Good Is Where God Is.

 Mark 1:1-8

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God?

Wait. What?

I think you’ve got the wrong guy.

You mean that guy who got himself killed by the Romans for being a threat to the empire?

What are you talking about, “The Good News?” 

He was jobless. A vagabond. He hung out with sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors. He wandered around critiquing our way of life. Good News? What the heck are you talking about, “Good News?” 

What a weird way to start the story.

Mark’s Gospel was the first to be written. It’s our earliest account of the events of Jesus’s life. 

Listen to the beginning of the Gospel of Mark with first century ears. Ears of those who have seen and heard the crucifixion of Jesus. Ears of those who are intimately connected to what happened on Calvary that dark Friday afternoon, ears of those who are living in the middle of, or just after, a war with the Romans. The Temple has been torn down. Resources are scarce. The world is in turmoil. There’s chaos and rioting in the streets. And Mark wants to sit us all down for a little bedtime story to soothe our hearts and ease our minds.

They would respond just as uncomfortably to these words,

 “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God” as we might react to say, “The Good News of Breonna Taylor, daughter of God” or “The Good News of the loved ones who couldn’t say goodbye to their parents dying of COVID,” or “The Good News of the country divided by politics, false information and hate.”

The good news? Is Mark crazy? This guy Jesus ended up getting himself crucified! He was killed by the Roman guards for sedition, and now his followers are caught in the middle of a war against that same state and Mark wants them to believe that this is good news? 

And it sounds so pollyannaish - so trite and easy - or maybe just simply wrong, to proclaim “the good news” of any of these people, who have struggled and suffered so long. 

Where is this good news?  This Gospel doesn’t really even have the happy ending that the other Gospels do. There’s no riding off into the sunset, no happily ever after.

The Gospel of Mark begins in the wilderness. And it ends in mystery. The Gospel of Mark doesn’t give us clear answers or a feel good ending. The first version of Mark’s Gospel ends in fleeing and terror and amazement. We get an empty tomb. And a vague promise that they’ll see Jesus again. That’s it. That’s the end. 

Later on, some scribes added on some new endings to help resolve some of that tension that we’re left with. But even those endings don’t have us leaving the movie theater with a satisfied resolution and the feeling that we got our money’s worth.

Even the longer, latest, ending in Mark is filled with mystery and disbelief. Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene but no one believes her. Then he changes form and appears to two others, who also don’t believe him. Then when Jesus finally does appear to the rest of the disciples, he reads them the riot act for not believing that he was back. And then he just gets sucked up into heaven. Annnnnd scene. The end. 

The longest ending to the Gospel of Mark leaves us where we started. A bunch of people wandering around saying that this news is good news. But there’s no early breakfast on the beach with Jesus. There’s no touching of his hands and side. No walk to Emmaus with our hearts burning inside of our chests. It’s a wild, mysterious ending. 

According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’s story is good news, not because of any happy ending, or light at the end of the tunnel, or grand moral insight that comes at the end of the story, but simply because Mark says so. Mark says that the life, death and mysterious resurrection of this wandering vagabond and his band of dusty, scraggly men is good news. And we have to take his word for it. 

I think this is because Mark has the eyes to see what we might not. Mark can see the presence of God even in the hard things, in the hard times, in the loneliness and the desperation. “Watch and wait,” Mark says. God is near. 

I have a hard time when I go through a hard thing and then someone tells me that "God put me through it for a reason." Or when people say "God needed another angel." Or, "God caused this bad thing to happen so that we could learn a lesson." "God has a plan." "God is in control." "We need the rain in order to appreciate the sun." "We need these trials in order to refine us, to sanctify us." Or, "If we didn’t live in a world of sin we wouldn’t get to experience God’s forgiveness." In the moment of our greatest pain, all that sounds a lot like bullshit. I mean, maybe these things are true. Maybe these folks are right. And for sure, these people are trying to comfort me with the best of intentions.

But. 

It discredits the hard thing. It kinda suggests that God wants bad things to happen to us. It tries to tie a nice bow around the really hard, impossible, horrible struggle, so that it doesn’t feel awful or hard or horrible anymore. It makes me feel like I’m not allowed to be sad or angry or repentant about the hard thing anymore, because look what good came out of it! 

But when bad stuff happens, it still hurts. It leaves a scar. We are forever changed. When bad stuff happens, we may heal, but we will forever walk with a limp.

