“Whose Gospel This Week?”

 A Sermon Preached at First Presbyterian Church

 By Dr. James R. Henery

 Sunday, July 11 2010

 A Presbyterian minister colleague of mine, Robert Short, died a year ago this week.  He was 76.  His home was in Little Rock, Ark.  He and I knew each other through some letters and correspondence and two books he wrote that I admired.  I invited him to Ithaca to preach in the winter of 2008 but we couldn’t make arrangements.

Who was he?  Actually, it is what he did in 1965 at the beginning of his ministry that launched a publishing trend that continues to this day.  His first book used the title  “The Gospel According to …” and his subject was Peanuts, as in the The Gospel According to Peanuts, for which he had permission from Charles Schultz.

Many books have now used the same format, although Robert Short really did try to parallel Peanuts cartoons with a theological discussion of the gospels.  Thus, the publishing world has seen a variety of these theme related books—The Gospel According to the Wall Street Journal, Gospel According to Mayberry and Andy Griffith, to Dr. Seuss, Elvis, Starbucks, Beatles, Oprah, and the latest—The Gospel According to Coco Chanel—life lessons from the world’s most elegant woman.

There is also a 2002 edition of a coffee table book titled “The Gospel According to ESPN: Saints, Saviors, and Sinners” that likely will have to be reprinted after LeBron James and his Thursday night ESPN epistle.

Fascinating word—Gospel—as printed in Greek in your bulletin—the word is evangelion.   And it means not a story, but a pronouncement, yet it has to be good news, joyful news—it’s a validation of something that improves or changes others, their conditions, their lives.

Of the four gospels—Mathew/Mark/Luke/John—only Mark begins this way.  It’s a literary beginning with no history.  No narrative.  No biography.  No Christmas story.  No defense or argument.  Just one verse:

Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησου Χριστοῦ.  The beginning of the gospel

of Jesus Christ.—Mark 1:1

There was a small town somewhere, and a preacher was out making his house calls to the parishioners. He was riding his bicycle, and came upon a little boy with a sign that his lawn mower was for sale.  Apparently this preacher needed a lawn mower, so he asked the boy, “How much do you want for the mower?” The boy said, “I just want enough money to go out and buy me a bicycle.”  The preacher thought about it and asked, “Why don’t you take my bike in trade for your lawn mower?”  The boy asked if he could try it out first and after riding the bike around for a while, said, “Mr., you’ve got a deal!”  The preacher tried the mower and pulled on the cord a few times and it just wouldn’t start.  He complained.  The boy said, “That’s because you have to cuss at it.  You’ve got to swear at it until it starts.”  The preacher said, “I’m a minister, and I haven’t cussed for so long I just don’t remember how to.”  The boy looked at him and said, “You just keep pulling on that string, and it will all come back to you.”

Mark does the same thing with 1:1.  Just keep reading that verse again and again and again, and it will all come back to you.  Everything you need to know, just keep reading that sentence.  The message will become clear and complete.  It is the essence of the title, articulated for the entire book.  It’s not just how the gospel begins or even how it is summarized, it’s the language Mark uses, and it’s the specificity of the words.  It begins with simply the beginning.

There is no embellishment.  It is not defensible.  It is the basis for how Mark will write and so it begins just that way:  “Here begins the gospel of Jesus Christ.”  That’s it, one verse.  Close the book and go home. That’s all we need to know, according to Mark.

In the original, just five words to summarize an entire gospel, the good news.    And that Greek word is evangelical that centuries later becomes “gospel.”  In the 9^th and 10^th centuries the English Anglo Saxons re-wrote scripture and this word first becomes godspel (and of course the Broadway musical by the same name) meaning the good news, which takes me to the title “Whose Gospel This Week?”

Whose gospel this week?  Whose proclamation did we get this week?  Whose directive?  Whose announcement?  Whose verbal or literary manifesto?  What were we supposed to learn or know this week from what we read or heard?  Whose gospel this week that attempts to moralize or structure or implore us or persuade our politics or inform us about the environment or even about our own faith? Whose gospel this week beyond Lady Gaga, Lebron James or the post-cold war espionage spy exchange?

I wanted the gulf oil spill and catastrophe to end.  I wanted the war in Afghanistan to end and our troops to come home.  I wanted the New York legislature to act responsibly.  That would have been a week of good news.

But the idea in all of the books I mentioned earlier is not so much about good news but extrapolating experiences from these individuals or companies to give us the sense of what a gospel is in terms of proclaiming their own brand, their success, their egos.  It isn’t so much about tolerance, accepting differences, morals, ethics, the struggle between good and evil, or reconciling the turmoil and conflict among people or countries.  Just a semantic way of putting out information that sounds much more profound when formulated as a gospel rather than a mere story.

Whose gospel this week?  Remember the key word here is evangelion.

Another of the gospel books, “The Gospel according to Disney:  faith, trust and pixie dust”—the author argues that, “Disney’s evangelistic entrepreneurship has produced characters more recognizable around the word than all the images of Jesus and the Buddha.”  Many years ago Billy Graham had a chat with Walt Disney and supposedly complemented him: “Walt, you have a great fantasyland here.”  Walt replied: “You preachers get it all wrong.  This is reality here, out there is fantasy.”

