Time for Some Good News

Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

Jae: Uh, well, hey, I'm glad that you woke up this morning and said, “Why not?” [laughter] “I guess I'll try it. I guess I'll get there.” Um, or maybe you woke up and you, uh, couldn't wait to be here. But whether you're here for the first time, um, or the first time in a long time, we're just really happy to be with you.

So we are in a series on the gospel of Mark, uh, which is one of the synoptic gospels. So one of the, the three gospels decided to be kind of the most, uh, direct narrative forms of, of Jesus' life and ministry. And we're walking through this in Lent together as we also walk together in a Lenten spiritual practices series. And so if I forget to accidentally, you know, accidentally forget to mention it later, uh, you can find sheets about that in the back or you can check it out on our website.

But we're together here in the gospel of Mark. And so I'm just gonna kick us off by jumping straight in. Uh, today's sections were kind of both Mark 12 and also parts of Mark 13. But we're, we're just gonna directly look at Mark 13:10-11 and 33. So just throw that up on the screen and I'll read it. For those of you who might not be able to see or just prefer to be, to be listeners instead of, instead of readers right now. Mark 13:10-11 says:

First, the good news must be proclaimed to all the nations. When they haul you in and hand you over, don't worry ahead of time about what to answer or say. Instead say whatever is given to you at that moment for you aren't doing the speaking, but the Holy Spirit is.

And verse 33 reads, “Watch out. Stay alert. You don't know when the time is coming.”

So this text hits on this word good news, which I feel like sometimes becomes one of those phrases that people just throw around all the time with maybe not always so much meaning behind it. Like, oh, it's the good news. The good news. We talk about good news. Jesus came to give good news. The gospel means good news, good news.

And for a lot of us, who maybe grew up questioning whether the good news we were seeing our churches give to the people we loved was really good or not. Or maybe you grew up sitting in the pew feeling like the thing that your pastor kept saying the Bible said about you or your behavior or your expression of yourself or the communities you were part of didn't sound good at all. And when you dared to question whether that was really what Jesus meant by his good news, you were told that you just didn't understand because you were a sinner.

And so oftentimes people go back and forth, what is the good news? What is good news? And usually when I have someone ask me that, I know that that's already loaded with what the other person is hoping to hear I think the good news is, so let's dive into what it really is. What is good news all about? And why is Jesus talking about it in time?

Something to note about Jesus' saying here in [verse] 13, that the good news must be shared, “and when they haul you in” is that Jesus is talking to the disciples about the very real persecution, tangible beatings they're about to receive, that he knows they're going to be oppressed and persecuted for proclaiming that the empire is not of the highest power, that the empire will fall. They're going to be persecuted for preaching good news that the powers of the empire are temporary. And so he's speaking to a group who have very real and tangible fears.

And he says, “when they haul you in,” think about this. Jesus's disciples originally were social outcasts. They were the reviled, they were low status, they were peasants. So on a daily basis, they were not coming into contact to the kings that will haul them in. And so Jesus is actually saying also, this is going to be one of the first public opportunities you have to speak directly to the powers that persecute you. This is gonna be the first time you get to stand face to face to the person who has been ordering people's death to the people who have been ordering forced relocation, to the people who have been ordering that people register, to people ordering that certain classes of people are disposable. Jesus says, you will be hauled in to speak directly face to face in a tangible way about the good news.

And so what is the good news then? Is it gonna be good news to the kings? Probably not. But Jesus is talking about a higher good news that isn't about people getting what they want. And maybe that's been weaponized against you. Like, oh, well you just don't understand the gospel because you're sinner and the God the good news is just not supposed to be what you feel is good. But I don't think that that was the intent. We get good news from the Greek word, euangelion εὐαγγέλιον, which is then turned into euangelistou εὐαγγελιστοῦ, which is to be an evangelist—that word is also maybe a little bit loaded right now—to be evangelical. To be evangelical at its core is meant to be that you are a bearer, that you preach and proclaim the good news. And the good news is to be defined not just as what is seen in the synoptic gospels. Jesus refers to the good news here, the euangelion, the gospels have not been written yet.

You can argue, yeah, well, Jesus knows that eventually because Jesus knows everything that the gospels will be written down and then canonized and then that's the gospel. No, when Jesus is talking about the gospel, the good news, the euangelion, he's talking about the entirety of God's story. He is talking about more than Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He's talking about more than the gospel of John. He's talking about more than just the New Testament. Jesus is referring to the entirety of God's story, of God's people from Genesis and then now we have Revelation.

That anywhere in there and everywhere in there there are stories of good news and that certain parts might not sound like good news to people like the kings, but it is a cohesive story. It's a story that compels us to look at what is the spirit of the things that connect Genesis one and Jesus's ministry. What are the strings that connect the Psalms and Jesus's ministry? What are the things that connect First Corinthians to Habakkuk to Job?

The whole of scripture has all kinds of good news. And at different times, it might feel differently relevant to your direct experience of what you need. Good news spoken into about what you've experienced, what you've mourned, what you've feared, who you've loved, what you've lost. I won't say the whole benediction. Um, and some things might be good news that you're not yet ready to receive, not ready to hear it, not ready to internalize it.

