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NEW SERIES BEGINS IN SEPTEMBER
What kinds of spiritual practices and habits work best for us? How do we keep our faith life fresh? What do we do when things we’ve always done feel like they’re not working? How do we stay plugged in to God’s work in us and our community? This fall we’ll look at spiritual disciplines as our means of survival in an increasingly chaotic world.
Join us every Thursday from September 6 through October 11, as we examine Spiritual Disciplines for Undisciplined Times.

This Week

God Only Knows

Tim: This week our tour of Mark’s Gospel stops at chapter 13.
Shea: Ah yes, “The Little Apocalypse,” Jesus’s end-of-the-world discourse in which he gives the disciples a terrifying snapshot of the alternative to God’s kingdom. He uses the destruction of the Temple—which, by the way, was happening just as Mark was being written—as a means of showing what a world without hope looks like.

Tim: That’s very important to keep in mind, because Mark’s writer is most concerned about his intended readers. We easily forget these texts weren’t written for us, and crises in the original communities often shaped how the stories got told.
Shea: What? All of these doomsday predictions aren’t about 21^st century America? The world isn’t about to end at any minute? Just kidding. It’s very tempting to take Mark 13, or later versions in Matthew and Luke, and hold them up against the daily news, because you can always find a match. Wars and rumors of war? Check. Earthquakes and famine? Check. Tyranny and idolatry? Check. People fleeing for their lives? Check. A lot of folks get obsessed with the future-casting Jesus appears to be doing and trying to crack the code causes them to miss the point.

Tim: But trying to crack the code is fun and exciting!
Shea: I agree, except for one thing. Jesus flat-out says the code can’t be cracked. “Nobody knows when the world will end, not even me,” he says. “Only God knows.” And, actually, I think that’s the main point. God knows. I truly believe Mark’s writer is comforting his community with ideas that get a lot modern American Christians so freaked out.

Tim: Or morbidly excited, because there are spins on this text that make it sound like the Great Escape. I personally know well-meaning believers who are so sure the world will end any minute they have no concern about what’s actually happening around them. And thinking about future generations, what kind of planet will we leave for our children, what kind of place will this be—forget about it. No need to worry about the present or future if the whole thing’s going to blow up!
Shea: But Jesus keeps anchoring his message in the present. “Stay woke,” he says. “Keep your eyes open. Watch God work!” In the middle of complete chaos, with the world coming unglued at every corner, God knows. God is doing something. Mark tells his community, “Yes, our Temple has been destroyed. Still, hang in there. God knows. God is doing something.” We click on the news and find every reason to despair. But I can hear Mark say, “Hang in there. God knows. Jesus is coming—not just at the end of time, but daily, finding us when and where we least expect it.”

Tim: I like that. Jesus is coming, stepping into our chaos and despair, finding us wherever we may be, which is why being ready is so vital. Honestly, I wasn’t very jazzed about this week’s lesson. Now you’ve got me fired up!
Shea: How can you not be? What do we say around Gather? Watch God work. That’s the lesson!

Join us this Thursday at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

Summer is the perfect time for a “walking tour” of Mark’s Gospel. The oldest and shortest of the Gospels, Mark is full of amazing details that capture the life and ministry of Jesus in fascinating ways. Mark’s Jesus is a man on a mission without much patience for folks who can’t keep up. He says exactly what’s on his mind. And the writer tells the Jesus story in an action-packed style overflowing with mysterious touches. Why is there no Christmas chapter? Why is Jesus so tough on the disciples? Why can’t they see who he really is? Why are the women afraid to tell the news of the Risen Christ? And what’s up with that naked man in Gethsemane (among other peculiarities)?
Join us every Thursday from June 7-August 30, as we spend the summer touring Mark’s Gospel. It will be a trip well worth taking!

COMING SOON!

