Transcript
I want to begin a brand new series with you of sermons today. I want to ask you a question though before we start, and that is, when you think of a story or you think of a drama, what is it that makes a drama or a story great? Whether it's a romantic story, like a romantic novel or a romantic story, or a mystery, or a historical adventure or a narrative of historical adventures, what needs to be
present to make a story great? Well, there have to be, as I see it, there have to be at least six elements present to make a story a great story. First, there has to be excitement. So, you need excitement so that your need for adventure is met. A story should be thrilling. If you've read Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain's great novel, you know that, you know exactly what I mean. Whatever else you say about that whimsical novel,
it is downright exciting. Huck and Jim floating down the Mississippi River is just plain exciting. There are rattlesnakes, there are near overturns, near arrests, all kinds of things happen, and it's a very exciting story and it satisfies that criteria. It has sheer excitement. Secondly, a story needs suspense and surprise to really be a great story. Otherwise, you put it down too easily. So, one of the marks of a great story or a great drama is that
you can't put the story down until you find out what happens next. This is what happens in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings novels. Those four novels, starting with The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings, the trilogy, is very hard to put down once you get started because you become involved with Frodo and Sam Ganji and this strange guy Gollum and then Gandalf the Wizard, and you want to find out what happens to all
these things and Tolkien strings you along and carries you along so that you cannot put it down and that's the mark of a great story and that's why that book is read by so many people. Those wonderful Lord of the Rings stories are read because they're suspenseful. There's surprise in them, many surprises. The ring itself, what a surprise in the ring and you can't wait to find out what happens to that dreadful ring. So, that was
what makes a great story. The third element that's needed in a great story is that there needs to be a tragic thread as well, what some people would call the shadow side of a story. There needs to be something in the story that makes us cry, that makes us feel for characters so that we feel for what's going on in their life and we care about them and there's that sense of what might be called the
tragic element in a story. It happens in the Chronicles of Narnia when we meet Eustace in the Voyage of Dawn Treaders when he, who was so beastly in the way he acted to the others and then becomes himself a dragon, becomes beast himself and now is this huge dragon then he feels very gladly about being a dragon and the ship has to move on and go and they have this huge dragon on their hands and they
can't take the dragon with them on the ship. He's bigger than the ship itself. He can't fly. They're going to have to go to future islands and so there's a great sense of sadness and grief and you feel for Eustace who's now a dragon and that's the nice thing about fantasy stories. You can have all these things worked out in great, these great forms and you care and there's a tragic thread here. There's something sad about
it and you're caught up in the story. You care about this shadow thread that's present in the story and then fourthly a great story needs comedy too. It's antiphonal to the tragic thread. There needs to be a comic thread. Remember in ancient Greek drama they always had the two masks side-by-side. The mask of shock and horror, you might say the shadow mask and then the mask of laughter. So there needs also to be comedy.
We need to laugh and the richest comedy is that comedy that happens when we laugh with the characters, not just at them, such as in Derision, but we laugh with them. Again Lewis wonderfully does this in the Chronicles of Narnia in the silver chair with Puddleglum, that wonderful marsh-wiggle, this character that we meet and we laugh with him and we see his character, we meet him and discover all the little qualities of his character that
make us laugh with him and at him and we see ourselves perhaps a little bit too and so it helps us as we laugh and I think also of Huckleberry Finn and the runaways in the scene on the Mississippi River when that terrifying moment comes when a group of men come by in a boat and they say is there a runaway slave on that raft and of course there is. Huck and Jim are there and Jim's
a runaway slave and so Huck thinks quickly and he says to the guys that are coming up closer and closer in their boat he says oh men please help me my paws got smallpox and we need help and the guys say and they all leave and Mark Twain knows human personality and we laugh. It's very very funny scene as Huck pleads for help my paws got smallpox and all the guys leave they don't want to look
for the runaway slave anymore and so Huck then Huck feels guilty for having told that lie but they go on down the river. It's a wonderful whimsical scene from Mark Twain and we laugh because it's really funny and so a great story needs comedy. Also a great story needs characters that we that capture our attention so that we want to know them. We not only cry for characters or laugh with characters or at them but we
need to know them and this is what happens in truly great books. A really great book creates characters we care about. This is what's marvelous about Hamlet Shakespeare in fact Shakespeare's marvelous story there are no throwaway characters in Shakespeare. Every character is worth knowing it's one of the reasons the plays never really grow old. Macbeth you want to know Macbeth he was Abraham Lincoln's favorite character and there's something about Macbeth that makes you grasp even his
wife. All these characters you want to know. It's the greatness of Beckett it's the greatness of Zhivago it's the greatness of all the Russian epic novels Brothers Karamazov in the Brothers Karamazov even the evil father Feodor you want to know him. He's not a throwaway character he's not paper mache you sense the substance and you sense his tragic thread so you want to know them. By the way I'm a great Agatha Christie fan our family has