I was at a funeral this week. I conducted a friend's mom's funeral for her. And her mom struggled with the highs and the lows of sobriety. She was in and out of sobriety from alcohol her whole life. And she admitted it. She was truthful. She said, this is something that haunts me and will my whole life. And she died as a direct result of her battle with sobriety. Not in the slow way that might be we all imagine of drinking to the point where your liver fails you, but of taking a fall while intoxicated. And my friend, as we talked about, what do you want this funeral to focus on? What do you want this funeral to be?

And she said, I, I don't want to stray away from the truth. The struggle with sobriety is the truth, but I need there to be some good, some goodness of her life that contains all of it. That the good news that you're gonna talk about when you talk about God's role in her life doesn't ignore that she struggled with addiction, but it doesn't use that as a weapon. So I thought about it and I realized that her mom in part struggled with different versions of good news people were telling her and that she was happy to proclaim good news to other people, that they were beloved. And yet because of other things that church structures told her, couldn't believe it about herself. And so I said, what good news would Penny—that's her name—what good news would Penny need if she was sitting in the room with us? And so I used a text from Genesis, from Psalms, from Isaiah, and from Matthew. 'Cause each and every one of those texts, to her and to her loved ones in that room, I felt in different ways, in different locations could be good news. That there is both good news for the mourner and good news for the past. Right?

So that's just an example of how there can be good news in more than just Mark. There can be good news in more than just the things people have told you are the only good news. You don't have to raise your hand, but raise your hand if you've heard that the good news, the goal of the good news is that, uh, just that Jesus came, died for your, your sins and you will go to heaven if you accept Jesus as your savior. You can raise your hand. You don't have to. I've been told that for sure. That was never compelling to me. I don't know about you, but that was never compelling to me. I was told that a lot. Even being told I was gonna go to hell, that wasn't compelling to me because my life already felt like hell. So that wasn't compelling to me.

What was compelling to me was when I had a friend who explained the nuances of liberation in Jesus' story, when I had a friend finally say, this story wasn't about Jesus beating you over the head with your morality. This story was about Jesus speaking to people's tangible in the moment, needs, their fears, the trap that they felt they were living in. Jesus was speaking to a real woman who had real suffering, who was bleeding and couldn't be connected to other people. Jesus is speaking to someone who's suffering deeply on a tangible letter level from physical ailment. That's not just a metaphor. People were physically suffering.

And as someone who was experiencing chronic illness, I said, that is good news. I wasn't compelled by the spiritualisms. But those are compelling for some people. I was compelled by feeling like Jesus saw and knew when I was going through my lived suffering and experience and that there was a hope beyond a hope I didn't see. So that was good news for me.

But you might find good news in so many other ways. You might find good news in the very goodness of Genesis one and might find good news in the story of Ruth and Naomi. You might find good news in a Psalm. You might find good news if you're kind of weird like me in Job and Habakkuk, you might find good news if you're like a real Bible nerd in, uh, like the apocryphal text that aren't even in the typical Bible. You might find good news in a gospel that no one's ever heard of 'cause it wasn't canonized, the gospel of Mary. You might find good news simply in showing up on a Sunday and interacting with people because reading the text right now doesn't feel like something you can receive. Jesus is saying that the euangelion is beyond just exactly what eventually the church would canonize as the gospels. It is the living, it is the proclamations. It is the way the community was structured. It is the fact that the disciples were not powerful people that all was supposed to be euangelion.

So what is the most immediate good news? And now what I'm not saying, I'm not saying like that. You get to just choose only things that are obviously good news for you because you want yours. The euangelion is still supposed to be good news for the whole. It is still supposed to point us towards abundance for the person sitting next to you. But what I am saying is that you precisely in your moment, in your time—Mark, is using the word kairos καιρός, which means a particular time, it is not chronological time, it's not chronos χρόνος—So in your particularity, in your moment that something might feel like good news that to someone else feels far away.

Here's an example of that. There's a Korean, I was just telling my, my friend Bennett, who's here, I won't call you out, you don't have to show anyone who you are, but I was talking to my friend Bennett last night about my trip to Korea and I said, went to this museum and there's a special exhibition on a martyr from the Korean revolution against Japanese colonialism. And in the early 1900s, Korea was under violent colonialism from Japan. And so this man, driven deeply by his Catholic faith and his belief in what the good news was, sought to liberate his people from violence. And that eventually gave rise to a new Korean theology called Minjung theology, which means the people's theology, which is liberation theology, that speaks to the good news as a collective liberation from lived oppression. Because those people in that time were experiencing massacre. So the good news to them was to be free of that massacre in their particular time.

