Scripture: Mark 1:14-20
Those of you who were at the King Day celebration last Sunday night will remember that the speaker, Tyrone Crider, spoke about having given the eulogy at his 101-year-old grandmother’s funeral. He referred to the program which listed her dates of birth, as we do at memorial services and on tombstones. In this case the bulletin had her name—grandmother Crider—January 25, 1899-May 15, 2000. The dates were impressive, he said, indicating that she had lived a long time and that her life had touched the 1800’s, the 1900’s, and the 2000’s. But what really interested him, he said, was the dash. The tiny little dash in the middle, and all the living that that tiny little dash represented.
Rev. Crider’s point in mentioning this last Sunday was to challenge everyone in the room to ask themselves what they are doing with their dash. But he was also commenting, or at least this is the way I heard what he said, on the irony of reducing a person’s life to a dash on a piece of paper or a slab of cement, whether that person lived 101 years as Rev. Crider’s grandmother did, or 39 years as Dr. King did.
Not that there’s some spectacularly better way of doing tombstones, but the point being that at memorial services sometimes all the attention is put on the sorrow surrounding death, the pain of saying good-bye, and/or the promise of eternal life to come. So Rev. Crider was just saying, “don’t ignore the dash”.
In the context of all of history and then in the larger context of eternity, each of our lives, even a one-hundred-year life, might seem like a little blip on the screen, a dash if you will. And sometimes we may even need to be reminded that this life of mine which I consider so absolutely, enormously important is really just a very, very small piece of the big picture. But faith not only says that there is a larger context to our lives, but also says that the dash too is not only obviously of some importance to the person whose dash it is, but that the dash too is the holy part. I don’t know if Rev. Crider meant to say that, but that’s what he caused me to think anyway.
Later this last week that thought came back to me when I looked at the lectionary scripture for today to see if I was going to preach on it. It’s about Jesus’ debut, if you will, the beginning of the story of what we know of his life on earth, the first report of what he did with his dash. It caused me to reflect.
Isn’t it interesting that Christians, when they look at Jesus, very often pay so little attention to the dash? The importance of Jesus, in much of Christian theology, is that he was born, that he suffered and died, and that he was raised from the dead. The part of the Apostles’ Creed that is about Jesus says: “I believe in Jesus Christ…conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. He descended into hell. On the third day he rose again…and so forth. Where, in all that, is the dash?
Often in the past when I have taught Confirmation classes, and we come to the section where we’re going to talk about Jesus, I have begun by asking the students—roughly 13-14 year olds—what they know about Jesus. This is before we’ve done any study, just “what do you know?” The most common answer, the one that seemed to just spring to the lips of 14-year-olds most often, was “he died for our sins”.
After I’d been through this experience a number of times, this answer ceased to surprise me, but it never ceased to bother me. In the minds of these young people, Jesus lived mostly in order to die…for our sins. A phrase they learned from where? Sunday school? Their parents? Their friends? Just various things you see and hear? It always disturbed me that this would be the thing that young people would think of first and say most often about Jesus. And it disturbed me to contemplate where this was coming from.
Of course, I realize that it could come from lots of places. It is after all what many people think of, and would want others to think of, as the central message of Christianity. I, on the other hand, would hope that the central message of Christianity would have quite a different flavor to it, and so it would disturb me if this was the one thing our children were getting from our Sunday school, or if they were somehow learning this in spite of what we thought we were teaching.
Could it be, I ask myself, that we are teaching our children that the only really important thing Jesus did was to die…on a cross…for our sins?
And could it be that if the teachings of Christianity don’t really value the life of Jesus, then they don’t really value my life either, that human life itself takes a back seat to the question of death and what’s going to happen to us after we die?
Could it be that in subtle, and perhaps not so subtle, ways Christianity—some portions of Christianity—devalue life in this world, devalue the dash?
