Sermon by Wes Goldsberry
Feast Day of Saint Mark
Friday, April 25
What do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?
Two years ago, The Edge Foundation asked that question of over one
hundred scientists, presumably to see whether or not any of them would
give an answer other than the answer that one would expect to be a
scientist's answer: “Nothing.” One might figure that any
scientists who worth their professional salt, are not going to believe
anything that he or she cannot prove. And in the rare event that
a scientist is able to prove something, he doesn't need to use the word
“believe,” because they don't merely believe it; they've skipped right
past believing and headed straight into knowing. There are
essentially two kinds of questions: questions to which we know the
answer, and questions to which we don't; and beyond those two
categories, what use has a scientist for this third category,
associated with belief? What is a belief, anyway? Something
that a person doesn't really know, but pretends as though he
does? Does belief logically reduce to “knowing without actually
knowing,” and if so, is the whole notion of “belief”
self-contradictory? I can imagine a scientist shaking his head in
The Edge Foundation's face, saying, “I'm sorry, but, I don't believe in
belief.”
But as for Carlo Rovelli, however, a European physicist of some repute,
when asked what he believed was true even though he could not prove it,
he boldly asserted, “I am convinced, but cannot prove, that time does
not exist.” He asserts that time is, rather, “an artifact of the
approximation in which we disregard the large majority of the degrees
of freedom of reality,” adding that time is, he concludes, “just the
reflection of our ignorance.”
That may be true. Maybe time is whatever he says it is, and maybe
there is some real truth buried amidst his labyrinth of prepositional
phrases, but, I just can't seem to wrap my head around this idea that
time doesn't exist, in the same way that, though the idea seems
immensely popular among people of faith, I can't conceive of God as
existing outside of time — I mean, unless God exists within time, can
God. . . experience anything? And can a being who experiences
nothing even be considered conscious or, even alive, in a meaningful
sense? What good to us is a God beyond time?
And, most importantly, if time does not exist, then why are we all in such a hurry?
I suppose it would be nice not to be in a hurry, which is why it might
be helpful to convince ourselves that this thing called time, which we
generally regard as running out, doesn't actually exist, and therefore
cannot be in short supply. But as far as I'm concerned, time is
as real as the desperation we feel at its fleeting. We don't know
when time will end, but we do know that the end will be nearer to us,
by the time I finish this sentence, than it was before it began.
Clearly I've been thinking a lot recently — a lot of sophomoric
thoughts, mainly — about time, and about this oxymoronic quest in which
I find myself in a hurry to slow time down a bit. For instance,
though it is undeniably ensuing, I am not in a hurry to lose the
remainder of my hair, even if I'm able to put a positive spin on its
recession. I find my only solace in the fact that, as long as I
remain at St. Andrew's, it seems that the more hair I lose, the more
powerful I may become. My ruminations on time and the passing
thereof no doubt have something to do with the fact that I turned 30 a
couple of weeks ago, which, according to my tutorial students, means
that I shall soon purchase a cat. Don't count on it; I'm allergic
to cats, which is why, next Thursday, when Mr. Myers celebrates his own
big Three-Oh, he is likely to mark the occasion at Faculty Hoops by
making good on an recent threat to smear Millington the Cat all over
his torso, to help quash my tenacious defense. I am not in a
hurry for any of this to happen.
But while I'm mired a futile struggle to put the brakes on time, many
of you find yourselves in a hurry to push through to that next birthday
ASAP — so that you can drive a car without Mr. Beckett's supervision,
or watch your first R-rated movie, or buy a scratch-off lottery ticket
to go with your Wawa milkshake (in support of Delaware public
education), or, perhaps most significantly, to vote for or against John
McCain. Sooner or later, however, you too may find yourselves
struggling backwards against the temporal current, wondering when and
why and how the patience simply to enjoy the time being, ever became so
difficult.