And this is what Mark is doing. “Here,” he says. “Here is a big ol’ scar. Here is a painful thing. John dies. Jesus dies. Here is struggle and fear and poverty and what looks like the bad guys winning, again." “But,” he says, “this is good news. This is good news, not because everything gets fixed. Not because the villain gets his just desserts at the end. This is good news because I am proclaiming it to be so. This is good news because I want you to see what I see. I see God here.”

Maybe that’s just Mark’s nice little bow. Maybe that’s just Mark’s own pollyannaish perspective. But I don’t know, somehow, it feels different. 

It feels different because he tells the truth. He doesn’t spare us the hard stuff. He’s not trying to ease his own discomfort by giving false comfort to us. It feels different because instead of using the bad thing as a tool or an object lesson in order to get us to the good thing, Mark lifts up the bad thing and tells us to wait. To wait and to watch. God’s there. Just wait. You’ll see. That’s it. 

Listen to this hard story. It will break your heart. But wait and watch. It’s still a good story. It’s still good news. Simply because that’s where God is found.

Enter in, Mark says. Come in. Come in. Enter in to this hard story. Because even though it’s hard, even though we’re kinda unsure about the ending, even though there’s a lot of irredeemable pain, it’s still good. It’s still so good.

This is good news because this is just the beginning. 

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. God’s not done showing up. The hard stuff isn’t over. But neither is God’s presence.

The Gospel of Mark is just the beginning. It’s just the start. And Jesus’s life and death and mysterious appearances afterwards are just the beginning of Jesus’s story. There will be at least three more gospels to keep the story going.

Mark starts with the story of a strange man in strange clothes eating strange food wandering around a strange wilderness. Mark starts the story with John the Baptist who will not have a happy ending himself. John the Baptist, who gets all kinds of people to flock to him in the desert so that he can tell them the “good news”: they’re sinners, they need to confess their sins and be baptized. He has gathered crowds and crowds of people around him, so that he can tell them that he is not the one they’ve been looking for. He’s not the answer. Someone else is coming. 

According to the Gospel of Mark, the good news is brought to us by a wandering vagabond who lives on locusts and honey and dresses in camels hair. This bringer of “good news” tells us that we’re all sinners, we need to repent, and he’s not the guy we’re waiting for - we have to wait a little longer. Good news, right?

This is the good news: Jesus is going to come, and he’s going to love us and heal us and teach us and be God incarnate for us and then we humans are going to kill him. Then we’re going to be left in uncertainty and fear. Maybe we’ll get a couple of visions. We’ll be left with a whole lot of work to do. 

Mark is here to tell us the story of the good news of Jesus Christ, Son of God, not because it fixes anything or rights all the wrongs or gives us a happy ending, but so that we can get to work. So that we can see God at work. Even in the hard things. Even in the endings that don’t turn out exactly as we wish. Even in the things we don’t understand. Even when there’s no resurrection yet. Even when the scars are still there and the war wounds still ache every time it rains.

And this is the Gospel of Mark. This is the good news. 

Mark is calling us to see and feel and proclaim and know the good news as it comes to us in the dark. As it comes to us out of the wilderness. As it comes to us in the hard stories of our own lives. God is there. In the hard stuff. In the wilderness and in the dark. In the crucifixions and the heartache and the mystery and the confusion and the fear. God is there. That’s the good news. The good news is that we get to enter in to where God is. We get to be where God is. Even if it’s hard. God is there. Our job is to be where God is. To go where God goes. See what God sees. And God sees resurrection even in the hardest stuff. God brings about resurrection even in the confusion and the fear and the anxiety and the death and the unknown. God shows God’s self in the life and death and strange resurrection of a peasant man from first century Galilee. God shows God’s self in the hard stories, in the brokenness, even in the sad endings. 

God is in the cancer ward at the Children’s Hospital. God is in the divorce lawyer’s office. God is on the battlefield and in the refugee camps and on death row and in the crack houses. God is sleeping under the bridges and sitting in the emergency rooms. God is with the stillborns and the support groups and in the therapist offices and the psychiatric hospitals. None of that is good. It’s all horrible. And God is there. And that is good. That is the good news of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Son of God.

The first audience of Mark’s Gospel were folks living in uncertainty and turmoil and disruption. And Mark comes in and says, “Let me tell you a story about a man who found God, who brought God into all this uncertainty and turmoil and disruption. It’s not an easy story, but it’s good.” 

