An Introduction to Mark: A Gospel of Trials

BY DR. KENNY CAMACHO / SERMON DELIVERED 19 FEBRUARY 2022 FOR REVOLUTION CHURCH

Good evening, everybody. It’s good to be with you again. Tonight, we are continuing our investigation into how uncertainty can actually strengthen our faith by starting a new series exploring the first half of the Gospel of Mark. We’ve chosen this particular book for a reason, and we’ve chosen these particular chapters from it for a reason, too. So, before we dive in, I want to set the stage as best I can for what the Preaching Team and I are hoping for in this series. That means tonight’s teaching time is going to be divided into two sections, each hopefully about ten minutes long: first, I want to introduce Mark’s gospel in its context, because I think this will help us see how reading through the gospel ourselves can help us grow in our own confidence in who Jesus is. And then, I want to look at the first chapter as a kind of microcosm of this question: what do we believe about Jesus? 

So, to get started with context: Mark’s gospel is particularly interesting to us this year because Mark’s gospel, moreso than any other account of Jesus’s life, is interested in how we know whether or not Jesus is who He says He is. Whereas other accounts fixate on Jesus’s ability to fulfill Scripture (Matthew), on the impact of Jesus’s existence on early Christian theology (John), or on the importance of creating an accurate record of Jesus’s life (Luke), Mark is focused on whether or not the dual claims that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah and that Jesus is the very Son of God will deeply matter to the lives of people in the first century. The author clearly believes that Jesus was a man of wisdom, power, and purpose–but do you believe He was the Messiah? Do the people in the story? Are any of us willing to take that belief all the way to the end? 

Mark is sometimes referred to as the Gospel of Trials, both because it begins with Jesus’s tribulations in the wilderness following His Baptism and because it spends more than half of its length on the last 24 before Jesus’s crucifixion. But that nickname also works in other ways, as well. The first has to do with the historical context of the gospel. The most-common view of critics and scholars is that the gospel of Mark was written in the mid-60s AD–perhaps the year 64 or 65–by a Christian scribe, possibly in Rome, and almost certainly under the tutelage of Jesus’s disciple, Peter. So, why do we believe this? 

From the weeks following Jesus’s resurrection until the later years of the first century, the essential method for spreading the “Jesus story” was by way of personal testimonies with anchor-points in the lives of Jesus’s living disciples. In a time when less than 10% of the population was literate, this was a standard practice: it made more sense to communicate a story aimed at “regular people” through the words of eyewitnesses than to use a more limited and expensive medium like a letter or book. We can imagine how this feels, right? Think of the stories of important experiences in your own life, or in the history of your friend group or your family: do you generally record them? Or do you remember them by telling them, over and over again? It was a practical system…especially for folks who were anticipating Jesus’s return any minute! 

However, in the mid-60s, three factors came together which changed the strategies of the leaders of the early church regarding the Jesus story. The first factor was the continued spread of the Jesus movement: what began in the relative-backwater of Judea had now spread throughout Asia and Europe, even leading to house-church communities in the capital of Rome. This meant it was no longer possible for every single messenger of the gospel to claim a direct connection to those first-hand witnesses! A written record (with a direct tie to those witnesses) would help to address this problem. The second factor was the fallout from a pivotal event in both Roman and Christian history, which was the Great Fire of Rome. In the year 64, 10 of the 14 wards of the capitol were burned nearly to the ground in a terrible accident. In the chaos that followed, the Emperor Nero desperately needed to deflect the blame that was piling up on his own doorstep, and he found scapegoats in those relatively-obscure and marginalized Christian house-churches we just talked about. So, Nero issued the first official decree calling for the persecution of Christians, up to and including feeding them to lions in the Colosseum, crucifying them along Roman roads, and even burning them alive to light the streets of the city. A written record, which could be shared with Christians in hiding, could be just what that community needed to know they weren’t alone and to help them face what was coming with courage. And the third factor was that, both because of the passage of time and the sudden onset of real persecution, it became clear that first hand witnesses to Jesus’s life weren’t going to be around forever. As these witnesses began to die and to be martyred, the need for a written record to add validity to the oral tradition became obvious. 

