PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

First Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20                                                           "Crisis"

Sermon January 25, 2009:  People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

            This morning I want to talk about some things that may be uncomfortable, both about the Bible and about our lives in 2009.  As hard as we may try we come at some time or other in our lives to a "crisis," and we need to understand how to live through it and do more than just survive. 

            The word "crisis" is from ancient Greek, where it was pronounced "kree-sis":  it meant a moment of "judgment," or "decision," or even the sentence in a court trial.  "Kree-sis":  a moment when a man or a woman is  under pressure, and whatever the question may be, it's going to go one way or the other.  "Crisis":  the way things used to be falls apart, and we have to make a decision about what to do next. 

            But what if God is squarely in the middle of the "crisis"?  What if your recent medical diagnosis, or your mortgage situation, or your job, or your child's behavior, or whatever your "crisis" becomes a moment when God himself shows up and confronts you?  Now that would be a "kree-sis."  And every one of us is either there right now, or will be. 

 

            There's a hidden "crisis" in the second verse of the Gospel Lesson today.  Mark intended this to be a summary of Jesus' message as he traveled around Galilee:

 

Mark wrote these words about 71 AD, right after a shock worse than America's 9/11, worse than Pearl Harbor.  Mark was writing for the Jews who lived outside Palestine—maybe in Egypt, maybe in what is now Turkey; but even for these Hellenistic Jews the temple in Jerusalem was the center of the world.  Mark's friends were Christians, but they still went back to Jerusalem to offer their gifts in the temple of God.  But the Jews of Palestine had rebelled against Rome, and the Roman army had destroyed Jerusalem and burned the temple.  It's hard for us to grasp how those people felt about it—worse than 9/11.  It broke their hearts for the rest of their lives.  Mark may have decided to write this Gospel just because it felt like everything important to him and to his church was crumbling—he wanted to leave the message about Jesus for future generations—like a time-capsule.  It felt like the end of the world.  "Crisis."

            But as Mark touches pen to paper and writes this summary of Jesus' message, there's another "crisis" right in front of his eyes.  Jesus preached that the time had come for God's reign, a new world order, and that people should turn to God and embrace this good news.  But Jesus had been executed like a common criminal, and the time had come and gone—nothing seemed to have changed.  In fact, it got worse.  The Romans not only killed Jesus, they also destroyed the temple of God.  So how can Mark write this message?  It was out of date, no longer applicable, old history.  And how did Mark feel having known those first Christians, to have known the apostles, and then in old age look back and see it all had crumbled to dust?  This is a "crisis," and Mark writes his Gospel in "crisis" mode.  There's no nativity story—Jesus just shows up at John's place and is baptized, and then starts preaching.  And the Gospel ends abruptly, too:  the women come to the tomb, see the stone rolled away, see that Jesus is gone, hear the words of the angel, and it scares them so badly that they run home and don't tell anybody.  Somebody a hundred years later wrote a smoother ending for the Gospel of Mark, to match Matthew's ending; but the way Mark originally wrote it is full of this sense of "crisis." 

            The critical problem is about faith:  how do you believe in Jesus Christ if what Jesus called "the right time" has passed and he died and nothing is changed?  That was the "crisis" facing the writer of the Gospel of Mark and the Jewish Christian fellowship he served.  I'm going to let that question hang there for awhile:  Mark's 9/11. 

 

            The First Lesson today from Paul's letter to the Gentile Christians in Corinth also comes with a "crisis," and you and I can see this one very clearly.  Paul wrote:

 

 

Paul believed that, the Corinthian Christians believed it, the other apostles believed it, and nobody was writing anything down except correspondence  like this because—well, what for?  If the End of the World would be soon, who would read a book? 

            Only, the End didn't happen; and that's the second "crisis" I'm talking about.  The world just kept turning, and the first believers in Jesus all died.  The little enclaves of Christians in major Roman cities grew and built great churches, and appointed bishops; and then Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the empire, so the church became rich and influential and started arguing among themselves about doctrine and authority.  For anybody who has eyes to see and ears to hear, this is a "crisis."  Jesus didn't come back like they expected him to.  By the time the Gospel of Luke was written, about 80 AD, they had begun to realize that before the End there would be an era of the church, so Luke wrote a volume two for his Gospel—the Book of Acts, about the growth of the church.  But the Apostle's words had failed. 