This Advent, let’s look for God in the dark. Let’s look for God in the wilderness. Let’s look for God even in the hard things. God is there. 

This is the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Thanks be to God. 

A Cute Little Apocalypse: A Sermon for the First Sunday of Advent

Read First! Mark 13:24-37

It is an indisputable truth that anything that is smaller than its original is ontologically cuter than said original. Ontologically. In its very essence. In its very nature. I feel very strongly about this. It doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s smaller, it’s cuter. Fluffy bunnies? Cute. Tiny fluffy baby bunnies? Cuter. Big fat cat? Eh…kinda cute. Mischievous tiny kitten? Way cute. This even works for things that are not naturally cute. Yoda? Eh. I mean, he’s cool with The Force. But Baby Yoda who is cool with the force and smaller? SO cute. This even works for gross, scary things. The smaller they are, the cuter. Giant tarantula? Ew. No thank you. A baby tarantula? Well, maybe? I am even willing to bet cash money that a tiny baby cockroach is immensely cuter than the full grown thing.

And that’s what we have here today. What’s called Mark’s “little apocalypse.” An apocalypse, but smaller. It’s not the full grown thing. It’s not the whole book. This end-of-times prediction doesn’t encapsulate the entire Gospel of Mark, like most of the book of Daniel, or all the Enochs, or the Book of Revelation. It’s not pages after pages of horsemen and fiery pits and desolation and doom. It’s just a little apocalypse. It’s a smaller apocalypse. So much cuter than the full grown kind. 

But even though it be small, it’s still pretty mighty. It might be cuter, but only insomuch as a baby anaconda is cuter than the full size thing. 

And this is how we begin Advent. This is how we begin our time of waiting for the Christ child to come and be made manifest in our lives once again. We start with a little apocalypse. A baby armageddon.

Like one cell, burrowed deep in the womb, we start in the dark. And like one cell that will be divided and torn and put back together again, all we can do is just sit and wait. There’s all sorts of chaos going on in the beginning creation of a new thing, but usually, there’s nothing to do but watch and wait.

And there’s plenty of chaos in our passage today. The sun is darkened, the moon will not give its light, and the stars are falling from heaven. It’s all darkness.

When things get dark, that’s when we’ll see the Son of Man descending from the clouds with great power and glory. But first, it’s going to be dark. All new, hopeful, good things start in the dark. But first, the powers and principalities that currently run the world must be torn down. The world as we know it will quake and shake and be destroyed. There will be suffering, and then the whole world will go dark. Cute, right? It’s just a little apocalypse. A small one. No big deal, right?

Almost exactly three years ago, I was sitting on my mom’s kitchen floor, drinking too much wine and puking in her trash can. I was just two months outside of a major mental health crisis, I’d made a complete mess of my life, I’d hurt a whole lot of people, and finally, the doctor thought maybe I should consider a change of meds. I’d been on this new med for about a month when I decided to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. The boys were staying with Dan and celebrating with his parents, so I had nowhere else to go but hop in my rusting Jeep and travel the six hours to Indianapolis. My memories are still pretty fuzzy around that time, but I think I walked in the door, hugged my parents, and went straight to the kitchen and opened a bottle of wine. My mom drinks really good wine. She likes it oaky and dark, and although I don’t care as long as it’s red, as I swallowed the smoky thick ruddiness, it came over me in a wave. What have I done? What on earth have I done? 

It was like waking up from a dream. Suddenly, I had this brutal awareness of all the missteps and mistakes and thrashing about that I had done in the last ten months. And now I was living alone in a crappy apartment I couldn’t afford, working at a coffee shop making nine dollars an hour, and sitting on my mom’s linoleum floor, crying and hugging her trash can.

In those days, after you’ve already suffered, mind you, then, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light and the stars will be falling from heaven. 

It was my tiny apocalypse moment. Cute, right?

I mean, the world wasn’t ending. People weren’t rushing in panic into the streets or driving along crowded highways to suddenly get sucked up from their seats and raptured into heaven. There were no earthquakes or tornados or plagues or locusts. There was just me, on the floor, and the realization, the sudden awakening, the instant awareness of the darkness that had been all around me all along. 