So, due to these three factors (the spread of the movement, the trials under Nero, and the deaths of direct witnesses), church tradition holds that the task of writing a “gospel” fell to a man named John Mark, who was a former assistant to the apostle Paul and a longtime disciple of Jesus’s own disciple, Peter. Peter had lived the story, so his account was among the most trustworthy around. Furthermore, Peter and John Mark were both in or around Rome at the time, and they knew firsthand how important it was not just for the story to be told, but for it to be told in a way that offered reassurance during a time of literal trials. Whether the gospel was written by the historical John Mark or not, in their construction of the gospel, Christians under persecution found a mirror for their own story as they, too, were challenged to bear witness to Jesus’s identity…and since Jesus’s story ends with the hope of the empty tomb, there was a real hope that their own stories would end in resurrection as well. 

Mark’s gospel is a “gospel of trials,” then, in that it focuses on Jesus’s legal trial and it comforts Christians facing their own accusations. But there’s one more thread to pull on before we shift gears, too: I think Mark’s gospel also gives us, as readers, a role to play in the courtroom. Specifically, the gospel puts us in the place of the jury! Mark lays out his case in the book like a prosecutor, telling us from the start that Jesus is the Messiah, that Jesus is the Son of God, and then calling witness after witness to back up his claim as he walks through the Jesus story. But in the end, the gospel does something that has always struck readers as being particularly strange: it ends with the empty tomb, and it leaves Jesus’s conviction as the Messiah, as the Son of God, up to us: do we believe He is who He says He is? Do we believe in Him? Are we really ready to? 

So, that’s the context of Mark’s gospel: Jesus is on trial first before His peers, then as an encouragement to the early church, and finally before us, the readers. Now, let’s turn to the first chapter to see how all of this works. 

Mark’s gospel lays out the big point, the big accusation, in its very first verses. The author writes, 

[This is] the beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:

“I will send my messenger ahead of you,

    who will prepare your way”—

“a voice of one calling in the wilderness,

‘Prepare the way for the Lord,

    make straight paths for him.’”

And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River […] And this was his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. Just as Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.”

Mark 1:1-3

So, what do we see? Like we heard a moment ago, Mark–the prosecutor–immediately says who Jesus is: he is the Messiah and the Son of God. This means that Jesus is the one the Israelites have been waiting for, who will bring them real freedom, and that Jesus has the very authority of God Himself in all that he does. He’s the whole deal: he is the one who will make God’s Kingdom possible again here on this earth. That’s the big claim!

It’s worth pausing just to try and connect ourselves with what this means not just to Israel, but to us: even 2000 years later, I think we also know that there is something wrong with the world. We experience and see suffering; we feel and witness injustice. There is brokenness in our governments, in our jobs, in our marriages, in our lives. There’s even brokenness inside us, as we sense the kinds of people we could be but can never seem to be those people on our own. All that is to say that we all resonate with what Creation feels like it was meant for…but we see it, and we see ourselves, fall short of that purpose. 

In Jewish tradition, the answer to that feeling is a Messiah, a person of God, who will fix Israel. But as we will see (and in what I think of as maybe the best news there has ever been!), Jesus’s sights are set on more than Israel: they are set on everyone and everything. Mark says right here at the start that this is what we are being invited to believe: Jesus is the real hope of the world. 

So, who is his first witness? There are three, back to back to back, in these opening verses: first, he says that Isaiah, the ancient prophet, predicts it will be Jesus. He actually blurs a few quotations from the Old Testament here in order to say that Jesus’s first actions line up with the coming of the Messiah. This testimony is then linked to the second witness, who is John the Baptist. John believed that Jesus was the Messiah. He had been preaching in the wilderness to all of Judea, calling them to repent and prepare themselves for the Messiah’s arrival, and then when Jesus comes, John baptizes him, in faith, as that person. So, Isaiah anticipates Jesus, and John recognizes Jesus. Who is witness #3? It is God Himself: when Jesus is baptized, a voice is heard by all around which says, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” Taken together, we have agreement here between 3 unlikely sources: 1) the prophets of the past, 2) the prophet of the moment, and 3) the God for whom the prophets have been speaking. Not only does this combo support Jesus’s identity, it also validates the entire tradition of prophecy: God’s voice affirms that everyone is looking in the same direction. 

What happens then? 

After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” At once they left their nets and followed him. When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.

Mark 1:14-20

Here, we see Jesus’s central message, which is also the message we sense the Messiah should be preaching: the Kingdom of God has come near. The restoration of the world to what God intended for it, which the selfishness and pride of men have resisted, is at hand. 

