We had a high absentee rate this Sunday due to illnesses and folks out of town, so we put off the next lesson on Matthew's Gospel for a week. We'll be back around on our regular schedule next Sunday, I promise! Meanwhile, those of us who were there shared what was going on in our own lives -- and that was very good, too! See you next week!
Matthew 2:1-6 Today we begin our study of Matthew’s gospel - the second of the four gospels to be written. Matthew was the name of one of Jesus’ disciples and for centuries it was taken for granted that this gospel account was written by the disciple Matthew. But this gospel is now pretty well accepted as having been written between ten and twenty years after Mark’s account – which was written in the early 70's, 40 years after Jesus. This puts the writing of Matthew somewhere between 80 and 90 AD, making it highly unlikely that was written by an actual eye witness – one who knew Jesus. There is also the fact that the writer lifted about 90 percent of Mark’s earlier gospel straight into this newer version. Why, Borg asks, would a real eye-witness use so much of the account of one who was not a contemporary of Jesus?
As with Mark, this gospel writer never identifies him- or herself. The name of Matthew was given to this gospel sometime in the 2nd century. We will however continue to refer to the writer as Matthew – just for convenience’ sake. Besides using so much material from Mark, this writer also pulled a large amount from the Q Source as well as a sizeable chunk that is unique to Matthew and known to scholars as “special Matthew.” Included in this last bit is much of the Sermon on the Mount, and various parables like the Workers in the Vineyard and the Pearl of Great Price. But the key to the whole of Matthew’s gospel is that he is a seemingly educated and passionate Jew who believes, heart and soul, that Jesus is the fulfillment of every Old Testament prophecy. For Matthew, Jesus is the one the Old Testament is pointing toward. I don’t have the time or space for details in this message but Borg makes an extremely convincing argument that the internal structure – the way Matthew’s gospel is put together – mirrors the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures – not only in its story but in its structure. The story of the Pentateuch is the story of Moses - the story of a people enslaved in Egypt and the great leader sent by God to set them free and lead them to their own homeland forevermore. It is also the story of The Law given to Moses for the people - the Law that shows them how they must live to truly inhabit that promised home. Jesus, too, came to lead people to freedom and to give them a new Law which will allow them to live into their new kingdom. Matthew quotes the Hebrew Scriptures constantly using the phrase “it is written” over and over. For Matthew, Jesus is clearly the fulfillment of what “is written.” In everything he writes here, Matthew is making the point that Jesus’ story is Moses’ story, and Moses’ story is Jesus’ story. From the slaughtering of innocent baby boys at the beginning of both men’s lives to the refusal of authorities to listen when both Moses and Jesus spoke God’s word, the similarities would have been recognized and noted by the Jews of Matthew’s time. The story of Jesus is the story of a new exodus and Jesus is the new Moses. Furthermore, while the other gospels show Jesus growing and evolving into an expanded understanding of his own mission, Matthew’s gospel remains uncompromising in its assertion that Jesus has come only for the Jewish people – the Chosen People. It isn’t until after the resurrection that Jesus finally sends the disciples out to talk to the wider world. For all that Matthew is a devout Jew himself there is a certain strain of hostility running throughout this gospel – one that has unfortunately been taken out of context and used against the Jewish people down through the centuries. When Matthew speaks of “the Jews” he never means anything nice. But it is important to point out that Matthew, when he uses “the Jews,” is referring to a particular sub-set of Jews -- not all of the Jewish people but those in authority who try to balk Jesus at every turn. Those who will eventually demand his crucifixion. Much of Matthew’s hostility has to do also with current events in the writer of Matthew’s own time. The earliest Jewish followers of Jesus never saw themselves as anything new and separate from Judaism. They viewed their faith as simply the next step in Judaism. That’s why they didn’t originally refer to themselves as “Christians.” Those in Jerusalem still gathered at the temple daily for prayer and to teach from the temple steps. In Matthew’s time, the purists among the Jews began to agitate against them and eventually they were labeled apostate and expelled from the temple and synagogues. They were expelled not only from the worship centers but from Jewish community life – expelled, as Matthew and those around him saw it, from their own home. God sent Jesus to save the Jews and they rejected him - just as they had long ago originally rejected Moses. There is much more to Matthew’s gospel than this, and we’ll get to that next week, but it is imperative that when we read this particular gospel we keep in mind its particular relationship with the Jewish people and the Jewish faith. Matthew was not writing to a broader early Christian world. His evangelizing was strictly for those whose people had been God’s own chosen people for well over a thousand years – those who were risking missing out on the natural evolution of Judaism in the person and teachings of Jesus. It is especially important that we, reading today, don’t let ourselves get carried away with Matthew’s diatribes against “the Jews” and remember this gospel was never intended to be a blanket condemnation of an entire people – only of those who “having ears, do not hear.” Next week we’ll pick up some of the elements – such as the nativity stories – that appear only in this gospel account. Mark 1:35-39 Last week we began looking at Mark’s gospel – the first written gospel (that we know of) – and we started out by looking at what isn’t there. We talked of which of the familiar (to us) gospel stories have no place in Mark. It was quite an impressive list if you’ll recall. So much of what we today take for granted as part of our Christian heritage apparently didn’t exist for many in the earliest Christian communities – not before Mark and still not for another ten or twenty years after this gospel was written – not until Matthew’s gospel account was written down. They apparently existed somewhere because Matthew had access to them but in Mark’s time it would seem they only existed in isolated pockets of the rapidly expanding Christian world – unknown to many, including Mark.
