Led By the Spirit on Wilderness Roads - A Homily for the Feast of St. Mark

A sermon preached by the Reverend Holly Huff at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark for the Feast of St. Mark, April 28, 2024. Due to technical issues, no audio version of this homily is available. We apologize for any inconvenience.

This is a wilderness road, Luke comments. The disciples of Jesus sent out to all the world in the radiant light of the resurrection, proclaiming life-changing Good News, find themselves on a wilderness road. Bishop Rob Wright of Atlanta who was here with us at diocesan convention last week said the church is the Good News Society: today, as then, we are disciples gathered around the proclamation that our crucified Lord has risen from the dead, a proclamation that is startling and ever-fresh, in the light of which our lives must be rearranged. This Good News, this proclamation of the way God chooses to love us, using divine power to express mercy, reorders our lives, names us as Beloved and sends us out onto every kind of wilderness road to tell the world that God has come near. 

            Rowan Williams in his lovely little book on the Gospel of Mark, comments about this world-changing Good News about Jesus. An evangelion or “gospel,” an account of the Good News about Jesus, emerges as a new genre, a genre which has the character of an official political proclamation. Gospel is proclaimed as if by the town crier with a tricorn hat and a bell, reading from a long scroll: Hear ye, hear ye! There has been a change in regime. The world is under new management. A new kingdom has come. That’s what the Gospels each announce, because that is what Jesus himself announced. Here’s how Williams renders the last lines of our passage from the opening of Mark’s gospel: “After John was imprisoned, Jesus went into Galilee announcing the official proclamation about God. The time has arrived, he said, the rule of God has come close, so change your minds. Trust this proclamation.”

            In this Easter season, we see the spread of the world-changing good news of Jesus rippling out from the epicenter of the cross and the empty tomb. The good news is itself world-changing: the Gospel proclamation itself changes our minds and works repentance in us. In this Easter season as we read the Book of Acts we see the first disciples driven by the Holy Spirit into wilderness places. We see the disciples on the move, pulled along in the wake of the Holy Spirit to go to places they never expected, to come alongside strangers they don’t think they share anything with, to break bread with people they thought would make them unclean. Just as Jesus has hardly broken the surface of the Jordan at his baptism when the Holy Spirit drives him into the wilderness, so too the apostles filled with the Holy Spirit are sent out on diverse wilderness roads, to meet God’s diverse people in the highways and byways of the world and gather them in, proclaiming the world-altering news that Jesus suffered, died, was buried, and on the third day rose from the dead, in accordance with the scriptures. Disciples living in light of this resurrection find themselves sent out into unknown places to meet unknown others, as the spirit inducts them into a new understanding of God’s chosen people, far wider and multi-hued a group than they had expected.

            This scene between Philip and the unnamed Ethiopian eunuch is one of the paradigmatic stories about disciples living out the world-changing, world-embracing effects of the Easter news. It takes place on a wilderness road. The Spirit says to Philip, catch that chariot! This is a scene with not a little comedy in it, as Philip runs after a moving chariot and overtakes it and, jogging alongside, keeping pace, shouts out to the stranger inside, “Hey! What are you reading?” This is an image of God the Holy Spirit on the move, coming alongside us when we are enclosed in our various self-made chariots, interrupting us in strange and comic ways, opening us to relationship. For Philip, the Ethiopian eunuch is a stranger many times over. A sexually ambiguous gendered other, an ethnic and racial other, an African, Ethiopian, powerful yet subjugated as a court slave, entrusted with the whole of the treasury yet deprived of personal dignity and agency. In short, the eunuch is a surprise! A stranger who is far from the disciples’ expectations of insiders for the news of the kingdom. Left to his own devices Philip is not going to be running after strange chariots on a wilderness road or climbing into the carriage of Ethiopian eunuchs to read the scriptures together. But living in the aftermath of the world-changing news about Jesus, Philip listens to the Spirit’s unexpected direction and joins this person, once a stranger, now a fellow reader, and interprets the words of Isaiah. “How can I understand the scriptures unless someone guides me?” the eunuch asks, and invites him into the chariot. The eunuch’s invitation seems to be just as Spirit-led as Philip chasing them down in the first place: there is mutual joining and hospitality as Philip clambers up into the carriage. “How can I understand the scriptures unless someone guides me?” None of us can read the scriptures alone or be Christians alone. We can’t share Eucharist on our lonesome or baptize ourselves. We need community, the new community of Christ’s body knit together in love with all its vast diversity of gifts. The Ethiopian eunuch asks about the passage from Isaiah, “So who is this about? Who is this suffering humiliated one? Who is the one who has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows?” And so Philip tells them the good news about Jesus. Jesus who entered our human life and took up our struggles and preached liberation and cross every border and carried the cross and died and was raised. Jesus who came alongside and joined us in every way, and who still meets us on our wilderness road. 