Curtain Call

Shea: Lots of high drama in last week’s study from Mark 11. We had Jesus’s triumphal entry in Jerusalem, the cursing of the fig tree and the cleansing of the temple. After all of that, what do you do for an encore?
Tim: Mark’s brilliance as a writer shines brightest in chapter 12, because he brings back all the villains and gives them a curtain call. Everybody gets a final go at Jesus. What’s fascinating is how Mark does what a Broadway composer would do: he gives them theme songs that reveal what’s really on their minds.

Shea: Okay, I’ll bite. What do you mean?
Tim: The Pharisees and Herodians have been teamed up against Jesus since chapter 3 and, go figure, their last inquiry is all about politics (kind of funny when you think about it). The Sadducees haven’t even appeared in Mark until now. But they show up and, being the intellectual crowd, they ask a convoluted theological question that falls flat. Finally here come the lawyers to take their closing shot. They think they’ve got the ultimate brain-bender for this country rabbi who’s been causing so much trouble. Of course, it’s a legal question: What is the greatest commandment?

Shea: Isn’t it a little late in the Gospel for that?
Tim: So it would seem. The other Gospels weave it into lengthier discourse as part of the fabric of Jesus’s teaching. In Mark’s Gospel, the Great Commandment—love God entirely and your neighbor as yourself—is the very last lesson Rabbi Jesus teaches. Mark writes, “After that, no one dared to ask him any more questions” (Mark 12:34).

Shea: So this week we’re looking at final confrontations with the religionists.
Tim: Exactly. And Mark’s writer isn’t going to let them have the last word.

Shea: That’s why the final lesson is love God, love neighbor, love self.
Tim: What else could it be? But there’s a lovely touch in how Mark records this final interaction, one of those moments when your jaw drops at how elegant this book can be despite it’s rough-and-tumble style.

Shea: Feel like sharing what it is?
Tim: That’s what Thursday is for! See you then!!

Join us this Thursday at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

Summer is the perfect time for a “walking tour” of Mark’s Gospel. The oldest and shortest of the Gospels, Mark is full of amazing details that capture the life and ministry of Jesus in fascinating ways. Mark’s Jesus is a man on a mission without much patience for folks who can’t keep up. He says exactly what’s on his mind. And the writer tells the Jesus story in an action-packed style overflowing with mysterious touches. Why is there no Christmas chapter? Why is Jesus so tough on the disciples? Why can’t they see who he really is? Why are the women afraid to tell the news of the Risen Christ? And what’s up with that naked man in Gethsemane (among other peculiarities)?
Join us every Thursday from June 7-August 30, as we spend the summer touring Mark’s Gospel. It will be a trip well worth taking!

COMING SOON!

Paying Attention to the Sacred

Tim: Lately I’ve been thinking about how easily Mark’s writer commands our attention. He (or she—I love that we’ll never know who wrote this text) gets us so wrapped up in what’s happening we don’t really notice when the story shifts.
Shea: So true. The last section of our study is a great example. Jesus comes down from the Mount of Transfiguration, travels through Galilee, walks south through Judea and ends up in Jericho. When this week’s study opens, he’s within shouting distance of Jerusalem. Now ask me what’s so odd about this.

Tim: I’m game. Tell me.
Shea: Seen any scribes and Pharisees lately? In the early days, up in the northern provinces, it felt like Jesus couldn’t do anything without drawing their criticism. Now he’s down in their ‘hood and they’re nowhere to be found.

Tim: I never thought about that! That might cause the disciples to think they’re out of harm’s way. Taking Jesus’s enemies offstage for a while surely adds to the suspense. We know something’s brewing. Then, when Jesus goes into Jerusalem, it’s clear he’s intent on getting his adversaries’ attention. He’s pushing all the right buttons at the right time.
Shea: And time is really the key here. No other Gospel pays so much attention to time. Mark’s writer is highly attuned to days and seasons and even hours.

Tim: Which is a very Jewish idea.
Shea: Time is sacred in Judaism, because it signifies many things that cannot ever be forgotten.

