According to Jesus’ family, he was, “out of his mind”, beside himself, not seeing things clearly. The religious leaders also thought he was “out of his mind” and were threatened by ruling breaking and challenges to their authority.

The two groups of people who should have been the most on board with Jesus, the religious leaders and his own family, wanted to stop him. Whether out of fear or pride, they tried to stop Jesus.

But Jesus was redefining the family; establishing a new kingdom. He was drawing a wider circle. One not restricted by biology or blood, but one birthed by belief. If we’re with Jesus, then we here with sister, brothers, mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles and cousins. A new family. In sickness and in health, and not even death can tear us apart.

In his gospel, Mark is purposefully stringing seemingly random and unrelated stories together and in doing so, invites us into the interpretive process.  He wants us to not examine these stories in isolation but in relationship to one another to see for ourselves the bigger picture he is painting.  This bigger picture of course is a picture of Jesus, who he was, what he did, how he did it, and why he did it. 

The picture is radically good one. Jesus’ good news is too good and his religious and political opponents can’t take it anymore.  Jesus relieves the oppressed of their oppression but invites their oppressors to dine with him.  Jesus brings restoration and healing to those exploited by political, religious, and economic systems, and he also appeals to those in charge of those systems.

Jesus’ arrival is good news.  For us and for our enemies.  For the oppressed and the oppressor.  For the ones who think they’re righteous and for the ones who know they are not.  Jesus came to love us all.

In Mark chapter 1, Jesus is a disruptor. He’s not merely tweaking the system, he’s re-writing it, stirring the pot, unsettling the status quo. It’s clear here that Jesus has authority to restore not just one aspect of our brokenness but every aspect. We see him healing bodies. Restoring spirits. Bringing people back into community. Upending systems of exclusion. Terrifying those who benefit from the status quo. 

In each of these situations, he confidently goes against the current, trusting that there are some who will eventually fall in love with God’s way and follow Christ.

We can all get stuck. Stuck in patterns of thinking that make it hard for us to change direction, we’re left feeling helpless and hopeless. We can look at what’s broken and think, “It’s all too broken. It can’t be fixed or put back together again.”

The good news of the gospel speaks to us in these moments. It’s good news because it’s so drastically different from what we’d come up with on our own.

In the first chapter of Mark’s gospel, Mark declares, that Jesus is the gospel, or in every day English, the good news.

The word “gospel” is that the Romans, the ones who ruled Judea in the time of Jesus, had already been using that same word for years. 

In the Roman world, when they pronounced a gospel, messengers were sent throughout the empire to share the “good news” that a new Roman Emperor had come to power. Mark puts his own slant on the term “gospel”. To Mark, the good news is a person. Jesus is the gospel.

This is how Mark starts the story of Jesus. With good news about a man from Nazareth, the Son of God. A man who identifies himself with the poor and common folk, who meets us in our suffering, and who goes into the wilderness on our behalf to win our freedom. And that is good news.

Though the Israelites had been delivered from Egypt, Pharaoh’s economy of never-ending work, greed, and oppression had formed and patterned their relationship to work.

We live in economy like that of Pharaoh’s—an economy governed by the almighty dollar and not by generosity, justice, and mercy.

In Isaiah 65, we see God’s hopes for our work. Work is meant for our good and for the common good.  As we fashion things, God fashions us into people who can embody the love of God in whatever we do.  Whether big or small. 

God cares about our work, because God cares about us and the world we’re forming and shaping.  God longs for justice, mercy, and love to rule in our hearts, and by extension, in our dealings with others.

Misión de Caridad was formed to break the cycle of poverty for displaced women and children on the Mexico side of the United States border by educating and empowering families to build healthy lives of purpose within self-reliant communities. 

When families come to the border, they often settle on land in an area near Misión de Caridad’s facility. The streets are dirt. Families construct houses out of whatever materials they can find. Few have running water in the home and some are even without electricity. But all are experiencing the effects of multi-faceted, multi-generational poverty.

The programs at Misión de Caridad are designed to empower and help families see their inherent dignity. When a student is accepted at our school, the entire family is enrolled in programs that afford them the opportunity to participate in a number of empowerment initiatives.

Revelation 7 gives us a glimpse of what worship could look like when we get to heaven. Here, the church isn’t plagued by debates over different worship styles and practice or what’s the “right way” to worship. The image presented is one of both diversity and unity.

It’s not just people from a few nations, or just those who speak Greek and Hebrew, it’s representatives from every nation, every tribe, every people group, and every language, which also signals to the early church that their efforts to spread the Gospel are not in vain.

When we hear the word “worship”, we often think of music or singing, but worship is so much more than that. Yes, we worship when we sing praises to God, but we also worship in all the ways we live our lives for the glory of God. Worship that is good and true and beautiful reflects the heart and character of God and draws us in to form us and shape us and send us back out as we more closely resemble the character of Christ. Worship is both a personal and a communal response to who God is and what God has done for us.

It important to look forward and visualize what we hope will happen. When I was a teacher, we would set goals for our classes and students. Knowing where we wanted to be at the end of the year helped us make decisions about what to prioritize during the year. Being able to see our destination helped us actually get there.

Leading up to Micah 4, we see there’s an army at the gates and corrupt leaders within. The circumstances are dire. And yet, Micah lifts his eyes to the horizon. He sees an amazing vision of humanity’s ultimate destination—people coming to a mountain to worship God where they will learn God’s ways and walk in God’s path.

It’s a vision of the future that promises justice, peace, security, and prosperity for all. In God’s kingdom, all people will be safe. They will have enough. In God’s story, no one will make us afraid. This is the far better future God promises us.

There is no doubt the world is a place of great need, and it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the extent and complexity of that need.  It's hard to know where to even begin.  Can do we end hunger?  Can we fix unjust systems?  Can we save the world?  

Only God can heal us and make whole what we have broken. God demonstrated this on the cross. Instead of creation ending in death, a new path was opened. In him, our deep wrong is transformed so that we, too, can reflect and reveal the love of God. 

We don’t have to fix the world in our lifetime. We don’t have to win the war against evil. This is God’s world and God loves the world and Jesus is coming again. It’s not all up to us. We are free to joyfully reflect God’s love without feeling pressure to do more than we can do.

We’re kicking off a new summer sermon series called Spoiler Alert: God’s Story Rules.  We are going to explore the end, or perhaps the culmination, of God’s story.  We will talk about the ways that knowing the trajectory of God’s story informs how we think and live now.  What’s the reason we do anything? The end of God’s story, the last pages of Revelation, give us some reasons.  

The picture we see in Revelation is one of restoration. The leaves of the tree of life will be the healing of the nations.  What has been broken will be restored.  At the culmination of God’s story, we will experience God’s glorious presence in ways we have never known.

God wants to dwell with. If we look backwards, we see God wanted to give us a physical place to be with God–the Tabernacle and the Temple. In Jesus, God came as a person. In the future, we will experience God’s presence in an even more direct and intimate way than we do in Jesus—in a way that is perhaps beyond what we can comprehend or grasp right now.