So today we are going to talk about what is found in Mark’s account. Again, it’s important to remember that Marks’ is the first narrative account of Jesus’ life among us. A narrative is a story. It is not just a collection of sayings or events thrown together into a random list. A narrative has flow – it starts here and it goes to here. It may meander a lot along the way but it follows a pattern – it has a direction. This is the story - as Jesus is quoted as explaining in our reading today - of what Jesus came out to do. In Mark’s story we begin with a fully adult Jesus going out to the wilderness to hear John the Baptist and it ends with an empty tomb. Marcus Borg points out that this narrative follows a threefold pattern – a pattern that will later be adopted and followed by both Matthew and Luke. Part One takes place in Galilee. This is where most of Jesus’ public ministry took place. I think I pointed out a couple of weeks ago that Jesus only went into Jerusalem at the end. The vast bulk of his ministry took place in the countryside and small villages. Roughly half of this gospel is devoted to the Galilean years. By the standards of the more sophisticated world this was truly a back-woods ministry, which makes it even more extraordinary when we think that it eventually spread throughout the world as it has done. Part Two covers the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, and Part Three takes place in Jerusalem and tells of the last few days of Jesus’ life, his struggles with authority and his death. So what stories do make up Mark’s larger narrative? We begin with Jesus baptized by John and going out for 40 days in the wilderness and being tempted by Satan – not much detail in these stories – just the bare statements of fact. When he comes out of the wilderness he begins to call his disciples. His first recorded healing is the expulsion of an unclean spirit from a possessed man. As Matthew and Luke will later do, Mark’s story of Jesus consists of many physical healings and expulsions of evil spirits, with teaching, in the form of parables, scattered throughout. Some of the particular events are recounted in the other gospels as well - a few are only found here. The first of the parables to be retold in Mark is that of the Sower and the Seeds: some seed falls onto the pathway and is eaten by birds; next, seed lands on rocky ground where it sprouts but immediately withers because there is no soil for roots to grow; then seed fall among thorns and weeds and the new shoots are choked out. Finally the seed falls on good soil where it increases a hundredfold. For several chapters, healing and parables are shared as Jesus and his followers move from village to small town to village – always on the move – teaching of the Kingdom of God everywhere he can reach. There is even a journey across the Sea of Galilee into pagan country and the casting out of a multitude of demons from the man named Legion into a herd of pigs. That herd of pigs emphasizes to us that Jesus has, for the moment at least, gone outside his home territory, since no good Jew would be raising pigs. Later, there would be a trip to Tyre, on the Mediterranean, and an interaction with the “unclean” Syro-Phoenician woman – another trip away from home country and known customs. Oddly enough we actually have the Loaves and Fishes story twice in Mark - once with 5000 hungry and once with 4000 – most likely an example of dubious editing with one story coming from two different sources. Then somewhere toward the end of chapter eight, the traveling continues but we enter Part Two and the wandering begins to arc toward Jerusalem and the topic matter between Jesus and his disciples becomes darker. Peter answers the question “Who do you say I am?” with “You are the Messiah” - a huge leap in identification. Three separate times Jesus tries to tell his followers that he will die in Jerusalem while the disciples squabble among themselves about who among them will be the most important in Jesus’ kingdom, proving, yet again, just how little they understand. Then with Chapter 11 and the “Triumphal Entry” into the city we begin Part Three – Jesus’ final days. Besides the actual events of Holy Week, Mark manages to squeeze in a lot more teaching into this final section. Among others, there is the fig tree cursed for not bearing fruit; the parable of the wicked tenants who murdered the landlord’s son; the “render unto Caesar” teaching on taxes and government authority; and the foretelling of the destruction of the Temple. Like the other gospels Part Three of Mark’s gospel has the procession with palms and the cleansing of the temple, but then it’s back out to Bethany and the anointing of Jesus’ head and feet by the weeping woman, followed by Judas’ decision to betray Jesus. Interspersed through all this are more teachings and more questions: who is David’s son? Is there a resurrection? Back in Jerusalem for Passover Mark tells us of the Last Supper, the prayers in the garden, the arrest and the trial before Pilate. Condemned, Jesus is taken out, crucified and buried. This part of the story is standard for one of the synoptic gospels – largely because Matthew and Luke would later follow Mark’s storyline fairly closely. As we discussed earlier, this is pretty much where Mark’s gospel ends. When the Sabbath passed the women went out to the grave site to finish preparing the body for a proper burial since there hadn’t been time before sunset on the eve of Passover. The women met an angelic presence and were told that Jesus had risen and was no longer there - but they saw no one else. The angel told them they would see Jesus again in Galilee. And here Mark’s gospel ends. Although we miss certain of the most familiar parables and stories, the basic story of Jesus’ public years and his ministry among the people is all here. Whether this version of things was fairly widespread knowledge throughout much of the ever-widening Christian world or more limited to the area around Galilee we don’t know. And just because Mark’s was written first does not make it any more correct not does it mean it is wrong when some stories are left out. It simply means that the gospels were written in different times in different locations with the writers having access to different pools of community memory. Remember – no tape recorders, no steno pads. The Gospel – the Good News – was a living, growing entity emerging out of a community that not only knew Jesus in the past but continued to experience him in their present – and so his story continued to grow – as it still does today. Next week we will begin looking into Matthew’s gospel, the second to make it into written form. Mark 1:1-8 Today, after the introductions and background information, we are finally ready to start with the first of the gospel accounts to be put into written form. As I will be doing for