Tim: Such as?
Shea: Life is a journey through time and the collective memory of the community is bound to time. That makes every moment a gift and every day is a treasure. The Sabbath and the Holy Days place specific demands that unite everyone in time. So here we have Jesus riding into town—staging a very peculiar, highly effective mockery of Roman power—at a very particular moment in the life of nation, when Jerusalem is overrun with visitors and imperial bigwigs. After that, all bets are off.

Tim: This time is going to be different, very different.
Shea: Better believe it. By the time this week is over, nothing will be the same. In the meantime, the text calls us to think more deeply about time, to account for our time, to understand what time really is and what it means. As Christians, we remember this part of the gospel as “Holy Week.” But I think we might want to be a little more attentive to how Mark uses this narrative to turn our attention to time. There’s something there for us, I think.

Join us this Thursday at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

Summer is the perfect time for a “walking tour” of Mark’s Gospel. The oldest and shortest of the Gospels, Mark is full of amazing details that capture the life and ministry of Jesus in fascinating ways. Mark’s Jesus is a man on a mission without much patience for folks who can’t keep up. He says exactly what’s on his mind. And the writer tells the Jesus story in an action-packed style overflowing with mysterious touches. Why is there no Christmas chapter? Why is Jesus so tough on the disciples? Why can’t they see who he really is? Why are the women afraid to tell the news of the Risen Christ? And what’s up with that naked man in Gethsemane (among other peculiarities)?
Join us every Thursday from June 7-August 30, as we spend the summer touring Mark’s Gospel. It will be a trip well worth taking!

COMING SOON!

God’s Vision and Our Vanity

Shea: We’ve come a long way in our study of Mark’s Gospel, from the exciting early days of the Jesus Movement when miracles were happening all the time with the only complaints coming from the religious establishment.
Tim: Of course, we know what’s going on there.

Shea: Jesus is a real threat to them, not only in terms of his popularity. But his theology—his kingdom of God idea—poses a big problem, because God’s kingdom is beyond their control.
Tim: It’s mustard seed logic. The movement is going to take root in unlikely places, spread wherever it wants to go, and in the process it’s upsetting all the order the Pharisees and priests and scribes have worked so hard to create. All their vain attempts at piety and purity are going sideways.

Shea: For starters, Jesus is including everyone: Jews, Gentiles, men, women, adults, children, all religions, clean, unclean—the list goes on and on. What’s more the cancer of Roman imperialism is being contested. Longstanding rules and taboos are getting debunked. Now with Jesus heading for Jerusalem, Mark is building up to the big showdown. And it will not be pretty.
Tim: No, it won’t. So far, Jesus has been able to control the violence. Violent people have found freedom. Violent diseases have been cured. Violent storms have been calmed. Now Jesus informs his followers he will confront a violence so deadly it will put him in the grave. Temporarily, he says. But it will look like death and evil get the upper hand.

Shea: It’s hard for people to understand this, because resurrection is an abstract concept for them. It’s will be tough.
Tim: With the ministry literally going south there are a whole lot of tough questions to struggle with. I like your point last week about the blind man who doesn’t see clearly at first. Very little of what’s going on is clear anymore and the disciples do what many do when they don’t know what’s going on: they jockey for position. They’re looking for security and they can’t find it.

Shea: They say vanity is rooted in insecurity…
Tim: That’s why Jesus starts talking about children. “God’s kingdom belongs to people who are like children,” he says. Young people know how to tap into God’s vision. Experiencing everything for the first time disables their vain impulses. They have the kind of clarity Jesus wants his followers to have—a kind we need, particularly now, when clarity is in very short supply.

Shea: Hopefully we’ll get some this week.
Tim: First we’ll pray, then we’ll prepare, and finally we’ll see!

