Sunday
June 6
Preparing for Mark
By Marsh Chapel
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Growth
Some big measures of the ice of contagion and the snow of infection and the wind of COVID have diminished. For this we are thankful, and mindful, too of the actual and metaphorical powers of masks, of vaccinations, of protocols for distance. The national pause for Memorial Day last week, including many memorials near and far, brought a sign of such diminution, if not the entire absence of cold and wind and the lingering feelings of ice and snow.
At our doorstep now the mystery of natural growth awaits us. Some of faith and preaching is about the nature of ministry and some is about the ministry of nature and some is about both. We are on the threshold of a new season, a season of natural growth. Growth is a mystery. All manner of growth is a mystery. Ministry in and through this natural mystery is its own kind of mystery.
Somehow, together, we have weathered a hard and bitter fifteen months. Somehow, together, we have done something hard, together. How shall we think of this? What may we most want to remember, or not to forget, about this shared drama and trauma? What has this hard, cold, shattering, shared experience taught us? When someone stops you on the street, or over a meal, or on the church door step and asks, ‘What is your COVID story?’, how will you start off, and what will you say? What is the first thing that comes to mind, and how will you put it? I invite you to tell someone, sometime, or offer it in a meditative prayer, sometime, or write it down in poem, sometime. Te invito.
Jesus taught in parables, teaching not without such, according to our Holy Scripture this Lord’s Day. Some were parables of the mystery of growth, growth of the ministry of nature alongside the nature of ministry. We are close today to the very voice of Jesus of Nazareth, in the parable served by St. Mark. One example to stand for a dozen: so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. Birds…of the air. But…what other kinds of birds are there? This is a Semitism, a sign of the Aramaic substrata of the passage, the closeness to the voice of Jesus, 2000 years later. A mystery, too, this a mystery too. Around us this coming month nature performs her ministry to our succor. May this ministry of nature nudge us toward a fuller enjoyment of our own—in whatever walk of life—nature of ministry. And the seed should sprout, he knows not how…
How shall we understand these holy words, ancient and potent? We shall need to prepare for the work, for the work on these words, high and lifted up, in our Lord’s parable in St. Mark. To get up high, we need a reliable scaffold.
Mark
Before you work high you build a scaffold to get yourself up there. Over the past years, one of the most interesting church related figures, town by town, was the ‘steeple jack’, a person hired to go up high and fix things.
Steeple Jacks, famously and normally, do not use a scaffold. They use rope and pulleys, and they rightly earn a good salary. As one joked to me, sort of quoting Scripture, and speaking of the dangers of height, “Jesus said, ‘Lo(w) I am with you”. Meaning, he continued, ‘up high you are on your own’.
Our smaller churches hired Steeple Jacks for the minor tiling, shingling, painting and other repairs required of small church steeples on small steeple churches. One was squat enough (the church not the Jack) that he could go up by ladder. Later churches had taller steeples. The trustees sometimes tried to get by with a Steeple Jack, every time repairs were needed, but most times, no, they needed to spend more. Once a section of copper plate fell off the steeple onto a University neighborhood street. Exposure, liability, act of God, randomness—these words appeared in sermons later that month. Thankfully no one was hurt. Scaffolding went up the next week, and stayed up for several expensive days.
Both the interior and exterior spaces of churches require endless attention. As with care of the human body after a certain age, the motto for such care must be ‘maintenance, maintenance, maintenance’. Interior like exterior scaffolding also comes at a price. (There are as you sense other sermons right here in the wings, as it were, which we will leave aside. For now.) Sure you prefer to change light bulbs and paint ceilings with a huge step ladder and a fearless Trustee or hired painter. Sure. But the higher the nave, the, well, I refer you to adage above. “Lo(w) I am with you”. Not high. Even before any paint is spilled, and even before any long-lasting bulbs are replaced, there is work, there is cost, there is meaningful preparation.
Somethings similar is afoot in preaching. The preacher either swings in the breeze like a Steeple Jack, if the matters of interpretation are low fences, but, if the height is greater, scaffolding is needed. What you see when the work is done, is the steeple repaired, the roof replaced, the paint (both coats) applied, the bulbs changed. But before all that there has been scaffolding up, so that the work could be done. Today that is our work, to prepare for Mark.
Scaffolds
We come this morning to the interpretation of Mark 4. Mark requires scaffolding. We cannot begin to work until we have someplace to stand. No light bulbs will be changed until we can reach the fixtures. Come and help me a little with the scaffolding this morning.
