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“The Time is Now”
Mark 1:14-20
The Apostle’s Creed
A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Douglas M. Donley
September 30, 2007
Back before the Bible was closed as a canon, people tried to answer the
questions about whose faith it was and is anyway. They did this by making
statements about Jesus and about God. They
made statements by following one gospel writer or another. They made statements by their inclusion or
their exclusion of differing people. In
this sense, the ancient church was not a whole lot different than the
present-day church. The earliest
writings to try to unify the church were the creeds.
These creeds tried to make the church or at
least their community into a unified whole.
The Apostle’s Creed dates from the third century, although there are
different creeds that come earlier than this.
This makes a whole lot of sense to a lot of us. Many of us grew up reciting this creed. It grants comfort in that the words are familiar,
like a favorite hymn.
But it is today’s alternate text. Remember that this year; the alternative
texts challenge the scriptural texts. It’s
an alternate text because this creed and many like it are not concerned about
the life and teachings of Jesus. It says
Jesus was “born of the Virgin Mary, (comma), suffered under Pontius Pilate.” All of the ethical teachings of Jesus are
contained in that comma.
When the early Baptists and other separatists
started reading the Bible alongside the creeds, they saw that major portions
had been left out. Baptists have ever
since been a non-creedal people. We find that we need no creed other than the
Bible. In a Baptist church there are no
belief requirements, at least in this Baptist church. There are no magic words that make you a good
Baptist. What makes you a good Baptist
is what makes you a good Christian, namely your dedication to freedom of
conscience for each individual and your fidelity to the Scriptures out of which
you find your faith.
Whose faith is it anyway? It’s yours and its mine. The definition of our faith is the journey we
are on this year. So today and for the
next few weeks, we look at the comma. We
look at the ethical teachings of Jesus seeing how each Gospel writer portrays
Jesus. Throughout this journey, I hope
you’ll try to define and refine who you think Jesus was and is for you.
So, whose Gospel is it anyway? Today, we look at the words found in Mark’s
Gospel, the earliest of the canonical gospel writers. Matthew and Luke both used Mark as their text. If you read these books in their entirety,
you’ll find that the person of Jesus is a bit different in each one.
In Matthew, Jesus is a Jewish Priest.
In Mark, Jesus is a prophet. In
Luke, Jesus is a shepherd or a social reformer.
In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is a wise sage. In John, and many would argue only in John,
Jesus is God. Elaine Pagels
rightly points out that we tend to read scripture and understand Christianity
through the lens of John. That’s what
the early creeds do, they focus on Christ as the
manifestation of God often to the exclusion of the teachings of and posture of
Jesus. “Whose Gospel is it anyway?”
becomes “which Gospel speaks the most to you?”
Mark’s Gospel does not mince
words. There is no time to waste. Many passages have as their interlude, “and
immediately”, Jesus did this or that.
Mark does not give us an easy out to the problems which we face as
Christians.
Mark’s gospel is unique in that it
begins without talking about the birth of Jesus, like Luke and Matthew. The good news which Mark tells about happens
when Jesus takes action. The good news
begins when Jesus makes the decision to be baptized. That’s where the gospel begins. The good news happens for us when we make a decision—when we choose to go in a different
direction. When we leave our nets and delve into deeper, more satisfying
waters. The Holy Spirit descends like a
dove after baptism and a voice from the heavens declares “this is my child with
whom I am well pleased.”
Present and former students
realize that in college our world gets turned upside down by the sheer body of
knowledge that surrounds us. We run the
risk of being so bombarded with options, opinions and information that we no
longer have a clear sense of what we stand for.
We might have a sense of what we don’t stand for, but maybe not enough
of a sense of what we do stand for.
Being a disciple of Christ means
knowing what you stand for. And Jesus
gives us a prescription for this. He
says, “The time is fulfilled, the reign of God is at hand, repent and believe
in the good news.” This sums up Jesus’
whole ministry according to Mark. That’s
Jesus’ mission statement. Let’s look at
each of those four points. This is what
hooked the first disciples. Maybe it can
hook us, too.
The time is fulfilled. The kairos is
here. There are two kinds of time, there
is chronos
time which is the accumulation of minutes and hours and years. Everything proceeds during chronos time.
Kairos is different. It is the kind of time where something
miraculous happens. When Jesus talks about his time, his Karios, coming in the Gospel of
John, he’s talking about the time of his own suffering and death. Jesus begins Marks’ Gospel saying the Kairos is
fulfilled. The time is at hand. The time, the Kairos is now. We can’t wait for someone else to speak the
truth. The time is fulfilled. A new day is here. Our waiting is over.
Last spring, I asked the Council to lift up the moments of Kairos for our
congregation in the past few years. They
came up with many things:
o The Resurrection of Mary Magdelene
o The Color of Tears
o The Illegitimacy of Jesus
o Body & Sold
o Congregational vote
o
Jean’s trip to
o
Trip to
In God’s time, miraculous and clarifying things happen. Mark is saying, “The time, the kairos is now.