So how should we be spending “now”? Does the answer change
depending how much time is left? Should it change depending on
how much time is left? Many of us will remember the sermon that
Jon Walton gave on a Wednesday night last spring, in which he asked us
to consider what we would do if we only had one year to live. His
thought experiment seemed to say 'yes,' it would affect our
choices and our behavior — but if the effect is to be positive, and
within our control, why not starting living that better way now?
At the risk of quoting a book that is in danger of unjustly becoming
cliché, I cannot help but recall what Morrie tells Mitch in Tuesdays
with Morrie: “Learn how to die, and you learn how to live.”
Today, April 25, is the day on which the Episcopal Church celebrates
one of the great hurriers in the history of Christianity — St. Mark the
Evangelist, who is best known to all former and current IV Form
religion students as the author of the gospel that bears his
name. Today, exactly 1,940 years to-the-day after Mark's death,
Mark may be the most consistently perennially read author by St.
Andrew's sophomores. One of the reasons why the chaplains and I
assign Mark's gospel in particular to be read, is that Mark, according
to a preponderance of scholarly conjectures, was the first of the four
canonical gospels to be written — and yet even this one was written
some three decades after Jesus' death, once the disciples had played
thirty years of telephone with the oral tradition. Still, while
Mark probably never hung out with Jesus, he almost certainly hung out
with people who hung out with Jesus, making Mark's testimony some of
the most historically reliable information that we have about the most
influential person who ever lived — a claim, I will note, with which
you don't have to be religious to agree.
I have a hunch that Mark was a hurrier, because the Jesus that Mark
portrays is something of a hurrier, and we tend to paint Jesus in a
flattering light — and by that I mean, a light that reflects “me,”
whoever “me” happens to be. If you're a democrat, then you read
the New Testament and conclude that Jesus clearly would vote for Obama,
if only he could. If you're a republican, it goes without saying
that Jesus would never support any candidate who supports abortion
rights, making Jesus a McCain supporter by default. And so, in
light of this phenomenon, when Mark uses the word “immediately” over 40
times to emphasize the urgency inherent throughout the gospel, it seems
that Jesus — and, therefore, probably Mark himself — is in a hurry.
Which brings us to why Mark's gospel, its author being a hero without
whom Christianity might have evolved in unrecognizable ways, is no
model for good expository writing. Earlier tonight, Jack read for
us the first fifteen verses of Mark's gospel, the first of which reads,
“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” and
the last of which has Jesus saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the
kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good
news.” Evidently, Jesus and Mark have some news for us, and the
news is too important not to trip over ourselves getting the message
out to the whole world — which partially explains the hurry in which
Mark finds himself. But in all of Mark's haste, a vitally
important piece of information was left out of the first fifteen
verses. Mark quotes from the prophet Isaiah; he tells us what
material John the baptizer's belt is made of; he tells us what kind of
insects John was eating at the time; Mark tells us everything —
everything it seems, except for what, exactly, the 'good news' IS.
Maybe Mark assumes that his audience already knows what it is, or maybe
he's trying to build up some suspense, to keep us reading; in either
case, Mark fails in this first chapter to define the central term of
the gospel. If you prefer your truth served au naturel, Mark is
not the author for you. His gospel thrives as storytelling, but
disappoints as journalism.
Over Long Weekend, as I was enjoying a venti Refresh tea at the
Middletown Starbucks, I decided to comb through the rest of the gospel
to see whether Mark ever makes clear, whether by explicit or implicit
means, what he means by “good news.” The method was simple:
first, sift through all sixteen chapters for traces of anything that
constitutes “news”; then, sift through all of the news for traces of
anything “good.”
I discovered that if you're looking for a straightforward definition,
you won't find it in chapter 2, or chapter 3, or any chapter
thereafter. Just as Mark's Jesus is bent on keeping his identity
a secret, the gospel writer himself seems to enjoy keeping his “thesis”
a secret, which angers me, as both a teacher and a theologian, and one
who honestly wants to know what Jesus has to say that stands to make a
disciple out of me. I want to be profoundly moved and inspired —
just tell me why I should be.