Join us this Thursday at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

Summer is the perfect time for a “walking tour” of Mark’s Gospel. The oldest and shortest of the Gospels, Mark is full of amazing details that capture the life and ministry of Jesus in fascinating ways. Mark’s Jesus is a man on a mission without much patience for folks who can’t keep up. He says exactly what’s on his mind. And the writer tells the Jesus story in an action-packed style overflowing with mysterious touches. Why is there no Christmas chapter? Why is Jesus so tough on the disciples? Why can’t they see who he really is? Why are the women afraid to tell the news of the Risen Christ? And what’s up with that naked man in Gethsemane (among other peculiarities)?
Join us every Thursday from June 7-August 30, as we spend the summer touring Mark’s Gospel. It will be a trip well worth taking!

COMING SOON!

Leaving the Secure Area

Tim: We’re halfway through our tour of Mark’s Gospel and things are about to get very serious.
Shea: Not that they haven’t always been serious, but you’re right. Up until now Jesus and his crew have focused their energy on the province of Galilee and surrounding Gentile region. Their encounters with religious and political toadies have been minor scuffles. Unlike John the Baptist, who paid for his activism by losing his head, the Jesus Movement has not yet gained the notoriety to put it in the crosshairs. All of that’s about to change.

Tim: Suddenly, it’s as if the light shifts, the music tenses up, and the scenes get longer, more complicated. The reader immediately senses something’s up.
Shea: Yes. Things get bumpy right off the bat. Jesus heals a blind man. But it takes two tries for the man to recover his sight. He also performs this miracle in private, away from the crowd. And he does something else we’ve not seen before. He spits in the man’s eyes!

Tim: That’s another move the Jewish authorities would revile as unclean.
Shea: You better believe it! From there, Jesus begins talking about his death, which puts everyone on edge. Peter rightly identifies Jesus as the Messiah but immediately gets into an argument about whether or not Jesus should risk dying.

Tim: The tension between them is galvanizing.
Shea: Jesus makes it very clear there’s a cost of discipleship. They’re going to pay dearly for this work.

Tim: So why do they stick with it?
Shea: Because they see and experience things no one else has ever witnessed. Take the Transfiguration, for example. There’s no way to explain what happens on that mountain. For centuries theologians have conducted a robust discussion about what it actually means. But, for all that it is and whatever else it might have meant to Peter, James, and John, we have to know it was life changing.

Tim: And timely, because the Transfiguration comes at the turning point, when Jesus focuses his attention on Jerusalem.
Shea: Exactly. The comforts of the provinces are a thing of the past. They’re going into the big city to confront the corrupt religionists of their time. It’s like those signs you see at the airport as you’re leaving the secure area. There’s no turning back now.

Tim: This is so exciting!!

Join us this Thursday at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

Summer is the perfect time for a “walking tour” of Mark’s Gospel. The oldest and shortest of the Gospels, Mark is full of amazing details that capture the life and ministry of Jesus in fascinating ways. Mark’s Jesus is a man on a mission without much patience for folks who can’t keep up. He says exactly what’s on his mind. And the writer tells the Jesus story in an action-packed style overflowing with mysterious touches. Why is there no Christmas chapter? Why is Jesus so tough on the disciples? Why can’t they see who he really is? Why are the women afraid to tell the news of the Risen Christ? And what’s up with that naked man in Gethsemane (among other peculiarities)?
Join us every Thursday from June 7-August 30, as we spend the summer touring Mark’s Gospel. It will be a trip well worth taking!

COMING SOON!

Jesus and the Immigrant Mother

Tim: So we’re reaching the halfway point in our tour of Mark’s Gospel.
Shea: The Gospel moves so fast and draws so many contemporary parallels that our heads are spinning.

Tim: No kidding. The great theologian Karl Barth said you should study faith with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, and our work in Mark has certainly validated that idea.
Shea: The issues Jesus confronted in his time continue to surface in our struggles today: empire, social indifference masked as religious piety, war on the sick and the poor, ethnic struggles and boundary issues, and questions about what defines authentic family.