            And here we are, two thousand years later, living in an age of science and technology, still arguing with each other about doctrine; and Christ's return is really delayed.  If you look at it this way, it's a "crisis" for us even more than for the Corinthians to whom Paul wrote the letter.  What do you do when the ultimate promise of your religion doesn't happen?  I'm going to let that question hang there for awhile, along with Mark's "crisis" about the destruction of the temple and Jesus' death.

 

            We too face a spiritual "crisis," and I need to ask the question if God might be in the middle of our "crisis" to make it not just a problem to solve but rather a time of judgment and decision for us, who are addicted to happy endings.  Our "crisis" is multiple.  I've already mentioned the economy enough over the past few weeks.  I feel like I haven't talked enough about the environment.  I'm no environmentalist, and some of the things Al Gore put in his movie "An Inconvenient Truth" don't ring quite true to me; and yet the earth is in deep trouble. 

When I was a boy people thought I was weak because I sneezed and my eyes watered every spring and fall; but farmers are beginning to have the same problem.  I knew a farmer in Virginia, a big man with a nice spread overlooking the South Anna River.  One day the men of the church got together to trim back the bushes and trees, clean up the cemetery and make the church property look nice for Easter; and he showed up in his pickup with his tools, but he told us right up front that he couldn't trim any bushes because of his allergies.  He went home early.  Since then I've noticed the problem getting worse:  people without allergies are catching them.  A "crisis" in the environment.

            You may remember news reports last month about an earthen dam in East Tennessee collapsing and pouring millions of tons of ash down the river.  The ash came from a big coal-fired plant generating electricity—I've driven past that Kingston Steam Plant for years and never considered how it was damaging the environment.  The ash is washing up along the river bank about three hundred yards from my sister's house.  It's killing everything; and think of the pollution that plant has spewed into the air over the last fifty years! 

            You hear a lot of things about the environment, but last week NPR interviewed a scientist who believes the earth is going to run out of useable water before we run out of oil.  Why worry about one-fourth of the Greenland ice melting?  The water just runs into the ocean—right.  But the ice has no salt, and when it flows into the ocean it changes the salinity of the ocean, and that can change the ocean temperature, the trade winds, and the weather patterns all over the world.

            So we have an economic "crisis," an environmental "crisis," and disease:  did you know that more people die of dysentery every year than die of anything else?  For less than ten dollars per person they can all be treated and saved, but the World Health Organization, Church World Service,  Doctors Without Borders and all the other world health agencies don't have enough money to save them.  Disease.  And here we are in America arguing over stem-cell research and whether to allow the Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn—do you think maybe we're asleep?  In our time, our world is in "crisis."  And what can we do besides worry about it?  What if God is right here in the middle of this moral "crisis" to transform all these things into "judgment"?  What can we say about that?

 

            Now I'm going to go back and suggest how we might resolve all these "crises" I've left hanging.  When the Gospel of Mark reports Jesus' message that the time of God's reign had come in the person of Jesus, but Jesus had died and the temple itself had been destroyed, Mark still wrote it down.  He knew something we need to know.  Yes Jesus died on the cross, but the cross was not the end of the message.  That's why Mark's friends in 71 AD were Christians.  God was present even when it looked like God's "time" had failed:  the "crisis" was a judgment, and Mark says, "Turn to God and embrace the good news" even now.  There is also:  resurrection!

            And yes, in Paul's letter he said what all the first-generation Christians believed—that Jesus would soon return and the next world would begin; but it didn't happen.  It still hasn't happened.  But to the one who comes to this "crisis" with humility and waits for the Lord, the old Book also says that discipleship is not upward mobility and miracles, but taking up your own cross and finding there the freedom, the power and the blessing of true life—resurrection is also now. 

            So what about the economy, the environment and disease?  It's been two thousand years:  we don't know what to make of the resurrection; but we don't need to know!  What we need to do is turn and embrace the dynamism of God's new thing—not as anxious, fearful people, but as responsible people of faith, hope and love; and let God do the resurrecting.

            What does this answer do for us who feel the "crisis"?  It lifts the burdens of the world from our shoulders—just to let God love you the way God wants to.  Time, the kingdom, possessions, fixing everything—but God is the finisher, and God is faithful.  What if the ultimate answer to "crisis" really is LOVE?           

            A fourteenth century teacher of prayer once wrote that "God can be grasped by thought never, only by love."  You don't answer these questions with your mind:  you answer them with your heart and your life.  And in every "crisis," God is present—to love you.

 

AMEN