The reign of God is at hand. In
the Lord’s Prayer we say “Thy Kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is
in heaven.” God’s will is to be done
here on earth. The reign of God is at
hand ad the time is now for it to occur. Saying the
God’s ways are ways of justice and inclusion and are ultimately good
news for the poor. In other words the
We also don’t have to wait until an election or a vote to live in the
reign of God. It’s not about political
movements. If we wait for government to
save us, then we have morphed into an empire mentality. A government is an institution. It exists in part to perpetuate itself. The
Repent. That
means take on a new life. It means turn
around. It means change your ways. It means distance yourself from the same old
same old. It means as Paul reminds us,
“be ye not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of
you minds.”(Rom. 12:2)
Mark records Jesus saying his first words after John
the Baptist was arrested. It was
John who preached a baptism of repentance.
Jesus, many believed was a disciple of John the Baptist and
well-schooled in his vocation of repentance.
After John’s death, many of John’s disciples, we can assume, went back
to their old ways. Maybe even James and
John and Simon and Andrew were among those disciples going back to their old
jobs. But Jesus challenged them. He said “don’t give in and don’t give
up. I’m going to give you an even better
way to live. John the Baptist said
repent. I will say that too,” says
Jesus, “but I will add, the time is fulfilled, the reign of God is at hand, and
believe in the good news.”
So, don’t let this world order decide your future and your
calling. Don’t let others define what
you believe. Repent.
Don’t let people say you are not worthy. Don’t let people convince you you are not worthy.
You are worthy. Repent.
Don’t let injustice go unchecked.
But like the prophet Amos declared “let justice roll down like a mighty
water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”
Don’t allow violence to be the sad reality of our lives. Repent.
Show, yes model a new way to live with one another. Believe that we can and must find a way to
not be held captive by an economic and political system which continues to make
most of the world poor and the rest of us blind to their plight. Don’t delude yourselves into believing that
the only security we can have is at the other end of a gun barrel.
Repent, says Jesus to the unbelieving disciples—to us skeptics—to those
of us smart enough to ignore the gospel.
The time is fulfilled, the reign of God is at hand, repent and,
Believe in the good news.
Believe in the Gospel. He does
not say believe in a book. He is saying
to believe in the good news, the new world order, the reality of God made
human, the love of God for all people, the truth which has the audacity to tell
us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
The good news is the unfolding story that is contained in the pages of
Mark’s Gospel. But it is not a static
story.
It becomes alive only when it intersects with our very lives—only when
it changes us. That is the good
news.
It is good news only when we refuse to be lulled by the soothing sounds
of the world as we have it. Everything
is not all right.
The good news happens when we side with the dispossessed, the outcast
and tell the powers that be that this is not God’s way. That is the good news.
The good news happens when we say to the powerful, the dominant ones, and
even ourselves the time is fulfilled, the reign of God is at hand, repent and
believe in the good news.
We know all about how Jesus called the disciples and said “follow
me.” And they left their nets and
followed him. Mark makes it that simple,
but I don’t think it was. I think there
was a whole lot more persuading going on.
I think there is a whole lot more that was in the lives of Simon and
Andrew and James and John which made them be willing to give up their former
way and encounter a new way. And that is
what Mark’s gospel is all about. When
you become a Christian, when you truly follow Jesus, you leave your nets. You leave all that ensnared you. You leave behind that way that leads to
dissatisfaction and disappointment and disillusion. And you grab onto a way of life which will
change your world. You embrace a new
day.
When we do that, we will no longer simply be accumulating fish in our
nets—no longer simply making a day’s wage, but we will be casting our nets into
new waters and our catch will be people in need, maybe even people in positions
of domination, maybe even our cynical selves.
But before we can believe in the good news, we have to know it. We have to study it,
we have to be attentive to how the bad news of the world intersects with the
good news of God. And that knowledge
ought to change us.
You know, there is a temptation out there to wait until we have all of
the answers to move forward. But you
know, we will never have all of the answers.
We have the faithfulness and the power to act as if the new world order
is a part of us. We are the new world
order. Don’t wait for tomorrow. The time is now. That’s the word of Mark. It’s the impatient and impertinent word of
the Jesus who lives as a prophet. The
time is now.
There is no time like the present.
Great things are happening and will continue to happen. It makes no sense to wait. The
time is fulfilled.
It’s time for us to wake up and live into what we have been waiting
for.
The reign of God is at
hand. We answer to God, not to the ways of bigotry,
of intolerance, of me firstism, of military might
which is the way of the earthly kingdoms of today. We seek to live our lives by God’s politics
where everyone is valued, where life and opportunity and acceptance and
abundance are the rights of all not just the privilege of a few. We are citizens of the
Repent. Let
us no longer settle for business as usual.
Let us rather be transformed and let us never resort to violence in
thought word or deed. Let us repent of
our self-centeredness, our cynicism, or resignation to the world as it is.
And let’s believe in the good
news. Let us know the gospel and
know how the Gospel tells us to behave in a world run amuck. Let us always remember that God’s plan for
us, our church, our families, our nation, our world, is one of compassion,
justice and peace. Let us so believe in
the good news that we spread it here and abroad.
My friends, embrace the impertinent,
impatient, imposing, seemingly impossible prophetic vocation as disciples of
Jesus. Don’t wait until a more opportune
time to take the Gospel seriously. The
time is now. The first disciples left
behind their ensnaring nets hoping to catch some of us. Have they caught you yet? “The time is now,
the reign of God is at hand. Repent and
believe in the good news. Amen.