Not a Fan Club
Before I get started with digging into this passage, I want to give you a few instructions. First, you may want to keep your Bibles open to Mark 1, because we are going to spend a lot of time referring back and forth to the passage. Also, I will be giving you the option of writing some things down as I go, so you might want to get a pen and paper if you like doing that sort of thing.
My mom and I are both readers. My father was as well, but as his eyesight has declined he reads less. I think it is something about wearing those pesky glasses. Anyway, Mom and I like different types of reading. Mom likes the mass produced paperback novels. Mysteries by authors who write stories for each letter of the alphabet. Romance Novels with pictures of Fabio on the front. Grisham courtroom dramas. She likes fast-paced entertaining stuff that moves from one thing to another fairly quickly.
I like different books. First of all, I read a lot more non-fiction than fiction. Forget Danielle Steele, I would rather read Freakonomics. Or some analysis of Catholic writers Thomas Merton, Flannery O Connor, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day, and their realationships to one another. I like books that make me think about and analyze things that I have never thought about before. In other words, I am a little bit more of a nerd than my mother is.
We are the same ways with movies. I will want to talk about this or that with the movie, and how a certain scene was organized. Or what all of it made me think about. My momma plays along for about 5 or 10 minutes. Then she looks at me and tells me to be quiet. “Can’t you just enjoy the movie?” she says. Movies are about escapism and enjoyment!”
Then I wait until I get home and go write something about it for myself. And include it on my weblog or write something up for the church newsletter that it made me think about.
Different Gospels have different moods to them. And while the Gospel of John and Matthew could read a little bit more like the things I want to read, the Gospel of Mark reads a lot more like a Grisham novel or a one hour documentary of Jesus’ live that we would watch on Biography or the E! channel. Which….is why it is a challenging book to preach out of.
Our readings out of Mark today are almost fractal. Small little snippets of things pointing us to a bigger story that it reflects.
If you have ever sat down with one of our middle schoolers or one of our freshman in high school, it reads a little bit like they talk from the Gospel of Mark.
There was this demon. And he was like really mean. And …then….Jesus cast him out, and everyone was all WOW….and then he was like really popular. So he went to a friends house cause he was all tired…and then he saw someone was sick and he healed her…and we were all like THAT’S HOT…and everyone was bringing possessed and sick people to him and all the sickness and demons were like GONE. And that made him even more popular…..
Anyway you get the point. Lots of action. Not a lot of explanation.
From Mark 1:21-45 Jesus has two full days of healing and exorcism. A healing of a disciples’ relative, an exorcism of another evil spirit, a prayer retreat, a healing of a man with leprosy, and a mission trip into the rural outskirts of the modern world, and a camping trip where he was followed by a whole bunch of stalkers. How are we to deal with all this information? What is the point?
And, as I approach this passage an even bigger question comes up. Why is Jesus being so secretive? He shushes the demons. He avoids the big cities for small towns. He tells the man he heals not to tell anyone what he did. He seems to be going out of his way to tell nobody who he is? What’s up with that? Aren’t we told not to hide our light under a bushel?
You may wonder, Clint, is this going anywhere? Yes it is. So, here is what we are going to do this morning. This sermon is going to feel a little different. Instead of just preaching at you, I want you to join me on my journey to understand just what God is saying to us through his word this morning. Let’s explore Mark 1!
First, and I will say this very quickly and point it out over and over again through our conversation this morning, first, we need to notice that Jesus is very clear about his mission and purpose. We don’t start with a birth, or with creation of the earth. We immediately start out on a mission. John the Baptist prepares the way for the mission. Jesus immediately begins on his mission. He does what he does with clear intent, even at one point saying “this is what I came for” or this is what I came to do”. That doesn’t mean Jesus was a concrete-sequencial type, but God wants us to know through Mark that right off the bat Jesus has a very clear purpose for his life and what he is doing.
POINT 1: Jesus carries out his life and mission with purpose.