Tim: Now this week, the timeliness is especially intense as we look at an immigrant mother who challenges Jesus’s xenophobia. That probably makes a lot of people uncomfortable—to think that Jesus had some rough edges that needed attention.
Shea: That’s right. Mark shows us what happens when Jesus encounters a foreign woman whose love for her daughter compels her to risk her own humiliation as she begs Jesus to reconsider his feelings about people who don’t belong to his tribe. She actually teaches Jesus how faith and inclusion are intertwined. “All” means all for her and Jesus learns that from their interaction.

Tim: Wait. Are you saying Jesus doesn’t know it all?
Shea: The idea of a “teachable moment” for Jesus, well, that upsets a whole lot of the perfection we place on him. We talk about Jesus being fully human and fully God. But we don’t allow him to have a fully human experience, which includes getting it wrong sometimes, discovering the full the scope of his ministry, and, as a human, learning what godly compassion is all about. His own people don’t get him. But this Syrophoenician, pagan, foreign mother, she sees all that Jesus can be for her and everyone like her. And it’s she who teaches Jesus in this moment.

Tim: A fully human Jesus, who needs to unlearn some of the prejudices and assumptions his culture has put into him—that’s powerful stuff.
Shea: He calls this desperate woman a dog!

Tim: Why would Mark’s writer include such a story? It’s not Jesus’s finest moment.
Shea: Mark wants to show us we all have some unlearning to do in order to be taught. And to think that we don’t suggests we think we’re better than Jesus.

Tim: Which clearly we’re not.
Shea: This moment is pivotal in Mark’s Gospel, because it comes just before all the attention turns to Jerusalem, where Jesus will confront, and be confronted by, the evils of empire and religious bigotry at their most powerful and blatant. He has some learning to do!

Tim: There’s even more to this story and we’ll unpack it all this coming Thursday night!

Join us this Thursday at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

Summer is the perfect time for a “walking tour” of Mark’s Gospel. The oldest and shortest of the Gospels, Mark is full of amazing details that capture the life and ministry of Jesus in fascinating ways. Mark’s Jesus is a man on a mission without much patience for folks who can’t keep up. He says exactly what’s on his mind. And the writer tells the Jesus story in an action-packed style overflowing with mysterious touches. Why is there no Christmas chapter? Why is Jesus so tough on the disciples? Why can’t they see who he really is? Why are the women afraid to tell the news of the Risen Christ? And what’s up with that naked man in Gethsemane (among other peculiarities)?
Join us every Thursday from June 7-August 30, as we spend the summer touring Mark’s Gospel. It will be a trip well worth taking!

COMING SOON!