One of the things that I find deeply convincing about the Jesus story is how simple, and how deeply resonant, the equation of Jesus’s hope is. Let’s take a step back from the brokenness of all of Creation and just look at the brokenness in ourselves: where does it come from? What is the root-source of your own grief, your own hurt? Why aren’t you as kind, or as good, as you might be? My conviction is that it’s the same two answers for all of us: first, we have been wounded by the selfishness and pride of others, and second, when we are weary, we are selfish and prideful ourselves. This is the sabotage: I cease to be curious, I cease to be compassionate, I cease to be kind, and I pass the same hurt around in the world that first hurt me. And what is Jesus’s message, in a simple 13 words? “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” The God of the Universe has taken the initiative, has drawn near to me, has offered me forgiveness for my weaknesses and invited me to lay my burdens down and trust him to make all things new…and my job is to own up to my mistakes, to “repent,” and to accept His presence, to believe. That’s the whole story: we talk endlessly about it, and we wrestle with it, and that’s good! But in the end, that’s it: can we admit to our mistakes and trust? What makes this so hard? 

Well, perhaps in answer to that very question, what do we see in the next verses? We see the first disciples put down what they are doing, what they know, in order to follow after him. That Jesus interrupts the disciples at work is no coincidence; it’s a metaphor. All we need to know at first is that what we are doing is not enough. Fishing for fish isn’t enough. Managing your nets isn’t enough. And even if we don’t know everything there is to know about what in the world a Messiah is, or what a Messiah does, or how to be a disciple, we can put the things we know aren’t enough down and take a few steps after him. That’s how belief starts: we’re curious enough, we are wondering enough, to trail behind Jesus for a while. In every gospel account, the disciples are mostly total goofuses! They never quite figure Jesus out. They also didn’t sign a Terms of Discipleship agreement on that lake shore or pledge a minimum companionship agreement for six months: they just put down their nets and took a few steps. 

Ultimately, I think this is exactly the challenge for us from this first chapter: we have heard who Jesus is supposed to be…but we don’t have to be totally convinced by that yet! We only need to be curious enough to put what we’re doing down and take those first steps. If we don’t do that, we won’t ever be convinced because we’re not going to be there when the next things happen. And more than that, taking steps doesn’t mean you can’t go back to fishing! Do we trust who Jesus is enough to have the same open-handedness? Am I willing to take my discipleship one day at a time? What would change if I saw every day as a new chance to put down what I’m doing and follow? Would I pay closer attention? Would I live more curiously? 30 years into my life as a Christian, am I still interested in who Jesus claims to be? 

Before we close, I want us to look at our final witness in this first chapter, because it may be the most interesting one of them all. After Jesus calls his disciples, he goes into a synagogue to teach. What he says amazes people, but 

Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an impure spirit cried out, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” “Be quiet!” said Jesus sternly. “Come out of him!” The impure spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek.

Mark 1:23-26

Our last witness to take the stand tonight is not a disciple but a demon: “I know who you are: the Holy One of God!” I bring this up, first, because it’s interesting, isn’t it? In the first 20 verses, Mark frames his gospel as a question about who Jesus is…but we could make the case that there really isn’t all that much uncertainty about this, is there? We’ve seen people believe it, we’ve heard God say it, and now, we hear it from the mouth of an evil spirit! It’s true that many of the people in this story are still wrestling with the “who” question, and they will continue to in the chapters ahead. But I want to suggest tonight that there’s a second question, which this demon asks, that is perhaps going to prove to be even more important. That question is, “what do you want with us?” What are you going to do here, Jesus? 
As we close our time tonight, this is what I hope we carry with us: the Gospel of Mark is meant to invite Christians to keep their questions in front of them…because it will ultimately be those questions that see us through our own trials. If we think our faith is just about what we have declared we believe about Jesus–“Jesus is my Savior!”–we are still keeping ourselves at the center of things. We’re putting our hope in our own ability to be strong and unwavering. But the Christians in Rome are at this very moment learning the limits of their own strength in the pit of the Colosseum! And what they need–what we all need–is a hope that comes not from what we can do but from what Christ is still doing in us, despite our weaknesses. We have been invited to put down our nets and to follow Jesus in wonder. As we continue to study Scripture in the weeks ahead, what will we find? Who will we say he is?

The Parable of the Sower

BY DR. KENNY CAMACHO / SERMON DELIVERED 12 FEBRUARY 2022 FOR REVOLUTION CHURCH

I want to start tonight with a question: what is the meaning of a thing?

How do we know?

What if it changes?

What if we change? 