Also, as we begin to explore we notice, as I said earlier, that we are right in the thick of the action. But it is interesting to note the type of action we are a part of here. And within a couple of moments Jesus is being baptized. And then he is immediately being tempted in the wilderness. His miracles all have to do with healings and with demons.
Healings and demons? Yes, healings and demons! Which gets us started with our first point that we get from God through the gospel of Mark. Jesus’ ministry is about conquering sin and death. Jesus’ message, from the start, is about spiritual warfare. His purpose, from the start, is take ground for God’s Kingdom. His purpose, from the start, is to do battle with the Enemy of our souls, namely Satan and his forces.
God could have eased us into this truth. He could have had Jesus dancing through and orchard talking with birds and kitty cats with flower petals falling all around him. But God doesn’t allow Mark to sugar coat his gospel. Life is not easy. As a matter of fact it can be very ugly. There is evil in this world. Life is a struggle. Jesus comes to heal and to deliver.
We are involved in a very real struggle. A struggle where souls hang in the balance. The Bible is clear. There is a heaven, and there is a hell. A place where we spend eternity with God, and a place where people spend eternity separated from God. And the Bible is also clear, it is up to us which side of this battle we want to be on.
This truth of God’s Word is reiterated over and over again in the New Testament. It is so essential to Christian faith that it is mentioned in the Apostles Creed as one of the biggest reasons Jesus came to earth. To crush Satan under his feet. In the Gospel of John Jesus puts it this way; “The thief comes to kill and to destroy. I have come that you may have life and have it to the full.”
And as we look at our lives, and begin to follow Jesus, we notice two things.
1.) The war is won with the work of Christ on the cross.
2.) The battle still rages
Evil is still at work in this world. As Eugene Peterson says, “Every inch of ground is contested ground”.
All of you know this. And if you don’t….well then….maybe you are not in the battle.
Try to allow to do some small or large great thing with your heart and your life and you will notice two things:
1.) You will have a sense of peace and purpose and power like never before AND
2.) At the same time you will experience more challenges and heartache than you ever anticipated.
POINT 2: Jesus comes to engage Satan in spiritual warfare
Because of this, the fact that Jesus keeps shying away from the crowd starts to make a little bit more sense.
Please follow along.
Jesus is on a mission.
His mission, to a large part, involves defeating evil, and those forces who seek to enslave the world to sin and evil.
So……..
Jesus needs more than a fan club. He needs kingdom workers.
I see nowhere where God is impressed with our church attendance, as important as that may be. I see nowhere in the Bible where God is interested in flattery or lip service for their own sakes.
Why does Jesus have the demons keep silent, and why does Jesus tell a man he healed to tell nobody. Why? Lots of scholars have come up with lots of reasons for this secrecy motif. Here is what I think God is saying through Mark.
I think he is saying..”I don’t need a fan club. I am not here to play to the crowd. I did not come to earth to be popular. To be a diva or an icon. I didn’t come to earth simply to be a bumper sticker on the back of your car, or a t-shirt slogan. I did not come to be a supernatural endorsement for a political point of view, or to be used for someone’s agenda or power trip. I didn’t come to earth to form a sanctified social club!”
I think Jesus is saying, “I came to set people free. To set people free from sin. To heal them. To offer them eternal life. To make their world a better place.”
I think Christ say to us, “I came to show them that longsuffering love has more to offer than a surge of adrenaline and/or hormones. I came to show them that being compassionate to their neighbor is more important than having more money and more power. I came to show you that living with integrity and honesty is more rewarding than always trying to be what everyone else expects of you.”
Why do I say Jesus doesn’t need a fan club? Because I occasionally listen to sports radio…that’s why.
Whether it be in Denver or KC, to a Seattle Seahawk booster, the fans are obnoxious on talk radio. You turn on the radio in the middle of the winning streak and the fans are all about how they carried the team to victory because they sat in front of their TV and screamed and yelled for two hours. But, that is not the bad part. The bad part is when they lose.
