O God, you
revealed your Son to all people by the shining light of a star. We pray that you
bless the people of St. Andrew with your gracious presence. May your love be our
inspiration, your wisdom our guide, your truth our light, and your presence our
benediction; through Christ our Lord. AMEN.

This week
President Trump announced his eleven “Fake News Awards.” Eleventh prize went to
“RUSSIA COLLUSION!” He referred to Russian collusion as “perhaps the greatest hoax perpetrated on
the American people.” He emphasized in all capital letters: “THERE IS NO
COLLUSION!”

Until the 2016
presidential election “fake news” was not a commonly used term. “Fake news” has
been defined as “a type of yellow
journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate misinformation or hoaxes
spread via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media.”
It is “written and published with the
intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person, and/or [to]
gain financially or politically.”[1]

President Trump
has taken the use of the term “fake news” to new heights, using it to refer to
stories and news sources with which he disagrees. Some political analysts see
“fake news” as a grave threat to democracy, free debate, and our western
civilization. On the one hand, we have greater access to news sources than ever
before. But on the other hand, the uproar over “fake news” has impacted our
confidence in the news we receive. It has become very difficult to know who we
can trust to inform us.

This is not, of
course, the first time in history disinformation has been used to influence and
control people. The Nazis were notorious for perpetrating the “big lie.” Ancient
Rome at the time
of Jesus was not immune to disinformation campaigns. For example, Eve MacDonald,
a Teaching Fellow in Ancient History at the University of Reading, has argued that “fake news sealed the fate of Antony and Cleopatra.”[2]Jesus was a victim of a disinformation campaign. According to the gospel of
Mark, after Jesus’ arrest, he appeared before the Sanhedrin, the Council of 70
religious leaders. They were “looking for
testimony against Jesus to put him to death, but they found none.”
Nonetheless, “many gave false
testimony against him, and their testimony did not agree.”[3]The highest religious leaders in Israel apparently had no qualms about
playing fast and loose with the truth in order to achieve their
objectives.

Our gospel reading
for today affirms that God sent Jesus into the world first and foremost to
proclaim good news people could place their full trust in. As we read in Mark
1:14, “now after John was arrested, Jesus
came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of
God.” What could be better news than the good news of God? Jesus sums up
this good news in Mark 1:15: “The time is
fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in
the good news.” “Gospel” and “good news” are synonyms. The entire gospel of
Mark unpacks the good news Jesus proclaims in this one verse. A gospel is not a
news report in the typical sense. The purpose of a gospel is to proclaim what
God is up to in Jesus Christ and to call people to follow Jesus— that is, to put
their full trust in him.

What then is so
good about the good news of God? The kingdom of God was Jesus’ central vision of God’s
intention for the world. God tended to be thought of as distant and
inaccessible. Jesus announces that God is very, very near. In fact, the point of
the gospel of Mark is that God is as near as the life and ministry of Jesus.
Jesus also sought to teach that God ruled in a decisively different way than the
kings they had known. A key passage in Mark’s gospel is 10:42–45. James and John
and the other disciples had visions of grandeur about rising to power with
Jesus. But Jesus calls them together and instructs them: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom
they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are
tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become
great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you
must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and
to give his life [as] a ransom for many.” In the kingdom of God one rules by serving, not by
dominating or lording it over others. Jim Wallis has criticized President
Trump’s strongman style of leadership as “a direct contradiction of the Christian
ethic of servant leadership, and the civic ethic of public service.” Wallis
“points to the critical need for humility
as well as checks and balances to restrain our political leaders.”[4]

Because we do not
live under a king in our society, my seminary colleague Paul Neuchterlein
proposes speaking of the culture of God to help us get at what Jesus intended in
speaking of the kingdom of God.[5]

What distinguishes
God’s culture? It is a culture cultivated by the good news of truth. That truth
was embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. There was nothing
fake about Jesus.

It is a culture
cultivated by the good news of peace. Our own culture is so divided, so
partisan. Deep divisions threaten to tear our society apart. In the biblical
understanding “peace” refers not just to the absence of violence, but also to
the well-being of each person and of the whole community. There is no leaving
behind the lowly and marginalized in God’s culture. But sadly we are leaving
many people behind in our culture.