I know that’s a bit vague, so let me make it more concrete. Consider a wedding ring. If you have one, take it off and have a look at it (if it can come off!). This is my wedding ring: if you can’t see it from where you’re sitting, it’s a gold band, plain and maybe a bit thicker than average. When I ordered it some 19 years ago, I told the jeweler I wanted one that looked like the One Ring from Lord of the Rings. On the inside there’s an inscription: “I love you forever.” It’s a pretty simple object; fairly common. What does it mean? I’ve officiated a handful of weddings at this point, and oftentimes, the script will call for me to answer that question, to say that the circle has no beginning or end and symbolizes the constancy of love. But is that what it will always mean? Consider what it might mean to someone who is not married, but longs to be. Consider what it means to a person who is at the start of their marriage…or what it means to someone whose marriage is over? What does it mean to a person who has divorced? To a person who has been widowed? To a person who has worn a different ring before? It’s one object, and a simple one at that. But does it mean only one thing? Does it mean any one thing forever? 

I bring this up because tonight we’re starting a new series which will run intermittently throughout the year. We tried this practice last year with a series on the Psalms, and we talked about various examples in the weeks in between our other, major series for the year. As a Preaching Team, we really loved that experiment, as it gave us both brief breaks between the “big lessons” of the year, as well as a kind of “through line” to keep us connected to our annual theme. So, we’re trying the same kind of thing this year, but this time discussing not various psalms but selected parables from the teachings of Jesus. The series (predictably) is called Parables, and this week, I want to start by trying to dig as deeply as we can into a fundamental question of Jesus’s approach to ministry: why doesn’t Jesus simply say what he means? In the brief time in which God walked this Earth in the physical body of a man, and spoke in the plain language of a group of people, why didn’t he choose to lay out the secrets of God, the secrets of life, more clearly? Why did he speak in stories instead of lists or doctrines? To answer that, I think we need to keep something like a wedding ring in mind. I think we need to consider whether the clarity we are often seeking–the certainty–is as helpful as we imagine it will be. Or if the harder truth–the deeper Truth–is that meaning isn’t something we hold as much as it is something we experience. And if real learning–about the world, about God, and about ourselves–is a process of knowing a thing more rather than knowing more things. 

To center on a specific example this week, we’re going to look at what I’m half-jokingly referring to as the “First Parable” of Jesus, which is the Parable of the Sower. I’m calling it the first because it is the first one to appear in the gospel of Mark, which we are fairly confident is the first gospel account of Jesus’s life to be written. The timeline of Mark’s gospel (which, as an aside, will be the subject of our next full series, beginning next Saturday) is pretty clearly a tool the author uses to organize Jesus’s ministry rather than a strict representation of the historical order in which Jesus did things, so it’s a leap to say that the Parable of the Sower was, in historical fact, the first parable Jesus told. But even so, the Parable of the Sower has another distinctive which makes it a good place for us to start: it is also the only parable Jesus ever unpacks and explains for his disciples. 

So, let’s get to it. The context here is that Jesus has begun traveling around the northern region of Israel known as Galilee and performing various miracles: specifically, he has been casting out demons and healing the sick. In response to these wonders, townspeople have begun forming crowds around him and expressing interest in who he is and what he might have to say to them. In Mark chapter 4, he begins to talk to them about the coming Kingdom of God, and he starts by saying, 

“Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.”

Then Jesus said, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”

Mark 4:3-9

On the surface, it’s a story that the people in this rural part of Judea could easily understand. They know from experience that not every seed a farmer scatters leads to a plant: animals eat them, or they land in places that are infertile, or they wither if the conditions for growth aren’t right. And they were also capable of working with this as an analogy: sowing seeds is like what Jesus is doing, what God has done. Not everyone will take root in Jesus’s teaching, and not everyone will have a secure place in God’s Kingdom. But what makes the comparison frustrating–and what makes it more than an analogy–is the uncertainty about why: a farmer scatters seed because he only has so much time and can only be so diligent in his planting; couldn’t God be more careful and purposeful? A bird eats a seed because it is hungry, and it also serves a part in the ecosystem: who are the birds eating the seeds God plants? Can he not stop them? The story seems to baffle at least the disciples, and so later they ask Jesus about it. And Jesus says to them,

“Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? The farmer sows the word. Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.”

Mark 4:13-20

Well, everything’s settled then, right?! We don’t actually hear the disciples’ response, but we do have their memory of the conversation recorded here in the story of Jesus’s ministry. So, what can we make of it? 

The first rule for reading a parable is to accept Jesus’s challenge to “have ears to hear.” There are a few verses between the parable and Jesus’s explanation which I cut from this conversation because they’re complex and I didn’t want them to lead us down a rabbit trail, but the heart of them is that Jesus is here to help us recenter our perspectives from fixating on ourselves to fixating on the kind of world God intends for this world to become. We can call this a “Kingdom mindset,” if we want: the point is that Jesus is bringing God’s Kingdom here, in a tangible and personal way, and the parables exist at this intersection of the way we see the world and the way God wants us to see the world. So, when we read or hear a parable, we have to shift our perspective from how this relates to us to how this reveals God’s heart. 

