The Stories We Are (Mark 10:35-45)

This sermon was originally preached on October 20, 2024 at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN.
You may view the service here.

Today's gospel is Mark 10:35-45.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about stories this week: Stories we tell, stories we believe, stories we know to be true and the ones we wish were true — or may yet become true.

And how, in today’s Gospel, Jesus is telling a story in which the life of the disciples hinges on just a few words. Words that are a doorway into another way of seeing, of being, where the history they’re all currently living through is just prologue to the New Creation they’ll write together.

image: “Zechariah and St. John the Baptist" Medieval Georgian fresco from the Monastery of the Cross, Jerusalem

"But it is not so among you."

So begins a yet-unwritten post-apocalyptic epic where worlds are resurrected, redeemed, and rebuilt; full of restored relationships and radical reciprocity, of deep reverence for how all life — from the deepest roots in the earth to the wildest winds hovering over distant planets on the cusp of life’s first breath — cooperates in communion in order to create, rather than destroy. 

We’re still in the prologue, though — the part in which Jesus’s backward teachings about greatness precede his days-away triumphal entry and crucifixion. The part in which power and greatness are measured by the ease and scale of the destruction done. And where the disciples, God help them, still think they have a chance at defeating the empire and transcending its “greatness” on its terms.

We know that this story which began with John the Baptist declaring, “Prepare the way for the LORD; Make straight the path before him,” will end with that Lord’s death march, crucifixion, and burial; with a boulder removed from his empty tomb, and a trio of terrified women fleeing from the one who brings word of the impossible: Resurrection. 

And From a narrative standpoint, Mark’s gospel is the best kind of prologue, because it begs a turn of page.  

But we’re not there yet, and the disciples aren’t even close to being able to metabolize that fantastical a story.

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