Ten Sermons in Ten Minutes
Ten Sermons in Ten Minutes
Mark 16:1-8
This morning, I am going to do the impossible. Here are ten sermons in ten minutes…
Sermon One: We’re in the Gospel of Mark, the first Gospel written. Mark is the “U.S.A. Today” Gospel, firing snippet after snippet of information at us. If you don’t like a particular text in Mark, the good news is that you won’t have to not like it for long. Mark is always on to the next account. If you read this Gospel, start to finish, the effect is like being on a roller coaster at Great America and holding on for dear life. Life is like this some times.
Sermon Two: The most common Greek phrase in the Gospel of Mark is “en to hodos.” This could be translated as “on the road.” I like to translate it, “along the way.” Jesus ministry is not about a destination. Rather, it is about everything that happens along the way, while they are on their way to somewhere else. Along the way, Jesus recognizes the needs of the people he sees. He is willing to be interrupted by the needs of others. Are we willing to be interrupted, too?
Sermon Three: Part of Mark’s agenda is to confirm what people had already heard about Jesus, namely, that he healed people. In today’s world, that makes Jesus a miracle worker. In Jesus’ day, being a healer would have aligned him with the poor and the outcasts. The authorities—religious and political—had declared that some people just don’t matter, that some people are cursed, that some people are less than human. Jesus makes a bee line to those people and in doing so, challenges the powers that be.
Sermon Four: Jesus didn’t care about these people just to challenge the authorities. Rather, Jesus saw people who were broken by physical diseases or mental illness or poverty and recognized the barriers that blocked them from being the people whom God created them to be. Jesus is in the business of removing whatever blocks anyone from living fully as a child of God. I suspect we are meant to be removing barriers for others, too.
Sermon Five: Jesus was willing to do whatever it took to remove those barriers. He healed on the sabbath, much to the authorities dismay. He forgave sins which was supposed to be the Temple’s turf. He touched lepers, cared for foreigners, thought a tax collector could be a good person and healed a centurion’s daughter. When he tried to heal a blind man and failed, he tried again. He did whatever he could do and he never, ever quit. If we start caring for marginalized people we shouldn’t be surprised when people get angry at us, too. When Jesus healed someone, he would tell them to tell no one (and no one kept the secret). Jesus wasn’t looking for “credit.” Mark wanted to walk a fine line: “Yes, Jesus healed people but he was so much more…” For us, this might be an invitation to help someone and not broadcast to everyone around us that, “Hey, I just helped someone here!” Humility, catch the fever!
Sermon Six: Jesus called disciples but being a disciple didn’t make you better than anyone else. In the Gospel of Mark, everyone, except Jesus, is a total piece of work. The disciples try to keep the children away from Jesus, get stuck in arguments with each other about who is the greatest disciple, decide to offer Jesus a little free advice on what he should do to help people, reject his words about what is going to happen toward the end of his life, and utterly abandon him in his final days. The story is not about how great some people are. Rather, the big news is that Jesus is unbelievably patient and forgiving and relentless in trying to love the people around him, including the people who are closest to him. And that, is terribly good news that is worth pondering. If we really understood how gracious and loving God is to us would we really ever dare to withhold our grace and love from others?
Sermon Seven: The one thing that those broken, total piece of work, human beings had to do was follow Jesus. When our ancestors in faith were in the desert, Moses led them but what was always out in front of them on their journey was the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark was a visible reminder to every one of those former slaves that God was with them, even in a wilderness far more barren than they ever could have imagined. Jesus is the Ark of the Covenant for the disciples, for the growing crowd of followers, and for those who were desperate enough to hear about him and decide that they had to see him for themselves. “I’ll lead. You follow.” Keep your eyes open. Just take the next step. Trust the man.
Sermon 8: In the final week of Jesus’ life, almost everyone stopped following him. The exception was the women. We’ve talked about this in the Gospel of Luke. This is equally true in the Gospel of Mark. In all four Gospels, Easter morning turns on the presence of faithful women. The one woman who makes it to the tomb in all four Gospels is Mary Magdalene.
Interestingly, in Mark’s Gospel, a faithful woman has already anointed Jesus’ body while he is still alive. Judas get’s angry because the nard could have been sold and the money given to the poor. Jesus praises the woman and her lavish act of kindness. Just after that, Judas agrees to betray Jesus. As the crowds around Jesus diminish, the faithful women keep doing what they can do, in the hopes that doing something is better than nothing.
Maybe the calling for a faithful church is to do something rather than nothing, too. Maybe we don’t think, “Oh, we’ve totally got this!” Sometimes, we just get started. Sometimes, we just keep going. Sometimes we just do whatever it takes to hold onto the hope that, with God’s help, we might actually be able to do more than we ever imagined. Faithful people don’t sit around and do the math. They get started and pray for God’s help and pray for the strength to endure.
Sermon 9: If you take Mark’s Gospel seriously, the women were on their way to the tomb to do something that had already been done. As we mentioned already, a faithful woman anointed Jesus’ body before he was ever arrested. She saw what was coming and poured out her love for him in real time. Did the women on Easter morning not know this or were they, like a lot of us when we are grieving, just looking for something, anything, to do? Clearly, this was the something that they felt that they could do.
We should remember: sometimes, living our faith means caring for the lonely, the sick, and the hungry. Other times, living our faith means lavishly, extravagantly worshiping God. Sooner or later, we have to be willing to do both of those things and allow them to feed on one another.
So, what matters about the women going to the tomb isn’t that the anointment that they were prepared to offer was necessary. Rather, going to the tomb was just the next step, the next loving, worshipful thing to do. The world had done the worst to the person they loved the most. They loved him, nevertheless.
As they walk to the tomb, they can’t help but think about the barrier ahead. There is a boulder sealing the tomb that is far too big for them to move. Everyone who has ever hovered on the edge of despair and decided to try the one last loving thing they can imagine has also imagined the barriers: the money you don’t have; the persuasive argument you can’t seem to assemble; the things which just aren’t in your power to accomplish.
When the women arrive at the tomb, the rock has been rolled away. Presumably, Jesus, who had been in the business of removing barriers all along, has lovingly removed this barrier, too. How would we live differently if we became really good at holding onto the hope that God is still in the business of removing barriers. Anyone can point out the barriers. It takes real faith to say, “Ya…that may be a problem. Let’s go find out anyway…”
Sermon Ten: We always want a satisfying ending. Mark does not give us that. Mark doesn’t give us fancy, shiny angels. He gives us a guy in a white robe. Mark doesn’t give us the risen Jesus. Instead, the suggestion is that Jesus has better things to do than hang around in a tomb. “You’ll find him in Galilee, back doing the work that he loved, healing the world, one broken person at a time. That’s why you need to tell the disciples to meet him in Galilee.” And what do the women do? They run away, terrified.
That’s the end of Mark’s Gospel—aside from the parts that other authors added later because no one was really satisfied. Mark, though, was perfectly happy, I think, to say to us, “If you want to know, you’re just going to have to go find out for yourselves.” The risen Jesus continues to lead and the challenge to all of us is to follow him to our own Galilee, to the place where people are just dying to know that someone cares and just dying to know that they are loved.