This is tough for us, as Christians! So often, we sit through times of teaching like this one with a single purpose in mind: preacher, you better tell me something that matters to me. It can convict me, it can encourage me, it can reinforce what I already believe…but I want to relate. But I think the parables push on that agenda: I think the parables ask us to move from a focus on ourselves and our experiences to a new focus on who God is and what God is up to in the world. It’s not that a self-focus is always bad–I hope all of us are finding deeper and more challenging relationships with God through church! But we aren’t the most important thing: God is working to redeem the whole thing, the big picture, the entirety of His Creation! Parables help shift our perspective from what we know to what God is revealing…but we need “ears to hear” this. 

In the case of this parable, what God is revealing, according to Jesus, is that the seed of His words is spread much further than Jesus’s listeners, which includes the authorities from the synagogues, might have expected. Also, that those seeds are not guaranteed to take meaningful root, or to endure: even ones planted “in the path” are at risk (which is a troubling thing to hear!). In this case, the “path” is so well-worn that they are easy pickings for birds…one is left to ponder what that might mean, in the context of Jesus’s already-building tensions with the Pharisees. The parable also reveals that there is no danger here to the ultimate harvest: the seeds which take healthy root will produce an abundance, and the Kingdom will come. What the parable leaves open is how the farmer might feel about all of this…unless, of course, the listeners with “ears to hear,” who are looking for how their experience can inform the lesson (rather than only how the lesson matters to them), consider how they feel when they are the farmer: do they fret over every lost seed? Or is their eye only on the eventual harvest? 

I don’t say this to provoke a heresy! There will be parables to come which emphasize how much differently God sees the results of his labor when compared to how we tend to see the results of our own. “Seeds” will get their due! But Jesus’s explanation leaves lots of room for questions, doesn’t it? And I think that’s an essential part of how all this works. So, the first point is to shift what we are expecting from how it relates to us to how it reveals, and invites questions about, what God is doing in the world. 

But what makes a parable distinct from a simple comparison or an analogy is that rather than trying to condense meaning by drawing from the quality of one thing to illuminate another, a parable draws on a person’s experience of one situation to expand their understanding. When we say somebody is “as stubborn as a mule,” we’re taking one thing about mules–that they are hard to make move–and using that to say somebody is being difficult. We don’t ponder what makes mules stubborn and how the hearts of men are shaped by the same instincts as donkeys. The comparison isn’t meant to deepen what we’re talking about, it’s meant to clarify what we’re talking about. But parables don’t work that way! So, the second rule for reading a parable is to look for more, not less.

This is where the “wedding ring” comes back into play: what is the meaning of a thing? Is it singular? Is it fixed? When we hear parables, Jesus is giving us a window into how God’s Kingdom works, into who God is, into the heart of things. But a window isn’t a picture! What’s in a window is alive and changing; it’s fresh each time we look out at it, with more to see and consider. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing fixed or concrete about it! The window in my living room isn’t sometimes facing a pond and sometimes facing a mountain and sometimes facing an ocean: it’s the same view each day, and in the same way, a parable is a view into God’s Kingdom. But at the same time, my window never reveals the same scene twice: the light is different, the weather is different, the birds at the feeder or the fox across the pond are different. When I look out of it, I’m not trying to bottle up or capture “what is outside”: I’m getting a deeper and fuller understanding of it. In the same way, the change in the meaning of a parable–the questions that come from it–don’t make it an incomplete or faulty kind of teaching, they make it a richer kind. So, what is the complexity and the richness here? 

That’s a hard thing for me to teach, isn’t it? I can tell you what richness there is for me today…and maybe that can help you see something new. Or maybe you’re seeing this for the first time, and that’s a separate experience altogether. Maybe you are the one with the right ears to hear or the eyes to see this week. When we stop and think about the situation, I think it makes it much easier to see why we need each other! This teaching time each week can’t be a kind of CliffNotes of the Bible for us: it has to be a time when we are stretched, when we encounter more of the mystery instead of less. 