In the week after a local team loses on talk radio, these ravid die-hard fans turn fickle. The quarterback needs to be traded or cut, the coach needs to be let go, the turf of the field needs to be changed, the uniforms from a decade ago need to be brought out of moth balls and used again because the new ones are jinxed.
The fan club is always fickle.
Churches had a pretty big fan club after 9-11. That lasted a few weeks. Maybe a month or two for some. Folks started feeling like they were going to be more earnest in prayer or devoted to church life. That soon changed though.
Jesus does not need a fan club, he needs committed disciples that know him, are loyal to him, who are committed to serving him.
He needs people willing to join him on the mission. Willing to engage the Enemy in spiritual battle so that he can remake this world more in his will, and remake our souls more in his image.
POINT 3: Jesus does not need a fan club, he needs kingdom workers.
So then, what is Jesus’ method of carrying out his mission? Is it a mass-marketing scheme? Is it wowing people with his healing powers and his charismatic speaking voice? Is it gathering throngs of people around him?
No. As we have seen he seems to avoid this. Even when he feeds the masses, he tries to send them away to get food at first.
What is the way of Jesus? The way of battling the tide of evil and sin in our world? What is the way of being true to his mission?
It is laying hands on individual people and touching them.
Think about it, Jesus could heal anyway he wanted. But most often he does so by personal address, personal touch, personal teaching here in the first chapter of Mark.
He reaches out and loves individual, unique people with unique histories and unique joys and struggles.
He did and he still does.
He avoids the popularity trap so that he can touch each of us and make each of us whole. He avoids the crowds so he can spend time with God…yes. And he avoids the crowds so that he can have children sit on his lap and he can bless them. He avoids the crowds so that he can sit and listen to our hurts and our happiness.
He wants to whisper in our ear:
You are the apple of my eye!
Before the earth was formed I was thinking of you!
I love you so much I know how many hairs are our your head!
I have made wonderful plans for us to be together!
A couple of weeks ago we did this imaginative prayer thing in our CHOW group. And we asked Jesus “what do you think of me”. Now usually, when I am leading this exercise I do not get into it as much as the people I am leading, because I am too focused on leading.
This is also hard for me, because it is hard for me to clear out all the accusations of myself I have in my mind. The memories of my sin. Of my failure. I never get past the place of feeling frustrated and unworthy.
But this time was different. I asked Jesus, “What do you think of me” and all of the sudden I was in a room. A very large room. Like a mansion or something. And almost immediately, Jesus seemed to answer, “What do you mean…what do I think of you?...You should mean when do I think of you…and the answer is I think of you all the time..”
And I looked around and the walls were full. FULL! And they were all pictures of me. Me running. Me smiling. Me praying. Me ministering with teenagers. Me doing things that only God and I knew about. Me crying. And there was that picture of me going to the bathroom in the river that always embarrasses me when my mom pulls it out of the photo album.
And it is those moments, those rare moments of clarity we see what the Bible is teaching us here today I think.
Jesus does not need a fan club, but he wants to be our #1 fan. He wants to be even more actually. He wants us to come home. He wants us to be his.
That is what we celebrated here at the altar. That is why we eat the bread and drink the cup.
That is why it is necessary that we do whatever we can on Christ’s behalf to tell people of the new life we can have through choosing to follow him.
And so he fights through the battlefields, and he avoids the fickle crowds, so that he can make his way to us….to each of us?
Won’t you open your life to him?
Before I get started with digging into this passage, I want to give you a few instructions. First, you may want to keep your Bibles open to Mark 1, because we are going to spend a lot of time referring back and forth to the passage. Also, I will be giving you the option of writing some things down as I go, so you might want to get a pen and paper if you like doing that sort of thing.
My mom and I are both readers. My father was as well, but as his eyesight has declined he reads less. I think it is something about wearing those pesky glasses. Anyway, Mom and I like different types of reading. Mom likes the mass produced paperback novels. Mysteries by authors who write stories for each letter of the alphabet. Romance Novels with pictures of Fabio on the front. Grisham courtroom dramas. She likes fast-paced entertaining stuff that moves from one thing to another fairly quickly.