God’s culture is
cultivated by the good news of hope. So many people seem to be struggling with
hopelessness and pessimism. People in the ancient world also struggled with
pessimism. God sent Jesus into the world to instill hope in hopeless
hearts.

God’s culture is
cultivated by the good news of salvation. Salvation is not understood in simply
a spiritual sense in Mark. Jesus engages in a preaching, teaching, and healing
ministry. He is all about the salvation of the whole person— mind, body, heart,
and soul.

Jesus begins his
proclamation with the words “The time is
fulfilled.” This points to another important distinction between God’s
culture and our prevailing culture. We tend to think of time in terms of
chronological time. The Greek term is chronos. Chronos is time measured on our clocks
and calendars. When we focus on chronological time, we tend to live a hurried
and harried life, sacrificing our well-being, the well-being of others, and
indeed the well-being of the Earth community as a whole. The time Jesus refers
to is kairos time. Kairos is the right time, the fitting
time, God’s time. Whenever God and Jesus are present in our lives, the time is
fulfilled—it is kairos
time.

Given that the
time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near, how are we to respond?
“Repent, and believe in the good news,”
says Jesus. Repentance tends to be associated with feeling or expressing
sorrow for our sin. That is certainly an aspect of repentance. But here
repentance has more to do with turning from our life-diminishing ways and our
life-diminishing culture and turning toward God’s life-giving ways and
life-giving culture revealed in Jesus.

It is time to turn
from hate-filled, divisive ways and to turn in love toward God, toward our
neighbor, and toward all God’s creatures. It is time to turn from life governed
by chronological time and turn toward an abundant life governed by kairotic
time.

It is time to turn
from putting our trust in a culture that has betrayed us and turn toward putting
our full trustin God’s culture and
adopting its ways. In other words, it is time to put our full trust in the good
news of Jesus Christ. In the final analysis life really does come down to who we
trust to transform our lives.

Michael Rogness
tells the story of “an alcoholic who
became a Christian and was able, by the grace of God, to quit drinking. His old
drinking buddies made fun of him. One of them asked, `Do you really believe that
Jesus turned water into wine?’ The new Christian thought for a moment and then
replied, `I don’t know whether Jesus turned water into wine— but I do know that,
in my house, he turned beer into furniture.”[6]

I just finished
reading the story of an Austrian farmer during the Nazi period named Franz
Jägerstätter. Franz was married and had three daughters. He also served as the
sexton or custodian for his local Catholic parish. When the Nazis took over
Austria, he was inducted into the
Nazi military. He refused to serve. In effect, he said “No” to Nazi culture and
“Yes” to God’s culture. This simple but thoughtful farmer could see that
everything about the Nazis was fake. He put his trust in the good news of Jesus
Christ. Many tried to talk him out of his radical stand— even his priest and the
judge at his trial. Only his wife stood by him & supported his decision. The
Nazis put him to death, but they could not put to death his life-giving witness
to Jesus and Jesus’ ways in the world. On October 26, 2007, Franz Jägerstätter
was beatified and became a saint. His loyalty to Jesus will be an example for
generations to come.

I want to lift one
more piece of good news in our gospel lesson for today. The first four people
Jesus called to be his disciples were fishermen— that is, ordinary working guys.
In God’s culture everyone counts— there are no second class members. What counts
is following Jesus. When Jesus called Peter, Andrew, James, and John, they
responded immediately and followed him. It is also good to
know that when it came to following Jesus, they did not always get it right. It
can be hard to stay rooted in God’s life-giving culture when we are still living
in a life-diminishing culture.

We too are called
to follow Jesus immediately. The challenge is to discern what it means to follow
Jesus in our time and place. Like the disciples we will not always get it right.
But let us not tarry in leaving behind a culture we cannot trust and putting our
full trust in the good news of God’s culture revealed in Jesus Christ. Be
assured there is nothing fake about this good news; this good news is as real as
it gets.