most of this series, I’m relying heavily on Marcus Borg’s Evolution of the Word for my information. Sometime around 70 AD, a full forty years after the life and death of Jesus someone put down in writing the first narrative account of Jesus’ life and dying. The author never identifies him- or herself by name. None of the gospel authors ever do. By the 2nd century there were apparently quite a few gospel accounts floating around and names were assigned to them just to help keep them straight. As far as we can tell it was a matter of entirely arbitrary choice, but there may have been some community memory involved. We just don’t know. Since the 2nd century this particular account has been known as the Gospel According to Mark. Mark, by the way, is a Latin name, not Hebrew, even though this gospel originated in the Jesus community located in northern Galilee There’s a bit of irony in the fact that the name Mark means dedicated to Mars, the Roman god of war. There may have been some written works before this first gospel account – remember the Q Source I mentioned last week – but they were likely just collections of Jesus saying or teachings. This piece we call Mark’s gospel was the first narrative – the first to be written in forty years – the first story of Jesus – not just what he said, but what he did and how he did it. To begin, I’m going to ask you to try to put aside all that you think you know about the gospels. I understand that this is really impossible - we cannot un-know what is in our minds - but give it a try. Most of us have heard these gospels all our lives. They probably tend to run into one big gospel in our minds and except for a very few particular stories, without having our bibles in hand to check right then and there, we’d most likely be hard put to say which gospel account what story comes from. And then, for those of us who were children in a church, there is Sunday School. Now remember, before coming to ordained ministry I spent long years directing religious education programs. I have immense respect for all those volunteers who step up to teach children’s classes in church. BUT – over the years in that job I came to realize that many published Sunday School curricula are severely biased to reinforce a pre-chosen cultural philosophy and simply either written on the assumption that this is “what we all believe anyway” or deliberately slanted to push a particular view of Christian thought. Even the best curriculum is broken down into the obvious big-story points to make it easy for children to understand and in which they are stripped of all nuance. In short, a lot of what you probably heard in Sunday School was just plain wrong. And it’s almost impossible to get people to let go of that early indoctrination. But please try. Let’s look first at what Mark’s gospel doesn’t say. When we first began this series I quoted something that Borg said to the effect that communities remembered the things that mattered to them, and therefore each community’s memory contained different things. We can learn as much about Mark’s community from what isn’t included as from what is actually written down. • First, there are no infancy or childhood stories. No miraculous hero’s birth. Mark begins straight off with Jesus -- a fully adult man -- going out into the wilderness to hear the wild-man preacher, John. Now, try if you can, to imagine what and how we would feel about Jesus if we took Christmas entirely out of our story. We have so many warm, cuddly emotions tied up in Christmas – the sweet little baby, the loving parents, the shepherds and the angels in the sky – even the carols and glittery trees and colored lights play a role. All these things have a subliminal influence on how we view the human Jesus. What image would we have of Jesus if we could somehow delete all that from our memory banks? Who would be left in there? Our idea of Jesus is simply light-years away from that held by Mark’s community. • The Lord’s Prayer is nowhere in Mark - in fact the whole Sermon on the Mount is missing. This one sermon that fills three full chapters in Matthew – none of these stories or parables – not the Beatitudes – none of this is found in Mark’s narrative. Now, it is possible that the author of Mark was aware of the Q Source and didn’t include all this stuff because he or she knew it was written down elsewhere – but that is only a vague “maybe.” It is equally possible that these things were simply not within the memory of Mark’s community. • Many of our favorite parables aren’t here – the Good Samaritan; the Prodigal Son; the Workers in the Vineyard; the Sheep and the Goats; and lots of others. If Mark were the only gospel to have survived, we would not know any of these stories. • And most puzzling, there is no Post-Easter resurrection appearance by Jesus in Mark’s gospel. This gospel ends when the women go to the tomb early Easter morning and find it empty except for a “young man” – usually assumed to be an angel – who tells them that Jesus is risen and will see them in Galilee. The women are so terrified they run home and say nothing about this to anyone. The End. There are two extra "endings" tacked onto this, but one was written no earlier than the end of the 2nd century and the other wasn’t written until sometime in the 4th century. It clear to those who parse out such things that they were written in a different time by different authors. Even to the untrained eye they are clearly written with a different syntax and a different style. They are unquestionably attempts by later generations of Christians to make Mark’s account match the other gospels. But even there they are interesting in that they show us how thinking had changed in a couple of hundred years so that what was never stated in Mark’s account now has become “common, accepted knowledge.” So this the gospel according to Mark – the one that grew out of Mark’s community. There is a lot that we’d expect to be here that isn’t, but there is a whole lot that is here. And for ten years or so this would be the only gospel. Next week we will give a brief look into what Mark’s gospel does record – what is there – what Mark’s community apparently felt was important enough to write down so it wouldn’t get lost. You might want to take a quick read through Mark this week. Since it is the shortest of the gospels at only 16 chapters, it’s a quick read. And then we’ll continue next week. Psalm 102:18-22 This is the second in our Summer Series looking at the books of the New Testament in the order in which they were written rather than the order in which they appear in most Bibles. We started, if you recall, last week by talking about communal memory and then skimming over the basic information that most people would have had access to prior to any written documents – the things that “everyone knew” before there was ever a written gospel.
