beginning — Andy James

a sermon on Mark 16:1-8
preached on Easter Sunday, April 5, 2015, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

All too often, when I look around our world, all I hear about is death. Whether I turn on the TV or radio to hear the latest news, look up the latest news online, or check in with family or friends, there is some note about someone who has died. Our human stories, it seems, are very much set in stone: we are born, we live for a while and do a few things, and then we die. Life has a clear beginning, middle, and ending.

The story of Jesus ought to be the same, right? The gospel of Mark certainly starts out that way as he tells us that it is “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God.” And everyone around Jesus certainly thought that his story was just like all our other human stories, with a clear beginning, middle, and ending.

On Friday when he was executed, it seems like his disciples, the women who supported and cared for him, and everyone at the crucifixion thought that it was the end of everything—the end of Jesus’ life, the end of their time together, the end of the story that he had begun by preaching and teaching and healing in Galilee and beyond. When we hear the story of Jesus, it can seem like all we need to remember from it ends on Friday, with Jesus dead after his execution on the cross by the authorities of the day, safely sealed away in the tomb, never to be heard from again.

When the women set out on that Sunday morning to go to the tomb, reality had firmly set in: Jesus was dead, and it was the end of his story. Little did they know, though, that it was really only the end of the beginning. As they carried their spices for anointing the body to the tomb, they were prepared to mark this end, to give Jesus the proper burial that he deserved rather than just the hurried dumping of his body in a friend’s tomb as the sun set to begin the Sabbath. Of course, they weren’t totally prepared—it was only on their way to the tomb that they realized that they might need some help rolling the stone away from the entrance—but they were most definitely not ready for what they encountered when they arrived there.

Their fears of not being able to get in the tomb were quickly replaced by a deeper uncertainty and greater alarm when they discovered that the large stone had already been rolled away—and that someone else had gone inside first! When they went in, rather than being met with a smelly, decaying body, a young man in a white robe was waiting for them. His words shocked them all the more:

Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.

As they left the tomb, the women found it difficult to understand all that was swirling around them. They were alarmed and afraid and terrified and amazed. Not only was the grave empty, but all their assumptions about beginnings and endings and everything that comes in between were turned upside down. While they knew that there was something special about their friend and teacher Jesus, it never sank in that the end of his story might not be the end—that it might be only the end of the beginning. They had never put all the pieces together, never fully listened to him and trusted his words, never sorted out that he might actually die, let alone be raised to new life. So they went away from the tomb, fearful and amazed and terrified at what they had seen and heard.

By all the most reliable accounts, in all the oldest manuscripts that we have, Mark’s story of the resurrection ends right there:

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

There were no encounters with Jesus in the garden, no breakfast fish fries on the beach, no walks to Emmaus where Jesus suddenly gets recognized, not even an encounter with doubting Thomas in an upstairs room. Over the centuries, a lot of people didn’t like that ending, so much so that they wrote two other endings that got attached to some of the manuscripts that have come down to us over the centuries, but I think this is a wonderful place for the beginning of the good news to come to an end.

Even though we never actually see Jesus alive again, Mark makes it clear that the empty tomb is only the beginning, that this story does not end with Jesus’ death on a Friday, his resurrection on a Sunday, or even his ascension some forty days later, because the risen Jesus is on the loose in the world even now, and we too will encounter him along the way.

The things ahead for us and our world now that Jesus is risen will not be like the things that have come before—he is not resuscitated back into the life that he had but is risen into a new life for the future. The resurrection marks the end of the beginning of this good news—because the rest of the story belongs to the women, the disciples, and all of us who would dare to follow him. We are called to go forth with them, into the Galilees of our world, looking, watching, waiting for Jesus, confident that our redeemer lives and has overcome the powers of death, and encountering him wherever stones are rolled away, the power of death is overcome with new life, and the domination of a few is replaced with a future for all. We are called to meet Jesus on his own terms, not as a dead body hanging on a cross or decaying in a tomb, not trying to make his story look and sound like our own. We are called to meet Jesus as a living reality, uncontainable and unforgettable, who goes ahead of us so that we might encounter him again and again in the days to come.

And then we are called to bear the resurrection into the world, to be on the lookout for this Jesus who is on the loose, to live in ways that point to the kind of new life that comes when death does not have the final word, when our world is restructured to make mercy and peace the pattern for our days, when even the most broken things can be made whole again, when love triumphs over hate and life triumphs over death.

So may this Easter be the end of the beginning for us, the end of an old way of looking at things where death has the final word as we begin to proclaim and live the good news of the resurrection each and every day as all things are made new by the power of God who brings us from death to new life in Jesus Christ our risen Lord.

Alleluia! Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Amen.

a sermon on Isaiah 43:1-7 and Luke 3:15-17, 21-23 for Baptism of the Lord Sunday
preached on January 13, 2013, at the First Presbyterian Church of Whitestone

Sometimes you just have to go back to the beginning. In the midst of our very complicated and complex world, it is easy to forget where we began. In the face of changing times and places, we can easily end up someplace that isn’t where we intended to be—and that just isn’t faithful to to the original intentions of our journey. So sometimes we need to remember where it all began and do what we can do to reclaim that beginning once again.

