Podcast of "And" (MP3)
Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25:1-10
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts
be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen
One of the unexpected benefits of
the Internet is the new toys that utilize its data processing, visual, and interactive
technologies. One of my favorites is something called a “word cloud.” Like many
other Internet toys, the word cloud has a useful purpose. Word clouds are the visual
representations of the relative frequency of specific words in a set of text. Some
of the images that come to mind when we think of graphics are the graphs we
learned about in school. Images of bar graphs and pie graphs would show this
relative frequency in familiar ways. Word clouds display their results
differently.
According to their homepage, “Wordle
is a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds
give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source
text.”[1] So
the larger the word in a word cloud, the more often it appears in the text.
Unless you can eyeball exact proportions, it’s difficult to discern hard data using
a word cloud, but that is not its purpose. Looking at a word cloud gives the
viewer a quick look at each word and the bigger the word the more often it appears.
Let’s remember, the Wordle website
calls its own technology a toy, so you can play with the image the data spits
out. Choosing different fonts, layouts, and color schemes makes each word cloud
a little different. The relative font size doesn’t change, but manipulating the
other elements changes the images into new and interesting pictures.
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| Wordle word cloud of Mark 1:9-15 Click to see larger image |
Wordle automatically omits the most
common words, the words that are peppered everywhere in language. It omits the
definite and indefinite articles “a,” “an,” and “the.” Pronouns are also left
out of the Wordle so “I,” “you” and “them” are missing. It leaves out being
verbs like “is,” “was,” and “were.” It also leaves out connecting words like
“if,” “and,” and “but.” If these words were left in the image they would
overtake the cloud dwarfing even Jesus. There is one of those words, those
ever-present words that caught my attention, the conjunction “and.”
Looking at our reading, in seven
verses of scripture, the word “and” appears ten times. There is a lot of
this-and-that going on in this passage. That’s what I want us to examine.
If our reading looks familiar it’s
because we saw these first three verses together on Baptism of the Lord Sunday.
It is where Jesus came from Nazareth and was
baptized by John in the Jordan
The connection between the two is
that Jesus joins the community. Jesus comes, physically moves himself to be
with the people who await his arrival. Jesus comes to be with the people
bodily. We can’t say this too many times: Jesus came to be with the people; God
comes to be with us in person. Not only does he come, he comes identifying
himself with the community in their baptism.
The people confessed their sins to
John before they were baptized; and it would have been a lie if Jesus had
confessed his sin. Still, with no sin to confess, he comes and accepts John’s watery
baptism. The one who came to baptize with the Holy Spirit is baptized in the water
of the Jordan Jordan
The next set of and’s is a triple
whammy, coming from the water Jesus saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit
descending upon him and he heard the voice of the Father. Such wonder and glory
in a moment frozen in time in Holy Writ. People with too many academic degrees
and too much time on their hands call this a “theophany,” an appearance of God.
This is the first time in all of scripture that all three persons of the
Trinity; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, appear together. In concert they come
together marking a new chapter not in their life together, but of our life with
God; and according to Mark’s gospel the folks who were there couldn’t even see
it.
The next incident has Jesus
immediately being sent into the wilderness forty days and there he was tempted
by Satan. Sent from the Jordan Jordan
In the meantime, he was with the
wild animals and the angels attended him. It takes a hard look at the Greek
grammar to see this, but these are two specific wilderness experiences. First
is that Jesus was with the wild animals and also the angels attended him.
Mark’s gospel doesn’t say what the
animals were doing, it’s logical to think the wild animals, or in other
translations wild beasts, were doing what wild beasts do. Lions and tigers and
bears, oh my; Jesus seemed to have been in great peril. What our text doesn’t
exclude is that this was a “Daniel in the Lion’s Den” experience. The beasts
that surround him might have been at bay. It just doesn’t say.
As for how the angels waited on
Jesus, again it doesn’t say. Where Matthew’s gospel delays the angels until
after forty days of fasting and Satan’s temptations, in Mark’s it seems like
they might have been there all along. Perhaps he was being protected from the
wild beasts by the angels. Then again, this could have been an “Elijah and the
widow moment” from 1Kings 17 where there the Lord provided flour and oil for
bread when all else seemed lost. While Matthew gospel says more on the subject,
Mark’s doesn’t.