Even though seven of Paul’s letters were the first to be written, we’re going to begin our study with the gospels, and then move back to Paul’s letters. We will begin next week with the first of the gospel accounts, which is Mark’s, followed in chronological order by Matthew, John, and Luke – which is considerably different from the order in which we are used to seeing them. This week’s message is going to be pretty dry, I’m afraid – sorry about that, I can’t make it any more exciting – it’s necessary background information, but I think it’s stuff that is important for us to at least be aware of before we dig much deeper into the readings. It will get better, I promise. I need to confess here that I am not a New Testament scholar myself -- not even close. It was not my field of passionate interest in seminary so I took the minimum requirements in biblical studies. I was much more interested in story and narrative and how we communicate ideas with each other than in dissecting biblical manuscripts. However, I am clever enough to know where I am lacking and to go straight to sources who do know such things. So before we get into Mark’s gospel I want to take today to give you a very brief introduction to two other documents – ones you’ve probably never heard of. There are all sorts of non-canonical documents out there from this time period and even those that were never part of the bible have things to teach us about the early church. Chances are, unless you are thinking of going into New Testament studies in a big way, you will never have reason to know much about these particular two “documents.” The Q Source and the Didache were early Christian documents and both, in very different ways, had an effect on the writing of and the studying of the accepted New Testament books. The first, the Q Source, or “Q” as it’s usually known, takes its name from the German word quelle, which means source. It is not even an actual document – it’s a hypothetical document of Jesus sayings - one that scholars believe must have existed at one time – pre-dating the gospels -- but they can’t prove it because no copies remain in existence today. The primary reason for this belief is the considerable amount of material that is found almost word for word in both Matthew and Luke. We know that Matthew, especially, pulled from Mark, but there is too much other material in both Luke and Matthew that isn’t in Mark that scholars have been forced to ask “where did they get this?” and to conclude – because they are so identical – that both Matthew and Luke must have copied it from some other existing written source, not just word of mouth. The existence of “Q” was posited around 1900 so it is a fairly recent theory and while widely accepted it does have it’s disbelievers. Before 1900 the church generally followed St. Augustine’s hypothesis that placed the writing order of the four gospels in the order we are familiar with – Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. I’m not going to take time to explain this one - just that it used to be the way scholars looked at the gospels. It covered most of the bases but had enough holes in it to prompt deeper digging and eventually to the positing of the Q Source. So Q is a possible pre-gospel document which provided both Matthew and Luke with source material for their gospels. We will go more into this when we read about those two gospels. The second document, the Didache, does exist – in several forms. Didache is Greek for teaching, and that’s what this document is – a series of teachings about a whole bunch of things. It is not a narrative – it doesn’t tell a story – no life of Jesus. It does contain a version of the Lord’s Prayer. We’ll get into that with Matthew’s gospel. What it mostly does is describe for us much of the life of the earliest Christian communities. It gives us a remarkable picture of how a scattered group of Jewish Jesus-followers morphed into the Christian church. It was probably written late in the first century. And though it isn’t quoted directly in any of the other writings, since it is accepted as genuine, it had, and still has, power in its use as a check against disputed early documents. Much of what we think we know about baptism and communion – how they changed from casual gatherings in homes or on riverbanks into detailed church rituals – all that comes to us from the Didache. It will probably not play much role in our summer explorations but I wanted you to know that such a document exists and helped shape our thinking of those earliest years or Christianity. OK - that’s that’s the dry stuff out of the way. I just wanted to make the point that the New Testament writings did not stand alone as the only written records of the early church. Some of the other documents are important, some don’t seem to offer us much that is useful, many are only fragments – much as been lost to time. Next week we will start with Mark’s Gospel and take a look at how a gospel account takes shape and grows out of an existing community of believers – forty years after the events it describes. John 16:12-15 (The Message) These words today from John’s gospel reminds us that we still have much to be taught - still have so much to learn. They also should remind us that the Spirit is continually revealing new truths to us as we grow to be able to take them in and start to understand them. We can’t take it all in at once – there’s just too much – we simply can’t hear it or comprehend it – and so it is revealed little by little, bit by bit, day by day, stone by stone ... Three or four weeks ago when our scripture reading was from the book of Revelations I gave a very brief introduction to the writings of New Testament scholar Marcus Borg, specifically his work on reading the New Testament in the chronological order in which the various books had been written instead of the literary-style order in which they are usually presented. In talking about this after church that day I suggested I was thinking of doing a summer sermon series on looking at the New Testament in this way and you all seemed interested, so ..... here we go. This is bound to be more of a teaching series than a spiritual growth-type series but since these writings are the base of what we’re all about here, I can’t help but believe that the more we understand this book, the more we will understand who we are today as a result of these stories and how we got to be who and what we are. We’ll begin today with some basic information on the make-up of the New Testament and then head into Mark’s Gospel next week. I touched lightly last week on oral history and community memory and how stories were retold within communities and that one community’s body of Jesus stories might contain different material than another community’s collection. Or they might have several of the same stories but with slightly different memories of just how the story went, so that before they were ever written down and codified, what you believed about Jesus might well depend on where you lived – whose stories we were raised with. The earliest pieces to be written, it seems, in the New Testament were seven letters from Paul to various churches. These were all written without the benefit of any authorized ‘life of Christ’ to refer to – although there were still living witnesses, such as Peter and James, who had known and walked with Jesus himself. These early letters seem to be less about who Jesus was than about how we – the readers, should live our lives because of Jesus. In the very first chapter of his book, Borg gave us a list of the things that most people would have known by word of mouth about Jesus prior to the first gospel account being written down. I’m going to paraphrase but this is all Borg’s list: • Jesus was born shortly before the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE and grew up in Nazareth, a peasant village. These are the things, in scholarly reckoning, that would have been fairly common knowledge about Jesus. The details might have differed greatly from place to place but this was the shared base of what people knew.