read virtually all the Agatha Christie's we love to read them when we're on trips and stuff like that and I like Agatha but I want to tell you this is a weakness in the Agatha Christie novels and I can say as an expert now and having read almost all of them that you don't care about hardly any of the characters and they begin to all blur together and as people are knocked off and murdered you be
kind to say well they deserved it or I don't care that much. I'm noticing that now with murder she wrote to the movie or the TV series is sort of built on Agatha Christie character I love a I love Angela Lansbury but you know within about three minutes into that movie you know who's going to get murdered it's always someone who's kind of a grouchy person that you don't care much about and that's because they don't
want you to feel too sad when that person is murdered and then she solves the murder but the characters in the all the Agatha Christie's they all blur together even Hercule Poirot is not that interesting when you get right down to it he's got all kinds of quirks but not too much character as T.S. Eliot's made that comment about the modern characters that has nervous reactions not a conscience and we're watching people with nervous reactions
more than with a conscience but a great story truly great stories have that wonderful sense of character that develops so that you do get involved and even though Zhivago the great novel by Boris Pasternak Zhivago the hero of that novel is a bad man and does bad things yet you care deeply about him because he's also a good man and you feel you know a character and you're drawn into it and of course one of the
greatest of novels Les Miserables wonderfully succeeds at this even Javert who is the in a sense the villain in Les Miserables but Javert is so complex and so deep and it's such a good man with a twist that I was struck and having seen the musical now four times that when the curtain calls occur in that musical Javert himself gets tremendous curtain calls never a hiss from the audience because as bad as Javert is the audience
feels for him because you that's the way Victor Hugo wrote him he's not just a villain that you can dispose of he's a profound human being with a great tragedy in his life and you love him even though you despise what he does that's the mark of a great story the characters you care about finally the sixth mark of a great story is that a great story needs what I'll call importance it needs importance it needs
to teach you something I remember my son's favorite story was Dove the marvelous story of Robin Lee Graham who went around the world as a 14 year old boy and there's so much to learn in that wonderful adventure story it's a true story but terribly exciting terribly suspenseful suspenseful it has its shadow side it has its comic side but you learn something a boy learns about sailing around the world this is the you need to know
something and learn something in Les Miserables do you realize that Victor Hugo spends three chapters explaining the sewer system of Paris because the sewers play such a big part in Les Miserables and so he literally spends three chapters explaining the whole way they were built the way they were designed now if you're interested in engineering you love Les Miserables for that you get an abridged edition those three chapters are top are chopped out don't buy abridged
editions of any book because there's something you may need to know but a great novel will give you things you need to know will teach you things also there's a sense of importance in an even profounder way a great novel a great story whether it's a fantasy story whether it's a true story whether it's a narrative whether it's an adventure story a romance a great story will ask big questions of you will be involve you will
involve me as it we read it so that you and I are pulled into the story and when Eustace the dragon the boy who was beastly and became dragon and then in an amazing encounter with Aslan the great golden lion he is the dragon and he becomes a boy again and we feel for him and we rejoice with him and we feel a sense of importance we feel that we watch salvation happen and we learn something
about what it means to have the dragon stripped off of us and then we become a boy a girl again a person again and we feel a sense of tremendous awe at seeing importance in the midst of that story and that's what grips us I want to read you something by Dorothy Sayers who is a wonderful writer she is the premier translator of Dante and also wrote detective stories herself the Peter whimsy stories and but also
was a Christian writer and she has some things to say that I think are wonderful with in with regard to stories and with regard to our story this is a little piece she wrote called the greatest drama ever staged and here listen to it official Christianity of late years has been having what is known as a bad press we are constantly assured the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine quote dull dogma unquote
as people call it the fact is the precise opposite it is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness the Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man and the dogma is the drama you know the word dogma means the affirmation confession that we affirm the drama is summarized quite clearly in the creeds of and if we think it's dull it is because we have is because either we have never
really read those amazing documents and the document that stands behind those dogmas the New Testament the Old Testament or we have recited them so often and so mechanically as to have lost all sense of their meaning the plot pivots upon a single character and the whole action is the answer to a single central question what do you think of Jesus Christ before we adopt any of the unofficial solutions some of which are indeed exceedingly dull before
we dismiss Christ as a myth an idealist a a liar or a lunatic it will do no harm to find out what the creeds and what the Bible really say about him what do we think about Jesus Christ I love that quotation from Dorothy Sayers the greatest drama ever staged is the drama about Jesus Christ she says that's what's staggering oh I love that she says the drama is if we think it dull it's because we've