I like different books. First of all, I read a lot more non-fiction than fiction. Forget Danielle Steele, I would rather read Freakonomics. Or some analysis of Catholic writers Thomas Merton, Flannery O Connor, Walker Percy, and Dorothy Day, and their realationships to one another. I like books that make me think about and analyze things that I have never thought about before. In other words, I am a little bit more of a nerd than my mother is.
We are the same ways with movies. I will want to talk about this or that with the movie, and how a certain scene was organized. Or what all of it made me think about. My momma plays along for about 5 or 10 minutes. Then she looks at me and tells me to be quiet. “Can’t you just enjoy the movie?” she says. Movies are about escapism and enjoyment!”
Then I wait until I get home and go write something about it for myself. And include it on my weblog or write something up for the church newsletter that it made me think about.
Different Gospels have different moods to them. And while the Gospel of John and Matthew could read a little bit more like the things I want to read, the Gospel of Mark reads a lot more like a Grisham novel or a one hour documentary of Jesus’ live that we would watch on Biography or the E! channel. Which….is why it is a challenging book to preach out of.
Our readings out of Mark today are almost fractal. Small little snippets of things pointing us to a bigger story that it reflects.
If you have ever sat down with one of our middle schoolers or one of our freshman in high school, it reads a little bit like they talk from the Gospel of Mark.
There was this demon. And he was like really mean. And …then….Jesus cast him out, and everyone was all WOW….and then he was like really popular. So he went to a friends house cause he was all tired…and then he saw someone was sick and he healed her…and we were all like THAT’S HOT…and everyone was bringing possessed and sick people to him and all the sickness and demons were like GONE. And that made him even more popular…..
Anyway you get the point. Lots of action. Not a lot of explanation.
From Mark 1:21-45 Jesus has two full days of healing and exorcism. A healing of a disciples’ relative, an exorcism of another evil spirit, a prayer retreat, a healing of a man with leprosy, and a mission trip into the rural outskirts of the modern world, and a camping trip where he was followed by a whole bunch of stalkers. How are we to deal with all this information? What is the point?
And, as I approach this passage an even bigger question comes up. Why is Jesus being so secretive? He shushes the demons. He avoids the big cities for small towns. He tells the man he heals not to tell anyone what he did. He seems to be going out of his way to tell nobody who he is? What’s up with that? Aren’t we told not to hide our light under a bushel?
You may wonder, Clint, is this going anywhere? Yes it is. So, here is what we are going to do this morning. This sermon is going to feel a little different. Instead of just preaching at you, I want you to join me on my journey to understand just what God is saying to us through his word this morning. Let’s explore Mark 1!
First, and I will say this very quickly and point it out over and over again through our conversation this morning, first, we need to notice that Jesus is very clear about his mission and purpose. We don’t start with a birth, or with creation of the earth. We immediately start out on a mission. John the Baptist prepares the way for the mission. Jesus immediately begins on his mission. He does what he does with clear intent, even at one point saying “this is what I came for” or this is what I came to do”. That doesn’t mean Jesus was a concrete-sequencial type, but God wants us to know through Mark that right off the bat Jesus has a very clear purpose for his life and what he is doing.
POINT 1: Jesus carries out his life and mission with purpose.
Also, as we begin to explore we notice, as I said earlier, that we are right in the thick of the action. But it is interesting to note the type of action we are a part of here. And within a couple of moments Jesus is being baptized. And then he is immediately being tempted in the wilderness. His miracles all have to do with healings and with demons.
Healings and demons? Yes, healings and demons! Which gets us started with our first point that we get from God through the gospel of Mark. Jesus’ ministry is about conquering sin and death. Jesus’ message, from the start, is about spiritual warfare. His purpose, from the start, is take ground for God’s Kingdom. His purpose, from the start, is to do battle with the Enemy of our souls, namely Satan and his forces.