Those of course are rhetorical questions. They are not only rhetorical questions; they are silly rhetorical questions. Of course all those things could be. In fact they not only could be true; they are true. Christianity has indeed often portrayed life in this world as just a poor prelude to life in another world, and in so doing has deprived the life of the flesh, the life of this world, of appreciation, attention, love, and the desire to love the world into being a better place. After all, we’re just passing through. This is just a place to endure until we’re ready to go to a better place. This is just a testing ground, a waiting room for heaven.
I do believe all this needs to be corrected, all theologies that so much as hint at this life-denying attitude need to be corrected. And it seems to me that one of the steps that can be taken in this direction is to give Jesus back his earthly life. He was not just born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried and on the third day rose from the dead. There was a dash in there too that also had holy significance, as all our dashes do, and it would be good to pay attention to it.
We can do this, give Jesus back his earthly life, even though most of his life is a mystery. It’s true the gospels don’t even try to tell us about his growing up or what he did before he began his ministry at the age of something like 30.
We can do this even though when the gospels do get around to talking about Jesus’ life they don’t tell us everything we might want to know, disagree on some of the details, and clearly are more concerned with spiritual truth than with historical fact.
But given all the problems we may have with the large gaps in our knowledge and the problems in working with the gospels as our source of knowledge, still it is worth paying to attention to what the gospels do say.
Mark says for instance that before Jesus set about this business of dying, he had some living to do, and the ministry part of that living, which is what is on Mark’s mind, begins with Jesus talking about the reign of God. When Jesus first speaks to us in Mark, that’s what he’s talking about, the reign of God. And as we read further in the story, that’s a large part of what his living is all about. Preaching about the reign of God. Describing the reign of God. Praying for the reign of God (Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth…). Living toward the reign of God.
This is how, this is how much Jesus valued the life of this world. He devoted himself heart, mind, body, and soul to the redeeming, the renewing, the transformation of the life of this world.
The point in what Jesus said at the beginning of his ministry and continued to say throughout his ministry is not that we’re supposed to believe in Jesus. That’s certainly not what he said in these first words he spoke to us through Mark.
The point here is not that Jesus is going to guide us through this world that is fraught with danger and temptation so as we can arrive at an otherworldly destination—I’m sorry if this all is sounding pretty basic, but these are unfortunately not settled matters in the Christian community—the point is not to somehow get us out of this world into another and better one.
The point of Jesus here and elsewhere is the exact opposite of devaluing earthly life, the exact opposite of dismissing or minimizing the importance of the life of the world. The point here is what God wants for this world, what has been in God’s heart for this world from the beginning, what God dreams for us, the reign of God, a world that is infused with holiness.
The reign of God is about a new world, a new earth, a new creation, yes, but not in some distant spiritual, other dimensional sense. It is about a new community, a new way of people living together in very earthly, fleshly, this-worldly ways. It is not a kind of paradise we enter one by one as a reward for being, on balance, pretty good people in this life. It is a place we build together and a place we live in together.
It is this dream that God has for us that redeems the life of the world, that infuses this world, this life with holiness. Focusing on that dream, that realm that is God’s intention for the world, may, I admit, seem a bit distant, a bit abstract sometimes, though Jesus made clear that it was in no way abstract to him and tried to make it less abstract to us. Still it is frankly not something most of us wake up with on our minds.
It is also something that can seem a bit too goal oriented. What makes this world holy, after all, is not, cannot be just all our strenuous efforts to move toward this realm of God. If the world is holy, it is holy also because there is room in it to stare at a sunset, to delight in the touch of a lover, to feel a breeze drift across the skin, or lose oneself in a piece of music without wondering whether you shouldn’t be out somewhere improving the world or carrying it on your shoulders toward the kingdom.
The reign of God is not a burden that God has placed on us, and neither is the calling Jesus offers us. Like Peter and Andrew and James and John in the scripture, we are called into a community of people gathered around Jesus but whose prayers and hopes and efforts are focused not on Jesus but on what Jesus’ own prayers and hopes and efforts were focused on: the reign of God.
We are not burdened but blessed by having that journey to make toward the reign of God, and blessed too by having holy people to travel with and blues and sunsets to keep us company along the way. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 26, 2003