Dear Synod,
It may feel a bit early, especially for you preachers and worship planners reading this, for me to be writing about the Year of Mark, which begins Dec. 3, the First Sunday of Advent. I assume I will want to use my next column to write about the trip to our companion synod in Tanzania. So, onto Mark.
Fun fact, we are in the middle of a three-year term in which the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) and Narrative Lectionary share the same gospel. For a great review of the RCL or just the Year of Mark, I highly recommend Gail Ramshaw’s concise A Three-Year Banquet: The Lectionary for the Assembly.
In addition to my own reading of the gospel, which I occasionally need to remind myself is important to both me and those in the assembly to whom I am preaching, I have leaned heavily on two commentaries: the Augsburg Commentary Mark by Don Juel, one of Brian Blount’s early readers of this commentary, and Ched Myers’ Binding the Strong Man.
When I visited the North Central Washington Cluster this summer, I stayed with Rev. Dr. Barbara Rossing and her husband Lauren. I asked Rossing what Mark commentary she might lift up for the synod and she pulled out Brian Blount’s 2014 Go Preach! Mark’s Kingdom Message and the Black Church Today. Like Rossing, I believe this commentary has much to offer our synod today. From the introduction, “It was as though in his preaching Jesus opened up a present pocket of future power that resisted and overwhelmed the boundaries separating Jews from each other and Jews from Gentiles. In Mark’s narrative story, then, Jesus’ preaching was the future kingdom exploding transformatively into the present moment.”
It is so easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless today, but I trust that all of you have had an experience where you experienced one of these pockets. As we prepare for the Year of Mark (which will also include a lot of John—more on that later), consider how you will bring to our context the pockets Jesus points to, Mark writes of, and Blount interprets, as disciples of Jesus today. Who is your favorite Mark scholar? (Kudos to all of you living into the Expanded Advent, which begins Nov. 12.)
Bishop Meggan Manlove