I suppose we preachers do get it wrong Sunday after Sunday?  Imagine standing before you this morning and reading one verse and believing that this is what it is all about.  We probably do get it wrong—a one-verse condensation:  “Here begins the gospel of Jesus Christ.”  Imagine that and believing it is reality:  that one verse can verify, can substantiate all that we have to believe and all we have to declare.  No additional glitz, no more theme development necessary, no extraneous plot material, just Jesus Christ. And it is, if you read the entire gospel, a proclamation of life and death and that amazing Easter event which makes us what we are.  Reading this verse and believing that we can find a better way for you and me to live our lives, with the enriched possibility of God’s amazing grace—could it really be all that simple?  Whose gospel this week?  If it were taken seriously, our church and others would be filled every week, not just holidays or as a convenience.

Here begins the good news; the beginning of the way of how we will adapt to what we know and what we see, what and how we believe;  here begins the evangelization, the good news, the godspel, the gospel of how we will react to whom and what comes at me at times in the day regardless of how others want to trivialize life or behaviors or confuse their priorities or attempt to chastise others when they don’t just measure up to what we think or our own personal kind of satisfactions.  

This verse of five words, of consummate brevity, is the life and the ministry and the death and the resurrection, the totality of Jesus Christ:  “Here begins the gospel of Jesus Christ.”  Not how much we know, but how much we try.  Not how much we give or consume, but how much we care.  Not how successful or smart we are, but how we have grown and how we live.  Not how good we are, but how sacrificial we are.  And our responsibility in practicing and living this first verse is to be purveyors of good news—not cynical or critical or divisive or judgmental or exclusive—but good news that is inviting, welcoming, helpful.

Whose gospel this week?  Not the latest trend or fad.  Too many verbal gospels are boasting of simple or political solutions but none that demands transformation of one’s life.  Don’t you see:  it’s time to separate the gospel of the secular and seductive from the gospel of the sacred.  Separate the gospel of depth and substance from all the other gospels of fluff and spectacle.  However, as this first verse prepares us for this personal Christ-centered drama of immense suffering and a mission that advocates profound change and justice and love, this gospel message becomes one that has to speak to us in such an intimately personal level that from the beginning to the end we become part of the message, part of the ministry, part of the Christ.  If not, if we do not become part of the story.  If we do not become part of the gospel, if we are not motivated beyond just a few verses or an occasional message, then the gospel of Jesus Christ becomes a minimal experience.  However, finding and believing and living this gospel can be different and difficult when we are competing and absorbing a variety of stimuli that bombard us constantly.  And if life is not going the way we think it should, or what benefits us, then this gospel message of good news doesn’t really satisfy, and we will look elsewhere.  Amid all the disruptions and disappointments and uncertainties and failures, among all the senseless and untold suffering, this gospel message still reverberates. It still exists, it still lives, and it still changes lives, and the gospel, regardless of whom or where or when is our connection to the source of our faith:  “Here begins the gospel of Jesus Christ.”  That is the good news.

Whose gospel this week?

One of this country’s best known and respected evangelists is Tony Campolo who also happens to have a PhD in sociology and teaches at Eastern College in Pennsylvania.  Campolo incidentally wrote the foreword for “The Gospel According to the Simpsons” which was published by the Presbyterian publishing house Westminster John Knox and some believe that this book and sales kept the company from going under.

 Anyways, Campolo and in his25 books continues his ubiquitous theme of being an evangelist because that is the message of the gospels—he calls himself a red-letter Christian in following Jesus teachings.  In a recent printing in Context (June), he recalls an event in Haiti when he was there in 1996.  I will read that:  it’s powerful.

“How to be like Jesus?  To become part of the gospel message?  We can’t duplicate the power of Jesus.  We can’t walk on water.  I don’t have the ability to raise the dead.  But we have the opportunity to express the love of Jesus.  When it comes to the bottom line, Jesus was more committed to expressing love than showing off his power.

I was in Haiti and walking to the entrance of my hotel when I was intercepted by three girls.  The oldest was maybe 15.  The one in the middle said, Mister for $10 I’ll do anything you want me to do, all night long. Do you know what I mean?   I did know what she meant.   And I turned to t he next one and asked, what about you?  Can I have you for $10 and she said yes.  I asked the third girl and she just smiled, but it’s hard to look sexy when you’re 15 and hungry.

I said, I’m in this hotel in room 210 and you be up there in 15 minutes.  I have $30 and I’m going to pay for all of you to be with all night.   I rushed up to my room, called the concierge desk and said, I want every Disney video you’ve got here.  I called the restaurant and asked them to make the largest banana splits they could.

The girls arrived and the ice cream and the videos.  We sat on the edge of the bed and watched the videos  and ate ice cream and laughed until about one in the morning and that’s when the last one fell asleep.  As I saw those little girls stretched out asleep on the bed, I thought to myself that tomorrow they will be back on the streets selling their little bodies.   I changed nothing.  I didn’t know enough Creole to tell them about God’s love, but the word of the spirit, the gospel for one night was this:  for one night you can be little girls again.

Now you may be thinking, you’re not going to compare that with Jesus and walking on water.  But if Jesus were to make a decision as to which is the greater work, walking on water, or giving one night of childhood back to three little girls, which do you think Jesus would consider the greater work.”

 And that is the gospel, the good news—and it’s good for any day, any week.  Amen.