I’d turned off the artificial lights. Or they’d been shut off for me. No more fluorescents of distraction. No more bright L.E.D.s of diversion. No more hyper impulsive burning down of the forest of my life. Just me. In the dark. With the realization of all the pain and destruction I had caused. It felt like the end. For me, it was the end. That’s what apocalypses do; they bring our worlds to an end.

And it was just me. And a cold tiled floor.

But, not really.

I had a glass of good wine I could still taste. My mom leaned against the counter and listened. She made sure I didn’t drink alone. She brought the trash can nearby.

An apocalypse is really a revealing, an unveiling, a peeling away. That’s what the word means, “apocalypse” - a revelation. And that’s what was happening to me. A tiny little apocalypse. A cute little unveiling of layers and layers of denial and mental illness and distraction, showing me the truth of who I was, of where I was. 

We all get these cute little apocalypses in our lives. A loved one dies. We lose a job. We take the wrong advice. We have an accident. We have to leave the relationship. I mean, the whole world really isn’t destroyed. Others are going along, minding their business, doing the grocery shopping and waiting in traffic and texting their boyfriends, as if nothing has happened. But meanwhile, for you, your whole world is crumbling. You are sitting in the dark with only the realization of the truth of your life. It feels like the end.

Start there, Advent says. 

Start in the dark. Start in the waiting. Start with the mess and the truth of your life cradled in your bare hands. Wake up to what is going on around you. And then just sit there. Let the sadness wash over you. Be scared and overwhelmed and hopeless and paralyzed and broken and just sit in the dark with the truth. Because although it feels so hopeless in that apocalyptic moment, that’s actually where the hope begins. That’s where the cell starts to divide and multiply and grow into what very well could be the savior of your world. 

God was taking a big pumice stone to my heart and sloughing away all the dead and gross and delusion. And there I was, raw and fragile, and safe, sitting criss cross applesauce on my mom’s kitchen floor.

It was an apocalypse. A revealing. An unveiling. A peeling away.

And then, I got up. Blew my nose and brushed my teeth. And went to bed. I fell asleep.

I’m no better than the disciples after all.

I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was being back home for the first time since all this chaos had started. Maybe it was just that the new meds had finally kicked in. Maybe it was the knowledge that Dan was moving on. But something woke up inside me. And suddenly waking up is jolting. It’s painful. Sudden awareness is hard. It’s a tender, vulnerable place.

But before Christ comes to us on the clouds, before the stars and the camels and the Christmas Pageants and the brass quartets and the boughs of holly and the Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Christ comes to us in the dark. On the kitchen tile. In too much wine. Christ comes to us in the sudden painful awakening of apocalypse - when everything gets unveiled. The distractions and delusions get peeled away until all that is left is us, and Christ, in the dark. 

So when the dark comes, let it come. It’ll hurt so bad. You’ll be left with a limp and a shit ton of work to do. It’ll wake you up and shake you and shout at you “what the hell were you thinking?” 

We start Advent - this great coming - in the dark. Waiting for the apocalypse. Watching while our whole world is turned upside down. One tiny cell in the dark can make us feel so sick. But it’s the start of something. Don’t shy away from it. Christ is there. Keep awake. Keep alert. Don’t miss it when it comes. Because Christ is in it and through it and around it and on the other side of it. Christ is right there on the kitchen floor with your mom and your tears and whatever wine you can afford and your regrets and your shame and your gut wrenching nausea.  

There would be more darkness for me. This was just the beginning. This was just the revealing. This was just thecae little apocalypse. This was just the cell burrowing into the uterine lining.

There was so much more work to do. 

But now that I saw the truth of it all, the truth of myself and my life and the darkness all around me, I could hope with a real hope, I could hope with a sort of authentic and exfoliating hope. The kind of hope that bring saviors into the world. The kind of hope that turns clumps of cells into hands and feet and lungs and earlobes. The kind of hope that brings families back together. The kind of hope that introduces the first tastes of resurrection into our lives. 

That was three years ago. It seems like such a long time ago. And yet the bile still creeps back up in my throat every time I remember. 

This Thanksgiving I made apple pie and Mac and cheese and green bean and sweet potato casseroles and the boys set the table and we lit the candles and we shared what we were thankful for. We took a family selfie. We ate and ate. We toasted to each other with sparkling juice and just one really nice glass of red wine. 

But it all started with an apocalypse. That was the beginning of the healing. The rending of my entire world, the sloughing off of the dead skin and the slowly sewing it back together. It all started in the dark. That’s where Christ came first.

Thanks be to God.