God could have eased us into this truth. He could have had Jesus dancing through and orchard talking with birds and kitty cats with flower petals falling all around him. But God doesn’t allow Mark to sugar coat his gospel. Life is not easy. As a matter of fact it can be very ugly. There is evil in this world. Life is a struggle. Jesus comes to heal and to deliver.
We are involved in a very real struggle. A struggle where souls hang in the balance. The Bible is clear. There is a heaven, and there is a hell. A place where we spend eternity with God, and a place where people spend eternity separated from God. And the Bible is also clear, it is up to us which side of this battle we want to be on.
This truth of God’s Word is reiterated over and over again in the New Testament. It is so essential to Christian faith that it is mentioned in the Apostles Creed as one of the biggest reasons Jesus came to earth. To crush Satan under his feet. In the Gospel of John Jesus puts it this way; “The thief comes to kill and to destroy. I have come that you may have life and have it to the full.”
And as we look at our lives, and begin to follow Jesus, we notice two things.
1.) The war is won with the work of Christ on the cross.
2.) The battle still rages
Evil is still at work in this world. As Eugene Peterson says, “Every inch of ground is contested ground”.
All of you know this. And if you don’t….well then….maybe you are not in the battle.
Try to allow to do some small or large great thing with your heart and your life and you will notice two things:
1.) You will have a sense of peace and purpose and power like never before AND
2.) At the same time you will experience more challenges and heartache than you ever anticipated.
POINT 2: Jesus comes to engage Satan in spiritual warfare
Because of this, the fact that Jesus keeps shying away from the crowd starts to make a little bit more sense.
Please follow along.
Jesus is on a mission.
His mission, to a large part, involves defeating evil, and those forces who seek to enslave the world to sin and evil.
So……..
Jesus needs more than a fan club. He needs kingdom workers.
I see nowhere where God is impressed with our church attendance, as important as that may be. I see nowhere in the Bible where God is interested in flattery or lip service for their own sakes.
Why does Jesus have the demons keep silent, and why does Jesus tell a man he healed to tell nobody. Why? Lots of scholars have come up with lots of reasons for this secrecy motif. Here is what I think God is saying through Mark.
I think he is saying..”I don’t need a fan club. I am not here to play to the crowd. I did not come to earth to be popular. To be a diva or an icon. I didn’t come to earth simply to be a bumper sticker on the back of your car, or a t-shirt slogan. I did not come to be a supernatural endorsement for a political point of view, or to be used for someone’s agenda or power trip. I didn’t come to earth to form a sanctified social club!”
I think Jesus is saying, “I came to set people free. To set people free from sin. To heal them. To offer them eternal life. To make their world a better place.”
I think Christ say to us, “I came to show them that longsuffering love has more to offer than a surge of adrenaline and/or hormones. I came to show them that being compassionate to their neighbor is more important than having more money and more power. I came to show you that living with integrity and honesty is more rewarding than always trying to be what everyone else expects of you.”
Why do I say Jesus doesn’t need a fan club? Because I occasionally listen to sports radio…that’s why.
Whether it be in Denver or KC, to a Seattle Seahawk booster, the fans are obnoxious on talk radio. You turn on the radio in the middle of the winning streak and the fans are all about how they carried the team to victory because they sat in front of their TV and screamed and yelled for two hours. But, that is not the bad part. The bad part is when they lose.
In the week after a local team loses on talk radio, these ravid die-hard fans turn fickle. The quarterback needs to be traded or cut, the coach needs to be let go, the turf of the field needs to be changed, the uniforms from a decade ago need to be brought out of moth balls and used again because the new ones are jinxed.
The fan club is always fickle.
Churches had a pretty big fan club after 9-11. That lasted a few weeks. Maybe a month or two for some. Folks started feeling like they were going to be more earnest in prayer or devoted to church life. That soon changed though.
