Some time ago, a man went out to his well to get a couple of buckets of water. As he was pulling the first bucketful out of the well, the rope and pulley got kinked, so he climbed up on the edge of the well to straighten things out. Well, one thing led to another, and he lost his balance and went headfirst into the well. By some miracle, his foot got tangled in the rope as he fell into the well, so he found himself hanging upside down with his head only a few inches from the water. He yelled for help and was finally rescued, but during his time down the well, he had an experience of God that changed his life. His experience of God’s grace was so profound that he wanted to share it with everyone he met, so he spent the rest of his life going around the countryside, throwing people down wells.
Most of us have not been down wells, but most of us have had an experience like that. We have an experience of grace—an experience of the presence of God—and it really feels good. So we want to experience it again, and we want other people to have the same experience. Because it is really, really good. So we keep doing whatever it was we were doing when we felt God so strongly with us. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. But we keep doing it and it begins to seem like the only way to experience God’s grace, and we invite other people to do whatever it is that we’ve come to believe is the road into grace. Then when the experiences of grace get fewer and farther between, we may begin to wonder what we’re doing wrong. We may start looking for deeper wells and for more people to throw down them. Or we may decide that those moments are gone forever. Or we may come to realize that what we were doing when we felt that powerful experience was exactly that: what we happened to be doing, not the key to the experience. But if our actions aren’t the key, what is?
That’s where our patron saint comes into the story. Today we celebrate our patronal feast — the feast of St. Mark, for whom our church is named. This would be a really good day to tell you all about Mark, the writer of the earliest gospel. I’d like to tell you a few snippets about his life, his ministry, his theology, his understanding of the Good News. I really would. Unfortunately, as I’ve said every year, we really don’t know very much about any of those things. We don’t really even know who this man Mark was. Tradition leaves us with a blurry picture of a man whom we can’t identify. So why do we call Mark a saint? Why do we honor him? Why is he important to us?
Perhaps Mark is important to us because he shows us the key. By the time Mark wrote, people had been preaching Jesus as the Christ for several decades. If we had only the letters written by Paul, written before Mark’s gospel, we would have a clear picture of the way God has acted in the world through Christ, but we would have no picture of Jesus himself or of his life.
Mark paints that picture for us, and the portrait begins with the first words he writes:
“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God.”
Mark helps us know the man who refused to show off his power to prove himself, a man who would certainly have refused to do snake-handling or poison-drinking tricks to point to his connection with God. Mark shows us the pattern of grace-filled life that Jesus gives us. Mark records Jesus’ commandment to love God and our neighbor. Throughout the gospel legacy Mark gives us, we see the picture of a man who never stopped speaking and teaching and living the good news of God’s grace he was sent to give us. Mark shows us a man who lives in awareness of grace.
And the good news, my friends, is that grace is still with us. It surrounds us and it’s always in us. You heard me correctly. Grace is always in us. Whether we’re living in grace is another matter. It’s our choice whether to live in or out of the grace. We’re in grace when our faces are turned to God. We’re in grace when we feel the presence of God. We’re in grace when we know how we are blessed. It’s not always easy to know when we’re out of the grace. Sometimes we figure it out as soon as we’ve said the words we regret or realize we’ve made a choice to live outside our baptismal covenant. Sometimes we don’t know we’re out—we don’t know we’ve stopped paying attention to the grace that surrounds us—until the Holy Spirit breaks into our lives in a way that leaves us breathless with the nearness of God.
Mark helps us by giving us a key—by showing us how to pay right-now, immediate, in this very moment attention to God’s presence. He shows us how—and God calls us to show others.
Each of us shares Mark’s ministry of evangelism, the ministry of telling the good news to the people we meet. Telling the good news does not mean we are called to convince or coerce or change anyone. Telling the good news doesn’t mean managing or manipulating people into the way we believe they should live their lives. What it means is that we are each called to tell others how God’s grace brings new life to our lives every day. And that means that we are called to know how grace changes our own lives. And that means we have to give it a little thought.
So as we celebrate the gift of this St. Mark’s community, I invite you to ask yourself some questions: What is the Good News in your life? How do you experience God’s grace in our community? With whom do you want to share the Good News?