Hilton Head Island, SC – February 1, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 1:1-8; John 1:1-14
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. – Mark 1:1 (RSV)
Narrative: The Stories Of Our Lives
There are four Gospels that the early Church chose to include in the New Testament, and a dozen or more non-canonical Gospels that were rejected by the Early-Church Council that decided what should be in or out. The first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, give very similar accounts of the narrative of Jesus’ life. John gives a markedly different account.
A week and a half ago Marcus Borg died. Dr. Borg was one of the leaders of the Jesus Seminar. This group of New Testament scholars met together for years, pouring over the Gospel narratives of Jesus, trying to determine as best they could what was historically accurate and what was probably made up to suit the theological or Christological biases of the four writers. Most of the Jesus Seminar people, including Marcus Borg, concluded that most of the Gospel of John was not a valid narrative of what the historical Jesus actually said and did. What John claimed about Jesus reflected his understanding of who Jesus was, but it was not an accurate reflection of what Jesus said he was, said the Jesus Seminar professors.
The Gospel of Mark in general has the “lowest” Christology of all four Gospels. That is, the Jesus who is portrayed there is a very human Jesus, who makes no claims of divinity for himself, nor does he declare that he is God’s unique spokesman without whom the world would be cast into darkness. We see an example of this in the opening verse of Mark: “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The footnote says, “Other ancient authorities omit the Son of God.” In Mark, Jesus never calls himself the Son of God, although Mark might have.
If you were to write a narrative of what you considered to be “the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” what would you include in your Gospel? Would you carefully study all four Gospels, and put in only those things you were absolutely convinced were authentic? Would you do what Thomas Jefferson did, take all four Gospels and cut out everything you thought was inaccurate or inauthentic? What would be your narrative about Jesus, were you to write one?
The contrast between the opening lines of Mark and John are striking. “The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ” – period --, and “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This beautifully written prologue in John intentionally leads up to John 1:14: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” The Logos of God, His eternal creative Word, always existed, and the Logos became human flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, John said. That was one of the primary points John intended to convey in his version of the narrative of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection.
How the narrative of Jesus was told affects how we understand that narrative. Are the Synoptics essentially correct, or is John? In the last 25 or 50 years, an increasing number of New Testament scholars have suggested that each of the four Gospels came out of a particular community of believers, and not just out of the minds of the four authors. If so, are we prisoners of the narratives about Jesus, or are we liberated by them? Do the Gospels free us, or do they imprison us? Shall it be “Make me a captive, Lord, and then I shall be free”?
Besides Jesus having a narrative for his life, each of us also has a narrative for our own lives. What is our story? How shall it be told? How should it be told? And who will do the telling? If we tell it ourselves, will it vary considerably from what others would say is our story? And is our story essentially complete, or is it still unfolding?
For some time I have been sporadically writing a book called The Communion of Saints about various people I have known in the churches I have served over the past fifty years. In my new status, I am able to devote more time to it, and about that I am happy, because at the rate I had been going, the book would be finished a few years from now, if ever. My intention has been to suggest that all church members and perhaps many who are not church members are saints. Saints are all those who have faith in God and seek to serve Him. Everyone who ever joined any church orally expressed faith in God, and that is good enough for me to include them among the saints. I presume it is also good enough for God. But saints vary enormously in the nature of their sanctity, and the book attempts to illustrate that. Saints aren’t flawless; they all have flaws. But in their variegated personalities and personas, they are all saints nonetheless. In unique ways, each of the saints about whom I have written had narratives of sainthood, even if they were not always what we would call “saintly.” But then, no saint is -- or can always be -- “saintly.”
Recently we watched a movie on television called The Words. If it was ever in the theaters, I don’t remember it, but it is an excellent and absorbing film. The fictional screenplay tells the story of a young American soldier turned writer who fell in love in Paris after World War I. He wrote a novel about his life during the Roaring Twenties, when Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the other luminaries were all there. Then his marriage fell apart. For various reasons he decided not to try to publish his story. Many years later another young writer found the manuscript for the novel and published it verbatim as though it were his own. He won the Pulitzer Prize for “his” work. The real author read about it, and realized the younger man had somehow found his manuscript and had published it as his own. He looked up the young man, and confronted him with his theft, but he refused to blow the whistle on him. However, he did ruefully say about his fictionalized true-life story, (though the whole movie script is fiction), “My tragedy is that I loved the words more than I loved the woman who inspired the words.” Later scenes in the movie show an older man talking about the words in the novel. We, the viewers, are meant to infer that he is the word thief, now 15 or 20 years older, still trying to work through his guilt over what he had done. He is a professor of creative writing, where everyone is always taught, “Write what you know.” He asks his students, “At what point do you have to choose between life and fiction?”
In the narrative of our own lives, we are all faced with that question. What is real, and what is made up, whether we or others present the narrative? And what is real or fiction about Jesus?
What should be the narrative of these two, or possibly three, men, the original author, the words thief, and the older but perhaps wiser words thief? Why did the old man never try to get his novel published? Why did the young man publish it as if it were his own story? Why was the middle-aged man so furtive and mysterious about whether he had been the thief of the outstanding words that composed the by-now-old-man’s story? What are our real stories?
How shall our stories end? They shall all end in death, of course, but how?
In our move to The Seabrook, I came across some notes I had written some time ago. They were true stories told to me on the phone by a close friend of Lois and me from when I was the interim pastor of the House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. I had intended to use these notes in a future sermon, but they disappeared into a file, only to resurface when I was industriously getting rid of stuff in order to try fit much less stuff into our new apartment. So I phoned our friend to validate or to alter the notes I had written down some time back.
