Sermon from April 22, 2001
I want my life to matter. I want my life to have meaning. I want it to mean something that God Himself would call good. I believe you want the same. Such a life grows out of long-term, trusting relationships with God and our fellow man. That is true in marriage, friendship, career, leisure, politics, and preeminently, faith. Those relationships are not always easy. They are not always happy. They are always long term, and they are always marked by trust. Long-term, trusting relationships with God and with each other are the North Star of lives that matter and have meaning. Following our North Star, we can navigate hopefully our journey across this mysterious sea we call human life.

People in our time need to be hopeful. Amid the unparalleled peace and prosperity in this country we find ourselves in unexpectedly turbulent waters. Christians and millions of others, who share similar values, find theselves uncomfortable with the moral direction of our country. There is in fact a fair amount of discontent in this country over its moral laxness. Abortion and handgun violence and sexual promiscuity and incivility in public life and lack of moral vision in political leadership and moral relativism in higher education and the media suggest a culture that has come loose from its moral moorings and does not know how to get home again. I agree, but what do we do about it? I have lost confidence in the inflammatoy rhetoric of the religious right and the secular left that polarizes people, sheds very little light on the issues, and, more to the point, does little or nothing to help the nation stop its moral decline. I have a proposal.

I believe that most of us would like to see the United States characterized by a "vibrant, public, moral culture," (Witness to Hope, 847). That would provide a powerful safeguard to our political liberties. My proposal is that the Church is the key to achieving such a culture. Not the Church as a power broker in politics but the Church as a servant of humanity and as a model of the kind of vibrant, moral culture that would speak to the nation's conscience. I will pursue this proposal often with you in the months to come. I want you to appreciate its true scope and power. I want you to see how it embodies worship, love and detachment, the three governing principles of discipleship. Today, I want to focus on one crucial piece of this proposal that touches worship deeply.

If the Church is to model the kind of vibrant, moral culture that could speak to the nation's conscience, then we have to be a community marked by clear, shared, Christlike values, and it means also that God is calling us to have a certain kind of relationship with Him. These values and this relationship constitute what is properly called our sanctity. Right here the Gospel of Mark comes into play. We have come at last half way through this Gospel. Perhaps you have seldom, if ever, spent this long on one Christian writing. I am concerned that these sermons on Mark do not come across as exercises in ancient history or as intellectual pursuits or as the senior pastor's private hobby.

I want to communicate to you today that what matters to me is not so much the writing called Mark but Jesus Christ the Son of God, who is of course the theme of that Gospel. The story of Jesus that Mark has told gives to our interior life a means of having a long-term, trusting relationship with God the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. I want to describe something of that relationship as I experience it, so that when you hear these sermons you know where my heart is, and so that you also might imitate my example and have for yourself a long-term, trusting relationship with the Father and the Son. What follows is, therefore, a kind of mediation on the beauty of Jesus Christ as Mark presents Him to us. I hope it will also serve as a model for using the Gospel of Mark that will be conducive to our sanctity.

Our sanctity, yours and mine, the sanctity of pastors and people alike, holds a cardinal place of importance in human affairs. If we followers of Christ are effectively to challenge secular, democratic culture with a different vision of what it means to be human and what it means to be free, then the pursuit of sanctity must characterize our approach to all of life.

The mediation on Jesus will take you first inside my soul. Remembering Jesus as Mark presents Him gives my interior life access to Him any time, anywhere. Jesus promised at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, "I will be with you always, to the very end of the age," (Matt. 28:20). That promise becomes more real as I recall some part of the Gospel of Mark in the various circumstances of my life. In this respect it is something like a letter from a loved one, who is separated from you for an indefinite time. The letter is a poor substitute for the person you love, but in the absence of that person, the letter takes on huge significance. It is a piece of the person. You read and reread it to squeeze from it every bit of meaning it has. Likewise, the Gospel of Mark is a piece of the Person we love but have never seen. Here are some examples of how this works in my life.

First, I occasionally experience what I call unscheduled night vigils. Usually, because I fail to process an issue during my waking hours, my subsconscious proceeds to do it for me after I go to sleep. As a result, I wake up in the dead of night with my mind thoroughly immersed by the issue. Even if I then resolve the issue, I cannot go right back to sleep. Many, many nights I have called to mind some passage of the Gospel of Mark as a way of pushing back my earthly cares and allowing the reality of God to come before my mind and imagination. Sometimes, that puts me back to sleep – a perfectly honorable result. Other times it does not. Even when it does not, the presence of Christ is more soothing than the subconscious irritation that wakened me in the first place.

By the way, as you know, it is easy for me to call to mind some passage in Mark, because I have memorized it. The habit of memorizing scripture began early in my apprenticeship to Christ. The people who guided me encouraged memorization of scripture with verses like Psalm 119:11: I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you. But you can also read Mark in the middle of the night or just recall some story from Mark, retelling it in your own words. You should try to recall stories from Mark based on having listened to my sermons over the past sixteen months.

Here is a second example of how the Gospel of Mark brings Christ into my interior life. About two years ago, I had an MRI, the first and so far the only one I have had. It was of course painless, but I had no idea how loud it was going to be inside the cylinder. And of course the technician wanted me to lie as still as possible during the 15 or 20 minutes that imaging took place.

So, I got on the table, and she slid me into the machine, and the banging began. What do you do with your mind in moments like that? It came quite naturally for me to call to mind a passage of the Gospel of Mark as a way of pushing back my earthly cares and allowing the reality of God to come before my mind and imagination. It brought great peace to my interior life in spite of the noise.