As it turns out, if I had wanted to solve the “good news” mystery more
efficiently, my best bet would have been — naturally, as any one of you
would have told me — to skip to the end of the book. There,
in the sixteenth and final chapter of the gospel of Mark, after Jesus
has been literally tortured to death, buried, raised from the dead, and
probably in a hurry to get back to God's right hand, Jesus cuts to the
chase.
Jesus says to the disciples, “Go into all the world and proclaim the
good news to the whole creation. The one who believes and is
baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be
condemned.” Thus ends the reading.
We may regard that as pretty standard Christian 'stuff,' but remember
that nowhere until the last page of Mark are we treated to such a
transparent proclamation of what many Christians regard as the whole
'point' of Christianity: Jesus is our “Get out of Hell free” card.
But then, just when we think it's time to consider whether this news is
good enough to qualify as good, Jesus continues, saying...
“And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name
they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will
pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it
will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they
will recover.”
Just when we think our salvation is as easy as believing something that
we cannot prove, Jesus reveals that the litmus test for true faith is a
test that it seems only Jesus himself could pass. We could all
probably pick up snakes if our lives depended on it; and we could, with
practice, speak in tongues, as they do in the documentary Jesus
Camp. But I doubt that even Pat Robertson himself could drink
poison without being irreparably harmed.
But wait; maybe Jesus is speaking metaphorically in this passage, as he
often does, but the disciples in Mark have literally been casting out
demons at various points throughout Mark's latter chapters. Plus,
as a general rule, when in doubt, Jesus wouldn't have said it, unless
Jesus meant it.
So how, then, can we rescue ourselves from this bizarre text, which
makes infidels of us all? Here's a bit of good news, maybe even
great news, about this text: Mark didn't write it. According to a
HarperCollins Study Bible footnote, this passage, with its literally
incredible tests of faith were written and added to Mark's gospel by an
unknown author, probably no sooner than a century after Mark's
death. And now, for the bad news about this text: Mark didn't
write it. This means that Mark has not, in fact, solved the “good
news” riddle for us after all, sending us back to the drawing board: a
fifteen-chapter record a of cryptic parable-telling, miracle-working,
demon-slaying, dogma-subverting, sin-forgiving, egalitarianism-wreaking
prophet.
You know, that's some good news right — that when the God who reigns
over us becomes incarnate in human form, God becomes someone who is
that cool. To someone who can slay demons, I am willing to listen.
Throughout his whistle-stop healing tour, Jesus seems in a tremendous
hurry to see to it that we are in a hurry. But why?
Because, evidently, whenever a human being endures needless suffering
that we could help prevent, we should be in a hurry. When our
planet is choking to death on CO2 emissions, we should be in a
hurry. When we declare that clean water is a human right, at a
time when contaminated water is responsible for the deaths of up to 500
children per day worldwide, we should be in a tremendous hurry.
And that, my friends, is the good news — that God frees us from
preoccupation with our own salvation to begin harnessing the miraculous
power of absolute selflessness, by which, with God's help, this world's
self-inflicted wounds can and will be completely healed.
Even were there no injustices demanding our immediate attention — and
their name is Legion — we would still find ourselves in a peculiar kind
of hurry that, though we can see it coming from miles away, sneaks up
on us this time every year without fail. The number 30 has
already figured prominently in this sermon, and it's about to
again. Graduation is in exactly 30 days. If you are a
senior, how will you spend them? Perhaps there's something you've
long wanted to be: more studious, less studious, more punctual, less
vulgar, more sincere. I pray that this will be the month in which
you achieve your most cherished and frustratingly elusive goals.
Declare a video game moratorium. Talk to each other. Let
people know what they mean to you. Mend broken
relationships. Seek and grant forgiveness. Go to Andrew's
Place, finally. Clean up the messes you make. Better yet,
clean up a few that you didn't make. Especially if they're on
windowsills. There's still time. And that is good news for us all.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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