Embracing the Whole of Humanity

Shea: This week we’re looking at chapters five and six of Mark’s Gospel and I don’t know how else to say it except Jesus is crushing it.
Tim: The next two weeks give us some of the most famous miracles—feeding thousands of people (not once, but twice), curing a woman who’s been sick for 12 years, reviving a religious leader’s daughter and healing a pagan woman’s daughter, walking on water, and an exorcism that ends with 2000 drowned pigs. It’s all spectacular!
Shea: The earlier issues of clean and unclean, touchable and untouchable, who’s a sinner and who’s not, whether or not Jesus is crazy or possessed—none of the accusations hurled at him are sticking.
Tim: What’s more, we see a new pattern emerge with Jesus and his followers sailing back and forth across Lake Galilee. Mark’s writer cleverly uses geography to bolster the Gospels’ theme: the kingdom of God belongs to everyone.
Shea: When he’s on the west side of the lake, he’s talking to Jewish folks. But when he sails to the eastern shore he’s with Gentiles, folks who don’t worship the God of Israel, who don’t keep the Sabbath, who don’t obey all the clean and unclean rules that have occupied so much of the story up till now.
Tim: Yet the author is very careful to show us that what happens on the “Jewish” side of the lake also happens in the “Gentile” region. The mirroring is brilliant and the message is unmistakable.
Shea: Embracing the whole of humanity is Jesus’s mission. It’s central to God’s reign. And if we look at what he’s doing, the repentance Jesus calls for when he announces the kingdom of God is not a call for exclusivity, rigidity, piety, and other “religious” compulsions that cause so much pain. Jesus’s call is actually the opposite: to become more inclusive, more open-minded, more welcoming, and completely unconcerned about borders and boundaries, labels and locations.
Tim: How timely this lesson is right now! Jesus meets people in all kinds of trouble on both sides of the lake. On both sides, desperate parents whose children are endangered seek him out and Jesus is so moved by their faith he changes his policy to see the families are cared for. That alone should give us pause.
Shea: He also upsets an entire village when helping a deeply troubled man literally puts their pork-based economy under water. Something else we should think about, given our current proclivity to place financial gain over and above care for the neediest among us.
Tim: No amount of discomfort or disapproval can stop Jesus. In his mind, boundaries are for crossing, freedom is for taking, and the good news of the kingdom is for all people. And if we’re going to follow Jesus…
Shea: The road always takes us home, doesn’t it? “All” means ALL. Thursday night is going to be rich!

Join us this Thursday at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

Summer is the perfect time for a “walking tour” of Mark’s Gospel. The oldest and shortest of the Gospels, Mark is full of amazing details that capture the life and ministry of Jesus in fascinating ways. Mark’s Jesus is a man on a mission without much patience for folks who can’t keep up. He says exactly what’s on his mind. And the writer tells the Jesus story in an action-packed style overflowing with mysterious touches. Why is there no Christmas chapter? Why is Jesus so tough on the disciples? Why can’t they see who he really is? Why are the women afraid to tell the news of the Risen Christ? And what’s up with that naked man in Gethsemane (among other peculiarities)?
Join us every Thursday from June 7-August 30, as we spend the summer touring Mark’s Gospel. It will be a trip well worth taking!

Jesus Talks in Parables! 

Tim: Let’s talk about parables this week.
Shea: Ah, yes, Jesus loves to tell parables. What’s the deal with these?
Tim: Well, they’re more than stories or anecdotes. Whereas many people see them as reversals, I think they’re more than that?
Shea: What do you mean?
Tim: Parables don’t simply reverse the social order; they do so while also establishing that reversal as the new norm. In this way, they are a dis-course, that is, meant to set us off one course and on another!
Shea: Interesting. Can we try one? Let’s do the Parable of the Mustard Seed from Mark 4:30-34.
Tim: Of course. Here Jesus is telling a parable about the message of the Kingdom of God (gospel) as the mustard seed. It begins with a tiny seed, but it grows to be large, and, most importantly, it offers shade and refuge for the birds of the air.
Shea: Okay, but it’s a plant, not a tree. It’s certainly not the largest, right?
Tim: Exactly! You can see something is up here. One of the interesting things about mustard plants is they can grow in a weed-like manner. In other words, when the mustard seed is planted, it grows and takes over. For that reason, planting them was *illegal*. So Jesus is intimating how the gospel message will grow (and take over) by using an illegal practice as his example. Others may think that the mustard seed yields a weed, but Jesus sees what it will be: a tree.
Shea: And what about the whole birds/refuge part?
Tim: I’m glad you asked! This is a continuation of the theme in the Hebrew Bible about the limitless reach of God’s kingdom. Like a tree, God’s kingdom gives refuge, shade, sustenance. If we think about how planting mustard seeds was illegal, then we can begin to see what Jesus is getting at. Farmers have an antagonistic relationship with birds; they typically come in and wreak havoc in the garden. Yet, it is the birds of the air that are welcomed to rest in the “shade” this parable. Thus, God’s kingdom is a shelter for those that are normally driven away (i.e., unwelcomed). Here, once again, we find radical inclusivity!
Shea: Wow, all of that packed into this one short parable? What a timely parable for us today…
Tim: Yes. And this is just one of many! We will be talking about another popular parable this week in our study Thursday night.
Shea: I cannot wait!