The first story is about our friend’s elderly aunt, who had been blind for many years. The aunt had been the president of a national insurance company for decades, and had then retired, and then she was in a nursing home. One day, when she was 95, her son, a Lutheran pastor, happened to stop in to visit her. As he was talking, she began to exclaim to him excitedly about all the beautiful things she was seeing around them. At first he did not understand what was happening, or how she could see anything, but then he understood what it was. She was being prepared, right then, to go over to the other side of the Jordan River. And with that, she died.
The second story was about a lady we knew from the House of Hope Church. She was in the hospital. An orderly, who had gotten to know her during her stay, came into her room. She asked him to sing something to her. He began to sing Edelweiss, from Sound of Music. She joined him in the song. At its conclusion, she said it was her dead brother’s favorite song. After they sang the song, she said her brother was in the room with them. And with that, she died.
The third story was about our friend’s high school principal. He too was in the hospital, and his wife was with him. A friend came to see them, and while they were talking, all three of them heard a choir singing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. No one else on the hospital floor heard it, and there was no recording of it being played anywhere. And at the triumphant finale of the best-known chorus in all of musical literature, the principal died.
The fourth story is different, at least in one detail. A young man was also in the hospital. He had been in a coma, and while in the coma, his sister had died. Soon he recovered from the coma. Family members and friends decided to have a party in his room to celebrate his recovery. However, they all felt it was best not to tell him about his sister’s death. At the party everyone was talking and laughing and having a good time. Then, at a certain moment, the young man looked over into the corner of the room, where no one was standing. “What are you doing here?” he asked. The others, mystified, said there was no one there. “What do you mean, no one is there? It’s my sister!” he said. Soon he was back in the coma. Ten days later, he died.
Myrtis is not at all the kind of person to manufacture such stories. She told them to me because she thought I would be interested, which I certainly was. But there is no rational explanation for these stories. They are outside the realm of reason; they are extra-rational.
How would you want your narrative to be told? And how would you want it to end? If it ended like those four stories, which I have no doubt are accurate accounts of end-of-life episodes, wouldn’t it only be proper to include them? And if a life appeared to end by a crucifixion, but really was revived by a resurrection, shouldn’t that be told, and told in considerable detail? Is it any wonder that all four narratives of the four Gospels end with extended accounts of the crucifixion and resurrection? The last week of Jesus’ life takes up at least a third of all four of the Gospels’ narratives. In light of what extraordinary, unearthly events happened in those few days, should anyone truly be surprised by that?
George Raveling was one of the first four black basketball coaches in a major American university. In 1972 he became head coach at Washington State University. Prior to that, when he was an assistant coach at Villanova University, he became interested in the ministry of Martin Luther King, Jr. When Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963, George Raveling stood very close to him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. When Dr. King finished his speech, he turned to walk away. George Raveling was so moved by the speech that impetuously he asked Martin Luther King if he could have the copy of the speech, which Dr. King had taken from the lectern. Why George Raveling asked for the speech he didn’t know, and why the world-famous preacher gave to him is also unknown. Later, the basketball coach noted the few places where Dr. King deviated from the written manuscript. Then he put it into an autographed copy of a book by Harry Truman that he owned, and put it on a bookshelf, where it sat for the next twenty years.
The amazing thing about that amazing speech is that the famous ending was not included in the original manuscript. Martin Luther King had wanted to use it, but his aides talked him out of it. As he was delivering his address, however, he decided to add words that he had used before. “And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” Then he spoke of little white children and little black children playing together. The ending lasted for only 2 minutes and 40 seconds, and there were only 301 words in it. At the very end, he repeated those immortal words from that immortal spiritual, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” That oratorical climax entered into the permanent collection of the greatest speeches ever delivered. George Raveling has made arrangements for the original text of the speech to go to a proper public institution. But the spectacular ending is not there. Instead, it is written into the heads and hearts of everyone who has ever seen a recording of that speech. (See Sports Illustrated-1/12/15)
The movie Selma has come and gone from the movie theaters of the island. It is one of the most important films of all time, and its run lasted just two weeks. Everyone should see it, but very few did. And that speaks volumes about how racially and culturally divided we still are.
When the Selma marches were going on, I was in seminary. Some of our students and faculty went to Selma for the marches, but I didn’t. I thought they were making a mistake, and that they were pressing too hard and too fast. I was wrong about that; I should have gone. I didn’t regret it immediately, but I have regretted it ever since. It might have been a proud part of my narrative, but it wasn’t, because I was mistaken about the true tenor of those times. And anyway, I tried to console myself then and now, I am a talker, not a marcher.
What would others (parents, siblings, spouse, friends) say is your narrative? What would you say is your narrative? Of far greater consequence, what would God say is your narrative? Have we lived only for ourselves, or have we lived for others, and especially for God? Our lives are gifts from God. What have we done with our lives, and what can we yet do?
One of Martin Luther King’s favorite Negro spirituals was a song made famous many years ago by Mahalia Jackson. We can’t do everything, the song declares in its glorious simplicity, but we can do something.
If I can help somebody as I pass along,
If I can cheer somebody with a word or song,
If I can show somebody how they’re travelling wrong,
Then my living shall not be in vain. (Refrain)
My living shall not be in vain
Then my living shall not be in vain,
If I can help somebody as I pass along,
Then my living shall not be in vain.
What is our narrative, and who is best equipped to write it? Us? Someone else? Surely God knows our story the best. Dare we allow Him to write it?