Third Sunday after Epiphany, Jan. 24th
Sermon by The Reverend Loree Reed

Mark 1: 14–20
Spirit of the Living God, fall fresh on us.  Melt us, mold us, fill us, use us.  Spirit of the Living God, fall fresh on us. Amen.

This has been a week filled with new beginnings.  Last Wednesday a new President was inaugurated in Washington, a President who promised quick financial relief to people who have lost their jobs in this deadly pandemic and who vowed to inoculate 100 million Americans against the deadly virus in his first hundred days in office.  In the Senate two men from Georgia were sworn in, men who promised to work for all the people, regardless of their status in society.  And for the first time ever a woman – a woman, can you believe — was inaugurated as our nation’s Vice President.  Maybe best of all, amidst all these big changes, nation–wide there were nearly no protests, no violent uprisings.  Instead, there was peace – albeit a peace upheld by thousands of National Guard troops.  But after the deadly Capitol insurrection three weeks ago, this was very welcome news.  The nation’s fragile democracy had survived.
Now you might think it strange to begin a Sunday sermon on new beginnings by rehearsing recent political events in the nation.  But look, this morning, at the opening line of our Gospel reading from St. Mark.  He writes,
“Now after John was arrested Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.”

Do you see what he’s done?  He has framed Jesus’ whole new ministry against an ominous political backdrop.  Moreover, he seems to assume that everyone will catch the contrast between darkness and light, right and wrong, good and evil.
Well, they might get it, but I wonder if we do.  What was it, do you suppose, that Mark assumed his readers would understand?   And what was it about John’s arrest that persuaded Jesus to begin his own ministry?
First, I think, they understood that this was a time of crisis.   Israel had been living under Roman occupation for some time.  And this posed not just an external threat but an internal one too, because Herod and the parties loyal to him had become so corrupt, so self–serving that the nation’s government had nearly broken down.  Once John the Baptist’s voice had been silenced there was no clarion call to righteousness anywhere in the land.  There wasn’t even a system of justice to protest the arrest of one good man.
But Jesus had just been baptized by John at the Jordan, emerging from the waters to see a dove flutter down from the skies to hover over his head and to hear a voice in the heavens proclaim, “You are my Son, my beloved.  In you I am well–pleased.”   Affirmed and confident in his Father’s love, Jesus is now ready to tackle anything the world, the flesh and the devil can throw at him – including anything Herod the Great and the religious establishment loyal to him can come up with.
And then there were the crowds of people – maybe people just like us.  A mixed bag, if ever there was one, they were Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, high born and humble, well–educated and unlettered.   But every one of them was hungry to learn more of God’s Word, God’s ways.  They had proved that when they trekked all the way out to the Judean desert to listen to John’s preaching.  And now that Herod had had John arrested, the time was ripe for someone else to come along.  The time was ripe for a fresh word from God.
But the fresh word Jesus first uttered as he began to call them to follow him isn’t one that most of us receive with joy.  For that first word was, “Repent, and believe in the good news.”  Only most of us hear only the ‘repent’ part, screening out anything about ‘good news.’  When we hear ‘repent’ we hear that the One who sees all and loves us all has seen our sin and our missteps . . .  and is calling us to change . . . to rethink things . . . to reconsider.  And all too often we get bogged down by looking backward at those words and actions we now regret.  All too often the darkness of that backward remorseful look pulls us backward instead of drawing us forward.  But that was not Jesus’ intention.
Look, instead, at that word ‘repent’ in the context of Jesus calling the brothers, Peter and Andrew, James and John to rise up and follow after him.  When he calls out to them from the shores of the Sea of Galilee, they’re not doing anything they will later regret.  They’re simply fishing for a living, casting their nets with strength and rhythm and grace into the sea, and then hauling those nets in again, hoping they⁏re now filled with fish.  Jesus’ word to them is not a word of correction, a demand that they look back and reconsider what they have been doing.  Instead, it’s the good news that if they will drop their nets and follow after him, looking forward, they soon will become fishers for men and women and children.  And it’s the ‘become’ part, what they can now ‘become,’ that deserves our attention.
Which is not to say that a call to repent can’t be both a forward–looking and a backward–looking word.  When the late poet and essayist Brian Doyle wrote about repentance in his book How the Light Gets In, he wrote of it in the context of confessing his sins to a Catholic priest in a church.  But the crucial part of the process, Doyle wrote, comes after you leave the church.
You walk
To the river and while you are pretending to watch for herons
You envision each person against whose holiness you did sin,
And you apologize, and ask for forgiveness.
Some of
Them are long gone from this world but not from the
Infinite Mercy who remembers all levels and forgetteth not a sparrow.
You are absolved not when a man says so but when you have
Asked, with every fiber of your being, to be forgiven, to walk
Home clean, to start again, to be possible.
What we really ask
For in the sacrament of reconciliation is to be a question mark
Again, to be verb, to be not what we did but what we might
Yet be able to do; a map of the unknown, an unfinished song.
This, I think, is what Jesus calls us all to do as he calls us to repent, to reconsider, to begin again – not just as individuals but as a nation too.  He wants us to consider what we can do, what we can be, as we allow Him to lead us forward.  He wants us to look forward in hope and faith – not to what we have failed to be, but what, by His grace, we can yet become.
We are ready to begin – again.  By his grace.
Amen.
 
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