Beginning Again with St. Mark

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Feast of St. Mark by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

It’s interesting that each time we celebrate the Feast of Mark (the Gospel writer, of course, not our parish which would be garish and unseemly) we are taken right back to the beginning of our Patron saint’s Gospel to begin again. Gertrude Stein, in her work “Composition as Explanation” writes that poetry is, “a groping for a continuous present and using everything by beginning again and again.” Poetry, for Stein, is always an endeavor that is reaching after, a groping towards, the “continuous present”--or what Paul Tillich calls the “Eternal Now” of God. Each moment is a new beginning–death and resurrection in the snap of a finger. And our task as God’s people gathered in this place is to approach it as open-handedly as possible, using everything at our disposal to co-operate with God in the fashioning and building up of the Kin-dom of God. St. Mark reminds us that we are always in a sense at the beginning of the Gospel. Each year, each season, each moment is an opportunity, a moment of decision where we can choose like Mary to utter our “Yes” and give birth to Christ in and though the fragile lineaments of this precious human life, or voice our stubborn, stuck, same-old-same-old Pilate “No,” to God’s dream for us, and God’s good, good, very good creation. Not, “Why is the world always the same?”, but, “Why am I always the same?”

Rooted and grounded wide-eyed and wonder-filled in God’s Eternal Now, this grace-soaked continuous present, and using everything at our disposal under the sway of grace, what new thing is being called forth from us? What part is St. Mark’s corporately and each of us individually being called to play in lending its voice to the new song God is singing in Christ Jesus that God might be all in all? What if this moment–right here and right now–is, “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God in this place?” What kind of church would we be if we lived that out? What kind of world would it be where we saw it as our joy, privilege, to manifest God’s love through our very lives for others without exception? What if we leaned into the church’s role as an instrument of transfiguration, a place where lives are touched by God’s love in Christ through the Holy Spirit and poured, as I like to say, prodigally out without counting the cost?

You see, the Gospels (and all of Holy Scripture) are more than mere reportage. They do more than transmit information about the person of Jesus. As Fr. John P. Keenan writes, “The beginning of the gospel aims to actualize the good news in the lives of Mark’s readers, not impart information about Jesus.” The Gospels are living, breathing matrices of transformation into which we are invited, and, by our consent, changed into the people God intends us to be. The Gospels, rightly heard and passionately lived, are an immersion in the heart of God. The Gospels are a process of conversion, an Existential, Consciousness-Changing Exodus from self-centeredness to other-centeredness, from bondage into freedom, from self-enclosure to an arms flung wide open-heartedness where everyone and everything from Quasars to Quentins to goofball Quail is seen, known, and heard as sibling. Who is my mother and my sister and brother? Short answer–everyone and everything. Mark is initiating us, baptizing us, into a fresh way of seeing and being in the world that is a new start that promises nothing short of total transformation. Direct awareness–union and communion–with the Living God. Loving, life-giving, and liberating relationship with God, ourselves, each other and the Good Earth. 

Mark’s Gospel begins (again and again and again) with John the Baptist in the wilderness. Too often, we interpret the wilderness and its distance from Jerusalem and the Judean countryside in a rather predictably anti-Jewish fashion: “People are leaving the Temple because Jesus is the best.” Wrong! What we fail to see is that John’s wild-haired, locusts and honey camel’s hair undefended exposure and vulnerability to the pressure of God in his own life is what we are ourselves called into. The comfortable, predictable, rather staid life of the Temple that the people leave behind as they find themselves drawn into direct contact with the transcendent God in the wilderness is analogous to the hollowing out of the mainline Churches post 1950. Our hearts are restless for God in Godself and we give them badly-run Rotary Clubs with religious-themed wallpaper instead. No wonder the Yoga Studios are full and Church of the Holy Comforter is so popular on Sunday morning.

No surprise, then, that the “Son of God,” Jesus, goes out into the wilderness to be baptized by John. The Wilderness is that place of direct encounter with the Living God that rips the heavens open, cuts through our stale, cramped stories about ourselves, others, and God in Godself and reveals things as they truly are. Jesus’ baptism reminds us that we, too, are beloved children of God. All those things our teachers, parents, nations, and culture tell us about how we aren’t enough–smart enough, spiritual enough, skinny enough, woke enough–are relativized in the heavens-tearing descent of God’s Love over our blessed little heads just as we are.

When the Church stays true to what the Gospels are written for–to turn our hearts of stone into hearts of warm, potter’s clay vulnerable flesh–we wake up from our deadened slumber with I, me, mine at the center of everything and find ourselves being shaped and formed by grace as God’s instruments in the world. God has given us all we need. The Church is God’s vehicle to affect this transformation of consciousness and the world. Daily prayer, dwelling on God’s true and lively word in scripture, weekly worship in community, serving others in the spirit of sacrificial love, witnessing to justice and peace are the appointed means by which a new heaven and new earth are to be brought about in God’s own time. To find ourselves at the beginning of the Gospel each year is an humbling opportunity to see whether we’ve been placing ourselves in God’s way so that God can do God’s work in/on/through us, whether we’ve been doing the work of love we’ve been given to do that God might do God’s work. Have we stepped–vulnerable, needy, undefended–into the wilderness with John the Forerunner and Jesus the Son of God where the immediate awareness of God that bypasses all human constructs and containers can get at us? Or are we playing it safe in the Temple–contenting ourselves with half a loaf? Do we live as if union and communion with the Living God is a real thing? Is the startling trajectory of the Christian faith–that we might become by grace what Christ is by nature–the shape our lives take?

The same word–σχίζω/schizo–that Mark uses to describe the human-constructed heavens being opened, ripped, torn to shreds at Jesus’ baptism is later deployed to describe the rending of the Temple Curtain separating the holy of holies from the hoi polloi at the crucifixion. “Do not declare,” the picnic-blanket cornucopia God of Peter’s roof-top vision whispers, “anything I have created unclean.” Holy of Holies and Hoi Polloi, sacred and mundane, mountaintop and marketplace are one thing! Jesus comes to give us unmediated access to God in Godself. His Abba, Poppa, Daddy breath-taking intimacy with the Father is meant to be ours. That’s what God has done for us in the person of his only son. And it’s in growing in relationship with Jesus–falling in love with him again and again and again–that we come to share, by grace, that very same intimacy. As Fr. Kennan writes a little later, “Miracle and parable, healing and eating were calculated to draw individuals into immediate physical and spiritual contact with God and unmediated physical and spiritual contact with one another. He announced, in other words, the brokerless kingdom of God.” 

St. Benedict calls the monastery a “School for the Lord’s Service,” or a School for Love. The same is true, obviously, of a parish–any parish–but on this day, in this place, our parish. It’s a school where we are “taught by God” of God’s crazy love for us that we might be loved into loving others as God loves us. That’s what all this is for. It’s tried and tested. It’s been passed down and handed over from warm hand to warm hand, generation after generation for 2000 years. This–right here–is the wilderness of God. This–right here–is  the ripped open, brokerless kingdom descending upon the beloved children of God waiting to be taken up, experienced, and lived out sacrificially for others. So on this Feast of St. Mark we “begin again.” We re-orient ourselves on Jesus as the way. We acquaint ourselves with him. We learn from him. We fall in love with him and find ourselves–usually blessedly unawares and not knowing it’s happening until after the fact–being bread, water, oil for a hungry, hurting and broken world. Let them have their Church of the Holy Comforter. I’m headed to the wilderness–God’s wilderness–to begin again. And I swear I see something like a dove descending almost bodily, cooing a belovedness that the world doesn’t know and sure can’t give.