Preaching Mark S Gospel

The earliest of the four Gospels, the book portrays Jesus as an enigmatic figure, struggling with enemies, his inner and external demons, and with his devoted but disconcerted disciples. Unlike other gospels, his parables are obscure, to be explained secretly to his followers. With an introduction by Nick Cave

What Christian would not want to hear Mark's gospel as the first believers heard it? Using the tools of modern scholarship, Peter's Last Sermon takes seriously Mark's audience. The community would have heard rather than read the gospel. It would have encountered the story as a whole instead of piecemeal in short texts for sermons. Missing would have been the static of Matthew, Luke, and John. As for the speaker? While most modern scholars table the question of authorship, the post-apostolic writers of the second and third centuries claim with one voice that (though penned by Mark) the gospel actually went back to Peter. So to hear the gospel as did those early Christians was to hear it as if coming from him. Does it make a difference to our understanding of Mark's message if from Peter? Yes. And the result is surprising. Peter's Last Sermon takes us on a journey through Roman and Jewish texts to meet the Jesus not of the modern Church but of Peter's proclamation in Rome. Nero's persecution had left the community in crisis. What was Peter's message for his time? Christ was different from expected, he said, but how? James Dawsey shows that Christ broke the messianic expectations of his Galilean followers and the Jerusalem religious elite of his day. And as the reader of Peter's Last Sermon will see, he surprised Mark's hearers a generation later. The Gospel of Mark still confronts us in new ways

In this engaging treatment of the Gospel of Mark, Dawn Ottoni Wilhelm combines biblical scholarship with a close reading of the Gospel text to meet the needs of preachers today. Swift and purposeful, the Gospel of Mark proclaims God's reign and urges the participation of all God's people in the witness of the good news that God has transformed human reality through Jesus Christ. This insightful commentary helps that message come alive while providing pertinent suggestions about how preachers can proclaim this message to today's churchgoers.

In a classic case of failing to see the forest for the trees, Jensen, a homiletics professor and author of two works on narrative preaching, says that preachers tend to analyze biblical books to glean the slightest bits of exegetical data, yet miss the thrust of the overarching story they try to convey. Jensen contends that preachers get too caught up in an analytical, left-brained mentality that obscures the power and meaning of the good news story. In these pages Jensen helps us approach Mark's gospel with eyes wide open rather than with microscope in hand. He treats Mark's gospel as a narrative whole and challenges preachers to tell the gospel's story to their congregations. In doing so, Jensen emphasizes the strength of biblical stories. He says that these stories are powerful in and of themselves and that they work without much explanatory help. The problem is that listeners never hear the entire story because it's always told to them in bits and pieces. Jensen's adaptation of what Robert Alter (author of The Art of Biblical Narrative) calls narrative analogy assumes that "... parallel acts or situations are used to comment on each other in biblical narrative." In other words, if Mark told story "B" to flesh out the reality of story "A," then perhaps preachers today can do the same thing in their preaching. Students of Jensen have enthusiastically embraced this approach: "This is great, we never get to hear them (stories) whole " How did it ever occur to us that we could improve on the story of the Prodigal Son, for example, by reducing it to ideas? Richard A. Jensen teaches homiletics at Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa, and Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He is best known for his ten-year stint as preacher for the national radio program Lutheran Vespers. He has also produced a television series titled Reflections and one titled Rhapsody.

An expert guide from Galillee to JerusalemThis new resource examines the major literary units of Mark's Gospel with an eye toward helping the pastor in sermon preparation. Rather than major themes, Thurston guides the reader through the lectionary readings and how Mark's work offers a wealth of materials for Christian life and reflection.

Written by an L. A. County homicide detective and former atheist, Cold-Case Christianity examines the claims of the New Testament using the skills and strategies of a hard-to-convince criminal investigator. Christianity could be defined as a “cold case”: it makes a claim about an event from the distant past for which there is little forensic evidence. In Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace uses his nationally recognized skills as a homicide detective to look at the evidence and eyewitnesses behind Christian beliefs. Including gripping stories from his career and the visual techniques he developed in the courtroom, Wallace uses illustration to examine the powerful evidence that validates the claims of Christianity. A unique apologetic that speaks to readers’ intense interest in detective stories, Cold-Case Christianity inspires readers to have confidence in Christ as it prepares them to articulate the case for Christianity.

Brian Blount and Gary Charles team up to introduce us anew to Mark's Gospel. Reinterpreting Mark through sermons preached out of very different socio-cultural contexts, Blount draws parallels between Mark's message and the African American church's heritage of slavery and oppression while Charles wrestles with making the Gospel relevant to well-educated white suburbanites. Each chapter begins with an exegetical study and sermon by one author. Then, the other preacher responds from his own context, offering a different view of the text.