Mark 1:14-20 “God’s Mission Centers in Jesus Christ!”

Away from home at Christmas in 2005 was my only son. Andrew is a Senior Budget Analyst for the Governor’s Office in Richmond. He is married and the father of one child, with a second on the way at the time. Andrew is also a Major in the US Army Reserves. Earlier in that same year, his unit was called up and after several months of preparation, sent to Iraq. He was in a very volatile and violent part of the world, two hours north of Baghdad, with a mission of overseeing the training of Iraqi soldiers to preserve their own country from self-destruction. For this reason, he was in my daily prayers and thoughts.

Not far from where Andrew was deployed is the equally violent place where God’s own son Jesus, at about the same age as mine during his life here on earth, found himself located away from the comforts of home. Our text from Mark 1 tells about it. “After John was put in prison,” it says, “Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God.” Palestine at the time was like Iraq. It was occupied by Rome, the only superpower in that part of the world. There is also an ominous note that Mark sounds in speaking of John the Baptist’s imprisonment. For what most of the rest of his Gospel provides are the gory details not only of John’s, but of Jesus’ execution by local authorities.

Jesus’ mission was the one his Father had outlined many centuries before his arrival in Galilee. According to the Book of Genesis, the fallen world of Adam and Eve quickly became a violent one. Cain contended with Abel and killed him. The story only got worse after that and became no better even after God started all over again with Noah. But to save his world from self-destruction, God chose Abraham, stating that his Agent would be one of this man’s seed. Through subsequent events in Israel’s history like the Passover and the Exodus, God reiterated that his mission was one of salvation. Even in the dark depths of the exile that had resulted from years of conflict with adversaries, God offered the hope of a new day of peace. “The wolf will lie with the lamb,” he said through the prophet Isaiah…The calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.” (Isaiah 11:6)

Then, “when the time had fully come,” according to St. Paul, it happened. “God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law.” (Gal. 4:4-5) There can be no doubt about it. God’s mission centers in Jesus Christ. Home for Jesus as the Son of God was a glorious one. But for our sake, Jesus Christ left it in order to bring us “back home” to God and to each other in the human family. Jesus came under fire almost as soon as he got here. The opposition steadily mounted and resulted in his death on the cross. But the apparent defeat was in fact the ultimate victory God achieved for us over sin and death. For on the third day, he raised his only Son, Jesus, from the grave.

Jesus Christ had good news for the people of occupied Galilee. “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God is near.” God’s kingdom is not an earthly empire or nation. For wherever such kingdoms are established, the cycle of violence and destruction that has swept through the sorry story of the human family down through the ages gets repeated. On the contrary, God’s “kingdom” is different because it offers the hope of “peace among nations, peace in our homes, and peace in our hearts.”

According to St. Paul in II Corinthians 5, Jesus Christ is in fact the “good news” that he proclaimed in Mark 1. In Christ, he said, “God was reconciling the world to himself,” not counting our sins against us. The mission of God that centers in Jesus Christ is to be carried out through us in congregations like yours and others. For “God has committed TO US the message of reconciliation.”

That’s what the second half of this text from Mark 1 also makes plain. Jesus chooses disciples--Simon Peter and Andrew, James and John, you and me. To us all, he says, “I will make you fishers of men.” The net the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod is casting out has a name. It’s called ABLAZE. How many of you have heard of it? The ABLAZE movement aims to reach 100 million people worldwide with a witness to the good news of Jesus Christ by the 500^th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, on October 31, 2017. What it comes down to is you and I becoming open to sharing our faith with people in our everyday lives who do not have a faith-relationship with Jesus Christ.

So what is there for us, who may or may not claim to be mission-minded, to do, starting today? Our text from Mark 1 identifies three. “Repent and believe the good news,” Jesus says in verse 15. And then to the fishermen in verse 17, he calls out, “Come, follow me.” It’s a matter of repentance. It’s a matter of faith. And it’s a matter of discipleship.

Jesus’ “Galilee Manifesto” speaks of the nearness of God’s kingdom. For one thing, it is “eminent” (with an “e”) in that it takes precedence over anything else.

The disciples left their nets. They abandoned the boat containing their own father and his hired hands. It’s not that work and family are unimportant. It’s that the coming of God’s kingdom exposes our idolatries and for this reason, calls forth regular repentance in us.

During the weeks before Christmas, my son Andrew emailed me a couple of pictures of himself. One showed him in full battle gear on a helicopter pad overlooking a piece of Iraq’s ruggedly barren terrain. The other places him in a more casual pose, seated among a group of curious Iraqi children. “Just to prove that I am really not on the beach in Aruba,” he wrote. His message provoked more in me than the laugh he intended. “When our Lord came from heaven to earth,” I replied, “he did not arrive in Aruba, but in a place just as unglamorous and need-stricken as you are this Christmas. I know it pales in comparison. But because of the pictures you sent me, I have decided on Christmas Eve to help watch over a group of homeless women being housed at our church.”

The kingdom that Jesus announced as “near” is also “imminent.” (with two “i”s). It is impending, about to come in all of its fullness. The future of the world is in God’s hands, and the last chapter of its history has already been written. That future, when authorities and powers that stand in opposition to the will of God (including death) are to be destroyed forever, is hastening toward us. To live with this perspective, however, requires faith, a faith that is nurtured in us regularly by word and sacrament.

God’s kingdom is not only eminent and imminent. It is “immanent.” It is actually present in our volatile and violent world of today. For disciples are “apprentices.” They don’t just hear about or read about Jesus. They commit themselves totally to him and in the process start to live as he did. The sick, therefore, are healed. Demons are cast out. Folks from the “red” states and the “blue” states start listening rather than shouting at each other. Conservative and moderate (or even liberal) partisans are reconciled to each other as well as to God. For it is through us in the church that God’s kingdom is immanent. Or is it?

Richard Lischer, my dear friend and classmate who teaches at the Duke Divinity School, gave me a copy of his latest book, The End of Words: The Language of Reconciliation in a Culture of Violence. In it, Rick plays on the word “end” by suggesting, first of all, that all words today don’t mean much. Every day, each of us is inundated with a tsunami of words, around 60,000 messages. “Why should one of them called ‘gospel’ stand out?” or so Rick asks. Today we also live in the “Argument Culture,” where words become weapons to skewer opponents with contempt and sarcasm or to trump the adversary. “To speak is to fight” is the post-modernist term for it. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, listen to talk-show radio or one of the cable news networks.

What Rick proposes is what he believes is the only true purpose of the words that the 21^st century church has to speak. This “end” is to be found in the same gospel or “good news” that Jesus announced in Mark 1. It’s a “reconciling” message, according to my good friend, because it always “seeks to understand the position of the other (side).” It speaks the truth, but always with an open hand. And above all, it involves disciples who never take their eyes off the mission of God that centers in Jesus Christ. For the reconciliation God offers the world through him is the only overarching alternative to violence and destruction of one another that there is or ever will be. Like Martin Luther King, we will in fact present to our fractured world the vision of a “beloved community,” one that is “big enough to include victims and victimizers, the segregated and the segregators.”

I don’t know if my son Andrew will ever get to read Rick Lischer’s latest book. But I think that where he was in Iraq has given him a unique opportunity to participate in the point of it. “The kingdom of God is near,” Jesus is in fact saying to all of us today. “Repent and believe the good news.” For it remains what it has always been “the power of God unto salvation.” (Rom. 1:16) Amen.

Dr. Jon Diefenthaler, President

Southeastern District, LCMS