Third, this same reality applies in truly overwhelming circumstances. Almost forty years ago, I discovered in Mark's story of Jesus' calming the sea a significance that has nurtured and sustained me when life became more than I could handle. The most encouraging thing about that event is that the disciples, especially the fishermen among them, were in charge of the boat, but Christ was in charge of the sea.

In overwhelming moments that fact has come back to mind, and I have turned it into a prayer for help. "O Lord, you are in charge of the sea. I am no longer in control of my circumstances. Help me or I perish." In this way also, I have been able to practice the presence of Christ, which He promised us for as long as the world lasts. Mark was the love letter I held tightly during those dark times.

So, Mark builds trust in God by filling my interior life with the presence of Christ any time anywhere. Mark builds my trust in God in a second important way. It does so by correcting my tendencies to project on to Jesus my own image of what He was (and is) like. Let me give you two examples out of half a dozen that come to mind.

First, seeing Jesus as a Jew among Jews has given dramatic, new depth to the "picture" of Jesus I carry with me in my soul. For example, He truly stood in the great tradition of Jewish prophets. He knew them, He honored them, He quoted them in ways that made their insights relevant to His generation, He surpassed them; but He was one of them. The conflicts Jesus had with Jewish religious leaders had to do with issues of Jewish identity that mattered deeply to Jews of the first century and to Jews of our time. He did not speak as an outsider to people who were just being stupid. He had caught a breath-taking new vision of what it meant to be a Jew, and He tried vigorously to impart that vision.

When I began to see Jesus like this, it began to erode a harsh picture of Jesus that managed to see Him as somehow above the fray, delivering non-negotiable pronouncements from some untouchable vantagepoint of superiority. I saw Him rather as a real Man engaged with His peers in a difficult and dangerous conversation about the future of Judaism, about the future of humanity. It became easier to imagine His coming into our real-life situations and bringing His judgment to bear on them without cutting off the conversations that we might want to have. Everything I read in Mark makes me think He would invite our partnership in a dialogue, and the better informed we were and the more articulate and persuasive we were, the better He would like it. Worthy of worship on one hand but at the same time willing to talk – that is a remarkable combination.

A second corrective challenges the sentimentalism that clings to our collective picture of Jesus like jelly on a jar top. We say that He is a man of love, and so He is – none greater. However, all talk about love in our culture is about one step away from sentimentality of a particularly cloying kind. We have a tendency to portray Jesus as such a loving person that it is hard to understand why anyone would have hard feelings toward Him. It really is important to recall that His enemies did not have Him crucified for being such a nice guy. He offended certain very powerful people.

One corrective to this comes at the end of chapter nine where Jesus talks about people being thrown into hell. "If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell," (Mark 9:47). That grabs our attention, because it is strong, and because no one else in the New Testament talks like this more than Jesus did.

Whatever it means to be love on two feet, it does not mean that He was unwilling to call human beings to account in the most ultimate way imaginable. Warm enough for sinners to keep coming to Him on one hand but at the same time realistic enough that no one took liberties – that is another remarkable combination.

All of this and much more goes way beyond historical or scholarly interest. It keeps my heart close to this burning figure who is at the center of human existence. It wakens in me a mystical sense toward Him who bursts from the pages of the Gospel into our lives.

Who is this that appears like the dawn,
fair as the moon, bright as the sun,
majestic as the stars in procession?
Song of Solomon 6:10

But I do not have these experiences of Mark's Gospel in isolation. I recall with gratitude the seminary professor, who first fired in me a hunger to read the Gospel of Mark. How can I forget the other seminary professor and my classmates who responded with unexpected affirmation to the first sermon I ever preached on Mark? Then, there were the commentaries on Mark that deepened my appreciation of how the Church had read and received Mark before I ever took it in hand to read. Perhaps, above all, I have been benefited from congregations, who have listened and responded to sermons and dramatic recitations and Bible studies, who have prayed for my growth as a Christian man and as a shepherd of Christ's little lambs. The doctrine of the communion of the saints is not some stuffy irrelevance; it is a living reality with you and with others "whose rest is won."

My part in this communion of the saints around the Gospel of Mark has been going on nigh unto 40 years. That communion has guided me in how to interpret and communicate the truth about Jesus Christ. It has protected both me and the Church from doctrinal and moral error. It has provided encouragement to be faithful to the task. It has provided an audience. It has provided companions who listen to Mark's story of Jesus with the same sense of devotion as I have to the Lord they reveal.

Another level of meaning enriches and overarches this communion of the saints. When we open the Gospel of Mark in this context of public worship, heaven and earth meet here in this very room. We invoke the presence of the Holy Spirit to magnify Jesus Christ in all we do. The Lord Himself promised to be with us in every such gathering. We read of Him who at present is separated from our senses but who is present in our hearts and in our company. For a few shining moments this place is the center of the universe. How can any place where He is, not be the center?

The most astonishing part of the Gospel of Mark is yet to come in the final eight chapters, and I want to share it with you. With you I want to see all the ways its eternal story draws our little stories into itself and gives to us and to our congregation transcendent meaning. With you I want to follow our Lord walking on the road to Jerusalem to His foreordained destiny.

But I do not want us to go only with our minds, or only with our emotions or only with our wills. The Son of Man calls our whole being into fellowship with Him. Allow His story free rein in your interior life and be at peace. Only in such a long-term, trusting relationship with our God can we become the kind of people whose life together touches the conscience of our nation and challenges it to realize that "vibrant, public, moral culture" that freedom needs and human hearts long for.

Arise, shine, for your light has come,
and the glory of the LORD rises upon you.
Isaiah 60:1