This is what Paul and the other evangelists took with them as they went out to convert the known world of their time. When we have finished with the gospels, if we have time we’ll look at the first seven of Paul’s letter’s – all written prior to the existence of any codified gospel. This pool of knowledge is what existed as a result of communal memory – memories of a man who made a huge impact on the world around him. In talking about oral tradition and communal memory Borg points out that “Early Christian communities wouldn’t have remembered a saying or story by Jesus or a story about something he did unless it mattered to them.” I have to say that when I first read that last statement it was a “well, duh!” moment for me. It’s so obvious once I read it, but I don’t know if I ever articulated it that clearly to myself before. The stories about Jesus that came down to us through oral tradition and made it into written gospel accounts weren’t just little news flashes of “what Jesus said or did today,“ – the stories we know down to our present day were remembered because they were about things that mattered to Jesus’ earliest followers. Think about that for a minute ..... I’m sure that in three years of preaching and teaching Jesus said a whole lot more than what is contained in the slim few pages that make up the gospels. All four together really make up a very tiny body of work. All that we have received down twenty centuries are the things that were important enough to the early Christians to remember – without any written texts to remind them – for forty years after Jesus’ death. Mark’s gospel – the first to be written down – was written at least forty years after all these things happened. We will most likely never know what has been lost to us but what we do have are the stories that changed the world by changing the people who first remembered them and then told them to the rest of the world. And then told them to us ..... and here we are. Acts 2:1-6 Today is Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost is another of those special days, like Palm Sunday and Easter, that can drive me to a moment or two of despair because they come around every year, not just once every three-years, and after 20 or so years I begin to feel like I really have said it all...several times. This is a story we all know – we’ve read the scripture, heard the sermons. Oh, woe is me.
But then I am reminded that this is God’s story, not mine. This is the church’s story, not mine. And this is Luke’s story, not mine, and I think we need to begin there. We’ve spoken lately about Acts being simply the direct continuation of Luke’s gospel and that Luke/Acts is dated as having been written between 60 and 80 years after the Easter event when historical memory might be getting a little shaky, to say the least. But Luke is never about historical facticity - Luke’s narrative is a record of how the emerging church felt as a result of the events he describes. It was Luke after all who gave us the highly detailed Nativity story that we love so much at Christmas time - a story complete with a sky filled with singing angels – that no one seemed to notice or remember later. Luke isn’t describing something as it really happened. He describes the event’s effect on believers and on their future perceptions. In Luke’s vision the birth of Jesus into the human world was such a momentous event it deserved to have choirs of angels – that’s how important it was. That’s the truth rather than the fact of that story. And so to Pentecost. Since Jesus’ departure the Jesus community has been quiet. They don’t appear to have done anything much but they are doing something – they are praying, and they are waiting for God to act ..... and then a wind begins to blow. A wind just like the wind that blew over the waters of chaos in the very first moment of creation – the wind of the Spirit of God. The similarity here is no coincidence. Jesus had promised a “new thing.” Luke is making it crystal clear – to those with ears to hear – that it is a new creation that is happening with the winds of Pentecost. Have you ever just had a really great day – a GREAT day – one you look back on with a golden glow of happiness – a truly special day? And have you looked back later and realized that what happened that day was kinda ordinary except that somehow everything was perfect – somehow you remember it as bigger than maybe it really was – the perfect time and place with the perfect people – when everything came together just as it always should have been? Sixty to eighty years after the fact, this is how the emerging church felt on looking back at the first Pentecost day. Is it a factual story? Luke doesn’t care, and neither should we. This is the story the church had to tell about how it all began. This is what it felt like to them when the Spirit was in their midst and moved among them. Suddenly the people were emboldened to speak freely and tell the story they knew – the story of God’s love for all humankind and God’s great gift to the world through Jesus and the Spirit. Suddenly the people were on fire with God’s word. So on fire that they somehow made themselves understood by others around them and the story they had to share moved like wildfire through the whole world. Last Tuesday Hilary and I attended another meeting of our Regional Ministries Council as representatives of our Church Off the Center cluster group. It’s the beginning of a new term and so half the people there were returning, like Hilary and me, and half were new to the council – including the new Chair – so he asked us to go around and each tell briefly what it is we represent there and what we are doing in our group. As I listened, I realized that this was a perfect Pentecost story playing out in that small room. Probably the thing that catches the most attention in Luke’s story is the whole “speaking in tongues” thing. What is assumed, but never stated outright, is that whatever language they spoke or were heard in they were all telling the same story – each in their own words. What I realized I was hearing, last Tuesday in an upper room in an office building in San Ramon, California, was the church telling it’s story – each of us speaking a different language – but telling the very same story of love for others and service to others and a striving to be Jesus’ hands and voice in this world. Some of us spoke a language of Camp - shaping places and opportunities for youth and families to grow and learn and love God. Some of us spoke a language of Reconciliation, working in our communities to eradicate racism and bring justice to all God’s people together. We heard about those whose calling is to foster and nurture New Church development. We heard about the Men’s Ministry cluster and the things they have planned to minister specifically to the needs of men and boys. Hilary and I were there to speak for small, out-of-the-mainstream, off-the-center congregations and the challenges we face in being active in the wider church, as well as the blessings to be discovered in this particular kind of small group ministry and outreach to the immediate community. Each representative was there because they passionately love the work they are doing – the language they particularly speak in and to the larger church. The point is that we are all, in our own way