Community Church Sermons
Year B
January 11, 2009
The
First Sunday After Epiphany
Mark 1:1-11
“The beginning of the gospel
about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God.”
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
The Bible has a lot to say about “beginnings.”
There are the exciting beginnings of new things, as when the universe was formed, or when a baby is born.
There are the anxious beginnings of daring adventures, as when Abraham and Sara left the safety and comfort of home to follow God to a country they had never seen before, or when a couple pulls up stakes and retires to Tellico Village.
There are the fearful beginnings forced upon us when a loved one dies, or a health problem arises, or when a layoff notice comes.
There are the desperate beginnings we seek when life has piled so much pain and hurt upon us that we cry for there to be some way out, some miracle that will change things, some door to open that will let us escape.
Life is full of beginnings, and so the Bible has a lot to say about beginnings.
In fact, I think that if you want to really get to know the God of the Bible, one of the most important things to learn is that God is a traveling God, always moving on, never staying in one place for very long. When the Hebrew people wanted to build God a house, God told them He preferred a tent! When a young man wanted to follow Jesus, Jesus told him, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has no place to rest his head.” Coming to know that God is like this – always moving from one part of life, one adventure to the next – is crucial if you’re going to find the joy and power of faith!
God is a God of perpetual motion who specializes in new starts! The Bible begins in Genesis with God making a whole new world. And the Bible ends in Revelation with God making all things new.
And so it should not surprise us that when God’s Son comes on the scene, the Gospel of Mark describes the moment by saying, “The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
Beginnings.
One of the reasons people often miss out on the full joy of life is that we do not quite accept this fact that life never stops and is constantly changing.
In my early years of ministry, I gave a test to people who wanted to get married. It wasn’t a “Pass/Fail” kind of test where the result might put the kibosh on the wedding, but it was an inventory of various important aspects of the couples’ relationship. It was intended to point out areas where they needed to grow in order to have a successful marriage.
Then one day I read in a journal
that studies showed that tests of this sort have little or no impact upon the
durability of a marriage. Divorce rates for those who do the pre-marital thing
and those who do not are essentially identical. Then the author of the article
said something like this: “Marital
Awareness Inventories would be much more effective if given AFTER the wedding,
AFTER the couple has been married for a while, perhaps at 5-year intervals as
the marriage relationship changes under the weight of careers, children, and
other circumstances.”
Marriages change. Families change. Careers change. Bodies change. Relationships change. People change.
From the day you are conceived in your mother’s womb, your life starts changing.
I was reminded of this important fact of life last week when Sandy and I went to see the movie, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the film begins with Benjamin’s own words, “I was born under unusual circumstances.”
I’ll say he was! The “unusual circumstances” of Benjamin Button’s birth is that he is born as an eighty year old man! Can you picture that little bundle of wrinkled joy lying there in the cradle with cataracts, arthritic joints, and high blood pressure? When his father sees him for the first time he is so shocked by Benjamin’s gruesome condition that he grabs the baby and takes this…”monster”…out to the river to put an end to him. But a police officer intervenes, and Benjamin’s father runs, finally leaving the little 80-year old baby on someone else’s doorstep.
And from then on, the movie tells the story of Benjamin as he grows BACKWARDS, getting younger every day! And while Benjamin Button grows younger, the people around him grow older! Can you imagine what will happen when Benjamin – growing younger - falls in love with a woman who is growing older? It is a GREAT movie that will provoke your thinking about age and youth and the meaning of birth and life and death. Go see it, but don’t buy a large Diet Coke at the refreshment stand because the movie is almost 3-hours long and some of us can’t go as long as we used to without a restroom break!
Life is always changing. Life consists of one beginning leading to another…
So the Gospel starts with a call to appreciate and accept the changing nature of life. If you try to latch onto this one moment, or that one experience, or this particular period of time, life will leave you behind, you’ll get lost in a forest of disappoint, disbelief, and possibly even depression that what was is no more. And you’ll miss out on God’s new beginning. Oh, it’s nice to have memories about the “good old days.” But you can’t ever get the good old days back. You can’t hold onto any one moment in time for very long.
This is how God created the world to be. Life is pre-wired to constantly change. You have to learn to let go, and get with the flow. And the Bible tells why in the very first of the ten commandments.
“You shall have no other gods before me.”
This is not a commandment designed to prove our loyalty to God. No, it is a commandment that – if lived out - will help us find TRUE LIFE AND HAPPINESS AND FULFILMENT because – in a world of constant change, it counsels us to trust not in moments or experiences or other false gods, but in God and God alone.
“You shall have no other gods before me.”
But one of the gods many of us worship is the god of what used to be.
This week, one of our church members heard their doctor speak the devastating word “cancer.” They never saw that one coming, and it was a great shock. Many of us in our community – because of our rather unique demographics – understand what it is to think we are healthy one moment, only to find out we have a serious illness the next.
It’s perfectly normal to be scared and to become angry in times like those. Sometimes we go into denial, and that is normal, too.
But if you hang onto those feelings for too long, you can become embittered to the point that you lose the ability to really live in the face of your new reality. So our faith tells us that a better way to journey through a challenging time like this is not by trying to hold onto what was, or by being resentful of what is, but rather by accepting what has happened and claiming it as one of God’s new beginnings.
One of the reasons I love the opening chapter of Mark is because it is set in a time of great national despair. The glory of Jerusalem has been overshadowed and brought low by the might of Roman power. The beautiful things that used to be are no longer. A free people are now under Roman occupation. Can you imagine what it would be like if this happened to us in our country?
It is a time of anger, disbelief, and despair.
But then comes a voice speaking
the word of God: “The beginning of the
gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
It is the day of new beginnings.
If you are facing one of those moments of frightful change - cancer, or the loss of a loved one, or a family problem, or a loss of income, or the end of the world as you know it - the Bible makes this same beautiful promise to you: “The beginning of the GOSPEL of Jesus Christ, the Son of God!”
Life has changed for you. But it is not an ending. It is a new beginning.
And the promise is that Christ is with you in the moment you are facing. And there is “gospel” within it. The word “gospel” means “good news”. As bad as this moment may be, there is goodness to be found within this time – no matter how frightening it may be - because Christ is with you.
A few months after my friend Richard was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, there came a turning point for him. One day, Richard came to me and said that he wasn’t going to dwell anymore on what a nasty hand had been dealt him. Instead, Richard said, he was going to believe that God had something important for him to do with his illness. I asked him if he had any idea what it was that God wanted him to do, and he said, “Yes.” God wanted him to encourage the other patients he saw every day at the radiation center, God wanted him to give to his kids the time he never had for them before, and God wanted him to love his wife more fully than he ever had for as long as they had time together.
Richard lived for something like another ten years. And he lived it well! And when he died, Richard’s wife, Richard’s children, and even some of the surviving family members of Richard’s fellow patients came together at his Memorial Service and testified about the amazing goodness that came out of that time in Richard’s life.
His brain tumor was not an ending so much as it was a beginning. And even in his death, we who loved him claimed for Richard another new beginning – resurrection into eternal life.
“The beginning of the Good News about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
Hold onto those words. Speak them
into the situation you find yourself in today. And face this new chapter of
life with a faith that understands that life is always changing, but God is
there in the change. God is with you. Have no other gods before him. Trust the
God of new beginnings.
“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
“In the beginning was the word and the Word was with God…”
“The beginning of the Good News about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”