Sermons
December 31, 2023 (1st Sunday of Christmas)
“The beginning of the Good News”
Mark 1:1-15
Have you made any New Year’s resolutions? What have you resolved to stop doing, or start doing, tomorrow?
A lot of people choose to have a “dry January,” giving up alcohol, if they generally indulge, for the month; and others will make a plan to diet or exercise more. I suspect that many resolutions like that are motivated by guilt, or just not feeling too great, after the overindulgences of the holiday season. And I daresay that if that’s the motivation for a resolution, it won’t last. Guilt just isn’t a good motivator for real, lasting change.
Not everybody makes resolutions based on guilt, even if those resolutions are about diet or exercise. We make resolutions at the start of a new year because it’s sort of a natural dividing line between what’s past and what’s in front of us. It’s an ideal time for a new beginning.
But oftentimes our resolutions are unrealistic, which means we’re almost immediately going to get discouraged and quit. If you resolve, for instance, to exercise more in the new year, after barely even walking much beyond the recliner to the little room, you don’t start by training for a marathon. You’re setting yourself up for failure. Instead, the best thing to do is find something that is realistic and simply more than you’re already doing.
I watch a YouTuber named Gerry Brooks. He’s an elementary school principal in Kentucky or Tennessee, I forget which. Most of his videos are funny takes on things that happen at school, especially the things teachers deal with on a regular basis—faculty meetings, overly involved or hostile parents, their own occasional discouragement, that sort of thing.
But recently he posted a short video titled “I double dog dare you.” We all know, of course, that a double dog dare is a serious matter, and Mr. Brooks (he’s not my principal, but he is a principal, so I’m going to call him what I’d call him if he was my principal) was being quite serious. He was talking about new year’s resolutions, and he proposed five resolutions he believes everyone should make.
One, exercise. Don’t start by training for a marathon; start by getting up and walking twenty minutes, three times a week. If you can’t walk that long, break it up and do five minutes, four times a day. Or if even that feels like too much, there are videos you can find that guide you through things you can do seated, like chair yoga. It’s a simple beginning if exercise hasn’t been part of your life up till now.
Two, start saving. He suggested ten dollars a week, forty dollars a month. That amounts to a couple fancy coffee drinks or one trip through a drive-thru per week. (Since I’m already getting in the habit of exercising regularly, this is the one I would start with.)
Three, sleep. Mr. Brooks said experts disagree on what kind of exercise is best for your health (and for losing weight if that’s something you feel the need to do), but the one thing they all agree on is that getting a good night’s sleep is critical. Again, simple adjustments can help. Get everything prepared for the next day so you don’t lie awake making a mental to-do list. He didn’t mention it, but you may find, as I do, that a regular routine of bedtime prayer helps. A warm bath or shower can help our body know it’s time for sleep. And if you drink caffeinated beverages, stop them at a sensible time—4 p.m. is what he suggested; I find I have to stop coffee a lot earlier than that, personally, but everybody is different.
Four, add one healthy recipe per month. here are lots of places where we can find recipes these days; cookbooks are obvious, but there are tons of them online.
Finally, number five, which I think is the most critical, as you probably know if you’ve read our January newsletter, choose kindness every day. Notice the folks you encounter as you go about your day. Compliment something about them, even something as simple as how they’ve done their nails. And of course, whenever you act, keep in mind how what you’re doing could affect someone else.
I’ve told about this conversation I had with my mom when I was growing up—my folks raised me to choose kindness whenever possible. We were pulling into the church parking lot one Sunday morning—running late, as usual—and my mom parked in the second or third row back from the door even though there were spaces available right by the door. I asked her why we didn’t park in one of those closer spaces, since we were, after all, running late, and her response was that someone could come after us who can’t walk very well or very far, so we leave those spaces for them.
Choose kindness, daily.
So why am I going on and on about New Year’s resolutions?
Well, it is New Year’s Eve. Tomorrow we begin a new year, turn over a page on our calendar—if we still have a paper calendar, that is. It’s a new beginning, a fresh start. And that’s what our Scripture reading for today is about, too.
It says so in the very first sentence: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Mark’s Gospel, which will be our focus from now until Easter, hits the ground running.
Mark doesn’t include any birth narratives, nor does he start with a prologue, like John does, setting the stage and letting us know right up front the cosmic meaning of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. He starts with “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” and then John the Baptist shows up, after Mark makes the connection between him and “the voice crying in the wilderness” in Isaiah 40. Six verses in, Jesus himself appears and gets baptized.
Mark doesn’t, as Matthew does, explain why it is that Jesus, the Son of God, chooses to undergo “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” It just happens, and then the heavens are torn open, the Spirit descends like a dove, and the bat qol, the term used by some rabbis of the time for the voice of God, proclaims that Jesus is “my Son, the Beloved.”
People who were familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures would have noticed points of connection with a variety of passages from the Torah, the Prophets, and the Psalms.
The people, discouraged at the enormity of the task of rebuilding their destroyed capital and God’s ruined temple, cried out in the 64th chapter of Isaiah, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down…”
Mark’s first hearers would have connected John the Baptist with Elijah, whom it was believed would come as the harbinger of the Messiah, in addition to recognizing another passage from Isaiah and one from Malachi.
The statement, “You are my son…” came from one of the Royal Psalms, the 2nd, in which God refers to the anointed king of Israel as “my son.” Here it’s given a slightly different meaning.
And after he’s baptized, the Spirit drives him out into the wilderness, a place known to be spiritually significant: the Israelites wandered in the wilderness forty years, Elijah goes to the wilderness and encounters God—and of course, John the Baptist normally lives in the wilderness, choosing a life of voluntary poverty in pursuit of a deep relationship with God.
This is just the beginning, as I said; we’re going to be in Mark through Easter, except, most likely, for two weeks from today. Here is a new beginning, a new way of living, a new way of being God’s people. It’s not just a new year; it’s a new life, made possible by Jesus. So it seems appropriate to read this passage on New Year’s Eve, just before what in African-American tradition is known as “Watch Night,” an annual remembrance of the January 1 so long ago when their enslaved ancestors became free people.
But I don’t think Mark is just saying, “I’m going to start telling you about Jesus now.” Instead, I would argue that he is claiming that his entire Gospel is “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” And if a good story always has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the whole Gospel is “the beginning,” then what comes next?
Well, we do.
This is our story, ours and that of all the followers of Jesus who have come before us, and all the people who will follow him after we’re long gone. And today we have, in our reading, the beginning of the story. And we place ourselves in the story, as people who’ve been given a new beginning, who’ve been set free from enslavement to sin and death.
It gives the notion of a New Year’s resolution a whole new meaning.
Now we have new life in Christ who has set us free, as a somewhat new Korean hymn we have in the Chalice Hymnal says. What will we do with that new life? What’s your resolution, not just a New Year’s resolution but a new life’s resolution?
Having been made a part of the story that starts with the Gospel of Mark, how will we live from this moment on? How will our lives demonstrate our part in “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”?