telling the same story of love in community but telling it in different languages so that our story is understood by those we are speaking with. Many of you here do this everyday but you may not think of it that way. For the people you meet, God’s story often sounds like a kind word, a sandwich, a warm coat, a listening ear and heart. Some of you stack cans at a food pantry to tell your story. Some care for deeply sick people. The languages are limitless. When we let that wind blow through us and let it fan the sparks into a flame of action and speech, we are telling the same story the early disciples told on the long-ago day, in all kinds of different languages - the story that we are loved and called to love in return. We may never know who and how many are impacted by our story - whatever language we speak. All we have to do is allow the Spirit to move in us, to use us. When we let the Spirit flow, lives are changed. Let us continue to speak out in our many and various tongues and let us tell our story – the church’s story – the age old, ever new story, that death and fear are defeated, that the reign of God is here and now within our midst. The story that says that love will always – always – win. Holy Spirit, come. Fill us with your fire that we may continue to speak your love in all the languages of the world. Amen. Luke 9:18-20 The reading I’ve chosen for today is not a standard lectionary choice for this season. It’s one that is most often read during Lent, as we are approaching Easter, not after. But this season we are talking about the earliest beginnings of what we today know as Christianity in all its multitudinous forms, and this little snippet of the New Testament seems to me to be ground zero for much that has risen out of it over the past 2000 years.
We call ourselves Christians, “little Christs” – followers of Jesus, followers of his way – and so it seems to me that it is of major importance that we be somewhat clear as to just who it is we claim to follow. I chose to use the version from Luke’s gospel because we are reading Luke this year in the lectionary cycle, but this is one of the handful of stories that appears in all three of the synoptic gospels - Matthew, Mark, and Luke – and it’s there in almost identical form in all three. The scripture is often quoted as the definitive answer to who Jesus is – “he’s the Messiah” – and yet how many of us understand what we are saying when we say those words? Just as there are roughly as many definitions for the word “Christian” as there are Christians – even in our small group here I imagine that we pretty much all agree on a big-picture definition of “Christian” but when we parse it down further I’d guess we each mean something slightly different when we say we are a Christian – so too, that word, messiah, has many, many meanings. In the earliest stories of the Hebrew scriptures it’s clear that any messianic expectation was centered in a future event, not a person. It was God who would act – directly -- by shaping world events to benefit the Hebrew people and fulfill God’s promises to Abraham. Centuries later, when the people moved from their nomadic lifestyle to a settled urban/agricultural life, when they had demanded that God give them a king so they could be like the neighbors, the idea of a messiah began to be focused on the royal line. David and Solomon did for awhile raise them to that peak of freedom and international power and security that they associated with the promised messiah, but then things slowly fell apart and they returned to the idea of a messiah as one who would rescue them from slavery. One who would restore them to their former glory. It is after the collapse of this flourishing kingdom and of the Davidic line itself, when the people are once again enslaved and scattered, that the idea of the Messiah begins to be fine-tuned into something in which we can begin to recognize Jesus when he comes. But even here there are multiple descriptions and we show a depressing tendency to pick and choose just the ones that match the Messiah we want. In the writings of the prophets, the messiah is sometimes described like a leader of an army, a general who would lead the people as they march back in to forcibly re-take what is theirs. Our Palm Sunday story refers obliquely to these prophecies and points out the huge difference between what the people expected and what they got. In the 100 years or so before Jesus’ birth there had been a great up-welling in expectation of and longing for this military/political Messiah. The people were longing for revolution – bloody if necessary. What they got was Jesus and very few recognized them as the messiah they had been waiting for. Our idea of Jesus suffering and dying for our sins comes from Isaiah in the time of the great exile with the Suffering Servant prophecies, but in rabbinic interpretation the “suffering Servant” is Israel itself – the whole nation suffering for the world – rather than any single person. Christians, however, read backwards into this prophecy and find Jesus there. So the meaning of the word messiah has changed according to time and place and circumstance – just as almost all meanings change over time. All this matters to us because when we call ourselves Christians, this is what we are saying. Messiah and Christ are the same word – one in Hebrew, one in Greek – both technically mean “the anointed one” – and rather than clearing anything up this just clutters the conversation even more. Anointing has been used for centuries in various cultures and is still used for a variety of reasons. We anoint priests, we anoint kings, we anoint the sick and the dying. Many denominations anoint babies and anyone being baptized. We anoint those we are sending out into special ministries and we anoint each other in our role as servants of Christ. Ancient anointings were full scale dousings in oil. Today we tend to stick with tidy dabs – but anointing is an ancient symbol. Calling Jesus “the Anointed One” still doesn’t help us a whole lot. So with all these words we are back to Jesus and his question: “Who do you say I am?” When we call ourselves Christian have we really put some thought into what we mean? Are we talking about being a church member or do we mean something deeper? Do we think Jesus was a good guy or do we truly strive to live our own lives following the path Jesus laid out for us? Living our lives as Jesus lived his? I’m not saying everyone needs to do all the technical biblical and theological studying – all you will get there anyway is what other people think. But -- have you ever sat down with Jesus and just said, “I like what I think I know of you. I want to follow you and your way. I want to do your work. I’m pretty sure I need you – whoever and whatever you are – in my own heart, in my own life”? When Jesus asks: Who do you say I am? do you have an answer? Acts 16:9-15 In the weeks immediately following Easter the readings tend to focus on the earliest Christians and the founding of the Christian churches ... and I have to stop right here before I even get going and point out that my opening statement is not accurate. First, the people then did not call themselves “Christians” - nor did anyone else – not for several decades – and it would never have occurred to them that they were founding a new faith, a new “church.”