As Mr. Cordts so ably reminded us last week, we know not who wrote Mark, only his name. He wrote for a particular community, whose location and name are also unknown. He even mentions by name members of his church, Alexander and Rufus (15:21). The book is meant to help a community of Christians. It is written to support and encourage people who already have been embraced by faith. While it purports to report on events long ago, in the ministry of Jesus, its main thrust is toward its own hearers and readers forty years later. So, it is not an evangelistic tract and it is not a diary and it is emphatically not a history.
You will want to know what we can say, then, about Mark’s community. If the community gave birth to the gospel, and if the community is the primary focus of the gospel, and if the community is the gospel’s intended audience, you would like to know something about them.
For one thing, the community is persecuted, or is dreading persecution, or both. Jesus suffered and so do, or so will, you. This is what Mark says. This gospel prepares its hearers for persecution. For another thing, the church may have been in or around Rome, or possibly somewhere in Syria. It is likely that Mark was written between 69 and 73 ce. For yet another thing, Mark’s fellow congregants, fellow Christians, are Gentiles, in the main, not Jews. He is writing to this largely Gentile group. He writes for them neither a timeless philosophical tract nor an ethereal piece of poetry. His is rather a ‘message on target’. Further, Mark’s composition, editing, comparisons, saying combinations, style and Christology all point to Mark as the earliest gospel (see, inter alia, J Marcus).
Pause over the word gospel. You have heard the word many times, and know that it means ‘good news’. It is an old term. You could compare it to ‘ghost’. Gospel is to good news as ghost is to spirit, you might say. Mark calls his writing a ‘gospel’. He creates something new. Mark is a writing unlike any other to precede it. Any other. Mark is not a history, not a biography, not a novel, not an apocalypse, not an essay, not a treatise, not an epistle. Examples of all these were to hand for him. Mark might have written one of any one of them. He did not. He wrote something else and so in form, in genre, gave us something new. A gospel. His is the first, but not the last. That is the mystery of growth. Seed scattered on the ground…the earth produces of itself…when it is sown it grows…
Mark is not great literature. It is not Homer, not Plato, not Cicero, not Shakespeare. Nor is the Greek of the gospel a finely tuned instrument. It is harsh, coarse and common. The gospel was formed, formed in the life of a community, as described earlier. Its passages and messages were announced as memories meant to offer hope. Its account of Jesus, in healing and preaching and teaching, all the way to the cross and beyond, is offered to a very human group of humans who are trying to make their way along His way.
That is, the Gospel is a record of the preaching of the gospel. To miss this, or to mistake this, is to miss the main point of the Gospel, and of the gospel. It is in preaching that the gospel arrives, enters, feasts, embraces, loves, and leaves. It is in preaching that you may hear—that you may hear today– something that makes life meaningful, makes life loving, makes life real. It is in preaching that the Gospel of Mark came to be, as a community, over time, heard and reheard, remembered and rehearsed, as the story of Jesus crucified (his past) and risen (his presence). We should not expect narrative linearity, historical accuracy, or re-collective precision here. And in fact, we find very little. Let us put it another way around. Most of the NT documents are, in one way or another, attempts to remember, accurately, the nature and meaning of baptism. Well, Mark fits that description. What does it mean, here and now, to be a person of faith?
Two Marks
Let us put it this way. Let us put up our scaffolding this way. Ours is a tale of two Marks. Is Mark a moderate critic or is Mark a critical moderate? How you answer will both depend on and indicate where you stand on the scaffold. Moderate critic, critical moderate? That is, across the length of his Gospel, is Mark actively criticizing others or is he carefully moderating, coaching if you will, the approach of others? Is the tone of the gospel polemic or irenic? Granted there is both, when the chips are down, as they are today, which scaffold matters most?
Mark is clearly an apocalyptic writing, although clarity about this has only fully emerged in the last few generations. Mark expects the end of all things in his own time, and so the Markan Jesus so instructs his followers. In fact, Mark expects the culmination of all things, soon and very soon. To this coming dawn, Mr. Cordts so poetically referred a week ago. In this regard, and in regard to his understanding of the cross, Mark has some congruence with the letters of Paul. Given this apocalyptic perspective, is Mark a critic or a coach? Critic or coach?
The first option, Mark the moderate critic, was most piercingly presented almost forty years ago. First let me give you the outline of the planking in this part of the scaffold, and then let me tell you about the carpenter.