For us as Christians, going back to the beginning means going back to baptism. Now baptism may not actually be the beginning of the story for us—just like Jesus, all of us lived some part of our lives before we were baptized, and some of us may have even begun our Christian lives before our baptisms—but baptism is the official, formal mark of new beginning for us as Christians, the time when we see how God claims us and makes us new, the moment when we are given a sign and seal of how we are made one with Christ in his death and resurrection. So when we think of Jesus’ baptism as we do today, we go back to the beginning of our stories and remember our lives of faith as we remember how the beginning of Jesus’ story in his baptism connects to the beginning of our story in our baptism.

Each of the gospels tells this story of Jesus’ baptism, but the version we heard from Luke this morning is a little different. First, unlike any of the other tellings of Jesus’ baptism, Luke puts this story much later in his narrative of Jesus’ life because of the detail he offers about Jesus’ birth and childhood. Like many of us, then, the Jesus of Luke’s gospel has some history of life and even of faith before he is baptized, so this moment in the water is the culmination of many things that come before it even as it suggests an incredible journey ahead.

But even with this extra detail on the front end, Luke brings the story in line with all the other accounts of Jesus’ baptism by dealing with John the Baptist. Based on the amount of attention that John gets at the beginning of the gospel story, John must have been important to early Christians, and most scholars think that John’s followers were around for quite a while after his death. But John’s message is not easily appreciated these days. He didn’t have much positive to say to anyone and demanded repentance from everyone. He attracted a lot of followers, but I’m not quite sure how. John’s first words according to Luke don’t exactly make people welcome. Would you appreciate being called first “You brood of vipers!”?! Even so, many of his first listeners wondered out loud if he was the Messiah, but John made it clear that there was something and someone greater on the way.

But Luke’s story does make John seem a little different. Only Luke tells us that John and Jesus were relatives of some sort, most likely distant cousins. But Luke also notes that John was put in prison by Herod before he tells us that Jesus had been baptized by him. This all happened in the two verses that were left out of our lectionary reading this morning, because it doesn’t make for particularly good storytelling and complicates an easy passage from John to Jesus. According to Luke, then, Jesus was baptized along with others in the crowd, but strangely enough Luke doesn’t directly identify John as the one who did it.

Amidst all these interesting twists in Luke’s telling of Jesus’ baptism, what really seems to matter here for us as we consider our own baptisms is not who did the the baptizing or the proper order of the story but what happened after Jesus’ baptism. First, after Jesus was baptized, “the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove.” What a dramatic moment for Jesus, to have this clear appearance of God in his life at the very beginning of his ministry! Now I suspect that our baptisms were considerably less dramatic than this one, but even so, the Holy Spirit was present and active in our baptisms, too. And just as Luke gets John the Baptist out of the picture of Jesus’ baptism, so it should be with us too, for in the end, God is the primary agent in baptism for Jesus and for us. Baptism is not about the pastor or priest who applies the water, the denomination in which the sacrament is celebrated, the amount of water involved, or even the time in life when it happens—baptism is about how God breaks into our world and steps into our lives to mark us and claim us as God’s own even with a little bit of water.

But after this movement of the Holy Spirit, Jesus heard a voice from God: “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.” Even though he surely knew it beforehand, Jesus’ baptism showed him once again who he was and gave him the strength and hope to face the challenges of the journey ahead. And so it is with our baptisms, too. Just as Jesus began his life of ministry with this assurance of love and grace from God, so we too begin our lives as Christians with the sign and seal of water that shows us that God loves us. Just as God’s claim and call on Jesus’ life was made clear in these words, so we in our baptisms also learn that God claims us and calls us to walk in new life. And just as Jesus found strength and hope in this moment at the beginning of a long and difficult ministry that would eventually lead to nothing less than his death, so we emerge from the waters of our baptisms with the confidence that we are God’s beloved children who are called out of the water and sent into the world to join in what God is already doing to make us and all things new.

In our baptism, just like Jesus, we hear the words of the prophet Isaiah loud and clear, directed at us:

Don’t fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name; you are mine.

When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;

when [you go] through the rivers,
they won’t sweep over you.

When you walk through the fire,
you won’t be scorched
and flame won’t burn you.

I am the Lord your God,
the holy one of Israel, your savior.

Because you are precious in my eyes,
you are honored, and I love you.

I give people in your place,
and nations in exchange for your life.

These are powerful words, worthy of the power of baptism that begins the Christian life. We rarely realize it when we stand at this font at whatever age, but the waters in this bowl are far more powerful than even the strongest waves of Hurricane Sandy. We hesitate to affirm it when we welcome our children into our common life with this sacrament, but even the smallest bit of water on our heads in baptism means that we no longer belong to ourselves, to our families, or even to our church—but to God. And we may not always recognize it or remember it, but God’s claim on us in baptism never leaves us. We can do nothing to wash off this indelible mark. Even when we try our best to deny God’s place in our world or God’s claim on our lives, baptism shows us that “God loves us too deeply and too completely to ever let us go.”

And so as we remember and celebrate the baptism of Jesus today, moving from a season of celebrating his birth into more ordinary days, may the baptism of Jesus remind us of our own baptisms, of our beginnings in this life of faith, where we are claimed as God’s own forever and shown that God will go with us through the waters, the rivers, the fire, and everything else that is before us. And so today may we go forth sustained by this unforgettable sign and seal, remembering our beginnings once again, living out this unconditional love from God as we live with others and make it clear to everyone we meet that they too are claimed and loved by God now and always.

So remember you baptism, your beginning, and be thankful, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The End of the Beginning

A New Beginning