Text: Mark 1:1-8 Other texts: 2 Peter 3:8-15a
The beginning. The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, writes Mark. First verse, first chapter, in the first of the four Gospels to be written.
Except that it is not the beginning. It is not the beginning at all. The good news starts long before. We know that Mark knows that, because by his reckoning in the next verse, it begins at least as far back as Isaiah, five hundred years earlier. And in Matthew’s Gospel it begins with Abraham. And it John’s Gospel it begins with the creation of the universe.
Mark’s Gospel, more than the others, is like a video clip of a much longer film. There is no baby Jesus in Mark, no genealogy to prove pedigree, no cosmic stage setting, hardly a preface at all. Here is Jesus, Mark says, all grown up and doing great things. Healing people, and teaching them. And at the end, the other end, at the Easter end, the story ends with an empty tomb, and that’s all. No post-resurrection appearances, no sending out of the disciples into the world, no final words. Just: stop.
The story of the good news in Mark is a snippet. It is a middle piece of the story that is not only the life of Jesus, but the story of the life of the world. By starting in the middle, Mark makes us aware that this episode of Jesus is part of a much larger cosmic story that goes from creation to the end of time.
The story of Jesus is part of salvation history, a churchy phrase that means the history of God’s hand in the affairs of our own human, earth-bound existence. This short and intimate view (the life of the person Jesus here) inside a long and boundless view (the life of the universe) is a distinguishing (though not exclusive) mark of Christianity. Our faith seems to have two ends, represented physically in the Bible, starting with the creation story (another “in the beginning…”) and ending with the new city of light in Revelation. And for some people, these end points are the main points. Creation and the end of time are what it is all about. Even in the story of the life of Jesus the highlights seem to be the beginning—the birth of Jesus at Christmas—and the end—the passion of Christ at Easter.
Yet for all our interests in milestone events, our faith is not primarily one of originations and destinations. Christianity, just like our lives, is certainly full of events and celebrations. But they are signs of a deeper, longer, more satisfying story. Most of our lives, our lives in the world and our lives of faith, are lived in the boring middle, the day to day, the ordinary. When you get on the Mass Pike and it says that you are heading to Natick and Albany, it does not mean that those two ends are the whole trip. Or in the west, when you leave Lincoln, Nebraska and the sign says Denver, 486 miles, it does not mean that there is nothing in between; there is a lot of driving ahead of you.
The markers in our lives are prominent, but they themselves are not the story. We do not live in birth and death, we live in between them. Our lives are full of what seem to be key events. Our children are born, we start school, we marry, we begin new jobs. Momentous beginnings. People we love die, relationships are broken, we are laid off, we lose our fortunes. Discouraging endings. Yet just listing those events tells us little about the richness, the beauty, the suffering that make up most of our hours. It is in these hours which Jesus spends most of his time, in all the Gospels. It is these hours that are filled by our faith and our life as followers of Jesus. These hours are the ones that bring us together in community to pray and worship and eat together.
The lives of many of us here are full of transitions Beginnings and endings all smashed together, it sometimes seems. But though we often characterize the transition by an event—I’m graduating, getting married, moving to Houston, retiring—the transition is in fact the time between. It is all the time except the event, the time around the event. Getting married, say, marks a new part of one’s life. But the transition from friend to spouse started long before and carries on long after the wedding.
In every transition we are leaving something and going somewhere at the same time, and over time. We grieve for the past, whether or not we are pleased to be leaving it. We are anxious about the future, whether it saddens or excites us. What was is known, for good or ill. What will be is a discovery, for good or ill.
The prophet Isaiah joins with Peter in today’s readings to remind us that in the scheme of things we are tiny, fragile, ignorant, and short-lived. People are like grass, the prophet writes, our constancy is like the flowers of the field. We owe our brief lives to God. Peter tells his readers that what is long for us is a moment for God. What seems to be a thousand years to us is as a day to God. We live briefly in a much longer and more vast story, the story of the universe and salvation history. In the end, says Isaiah, God comes to restore the world. In the end, says Peter, all things are to be dissolved (a word which means they will all loose their moorings; things fall apart).
In neither case is this news meant to discourage us or to make us feel that our lives are insignificant. On the contrary, it is to make us think about how we will live in the in-between time. How will our lives go now, while the universe from which we come is here, while we are here, involved between our own beginnings and endings?
What sort of person, asks Peter, ought you to be? While you are waiting, he says, don’t worry so much about what you are waiting for, but how you will wait. Do not be anxious about the future, and do not regret the past.
Peter says to strive to be at peace when God comes upon us. We search for peace. Where can we find it? We look for it in security, in certainty, in keeping control of things. We look for it in power and righteousness. It is not there, Peter says. It is in knowing that our story, though finite, is part of a much larger one, that our story is part of God’s.
We do not exist without God, but God’s story is in part made up of our own. Our stories are strands that are woven into the braid that is the story of God. That story stands forever, Isaiah says. It begins at creation and goes to the end of time, and and each of us is forever part of it.
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