either never really read it or we have recited it so mechanically that we've lost all sense of its meaning that's the drama that I want us to spend the next few weeks before between Christmastide and Easter I want to spend the next weeks looking at that great drama the drama about Jesus Christ we're going to find it in the book of Mark I prepared a study guide and there are copies of that study guide by the
way out in the track literature rack as you enter the sanctuary if you did not receive one in my Christmas letter I actually enclosed a study guide in the book of Mark so that you could do your own study in the book in the gospel of Mark during these next weeks but it is a drama that fulfills the six elements of great story and in these next weeks when we look at the gospel of Mark you're
going to see those six elements of a great story the six elements of a truly great adventure you're going to see them for yourself first the drama is exciting the book of Mark is exciting the story of the life of Jesus Christ is exciting we have just seen it in our celebration of Christmas Mark actually begins his account with Jesus Christ as a young adult begins his account with Jesus Christ who as he encounters John the
Baptist his cousin the account that we have witnessed as we have celebrated Christmas was truly exciting the thrilling moment of the shepherds encounter with the angels of the wise men that came and saw Jesus Christ but we're going to see excitement throughout the whole that's just the tip of the iceberg because we're going to see excitement build throughout this whole narrative Jesus is going to heal people Jesus is going to walk in the water Jesus is
going to be tempted by the devil Jesus is going to face incredible opposition he's going to come into the city of Jerusalem and the people are going to cry out Rosanna he is going to face death itself in Roman crucifixion and there's going to be a victory over this is excitement and the drama that we're going to that we're going to consider in the book of Mark is exciting also there is profound suspense it satisfies the
need for surprise and suspense with the disciples we're going to wonder about those who oppose Jesus Christ and those who support him and we're going to be surprised that those who support him and we're going to be surprised at those who oppose him and we're going to have many suspenseful moments during this drama as we study the life of Jesus Christ the drama also has its tragic themes its shadows there's a shadow theme throughout the subtle
tragedy of those who do isolate themselves from Jesus Christ the tragedy of Thursday night the tragedy and the shadow theme of betrayal that we're going to see of denial and the mysterious shadow themes present in the in the famous Olivet discourse on the eve of Holy when the eve of Holy Week when our Lord makes predictions about the future we're going to see that shadow theme throughout the story also has comedy and in the gospel of
Mark we're going to sense that wonderful sense of comedy there's a rich comedy there's an incongruous mixture that we're going to see throughout the book of Mark Mark himself seems to be aware of it because many many times he interrupts himself to say immediately Jesus did this immediately he went there there are the sudden shifts and this there's a sense of comedy though there's the there's the comedy of the disciples themselves were chosen and how they're
chosen there is the there's the strange sign on the entry into the city when Jesus sees a fig tree in leaf and it's Mark who tells us it wasn't even the season for figs and he said he wanted a fig from the tree and there was no figs from the tree and he cursed the tree and the next day they saw the tree was withered up and out of that strange scene our Lord makes an amazing
promise about the fact that we can have hope for our lives and we can be healed and it's so incongruous it's a kind of a comic sudden perception of incongruity how could it be and that strange sort of lived-out parable becomes one of the joyous themes in the way Jesus handles it there's also a kind of strange comic thread in Mark 2 when in the garden when our Lord is arrested there's a young lad in
the garden only appears in the book of Mark many scholars think that's Mark's autograph for himself who would be the youngest then of those who witnessed the life of Christ and there's a young lad there and soldiers evidently grabbed for this young man and Mark tells us the young man ran away from them leaving his clothes in their hands and he ran away naked and that's funny there's a sense of humor in that it's almost like
Mark Twain's Jim and Huck on the Mississippi getting away from those that were looking for the runway slave and Mark gives that as his autograph they grabbed for his clothes and the boy wiggles out of the clothes and runs away and they are left with the clothes and that's in Mark's gospel and so there's these there are these comic moments that are in the great story the great drama we're going to read and then the characters
all great stories have characters we care about characters who capture our attention and believe me are we going to meet characters who will capture our attention John the Baptist Peter Peter who's sort of the hero of this novel this great story this drama we're going to meet Peter we're going to meet the other disciples and of course supremely the central character in the gospel of Mark we're going to meet Jesus Christ and finally the drama has
importance it matters what we're going to meet in this gospel matters notice how it starts look at the very opening line the beginning of the gospel that means the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God that sense of importance that is actually the title of the book though it's it's notice is not a sentence with a verb it's a title the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God and then suddenly
a quotation from Isaiah as it is written in Isaiah the prophet behold I send my messenger before my face who will prepare thy way the voice of one crying in the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord make his path straight and now then again John doesn't mark does not waste any time in his narrative John the baptizer that's John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins and