The eunuch’s next question is another version of “Who is this about?” Having heard the good news about Jesus, this person now expresses another answer to that question, who is this about? this is about me, it turns out. They have heard about Jesus coming alongside us, and that makes a new recognition possible. New sight, new hearing, new speech, new friends: look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized? Finally the carriage slows. The disciples are learning to listen to God, to follow the movements of the Holy Spirit, freeform like the wind blowing wherever it will. They are learning to listen to God rather than fixed ideas of self idolatrously put in the place of God. The disciples are learning to see God’s action in all the world, in the sacred ordinary. In the breaking of bread, in a wound, in breakfast shared on the beach. In baptism in a muddy creek by the side of a desert road, why not! Look, here is water! 

This is a moment of recognition, a moment of new perception, of one person’s opening to the world-changing Good News about Jesus. It puts me in mind of Anne Sullivan, faithfully tracing letters into the palm of a young girl both deaf and blind for weeks, joining her enclosed world without sight or sound, coming alongside her in a steady loving presence that was also a regime change—look, here is water, W-A-T-E-R signed in the palm of young Helen Keller’s hand. Recognition. Keller, who became a philosopher, educator, lecturer, socialist and peace activist, famously wrote of that moment, “Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that "w-a-t-e-r" meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!” 

Truly a living word, the embodied experience of text guided by another who has come alongside, water written in the palm of the hand. Finally I understand: this Good News about Jesus changes the world, and it also changes me. Here is water: how can I keep from telling others this Good News?

Jesus comes proclaiming the nearness of God’s kingdom. Look, here is water! Right here! The time is fulfilled! Kingdom life is lived on a wilderness road, trusting the Spirit, proclaiming our risen Lord, washed with the Love of God who calls us each Beloved. Just as the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness right after his baptism, with Jordan river water still dripping off of him, the Holy Spirit always sends us as baptized people out onto wilderness roads, to places beyond the neat tidy regime of our expectation, to the highways and byways where those marked as despised unwanted others by our society are pushed to the margins. Jesus wants all his friends at the party. The banquet feast in the kingdom of heaven gathers us around a long, long table with room enough for everyone. This is world-changing Good News: We have each been named as unconditionally beloved, washed by water and the spirit, and then sent out in the power of the spirit to our neighbors. 

That’s what we celebrate as we celebrate our patronal feast today: not ourselves St. Mark’s, or an admittedly beautiful cathedral named after St. Mark, but of Mark the evangelist himself, and his gospel witness to our trustworthy God: come to be with us in the person of Jesus, who draws us after him in the power of the Spirit. We are most faithful when we are following that Spirit into the wilderness. Faithful when we are on the road and on the move. Like Jesus on the road to Emmaus, like Philip on the road to Gaza. And doesn’t that hit us with special force today, the road to Gaza. Where else would the Spirit of Jesus move the disciples’ hearts right now? Christ is particularly present with all crucified peoples of the world. He joins in solidarity with the cornered, the ones attacked, any whose backs are up against the wall. If mourning the slaughter of innocents and crying out to God to defend the defenseless is political, then Christians must be willing to be political. In another passage, Isaiah tells us, “Your young people will prophesy”: the cry of young people to attend to injustice and divest ourselves from the machinery of war is a prophetic voice crying out in the wilderness. Let us listen to the Spirit as it blows where it will.

The Spirit is driving us into a hurting world, into the wild and hairy places where we meet our strange neighbors and are given to each other as members of one family, one body. Who is this about? In the spirit of our risen Lord we can now see that we belong to each other. Coming alongside the stranger, or having a stranger bust into our own carriage, we discover one of our own, a branch on the same vine, kin. The kingdom of heaven is this spirit-led recognition of each other as kin over and over—every old kingdom based on control of difference by violence now shatters like a clay and a new regime emerges. We are surprised by love, and knit together in love by the one who has loved us to the very end. 

Look, here is water! The waters of life right here, on this wilderness road. Amen.