Jesus does not need a fan club, he needs committed disciples that know him, are loyal to him, who are committed to serving him.
He needs people willing to join him on the mission. Willing to engage the Enemy in spiritual battle so that he can remake this world more in his will, and remake our souls more in his image.
POINT 3: Jesus does not need a fan club, he needs kingdom workers.
So then, what is Jesus’ method of carrying out his mission? Is it a mass-marketing scheme? Is it wowing people with his healing powers and his charismatic speaking voice? Is it gathering throngs of people around him?
No. As we have seen he seems to avoid this. Even when he feeds the masses, he tries to send them away to get food at first.
What is the way of Jesus? The way of battling the tide of evil and sin in our world? What is the way of being true to his mission?
It is laying hands on individual people and touching them.
Think about it, Jesus could heal anyway he wanted. But most often he does so by personal address, personal touch, personal teaching here in the first chapter of Mark.
He reaches out and loves individual, unique people with unique histories and unique joys and struggles.
He did and he still does.
He avoids the popularity trap so that he can touch each of us and make each of us whole. He avoids the crowds so he can spend time with God…yes. And he avoids the crowds so that he can have children sit on his lap and he can bless them. He avoids the crowds so that he can sit and listen to our hurts and our happiness.
He wants to whisper in our ear:
You are the apple of my eye!
Before the earth was formed I was thinking of you!
I love you so much I know how many hairs are our your head!
I have made wonderful plans for us to be together!
A couple of weeks ago we did this imaginative prayer thing in our CHOW group. And we asked Jesus “what do you think of me”. Now usually, when I am leading this exercise I do not get into it as much as the people I am leading, because I am too focused on leading.
This is also hard for me, because it is hard for me to clear out all the accusations of myself I have in my mind. The memories of my sin. Of my failure. I never get past the place of feeling frustrated and unworthy.
But this time was different. I asked Jesus, “What do you think of me” and all of the sudden I was in a room. A very large room. Like a mansion or something. And almost immediately, Jesus seemed to answer, “What do you mean…what do I think of you?...You should mean when do I think of you…and the answer is I think of you all the time..”
And I looked around and the walls were full. FULL! And they were all pictures of me. Me running. Me smiling. Me praying. Me ministering with teenagers. Me doing things that only God and I knew about. Me crying. And there was that picture of me going to the bathroom in the river that always embarrasses me when my mom pulls it out of the photo album.
And it is those moments, those rare moments of clarity we see what the Bible is teaching us here today I think.
Jesus does not need a fan club, but he wants to be our #1 fan. He wants to be even more actually. He wants us to come home. He wants us to be his.
That is what we celebrated here at the altar. That is why we eat the bread and drink the cup.
That is why it is necessary that we do whatever we can on Christ’s behalf to tell people of the new life we can have through choosing to follow him.
And so he fights through the battlefields, and he avoids the fickle crowds, so that he can make his way to us….to each of us?
Won’t you open your life to him?
10 comments:
Good stuff. The teen talk brought tons of laughs, I'm sure.
Happy Sunday.
u really r something...u know that??
I love that you said, "that's HOT" and the big question is . . . did you use your woman voice for that part? It's killin' me, I must know.
What is CHOW?
Thank you for sharing this, Clint. Thank you very much.
Nice on Clint.
Your boys were robbed yesterday, robbed!
You make me feel bad that I missed church yesterday. Our church does what they call the spirit bowl. Its a strange Superbowl-ish church celebration. Everyone wears jerseys, and the pastor does his sermon in a football uniform, yes, with the helmet on his head. They do this whole thing 'theater style" with music, and skits, and rappers, and mimes, and steppers, and I don't know, I should be able to get into it, but I just cant.
Whew, that's good stuff Clint.
The reality of what Jesus thinks of us cuts through all the stuff. It's amazing how he does think of each person and loves each of us where we need to be loved.
I am not sure I could get into it either.
"The fan club is always fickle." I liked that thought. They were all really good thoughts.
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