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, when I was growing up, a guest preacher came to visit my little Baptist church. He taught on this parable, and in the end, this is what he took away from it and shared with us: your salvation is not secured if you don’t keep working for it. If you think a prayer and a dunk in the baptismal guarantees your spot in Heaven, you’re a seed that has fallen on the wrong sort of soil. He looked at the birds which came to eat the seed and said they were temptations to stray. He looked at the seed that quickly withered and said that was us, if we didn’t keep to spiritual disciplines like prayer and reading our Bible. My church went ballistic: it was a key part of our doctrine that once a person was saved, they were saved forever! There was a meeting after the service, and several folks quoted Scripture to this point: “nothing can separate us from the love of God”! The man was called back the next day, not to teach, but to be formally rebuked as a heretic. There was an emergency service, just for our pastor to tell us that man was wrong. 

I know why this happened, and I also know that guarding the doctrines of our faith is important. But it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I can’t help but feel like my church was putting what we already felt we were sure of in front of what might have pushed us to feel challenged or convicted. It made our belief seem brittle, both in the sense that we refused to listen, and also in the sense that the man who spoke (who I also believe was sincere in his faith) worked so hard to say that this one thing–which ultimately got tangled in his own beliefs about “predestination”–was the only reason Jesus shared the parable. To have “ears to hear,” we must look for what God is revealing over what we want to see revealed…and we must trust that a story’s meaning can be rich and varied and even changing, as our perspective of it changes. God is speaking, and sometimes His words take root, and sometimes they don’t. But when they do, the Kingdom comes.

The Parable of the Sower makes us wrestle, but we are richer for that wrestling. We grow. Which, in the end, is exactly how the parable says things work: when we are planted in a place that is deep, when we reach down into the difficulty of things, we begin to flourish. Shallow understandings wither, or are snatched away. Emotionalism and sensationalism don’t endure. The Kingdom of God is a place where seeds scattered in dark places, even ones far from the path, can take root and be nourished. 

This week, I want us to hear more than a single lesson or takeaway. I want us to consider the ways we listen: are we hoping to know a thing more…or to simply know more things? What kind of soil is your heart? Are you content with the answer?

Rather than leading right into Communion this week, I want to give us space to pray and wonder about this: am I ready to let the words of Jesus settle into me deeply? Am I ready to let them take root? In a few moments, Sarah will lead us as we receive Communion, but before that, I’m going to pray for us, and then encourage you to take a few moments to pray as well.

A People Sharing Wonder

BY DR. KENNY CAMACHO / SERMON DELIVERED 5 FEBRUARY 2022 FOR REVOLUTION CHURCH

Good evening, everybody. It’s good to be with you tonight as we wrap up our first teaching series of the year, which has been called (Un)Certainty. The point of this series has been to challenge our fears when it comes to being certain about things like our religious faith…and to discover that uncertainty can actually help us to grow in our confidence. The world we are living in doesn’t offer us many things to be truly sure about! But maybe, just maybe, that’s the point: things aren’t designed so we can have complete understanding of them and then file that understanding away in the archives of our mind; they are designed to push us to be seekers who actively invest in our world…and in our relationship with the God who created it.

This week, we are looking at how living as seekers plays out when it comes to our witness, or our ways of sharing our growing confidence with others in the world. And I’d like to start with a question: when was the last time you experienced real wonder? And when you did…what did you do with it? 

I spent a lot of time this week trying to think about this for myself and to come up with a story that you haven’t already heard…which is to say, a story that doesn’t have to do with being attacked by a mostly-harmless animal or visiting a national park. And what I’ve come up with is this: there is an enormous alligator snapping turtle in the drainage pond next to my house. I mean enormous. The problem is nobody believes in him except me…and because I’m someone who routinely watches sasquatch and UFO documentaries, the people in my house refuse to take my word for it. 

I first saw this turtle, which I would estimate to be about the size and weight of an engine block, around 3 years ago. I was heading in from work, I looked out over this tiny pond, and there he was, floating on the surface. I couldn’t believe it: in 2 years of living in our house, we hadn’t seen anything living in this pond bigger than a bullfrog, and I would never have thought there would be enough food in there for something this size. But there he was: a giant snapping turtle. I ran into the house to get Meredith and the kids to come see…but by the time they got outside, he had gone back under the water. Skeptical looks all around. 

In the days, weeks, and now years since, I have kept my eyes out. But snapping turtles are slow and sporadic movers. I catch him maybe once or twice a year…but so far, there have been no other witnesses. I don’t know why he’s there, or how long he’s been there, or how he even got there…but it kills me that no one else really believes he is there. 

And then, this past fall, I was at the mailbox and I ran into a woman who lives in the next building over. She had recently had a baby, so I was asking how things were going…and out of the blue, she mentioned that she had seen this turtle! I absolutely freaked out. We laughed, and she said that she had been trying to convince her husband it was real for the last year, too. 