there went out to him all the country of Judea and all the people of Jerusalem and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan confessing their sins now notice again the things that mark notices mark notices things that a young person would notice he's very interested in the way John the Baptist dressed now John was clothed with camel's hair had a leather girdle around his waist he ate locusts and wild honey this is again a
mark of a of a youthful interpreter he's very interested in what John wore and what he ate and the fact that he ate strange things and wore strange clothes and he preached saying after me comes one who's mightier than I the thong whose sandals I'm not worthy to stoop down and untie I baptized you with water he will baptize with the Holy Spirit and after those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by
John in the Jordan and when he came up out of the water immediately he saw the heavens open the Spirit descended upon him like a dove and a voice from heaven thou art my beloved son with thee I am well pleased did you sense that importance in the opening of this gospel of John at the gospel of Mark it's a very important thing it's the good news and it matters because it has to do with us
it has to do with how we can be forgiven how we can be made whole and we're going to be the next weeks seeing that narrative uncovered several years ago a British Shakespearean actor Alec McQuinn came to New York and put on a one-man show called the gospel of Mark he stood in a stage empty in fact he won one of the awards that year for his performance and performance laughs for several years in Broadway
and he came and as a Shakespearean actor stood in a stage with no props at all and recited well he had one stool and then recited the gospel of Mark without any comment whatsoever from the King James version and that was his show it was called the gospel of Mark it was a very big success on Broadway and then several actors have done that around the United States maybe you've seen that performance he simply stood and
narrated the gospel of Mark but he did it brilliantly I remember reading in the New Yorker magazine you know how they have the personality profile from New Yorker magazine they did a personality profile of that actor and I remember the interviewer at one point interviewing this Shakespearean actor and said to him Alec it looks almost you're so impressed with this account and then the at one point the narrative the interviewer said are you yourself a Christian
are you a believer and I was very intrigued by his answer he said well I don't know I mean he was an actor and he did he said I don't know if I am a Christian he said I would be flattered if people thought I was and I thought that was an interesting very honest answer but then he made one more statement that was really marvellous he said I would be flattered if they thought I was
but he said I'll tell you one thing I'm an actor and an actor knows how to read scripts and you have you begin to develop a kind of honing device to tell false scripts from true scripts and I've done the gospel of Mark now for about two years and I'll tell you one thing as an actor the story is true I don't know if I believe it I'd be honored if you thought I was a Christian
because I don't know if I really believe it but I'll tell you this story is true because I'm an actor and I can spot a I was grateful for that that's the book we're going to look at there's not a false line in it and Dorothy Sayers says if it's dull maybe it's because we haven't read it and if the church is dull it's not dull because it has read the gospel of Mark it may be
dull because it hasn't read the gospel of Mark but I'm inviting you to join with me and study the book of Mark and see the Jesus Christ we're going to meet and I'll tell you what you're going to discover you're going to discover a very exciting story an exciting story that our generation needs today we're at a very important time in history have you thought of how critical our time in history is right now we have
been through a really amazing year of upheaval it's an odd year because America right now should be so happy when it thinks of what has been achieved in this year for the sake of world peace and yet there is a strange sense in which America is going through what some interpreters think maybe as a kind of a postpartum depression in a way we are kind of blue America maybe now we're coming out of it but there
was a kind of blueness in November and December in America yet in a way maybe blue because the Cold War is over and we don't have any great locatable thing to be afraid of and yet there's a such an amazing thing has happened the Soviet Union is now a whole new country where the Christian Church is totally free to share its faith and the people of the Soviet Union are looking back to their great church it's
interesting that President Gorbachev chose Christmas Eve as the time to make his announcement to conclude his whole his whole tenure and the end of the USSR in the forming of a new of a new era this the the whole country of Mexico south of us which since 1917 hasn't even recognized the existence of the Christian Church has now decided to exit to recognize the existence of the Christian Church in Mexico and a whole new era is
open to the churches people are looking to us in a whole new way and they want to know we believe the thing I worried about in the world today is the resurgence of a kind of tribalism like we're seeing that's destroying Yugoslavia where they can rest their feet and find a story true enough substantive enough exciting enough suspenseful enough with enough of the honest look at the tragic thread with a comic thread and with a sense
of that you can build your life on and that's what we've got. Heavenly Father thank you for the book of Mark thank you for the Lord of the book of Mark Jesus Christ our Lord and Lord as we now look in these next weeks and months between now and Easter as we try to understand the life of Jesus Christ as the foundation underneath all our hope Lord help us to discover this great drama to realize it's
not a boring page in it it captures our imagination as it captures our heart and Lord bless us as we seek to make it our own through Jesus Christ our Lord we pray amen