On this view, Mark combats, combats a view of Jesus that will not accept his suffering, his crucifixion. Long after the events of Calvary and Golgotha, spirited and strong people, singing a happy song, have caused the earliest church to forget their baptism, or its meaning. They expect ease, spirit, joy, and, soon, a conquering victory over all that plagues and persecutes them. To this, Mark says: ‘no’. To say no Mark remembers in delicate detail the story of Jesus’ passion, relying on a source, a document he has inherited. To say no, Mark pointedly shows the ignorance and cowardice of Peter, at Caesarea Philippi and in Jerusalem. To say no, Mark criticizes, diminishes the miracles of Jesus, letting them wind away to nothing as the Gospel progresses. To say no, Mark describes the disciples as dunces. They didn’t understand it and neither do you, he says. Mark stays within the fold of the inherited story of Jesus, the gospel of teaching and passion, of Galilee and Jerusalem, including our parable today. But he does so as a moderate critic of those who are unrealistic about the suffering that continues, from which the gospel does not deliver, any more than Jesus had been delivered from the cross. Saved, yes, delivered, no. On this view, at the heart of Mark there is a bitter dispute in earliest Christianity about what constitutes discipleship, baptism, and Mark is out to prove his opponents wrong. As with the alternative, there is plenty of evidence to support this sort of scaffold.
One person who most powerfully presented this view is a dear friend. In fact, he was our immediate predecessor in our Rochester church. Our eleven years in that pulpit immediately followed his seventeen. He is a Methodist minister who did his doctoral work at Claremont. It has taken some decades for the force and power of his argument to stand up and stand out in comparison to the work of others. Ted Weeden wrote: ‘Jesus serves as a surrogate for Mark, and the disciples serve as surrogates for Mark’s opponents…The disciples (in Mark) are reprobates’. (op cit, 163).
The second option, another scaffold, Mark the critical moderate, has in a way been present for a longer time, and, one could say, is still the more dominant, the majoritarian position. The culminating presentation of this position is in a two volume Anchor Bible Commentary. The author was (once) on the faculty of Boston University School of Theology, Joel Marcus, now at Duke. On this view, things in Mark’s community are not so much at daggers drawn. There are differences to be sure, but the disagreements are differences among friends. The Markan coaching does not face strong spirit people, committed to an idea of the ‘divine man’. Mark is not so negative about miracles. The disciples are mistaken but not malevolent. The titles for Jesus are not so telling or convincing. The real trouble is not so much in the community itself (perish the thought), but outside, among the potential deceivers of the church. Hence, on this scaffold, Mark has the job of more gently reminding his hearers of the cross, of suffering, of discipline, of the cruciform character of Christianity, as a moderate, a critical moderate, but a moderate, a coach, more than a critic, a critical moderate.
We have a hard time imaging that our faith tradition was born out of serious conflict. It is like family stories. We really don’t like to imagine that our family tree is littered with broken branches, dead limbs, crooked roots, and Dutch elm disease. We like the picture of the Palm Tree, majestic and free. The second option appeals to our sense of pride in our Christian heritage. It is a more pleasing view. But the former, Weeden’s Mark, is over time the stronger scaffold, and what we need from a scaffold is not presentation but reliability, not beauty but strength.
Here is where my feet come down. Marcus appeals to my heart, what I wish were true or truer. But my mind trusts Weeden. Our passage today is a case in point.
From the vantage point of this scaffolding, the key verse this morning is 4:29: when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come. That is, there comes a time of completion, of testing, requiring not just coaching but also and more so warning. Warning. Listen this summer for the warning in Mark, more than the encouragement. Listen for the critic not just the coach. The ministry of nature is meant to prepare us for the nature of ministry. The parables of seed and growth are meant to prepare us for those challenging moments of growth that still lie ahead. As individuals, and as communities, we prepare and need to prepare for the challenges, the harvests, of the future. And, friends, there are serious challenges ahead. There are riveting, sobering, critical challenges ahead of us in the country, around this globe, and in our churches, this year to come. Challenges. Challenges for you, your community, your nation, its constitution and its bedrock foundation of truth and freedom. Listen for the warnings this summer in Mark.
Coda
And hear good news, in the ministry of nature and the nature of ministry. The church is alive! The future is open! Love waits to fill the heart! The seed sprouts, we know not how. Foretastes, all, of heaven. If the heavenly banquet has this menu, perhaps we need over these few earthly years to acquire a certain taste for certain things, faith and hope and love. Just a little critical warning…
So, dear friends, then travel with a little imagination…Imagine Eucharist at Marsh Chapel. Stand to sing… Pause to reflect… Step out into the aisle… Look at and look past Abraham Lincoln and Francis Willard…Receive cup and bread, bread and cup… Kneel at the altar to pray… Stand in communion with the communion of saints…Here is the bread and cup of friendship…Imagine, a congregation reciting together a creed, a psalm, a hymn, a poem. Imagine, if you are willing, a congregation currently in diaspora, but just now, by the word spoken and heard, a gathered and thus addressable community, you and I and all together, able to prepare for the challenges, the harvests of the future, able to prepare for Mark.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