Maybe this is a silly story, but here’s where I’m hoping it can go: my theory is that real wonder is a kind of antidote for our temptation to be salesmen for the things we believe in or invest in. I think that we’re all wired to be on teams: teams at work, teams at home, teams to root for. Which means that, when it comes to things that are important to us and to the rhythms of our lives (like being a part of a church), we want our friends to join us here. We want our social circles to overlap! But if all we’re doing is trying to get somebody to join our team, we can end up sounding like we’re selling something door to door. And if there’s one thing modern life has done, it has made us wary of pitches: we throw away Bed, Bath, & Beyond coupons, we delete Old Navy emails, we hang up on automated voices, and we skip every commercial we’re allowed to skip. Which leads us to this very real problem, as people who, by being a part of a church, are choosing to pursue something with our lives that not everyone else chooses to pursue: I genuinely want the people in my life to at least understand why this is important to me…but the last thing in the world I want to do is give them a pitch. But wonder, I think, is the answer: when we experience wonder, we rarely know exactly what it is we’re seeing…but we share it anyway. And that–the sincerity of saying, “can you believe this?”–clicks with our curiosity over our certainty. 

Among the gospel narratives of Jesus’s life, there are three stories about women who experience and respond to a moment of wonder about Jesus in ways that I think can instruct us as a church. The first is in Luke’s account of Jesus’s birth. In the story, angels appear in the sky to a group of shepherds, and those shepherds are so amazed by what they see that they actually start going door to door in Bethlehem, looking for a newborn baby. They must have seemed absolutely crazed! But in the end, they find Jesus, and when they do, he is

lying in a manger. Once they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told to them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. 

Luke 2:16-18

This is my favorite moment in the Christmas story. The first part ties in pretty directly to our theme tonight: the shepherds are amazed; they find Jesus; then they go and tell everyone what happened to them. The shepherds can’t possibly know who Jesus will be or what Jesus will do…but their encounter is so incredible, they tell it anyway. This is an amazing thing! But for me, the wonder is in that last verse: Mary, Jesus’s mother, treasures up all these things…and ponders them in her heart. 

We think of Mary often, but I don’t know that we typically remember that she was a child, likely no more than 15, and her whole life had been turned upside down by a visit from an angel some 9 months earlier. We know there was skepticism on Joseph’s part about her story, but I wonder if (despite the obvious pregnancy!) she had moments of doubt, too. If so, I have to think the shepherds’ arrival was a tremendous relief to her: a validation, from outside her small circle, that what was happening to her was as grand as she was told it would be. So, I love that she takes this moment and holds it in her heart, to ponder and think on it. And as much as the shepherds are good role models here, I want us to start by challenging ourselves to imitate Mary, too: she takes the miracle and holds onto it, and she turns it over. 

If you’re still here at this church, after two years of a pandemic and one year of online services, there’s something about all of this that is important to you. You’ve experienced some miracle, some encounter with God, that you can’t let go. And maybe you are hard on yourself sometimes for not doing enough with it: not believing it enough, or not sharing it enough with your coworkers, or whoever. And sure, maybe those are things you do need to do one day. But first, I want to tell you that it’s okay to treasure and ponder, too. In fact, maybe that’s the thing you need to do most…and tonight, I hope you’ll commit to trying it out: what have I seen? What might it mean? When we pause and allow ourselves to hold a moment of wonder, we don’t just learn more about it, we also learn what it means to us. So, whatever your reason is for calling yourself a Christian (or even a person who is spiritually curious), it’s worth naming it and treasuring it. Does it still make you feel wonder? 

The second story tonight is often referred to as the story of the Woman at the Well. In it, Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman and reveals to her that he is the Messiah, or the Savior of the world the prophets spoke about. That’s exciting…but surprisingly, it’s not what inspires wonder in her. Rather, her wonder is produced by Jesus’s ability to call her out on a lie she tells about her husband: she says she has none, and he tells her she has had five, and the man with whom she is living is not one of them. There’s richness in this moment that’s worth, well, pondering…but our attention tonight focuses on what happens next: 

Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him. […] Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers. They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

