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Sunday
spoken eucharist - 8 am
bible study - 9 am
sung eucharist - 10 am

Wednesday

services begin at 7 pm

healing service (1st, 3rd)

evening prayer (2nd,4th)

eucharist (5th)

Beginning this Sunday and continuing for the next two Sundays, I will be speaking with you about the Welcoming Church, what it means when we say we are open and affirming and welcoming of all people, what it means when we celebrate on January 25th what we proclaim each week in fact, that we are a Reconciling in Christ congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America … and, not only what it means when we speak these words and proclaim these things, but why.

We will follow carefully the three Gospel readings appointed for these Sundays.  Two are from the Gospel of Mark (remember that this is the Year of Mark in the three-year Lectionary of Readings) and one is from the Gospel of John.

This morning’s Gospel gives us the story of Jesus’ Baptism by John in the River Jordan, next Sunday we will read the story of Philip’s invitation to Nathaniel (also known as Bartholomew) to follow Jesus, and on the last Sunday of January we will read the story of Jesus’ invitation to Simon (known as Peter) and Andrew and James and John to become his followers.

So to review a bit right at the beginning, in these three weeks we have an kind of outline of what it means to be a welcoming, reconciling community of believers who follow Jesus – it begins with Baptism, it continues with a welcoming and reconciling invitation.  In fact, beginning with the earliest followers of Jesus, what we call the Early Church and continuing right down to us, there is no other way that the church comes into existence, lives and grows than by this very understanding … it begins with Baptism and continues with a welcoming and reconciling invitation.  The three sermons I have planned explore how this is so and what it means for us, here in this congregation, this community of followers of Jesus, who have been baptized and who are called, asked, and expected to welcome others into this community of followers of Jesus.

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So we begin with the Baptism of Our Lord, as this Sunday is called in the Church Calendar, and we begin as Mark’s Gospel does with that Story.

Mark doesn’t fool around, it gets right into the matter … and if you haven’t read the Gospel of Mark for a while, here is how it begins:

Chapter 1, verse 1:

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Verse 2:

As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way;

Verse 3:

the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” ‘,

And then our Story this morning which comes next starting in Verse 4:

John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

Can you see, do you hear the way this Gospel puts it?   There is no long introduction or genealogy, no stories of Jesus’ birth as we read on Christmas, that will come in the much later gospels of Luke and Matthew. 

Here, in this earliest document of the life of Jesus that we have in the Christian Scriptures (not the earliest document alone, because the Letters of Paul predate this Gospel by about 20 years, but the earliest document of the life of Jesus, called the Gospels from the very word that Mark uses in the very beginning of his story, (and here's this week's Greek Lesson!):

Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ

ARCHE TOU EUANGELIOU IESOU CHRISTOU

“The beginning of the Good News … (εὐαγγελίου EUANGELIOU … the word that becomes our word for evangelism … (which means a “telling of the good news” or evangelical as in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America … which means “a church that tells the good news” … εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ EUANGELIOU IESOU CHRISTOU ...that is “the good news … the word we have is Gospel from the Old English word God-spel … the good news, the gospel of (meaning “about”) Jesus Christ.

That is where the Gospels get their name, the Gospels are the Stories of the Good News about Jesus Christ … and not just for your reading pleasure … but so that you may be welcomed into the community who follows Jesus Christ and tries to be like Jesus Christ and tries to do what Jesus Christ asked and we believe still does ask his followers to do, and not do what Jesus Christ does not ask his followers to do.

That’s all there (understood) in the first verse of the Gospel/the Good News of Jesus According to Mark.

And how does it begin?  With his baptism, and that is the lovely story we have in front of us this morning.

If you were an early follower of Jesus living in the 1^st Century, listening to this story being read, and being a Jew of course, as was Jesus, and his first followers, you would not miss the subtle and not so subtle references in this story of his Baptism … references to the Prophet Isaiah.

‘O that you would rend the heavens and come down!’ wrote the prophet (chapter 64) … and in the 10^th verse of our reading from Mark Jesus ‘saw the heavens rent open/torn apart.’  A very graphic image!

And in the very next verse, 11, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” … the allusion to the 42^nd chapter of Isaiah, “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.”  And maybe even indeed there is a connection to the adoption formula employed at royal coronations and found in the 2^nd Psalm, “You are my son; today I have made you my son/given birth to you’”.

In other words, what Mark is telling us is this: Jesus is not an enigma, something strange and unusual and completely divorced from the story of God and God’s people, rather he is the one on the scene now in whom heaven and earth meet, where God and God’s creatures are joined together … and the Gospel/Good News is the story of how this is woven and fleshed out and how we who also are baptized into Jesus shape ourselves around him, the one in whom God and God’s creatures are met.

When we say that we should live Godly lives, it is this that we mean … we shape ourselves around the life of Jesus who is the one where God and we are met and meet and in fact meet each other … and that last little part is the part where we find ourselves as the welcoming and reconciling in Christ ones who do everything that we can to live out this story.

That is what we call our faith … faith is the living out of the story.  It is making the story come to life in our midst and come to life in the world from our congregation.

When we live compassionate lives for each other, we live the story.  When we work for peace and justice and love and understanding in the world, we live the story.  When we uphold our neighbor and build up our neighbor and do not try to destroy and degrade our neighbor or make war upon him, we live the story.   When we live lives that seek to repair the brokenness in the world and protect the earth upon which we live, we live the story.

Next week, we will explore just how a welcoming and reconciling community invites others into its gospel life and the living out of the story of faith.

continued next week ...

+ Deo Gratia