For most of them, Jesus was a teacher - a marvelous teacher who taught them that they could experience God’s plan for the world right here and now. They were, at first, simply living a new way of being good Jews ... God’s people. They were followers of Jesus’ Way. They hadn’t left off being Jews to go be something else. They were just following a new path within Judaism. It was a long, slow process while they figured out who Jesus must be to be so “alive” in their midst when he had clearly been crucified. And they would not have called their gatherings “church.” They met to share their lives. They gathered to share their worldly goods. But most of all they met to talk about Jesus. There was no liturgy as we know it. If they sang hymns they were the Psalms they had sung all their lives. Our use of the words “Christian” and “church” are for our linguistic convenience and have nothing to do with historical fact. These words are anachronisms and subconsciously lead us into inaccurate ideas about those earliest years - so probably we should just stop doing it. Today’s story comes from one of Paul’s missionary journeys – specifically a journey occasioned by a dream, a vision, that moved Paul and those traveling with him to go to Macedonia, in northern Greece. It is the story of who and what he found there. And what they did together. Before we get into Paul and Lydia, there is one more point I need to explain. We’ve talked recently about Luke’s Gospel and Acts being one story bisected into two books but what we haven’t mentioned yet is that Luke’s gospel – regardless of where it sits in our Bibles – is the last of the four gospels to be written. Traditional thinking until recently has been that Luke-Acts was written around 90 AD but more current thinking is leaning toward as late as 110 AD. That means these books could have been written down a full 80 years after the life of Jesus. You can take about 15 years off that 80 years for the time of Paul’s visit in Macedonia - making it perhaps 65 years from Paul’s part of the story to the writing, but the things written about Jesus were still from 80 years in the past. My point being that the stories we read in the New Testament were carried in the communal memory for anywhere from 25 to 80 years before they were written down. Some of Paul’s letters were written earlier – the earliest dating put the first writings at about 70 to 80 AD with the last dating as late as 130 AD. So what we have here is less an historical record than a narrative telling what various groups of people remembered and experienced in these years. These were also not universal writings. When they were written down they were written by one group for one group with one group’s particular understanding and point of view. The letters and gospels that make up the NT are stories of various communities and their growth in understanding in who Jesus was and who they were in response. I keep hammering on this because it truly does make a difference in what we hear within our own minds when we read these writings. Now – after all that, we can finally get to Paul and Lydia. Paul and Luke and the others arrived in Philippi and just hung out for a few days but then, on the Sabbath, found their way down to the river where a group of people, apparently largely women, were holding a prayer meeting. It’s interesting that they didn’t go into the heart of the city and immediately beginning preaching in the civic center, as it appears they did in other places and times. Here they simply joined the group, listened for awhile, and then talked with them. The story they had to tell was so powerful, so honest, that Lydia was converted and asked to be baptized - right there on the spot. It doesn’t require pomp and circumstance and massive church structures. It doesn’t require high liturgies. It doesn’t even require choir singing. The truth that Jesus taught us all is so simple yet so incredibly moving and powerful that it can touch hearts and changes lives in a moment. So, if simply being themselves and telling their honest stories about Jesus was all that was necessary in those early days – what does that tell us about our responsibilities today? Peter and Paul and Silas and Barnabas and Luke and all those who traveled far from their homes – as well as those who stayed closer to home in Israel and Judah – had no written texts or special vestments, no hi-def multi-media screens – they had no tools at all except the love they carried in their own hearts and their bone deep conviction that Jesus had somehow touched something in them, changed something in them, and they could never be the same again. And that “something” moved them so they were compelled to tell others about it. They freely gave their stories and sometimes they gave healing, or reassurance, or comfort and hope. When they gathered they shared whatever food they had with each other. And they shared all this with any who came to them seeking, with any who came with minds and hearts open to receive. They didn’t check credentials. They didn’t check bank accounts. They didn’t check gender or race or nation of origin. They just shared this amazing Jesus who had somehow ended up touching their lives. We today are called to do the same – nothing has changed. We are called to be the people God created us to be – to be ourselves. We are not called to raise armies or build monster churches that seat thousands. We are called to share who we are and what Jesus has done in our lives. We are simply to share the amazing fact that we are – each of us – loved. Paul shared what he had - his knowledge of Jesus, and he used the rhetorical skill he possessed to make people stop and hear him. Paul has a reputation in our day (mostly undeserved) as a grumpy, misogynistic hard-nosed so and so. From the descriptions we have of him, he was not a beautiful person, not the guy anyone would expect to draw a crowd. And yet his love for and faith in Jesus - the one he acknowledged as “Lord” – shone through his rough exterior and moved hearts wherever he went. And because of what they saw in Paul, others were moved to meet Jesus for themselves and begin to live in “the Way” Jesus showed us. That’s our calling too. To say what is in our hearts and to live in the way Jesus lived. To share what we have with others. To be kind in all situations. To love without judgment - especially those who are the least lovable. To do what is in front of us with what we have to hand. In the words of the prophet Micah, to “do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with God.”