John 4:28-30, 39-42

What sticks with her isn’t the “Messiah” part…which is crazy! What could be more amazing news? Well, for her, it was that Jesus knew her. And even better: this is what persuades the townspeople, too! “Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I ever did.’” Here’s my point with this story: the woman at the well, and everyone in Samaria, has heard Messiah stories before. It’s not that these stories aren’t important–it’s just that, at this point in history, they’re sales pitches. But Jesus amazes her by seeing her…and she shares that amazement with others (and they respond!). Tonight, we’re trying to figure out what it means to be a seeking community of faith, open to all seekers. And what happens sometimes when we focus on telling people what we think we know is that we turn this whole thing into an argument. But it’s not meant to be an argument! The Law of Israel was an argument, and it didn’t make the people righteous! The point of Jesus’s actual presence in the world is wonder: that God will come to you, and see you, and stick around so you can know him, too. What we can learn from this woman is that we don’t need to argue others into joining our faith, we need to share what is wonderful about it, if only to get it off our own chests! If the love of God and the presence of God are real, there is enough of them to go around, to amaze others, too. Your wonder (even if, as in this case, it seems to miss the biggest point!) is enough. In fact, it’s a magnet. Come see this snapping turtle! 

But what happens if even you don’t understand what you’re seeing? The last story tonight is repeated in two of the gospels, but we’ll look at the account in John:

Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” “They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out, “Teacher!” Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.

John 20:11-18

In this story, Mary Magdalene works through a process of discovery: an empty tomb fills he with grief, then the questions of the man she takes for a gardener make her feel embarrassed and accusatory, and then the revelation that Jesus has risen from the dead–an utterly fantastic and impossible thing!–triggers a burst of joy and excitement, which she takes to the disciples. It’s entirely reasonable to label Mary Magdalene the first evangelist: she’s the first person to realize that Jesus has somehow defeated death and then to tell anyone about it. But it’s so, so important to notice here that she isn’t thinking in any of those terms yet: she’s not parsing out substitutionary atonement or the nature of incarnation; she sees her friend, whose body she came to wash, alive and whole. So she runs to tell the rest of his friends. It’s a moment of wonder: “come and see!” 

One thing we often miss in this story is that there’s a bit of the snapping turtle happening here: when Mary finds the disciples, she doesn’t say “He has risen!” or “He is gone!,” she says, “I have seen the Lord!” That’s what’s so amazing. But when the disciples follow her to the tomb, that’s not what they see: Jesus isn’t there. So, they are disappointed; we know that at least one of them holds onto his doubts. So what can we learn here about sharing our wonder? What happens if what we see isn’t what they see? My point tonight is that convincing the disciples isn’t Mary’s job: her job is to be true to the miracle she’s witnessed. To react to it in a way that is open and vulnerable, and lets it pour out of her, even if her friends don’t get it. I know why nobody in my family believes me about that turtle: it’s because I’m Bigfoot-curious, so they don’t trust me. But I can’t control whether or not they think I’m silly…and when I ran in the door to tell them about that turtle, I wasn’t worried about that in the slightest! I had seen something wild, and I wanted other people to see it, too…if only so I wouldn’t feel crazy. Jesus is wonderful. What we have a chance to do when we witness and experience that is to believe, and to let that belief overflow, trusting that what amazed us is capable of amazing someone else, too. It doesn’t need our help. 

As a church, it is so important that we don’t trade wonder for arrogance or easy answers. It’s important that we hold onto mystery, even when it can seem overwhelming. But when I say these things, I am not saying that answers don’t matter, or that we should be noncommittal in our faith. What I’m saying in this series–what I hope you have heard in it–is that God is more. As we seek after him, in prayer and in our church community and in trying to follow his example, he gives us more and more of himself…and yet he also keeps moving ahead of us. We can gather and gather, learn and learn, and never get to the end of him. And ultimately, this is exactly why he is here: this is how a real relationship is meant to work. We’re walking with the God of the Universe. Since the Garden of Eden, this is what we have been made for; it’s what we’re meant for. And we have permission, from that relational and amazing and overwhelming and wonderful God, to invite friends to walk with us. That’s actually what God wants: somehow, there is enough of him that every single person on Earth can walk with him, and he will see them and know them and love them and lead them intimately and personally. This is the wild miracle of our daily faith: God is here! God’s Kingdom has come! We just have to realize we’re living in it. 

So this year, I want to challenge you to let go, little by little, of the desire to control your faith, to hold your beliefs in a clenched fist, and to experience the wonder of an infinite and loving and personal God. And then, as you experience it, to let yourself share it the way you share anything that causes you to feel wonder: not in an effort to convince someone of anything, but out of a conviction that it’s simply worth seeing. 

If we can grow in this direction this year, our church will experience what it means to be a witness in a new way. And we will discover a passion that can animate our own growth, too. Come and see.