Join us this Thursday at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

Summer is the perfect time for a “walking tour” of Mark’s Gospel. The oldest and shortest of the Gospels, Mark is full of amazing details that capture the life and ministry of Jesus in fascinating ways. Mark’s Jesus is a man on a mission without much patience for folks who can’t keep up. He says exactly what’s on his mind. And the writer tells the Jesus story in an action-packed style overflowing with mysterious touches. Why is there no Christmas chapter? Why is Jesus so tough on the disciples? Why can’t they see who he really is? Why are the women afraid to tell the news of the Risen Christ? And what’s up with that naked man in Gethsemane (among other peculiarities)?
Join us every Thursday from June 7-August 30, as we spend the summer touring Mark’s Gospel. It will be a trip well worth taking!

The Jesus Crowd

Shea: Big week this week.
Tim: You bet. On Thursday night, we’re digging into the realities of Jesus’s ministry as reported in Mark—what this “kingdom of God” actually looks like, how it works, and why it’s so problematic for people who think they’ve got everything figured out. Then this coming Sunday we join the Chicago Coalition of Welcoming Churches for the 2018 Pride Parade. As always, the Coalition will show up in a big way and it’s going to be a thrilling first step into public ministry for Gather.
Shea: Speaking of public ministry, the Mark passages we’re looking at are all about the Jesus crowd. They also show up in a big way very early on and they make big trouble for Jesus. Why is that? It would seem that Jesus’s ability to draw lots of people would give him some street cred. Everybody loves an overnight success story.
Tim: The problem with the Jesus crowd is that it’s the wrong kind of people. There’s a perfectly good Greek word  for “the people.” But Mark uses a word that actually means “mob.” The original readers immediately got it; he was describing alleged sinners and social outcasts, supposedly unfit people and every imaginable kind of “unclean” person. Yet there they are, crowded around Jesus, becoming his supporting cast while he confronts evil, heals diseases, and challenges the Religious Right of his day. In fact, he shames his critics for questioning why he’s hanging out with this crowd!
Shea: So you think Jesus would have no problem marching in the Pride Parade.
Tim: It’s more like a Pride Parade keeps popping up wherever Jesus goes. These folks aren’t trying to prove anything. They get what Jesus is up to. Sure, some of them are in profound need. And some of them are there for the show. I imagine quite a few show up because they heard a party always breaks out when Jesus is in the house. But Mark never criticizes them the way he dishes the disciples and religious fanatics.
Shea: Why is that?
Tim: Because Jesus makes it very clear that he’s come for them—not to belittle or condemn them, but rather to forgive and embrace them. And he’s okay if that upsets the fanatics. “You don’t put new wine in old bottles,” he says. Jesus never turned down a reason to celebrate.
Shea: And that makes a lot of folks nervous.
Tim: They should be nervous—for lots of reasons we’ll get into this coming Thursday.
Shea: I can’t wait to see where this goes!

Join us this Thursday at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

Summer is the perfect time for a “walking tour” of Mark’s Gospel. The oldest and shortest of the Gospels, Mark is full of amazing details that capture the life and ministry of Jesus in fascinating ways. Mark’s Jesus is a man on a mission without much patience for folks who can’t keep up. He says exactly what’s on his mind. And the writer tells the Jesus story in an action-packed style overflowing with mysterious touches. Why is there no Christmas chapter? Why is Jesus so tough on the disciples? Why can’t they see who he really is? Why are the women afraid to tell the news of the Risen Christ? And what’s up with that naked man in Gethsemane (among other peculiarities)?
Join us every Thursday from June 7-August 30, as we spend the summer touring Mark’s Gospel. It will be a trip well worth taking!