Regardless, we do know that Jesus
was in the desert for a good long time, there were wild beasts, and there were
angels attending. We don’t have to know how all of this worked; instead we can
have faith and rejoice that it did.
Something missing from the New
International Version is in the New American Standard and the New Revised
Standard Versions are two more “and’s.” In the original texts verse fifteen
begins with “and.” Then between the two parts of Jesus’ original proclamation
is another. Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the Good News of God and saying
“The time has come and the kingdom
of God kingdom of God
Jesus leaves the dangers of the
wilderness for a more familiar place. Jesus was from a backwater town, but
selling the wares of his trade, he would have known and been known in the city.
This time though, he’s coming with a different message. Instead of selling his
skills he proclaims the Good News of God. He seems like the same guy to everyone
who knows him, but now there’s something different. Jesus declares that simple
difference in the first thing he says, “The time has come and the kingdom of God
Jesus tells them, Jesus tells us,
Jesus tells all creation that everything the world has awaited for such a long
time is now at hand. Friends, it’s done. Jesus is here, the Good News of God
walks among us.
Of course only a fool would believe
that even with the Good News of God present and the time fulfilled that sin has
been banished from the world. And it takes a different kind of fool to think
that nothing has changed because the time has come and the kingdom of God
The last connection made is “repent
and believe.” In the ancient world to repent meant to change your mind. It could
also to feel remorse and be converted. To repent eventually became the subject
of the disciples’ proclamation.[2]
What’s missing from this repenting is an action. That’s just what the way it
was in the ancient days. In the ancient world believing carried the action
element that we associate with repenting. Go figure, language takes turns that
we can neither anticipate nor expect. Words change but God doesn’t. The truth
is regardless of the words and what they mean, in this combination we are
expected to change our minds and our habits.
This whole concept of Jesus and the
“and” led me to examine some of the things I do when creating a sermon, rules
of thumb I try to follow. When writing, there are a couple of words I don’t
like using, the first of those words is “but.”
There are a couple of reasons that
I tend to avoid the word “but.” One reason is that both the Greek and Hebrew have
words that can be translated as either “and” or “but.” Using one over the other
is a translator’s interpretation of what these documents really mean. Of course
the folks who create those translations do it as their Christian vocation so we
can expect a certain level of expertise. Sometimes though, it’s kind of fun to
replace the exclusionary word “but” with the inclusive word “and” to see where
it leads.
This is the second reason I work to
avoid the word “but.” The word “but” makes us lean toward excluding things and
people. The Good News of Jesus Christ is a story of redemption of all humanity
and all creation. There isn’t a whole lot of exclusion to be found in the
gospels themselves. So I find it more fruitful to consider the “and’s” over the
“but’s.”
There is another word I avoid in
sermons, “you.” There are two simple reasons for this. The first is if I say “you
need to do this,” or “you need to change,” or “you need to” whatever; I set
myself above you. As soon as I separate myself from you I have quit serving the
Lord and this congregation. Telling you what you have to do puts me above you,
a place I do not belong. Like the word “but,” it excludes, it separates me from
you. This is not a good place for any pastor to be.
The other reason is that pointing
the crooked finger of judgment is the act that puts the preacher in the place
of God above the people and puts me in a place that belongs to God alone. I may
bring the word of God, but I am not the Word of God.
If I preach “at you” rather than
worship the Lord “with you” I fail you and God. It is this failure I work to
avoid. This is why you will rarely hear me address you, instead I talk about
us.
This is what I have to say about
us, Jesus was one of us. Because of his humanity he experienced everything we
will experience. He was tempted. He kept his sinless nature in tact forty days
in the wilderness, in the synagogues and temple, before Pilate, and on the
cross.
In him, all that we need has come.
In him all that we could ever want is near. Everything we ever needed or wanted
is with us because Jesus embraced the “and” of his fully human and fully divine
existence. Jesus embraces the “and,” and he wants us to join him in that loving
embrace.
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