Stories of Power

Mark 1:9-15; Genesis 9:8-17

February 18, 2018

For a long time I’ve wondered about the different ways liturgical seasons must feel in different parts of the world. The word Lent, for example, means simply lengthening, and it refers to the lengthening of the daylight during spring. But in the global south, the part of the world where the church is actually growing, the days are getting shorter just now.

It serves as a good reminder to me that our faith is not about some abstract notion of truth, but is, instead, about real life as experienced in real time in these bodies of dust. It also provides an excellent invitation to turn some of the symbols on their heads, and thus, this year, beginning last week at our Ash Wednesday service, and continuing through these 40 days, we’re not focusing so much on the coming of light, but rather on the gifts of darkness.

There is power in the darkness, and in the stories that come from dark places. We tend to place light in the center, but some of the most powerful narratives emerge from the margins, from places out of the limelight. Sometimes stories of power come from places without it.

If you have been worshipping with us for the past month, and if you are the kind of person who pays attention to such things, you will have noticed that every sermon title since late January has included the word story. It occurs to me that while we’ve talked about various kinds of stories, we haven’t really paused to talk about the idea of story itself.

So, let’s talk about stories for a couple of minutes. First off, what makes for a good story, in your experience?

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The, uh, great thing about beginning a sermon with an open-ended question is that I never know where you’re going to go with it. But I guessed, with this one, that compelling narrative devices – conflict, reconciliation, and so on – and good characters would probably come up in one way or another.

On this first Sunday of Lent, the lectionary takes us to the beginning of the story of Jesus, and we immediately get conflict and characters. Jesus, John, and Satan show up and they immediately seem like interesting characters. Satan is tempting Jesus – conflict right here in chapter one, and, almost immediately, John gets arrested – lots of conflict. Isn’t that a wonderful beginning?

But, seriously, what’s going on here, and, more to the point, why should we care about it now? In other words, does this story still have any power for us? Does it matter? Does it, to riff again on Mark’s favorite word, have any immediacy?

To get at that, let’s go back just a few verses to the very beginning of Mark – chapter one, verse one, which in the most trusted manuscripts reads simply, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” or, in the Greek, simply Iesou Christou, or Jesus, the Christ, Christ meaning “christened” or “anointed one” or “messiah.”

That brief journey through the Greek of the first line matters because it tells us two important things: first, from the first word, arche, the author of Mark is placing his text alongside Genesis as a story about the beginnings of salvation; second, from its very first sentence this story claims a particular kind of power for salvation, and that power is inherently and explicitly political in nature. As Ched Myers underscores, “Messiah was a political title, a symbol of popular kingship.”[1]

In the tradition of Jesus’ own community, the long-expected messiah was to throw off the yoke of the occupying oppressor, sit on the throne of King David, and restore Israel to its rightful place among the nations. That’s what the salvation story was about when the good news was first proclaimed among the poor and the marginalized of Jesus’ time.

Moreover, the word gospel – euaggelious in the Greek – would have struck Mark’s original audience as an entirely different kind of story than what we expect when we hear gospel. In our time I think most of us hear it as a genre of religious music, but even if we think first of holy scripture, we definitely hear gospel as a story of faith. It strikes us as an fundamentally religious word.

But Mark’s first readers would have heard in the word an invitation to a story of power. Euaggelious means “glad tidings,” and was typically news about battlefield victories. So from its opening words, this is a story about power not confined to the house of God. Or, perhaps more to the point, in this story about power we are invited to think much more broadly about how we understand the house of God.

It is as if Mark is proclaiming, along with the psalmist, that the earth is the Lord’s, the earth and all that is in it. God’s house is as large as the mind of God, and God’s power for salvation – healing, wholeness, communion with all of creation – extends throughout the house.

The good news that Mark begins here to proclaim reaches back to the origin stories of the people of Israel, and thus it reminds them that they are part of the covenant that God has made and renewed and is, in Jesus, renewing again: that the people belong to God and God belongs to the people – always and forever.

If we stopped the proclamation with that it would fit neatly on a Hallmark card and, like such cards, would do absolutely nothing to disturb the status quo. Which is another way of saying, it’s a nice, sweet, wholesome, thoroughly religious story – with absolutely no power.

But the story itself insists otherwise. After all, if the God of Moses did not threaten the status quo, pharaoh would not have found himself plagued by the children of Israel and their God. If the story could be simply confined to the “religious” section of the library, it would be far from the stories of world history and politics and the stuff that actually matters. But if Jesus did not threaten the status quo and the status of those who actually mattered he would not have wound up on a cross.

The book of Mark goes to great lengths to bind together those two stories in particular, and thus it’s worth noting other similarities. Both Moses and Jesus emerge to liberating leadership from unexpected places, outcasts by circumstance. Both Moses and Jesus come from the margins to the center, there to speak truth to power.

We need to be listening for truth these days with renewed urgency, for we live in a time of great deceit. Our fairly to tell the truth and attend to it has deadly consequences, mostly for those who dwell far from power.

Like most everyone this week, I have been deeply saddened and also angered by yet another school shooting. Like most everyone else, I have grown weary of our national inability to address this public health crisis that has made guns the third leading cause of death among our children. For context, young Americans are almost 50 times more likely to die from gun shots than their peers in the rest of the developed world.

The statistics go on and on and on, and they paint a tragic picture of unnecessary loss due to the pathetic inaction of people in positions of power.

Perhaps the problem is we understand power poorly. We believe that power belongs to the powerful – those in lofty positions of the government or industry.

But the stories of our faith tell us something different, and that difference, itself, has remarkable power. Jesus held no office. He had no wealth. He led no corporation. He had no tools of mass communication.

But he wielded the power of authentic good news. He preached liberation to the captives. He brought healing and wholeness to the sick and the brokenhearted. He gave new sight to the blind, and preached good news to the poor. He preached nonviolence in a violent world. He preached love to a people drowning in fear.

He brought the concerns of those on the margins directly to the center, and he spoke truth to those who held power in his society. That truth was simple: the good news is the God loves these folks you’ve neglected; God demands justice on their behalf; you need to turn from the unjust high road you’re traveling and walk the low road with humility, working in solidarity with everyone else who is struggling along.

In the current context, with the urgent concern of this week foremost in my mind, I am hearing as gospel truth the words of students, one of whom said simply, “blood is being spilled on the floors of American classrooms and that is not acceptable.” That child of God, witness to unimaginable horror in his school last week, went on to say, “by working through bipartisanship and working through our differences … we can make an actual change. And who knows? Maybe we could save some children’s lives.”

The kid who said that is basically the same age as my daughter. He goes to a school that is pretty much like Wakefield, or W & L, or Yorktown.

These kids have no power in the system – any systems, really. With respect to the decisions that have clear and dramatic effects on their lives they have no real voice. Compared to the halls of power where such decisions get made, these kids exist way out on the margins.

If there’s anything that all of scripture ought to make abundantly clear it’s this: listen to the voices from the margins, for that is where you will hear stories with the power to change the world. May it be so. Amen.

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[1] Ched Myers, Binding the Strongman, 123.