But at the same time, in the early 1900s, in 1919, the same year that the Korean Revolution from Japan began, World War I was ending and the Treaty of Versailles had been signed. And anyone in here, a big Lord of the Rings fan, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, anyone a Chronicles of Narnia fan. It’s the same people. [laughter] Uh, no, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Um, those two served in World War I. And you don't need to be a historian to know that World War I was horrific. It was the most violent, bloodiest war to that point because of the advent of modern machines of war. And both C.S. Lewis and Tolkien were haunted by the things they experienced in the trenches. And C.S. Lewis, if you know much about him, was an atheist prior to the war and during the war. And his friendship with Tolkien was a big turning point. 'Cause he had so many questions and they exchanged letters and perhaps you've read some of them. But to them in 1919, the good news wasn't necessarily rooted in that liberation. It wasn't necessarily rooted in what the Korean people in 1919 needed. It was rooted in the good news that there is freedom from the suffering of death. That there is an abundant life promised to everybody, that there is going to be victory over the powers of death. And you could understand right why in 1919, after watching many of their compatriots die and also experiencing having to kill, that the good news would be that there is an eternal life of victory over death. And that might not speak to you now in 2025 necessarily you, particularly as you sit here. But in 1919 after World War I, it makes perfect sense to me why the freedom of the work on the cross was freeing to Tolkien and to C.S. Lewis.

So you're like sitting there saying, okay, well you still haven't really answered what the good news is. And what I'm saying is the way that you would profess or proclaim or tell your story of what the good news of Christ's life was or what the good news of creation is to you is gonna be completely different maybe than how I would word it. But ultimately, the way you can discern if it is God's good news is that once you trace all the lines back, you go down the rabbit hole of what all the words you might use and then what you might use and I might use, might they point us towards the ultimate same description of God's character. Of life, abundance, compassion, grace, loving kindness, all those characteristic words that you might have done if you went to any kind of inductive Bible studies in your life.

And Jesus says, keep watch. He talks about time. I mentioned this earlier, kairos, as I wrap up here, I want to focus on kairos. Kairos is a precise, divine right time or season. It is used in reference, not just to time, but actually to weaving and to archery. Two things that's very different. Weaving and archery, because it's supposed to describe the exact right moment that you loose an arrow for it to hit its target, that there is that small window of time that's perfect so that you can hit a bullseye or you can hit your target, whatever it's. And in weaving, it describes that exact right moment when the shuttle must work to weave the yarn through a gap that if you do that weaving process wrong, you'll make a mistake. You'll have to undo your weaving and you'll have to start over again because there is that one precise exact moment when that gap can be filled by the shuttle.

And that's what kairos is. It isn't just how long you've been weaving. It's not just how long you've known to shoot a bow. It's not how long you've been going to church. It's not how long you've identified as a Christian. But there are those turning points in our faith lives. There are those turning points in our communal life. There are those turning points in our world that are kairos moments.

It might be when you accepted an invitation that you didn't really know if you wanted to accept, but you got there and it was freeing. It was good news. It might be a conversation with someone you were dreading having because you needed to tell them a truth that was gonna be so painful. But an opening opened and you didn't have time to sit down and journal about what you were gonna say when you needed to confront this person. But you just said it because the opening opened and you needed to speak into it. And out of it came good news. There might be those moments that go beyond the quantitative time.

And so I invite you as we move forward in these challenging moments, which there are many, I'm sorry, I've been getting really dry mouth lately. So if you hate the sound of someone drinking into a microphone, I just have to verbally say out loud that I'm very sorry for that. But, um, if you right are wondering how do I approach this difficult time of chaos, I invite you to consider those kairos moments, to look for the openings, to be with people in the moment and to not think too hard about how you're supposed to say it, but think about the things you know to be true about the love, the mercy, the grace, the freedom. 'Cause they hopefully will arise. And you don't need to be a preacher to know how to speak compassionately to those around you.

To show you a really quick picture before we move to communion. Someone asked me on social media this week, uh, I got into, I don't know, internet arguments with people about Christianity as one does. And, um, no one can believe that I'm like openly queer and trans and decide to still be a pastor in this time. And I decided to post something that said, Hey, I identify as little-e evangelical, good-news-bearing pastor. And I don't, I don't think there's an issue with that. I think it's important to identify with this word and, and take it back. And I understand if you don't want to, but I said that.

And on social media, if you just throw that picture up, um, and I'll read it to people, but basically someone just said, okay, well then define good news. 'Cause I said, evangelicalism = not good news. Evangelical message of good news, good is good news. And this person said, “well then define it.” And I said, okay, well I don't really know if they're on the right or the left side of this whole, um, shtick, but I said, sure, happy to. And this is what I hear is good news. I said, “Sure, happy to. The good news is that all are made beloved children called very good at creation. The evils of empire are temporary. The unstoppable forces of liberation and love will persist forever. Jesus came to free the captives liberate the oppressed, heal the ailing regardless of if they accepted him as their savior. And no one has to be perfect, pristine, or pure in order to receive those promises of being true and meaningful and experiencing lovingkindness, freedom from the powers of hate and of violence.” And they just replied. “I concur. Thank you.” [laughter] Um, but I think that is a good summary of what this church believes in professing. And so I too hope that as you hear those words of me proclaiming, “this is good news,” you receive that as good news in your life.

Uh, let me just have a quick prayer and we'll move to communion: God of Good News, We thank you for each and every one of the unique ways that we might hear your good news. And we pray that you would strengthen our ability to live that good news into our lives that others receive it, and or speak into those difficult conversations where good news can be professed. We pray to you in this difficult time, and we lift your name, Amen.