Mark 1:4-11
Make your way, the Way of Jesus.
Mark’s gospel is so short, you could say it is the gospel of gaps. We start the story with the adult Jesus appearing in the mid-drama of John the Baptist who is calling thousands to repentance. Baptism is described as minimally as Modigliani drew faces. And this brevity does not change. Jesus is Spirit driven, acting decisively, right up to the moment of his betrayal and then crucifixion. But there is a clue to the style Mark chose. The so called Messianic secret. The disciples appear downright stupid to not recognise Jesus as the Son of God, until the moment of his crucifixion when even the Romancenturian declares him to be who he truly is. The resurrection leaves disciples awe-struck and disturbed and urged to go back to Galilee, where the story started, thanks to this baptism, thanks to the declaration of God: This is my Son, Listen to him.
Increasingly this world of Palestine 2000 years ago seems irrelevant. What does this story have to say to the digital world, of a vast universe, of robotics, of relativity and quantum theory and fake news. Especially what does it have to say if being a Christian was actually a risky identity. It is hardly that now. But this explains the ‘secret’ and how criticisms of Rome are coded in Mark. We really are in a different world.
Except, you know, that the story of Jesus is strangely relevant beneath the surface, because the same sorts of crises, hopes and questions are ours, as the disciples had, questions of meaning, selfishness, possessions, friendship, mortality, corruption, courage and happiness. Our trouble is that there is not just a gospel of gaps, but a culture gap now between Church goers and the rest. There is not the common knowledge of the story and there is certainly misunderstanding in the extreme, of what it means to be Christian, because people carry just fragments of the Jesus event.
This gap has been growing for the last thirty or forty years. Instead of hoping to be better than our predecessors in trying to bridge the gap by teaching better, I suggest we change approach and admit we are getting lost at times too.
All this makes the opportunity we have with the earth walk and labyrinth ministry very valuable. It allows us and our neighbour to share in the same experiences of opening ourselves to greater truths than our daily preoccupations. By placing the labyrinth in the sanctuary, it always invites the walker to consider how their story relates to Jesus’s.
Today I want us to have an experience of labyrinth walking using the labyrinth design on the worship bulletin. But I also want to try to give it a particular use, as we have intended in offering the big canvas labyrinth as an earth walk, in the sanctuary.
This is yes, an illustration but also real work, for us to do together. It is not a baptism, but especially if this is your first time using a labyrinth, it can mark a new beginning. Which is the role of baptism, the way Mark’s gospel was written, to send people back to the beginning to live differently according to the way Jesus had lived, that in following his path then, or in 21st century, they realise Jesus’ identity for themselves.
We are presenting our labyrinth for an earth walk, as the expression of Christian faith for today, to be concerned for the earth and our relationship to the earth; to live differently. Let me show one way in which it can work.
Sadly, it seems that people have to be confronted with disaster before they realise what was at stake. The disciples admit this: Mark tells us, they were not able to understand until after Jesus was raised, after he was crucified. And that place was outside the city walls, the place of the skull, it conjures a rocky outcrop, barren, with three crosses and the smell of death.
Shocking scenes of death come to us – from many places across the world. A baby whose body is washed up on a beach. A black man with a police knee on his neck. Mass graves, from terrorist attacks in Nigeria. So many places. Yet closer somehow for me is the image of tropical forest cleared by burning, leaving a few trees, remnants of what was and a top of one tree is a mother Oran Utan, clinging. I find it so disturbing, so awful for what it represents. That it is Not sufficient for humans to kill one another, we are decimating other species for our own ephemeral needs. This destruction, such as Indonesiasuffers, is often for the production of palm oil. In the ‘eighties, saturated fats were declared unhealthy and the food manufacturers needed to find alterantives quickly and realised the safe substitute of palm oil was four or five times cheaper than sunflower oil. Its in lots of things. Too many but it is not essential. Progress is being made. Oil that is from plantations that are managed not new virgin forest is being promoted as ‘eco’. Better than that, products that are explicitly palm oil free, allow us to avoid green washing our purchases. We can all check the ingredients. Seriously, take a magnifying glass to the supermarket. Be strict. Tell the manager you would have bought this but……….And you can give funds easily to organisations protecting habitat for Oran Utans, and with that the millions of species that share the forest with this great ape.
A second story, with chimpanzees is a good illustration of the changing appreciation of how the earth can be protected from human greed and human crises. We have watched a video together from Jane Goodall Institute. It showed how the forest the chimpanzees need could be protected once local farmers discovered they were better off respecting the land because it was more fertile for their crops that way. But let Jane Goodall put it in her own words. Here is a recent interview.
Social justice and earth justice go together, but more than that, in hearing the call of the earth, it is as if John and Jesus are calling in our time for us to repent and believe, the realm of God is at hand. This is not about going backwards in time: its impossible. This is about going forward with a greater human soul, a collective soul. What is this going to be like?
I am not going to provide answers, I am providing a context. Earth and humanity going forward more consciously than ever before; baptised into this.
The experience of walking a labyrinth models what it is like, we move as individuals, we have our individual experiences, success and failures, moments of discovery, periods of quiet, but it is also a shared experience, I can tell you about my journey and I know it has a similarity to yours.We can, and will, walk together, affecting each other, once Covid-19 is defeated.
We know human justice and earth justice are inseparable now.
Each in our small way can follow the Way of Jesus, just as we were baptised like he was, we can go forward courageously for others as well as ourselves, honouring those in the past, making life in the future possible and good.
We can also do this a little today using the labyrinth pattern I have sent.
How to trace the labyrinth?
Use a little finger to trace your way on the pattern so you can see where you are tracing. Do itsitting, grounded:let your feet be flat to the ground, your shoulders relaxed,breathing consciously freely. Taking our time, in curious openness. Asking for a blessing, admitting God to speak God’s blessing on us.
Lets do this now, from the mouth of the labyrinth.
We follow in simplicity, knowing complexity, we breathe in and out and let our finger take all the time it needs to turn and not lose our way. And even if we do we continue to the centre, or back to the entrance where we can start over. Pause when you like, perhaps at every big turn of 180’. Finally, to reach and stay at the centre or goal.
Labyrinths were often laid out in cathedrals as substitutes for the pilgrimage to the holy land, the city of Jerusalem, the place of crucifixion and resurrection, birth and death of Jesus, Son of God.
We do not need to leave our homes; Jesus’ way can be our way, in simplicity and complexity, for us and for the earth in greatness of Soul, a baptism of repentance and forgiveness of sins.
Amen.