at least 3.5 stories: the explanation to the parable of the sower, the parable of the talents, the lamp on a stand and Luke’s version of the talents which is sufficiently different that Matthew’s to at least rate half a story. The full saying is roughly: those who have, more will be given; those who don’t, even what they do will be taken away.

Andrew Sullivan records an interesting physical aspect of this here. From a sports analogy, the more we practice shooting baskets the better we get – its called muscle memory. It is also why if we practice the wrong motion it takes a bunch of time to fix it. Spelling teachers new this when every spelling word you missed on a test had to be written correctly 50 times.

I’m usually sceptical or at least hesitent to point at things like this because it can either reduce the Spirit to a material effect or it just smells like a “just so story”. But this one brings together a few strands of thought that I’ve been pondering together. First and anyone who reads or listens to my sermons has heard – prayer, study and trial being the Christian life. Break the cycle, stop praying, don’t be in the Word, avoid living the faith – and the faith stops building. Second, read Hebrews 6:1-6. If you break the cycle when do vs 4-6 come into play? We talk about being in an unchurched society. Really instead of unchurched is it not a society that has rejected the Gospel? At least portions of that society? There are younger generations now that may have never heard the gospel, but would some portion of the society not be more like that generation in the Exodus that would wander 40 years and not enter the land? Even what they had will be taken away?

The biggest one that stood out is empathy. As society has become more secular, has it not also become harder? Are we not hardening our hearts? The language of Christianity has its own vocabulary formed by the Scriptures and 2000 years of living the faith. That language can sometimes be an impediment to teaching or understanding, but it gets it right. It describes our experience and our reality better than anything else. And if the strict materialists were right, that language would have no right to be right. You can’t build a sturdy building on sand so to say…

Tags: Culture, Luke, Mark, Matthew by Parson Brown
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This sermons subject – sexuality and specifically divorce – is a hard word in our culture. Jesus doesn’t allow it – divorce that is. Divorce is not in God’s plan. And we can’t keep that – neither in what our society formally calls marriage, nor in our sexuality that assumes marriage rights without the committment. And it is a standing judgment against us – sexual sins are those we can’t fix, are those we commit against our own bodies. Wouldn’t it be easier if Jesus was just more laid back about divorce? Go that way if you want to lose the Gospel. Marriage is how God describes his relationship with His people – and he took reconciliation all the way to the cross – no divorce indeed. We are sinners, but our God’s grace and mercy are much larger than our ability to mess it up. Trust in that faithful relationship sealed on the cross made sure at the resurrection.

Tags: Culture, Mark, Marriage, Sermons, cross by Parson Brown
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The gospel text for the day was Mark 16:1-20 or the ending of the gospel. The non-scripture reading that was paired with it just bowled me over to the point that you wonder if it was just another “preacher story” – truthfully I would hope that it was a pious fiction, but sorrowfully knowing that it was real because our fiction doesn’t imagine stuff like this. I’m probably breaking 50 copyright laws (although the readership is not so great that even on the internet it might be considered private use ), but I’m just going to type it out.

From Paul Tillich:

In the Nuremburg war-crime trials a witnes appeared who had lived for a time in a grave in a Jewish grave-yard in Wilna, Poland. It was the only place he – and may others – could live, when in hiding after they had escaped the gas chamber. During this time he wrote poetry, and one of the poems was a description of a birth. In a grave nearby a young woman gave birth to a boy. The eighty-year old gravedigger, wrapped in a linen shroud, assisted. When the new-born child uttered his first cry, the old man prayed: ‘Great God, has Thou finally sent the Messiah to us? For who else than the Messiah Himself can be born in a grave?’ But after three days the poet saw the child sucking his mother’s tears because she had no milk for him…When I first read it, it occured to me more forcefully than ever before that our Christian symbols, taken from the gospel stories, have lost a great deal of their power…it has been forgotten that the manger of Christmas was the expression of utter poverty and distress before it became the place where the angels appeared and to which the star pointed. And it has been forgotten that the tomb of Jesus was the end of His life and His work before it became the place of His final triumph. We have become insensitive to the infinite tension which is implied in the words of the Apostle’s Creed: ’suffered…was crucified, dead and buried…rose again from the dead.’ We already know, when we hear the first words, what the ending will be: ‘rose again;’ and for many people it is no more than the inevitable ‘happy ending.’ The old Jewish gravedigger knew better. For him the immeasurable tension implicit in the expectation of the Messiah was a reality, appearing in the infinite contrast between the things he saw and the hope he maintained.

Tags: Mark, Meditation, cross by Parson Brown
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People have long looked at the second grouping of these verses (Mark 9:42-50) as simply an individual warning. That reading has always caused me trouble as I either needed to treat it as completely spiritual which I don’t like, or I needed to go lopp off a hand or pluck out an eye, which I liked even less. The context of the entire segment continues from the last couple of weeks lectionary readings (Mark 9:14-37), and that is more teaching through actions to the disciples how the church (the reign of God) will function. Speaking of the church in bodily terms is not exactly unbiblical either. The first grouping of verses is clearly about how we treat those of Christ who are not of our group. This is not directed at heretics, but those who are doing good stuff (i.e. miracles! in the text) in the name of Jesus. We treat them well – maybe not join them, but definitely don’t stop them. That is the low walls portion. The church welcomes all who come in the name of Christ. This gets balanced by that second group. If someone within your tribe is causing people to lose faith – it is not good for them or the group, cut them out. This is the high standards portion and it calls for judgement. Does the crank in every congregation or synod – you know the one that is always harping on [pick the subject they don't agree with church teaching on] – does that guy or gal cause anyone to stumble? Probably not. Does an Elder of the congregation who denies infant baptism, or a preacher who ’sleeps around’ or worse? Probably so. Its a tricky thing to pull off in a fallen world, but that seems to be the call of the church. Low walls – welcome everyone who claims the name of Jesus. High Standards – the church stands for something. If someone disagrees and it causes people to lose faith they must be called to account or cut off. The church in that way is about reconciliation and absolution. We admit where we are wrong, but we also receive that forgiveness.

Being a little meta about this sermon – it is a tough subject. I was really afraid that this was a non-stop bore fest. It interested me and I think it is important, but not really a ‘felt need’ type of thing. It is a real need – we need to be in a church as that is where we find salvation. But the jump from felt needs to real needs is not always obvious and this tended to be very intellectual which is a code word for boring.

Tags: Church Direction, Culture, Mark, Sermons by Parson Brown
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