Last week we read from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles – Acts, for short. I talked then about how our present day view of Acts is as a discrete and separate document rather than a simple continuation of Luke’s gospel - which is what it is. Our misunderstanding comes about because of the way our modern day Bible is arranged – which is a fairly arbitrary arrangement set several centuries ago, grouping the gospel accounts together and the various letters together, regardless of the order in which they were written. Our thinking is influenced by where a specific text is located within the larger compilation. Those of us in the western world tend to think in a linear pattern – we start with “A” and march purposefully on to “Z” – whereas much of the Eastern world has long seen life as a spiral or a series of cycles. I have no intention of drifting off into philosophical speculation (or at least not too much) but simply hope to make a point about today’s reading. The fact that the Book of Revelation is situated as the final book in our Bibles has led us for centuries to see it as a book about The End of Things – the “Last” book. Now, you probably have noticed that I almost never preach on Revelation. That’s because, over the centuries, a massive amount of garbage has been written and preached about this book. So much that it seems almost impossible to stem the tide of “what everyone knows” – especially when so much of what everyone knows is simply wrong. Take “the Rapture” for instance. Everyone knows about that, right? Straight out of scripture - right? Wrong. Our modern idea of the Rapture was basically invented in the mid-1800's through a series of misinterpretations, bad translation, and a whole lot of classic wishful thinking. If we hope to learn anything from scripture then we absolutely must put aside wishful thinking and all the indoctrination in what “everybody knows” and learn to simply read what the words actually say – not what we want them to say. Marcus Borg was a New Testament scholar and teacher - one of the best. He died last year but thankfully left us a good-sized body of written work. In one of those books – The Evolution of the Word – he discussed what he believed Is the chronological order of the books of the New Testament. Here is what he had to say about Revelation: *The book of Revelation, which of course comes at the end of the familiar New Testament, is almost in the middle—number 14 of 27 documents [in a chronological arrangement]. When the book of Revelation comes at the end of the New Testament, it makes the whole of the New Testament sound as if we’re still looking forward to the second coming of Jesus and what is popularly called ‘the end of the world.’ When the book of Revelation appears more or less in the middle, we see it, hear it and understand it as a document produced in a particular time and place that tells us about what that Christ- community, and the author, John of Patmos, thought would happen soon, in their time—rather than it being ‘Oh, this is still about the future from our point in time.’ * It changes our whole way of seeing Revelation when we are reminded that it is just one story among many others like it - stories of the first Jesus followers and their experience of living in the kingdom of God while still living in this world. Again, we run into the problem of a difference in perception between our view from 2000 years down the road and the view of the very first Christians. Revelation is presented as a vision. Now, take a moment and think about this - if you hear a person today described as “a man or woman of vision” what do you think? Do you think they are having some kind of magical mystery hallucination or do you hear it as saying this person has a clear way of seeing what is and how it can be? Oh sure - I suspect John's community had a dream of Jesus riding in on a white horse and magically rescuing them all from their troubles. Don’t we all, from time to time, when things are getting rough, dream of someone coming to magically make it alright? But, I firmly believe, these early Christians were as anchored in the reality of their present day as any of us ever manage to be. Remember, all of this is about Jesus – a Jesus who still lived in and among them – not a distant historical figure but the one they saw as a real here-and-now Lord who still lived right in their midst. The same Jesus who told them repeatedly that the Kingdom of God is here and now present among them. They looked around themselves, perhaps, and it didn’t always look so very kingdom-ish, but they still claimed it for their own truth. Jesus said it and they believed it. We still claim the same thing today and it mostly still doesn’t look particularly kingdom-ish. The people of the early proto-churches didn’t just sit around waiting for Armageddon. They went to work building the kingdom. Just as we do today, these people had a choice to believe that everything is hopeless and ugly or to believe in goodness and grace. So they gathered together for meals and to share their stories and their lives - just as we still do today. And they told others about how good it was to live in this way - in this kingdom – following the example Jesus had given them – just as we do today. And none of this is for some glorious day far off in the future, it is Now, with a capital “N”. The beautiful promises of this reading are not for some mythical “someday,” they were for the people of that time and place just as they are for us here today. It is the same Now and it will always be the same Now because the reign of God’s grace is always Now. The “home of God is among mortals,” says John of Patmos in his vision. “The kingdom of God is here,” said Jesus to his disciples – it always has been, it always will be. The reign of God is in and among you. Now.
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Rev. Cherie MarckxArchives
April 2025
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