Do you ever wonder how the world is going to end?  Do you ever wonder when?  Do you ever look at society or the government or the environment and wonder just how long it can all keep going?  Right now, California’s burning—in the off season.  Small town coastal Texas is still recovering from Harvey’s landfall last year—not to mention poor Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria.  The local weather can’t make up its mind if it wants to be hot or cold or wet or dry.  The recent midterm elections were supposed to be a blue wave but instead…turned into a red tide?…or was that a rainbow ripple?

This weekend a group of people from my field placement, Good Shepherd on the Hill, are participating in a walk to support the Austin branch of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.  NAMI provides support and education both for people who have a mental illness and for those families trying to survive life with a mentally ill member.  People like me, and families like mine.  Because as much as I sometimes feel perfectly normal, as much as I want to wish it away, every day I swallow a small regimen of reminders that I’m not okay.  Innocuous-looking medicine—just 142 milligrams of dust—keeps my own brain from trying to kill me.

I am not often a socially perceptive person.  I can find the patterns and structures in writing and numbers pretty easily, but when it comes to interacting with another person, to understand how someone else is feeling (especially why they’re feeling a certain way), I feel completely lost.  For those times I get it right, it’s either blind luck or truly a work of God.  So when Shannon and I were starting to date, my friend’s wife, Lisa, must have been either highly amused or highly annoyed by my constant stream of questions. 

…how a person introduces him- or herself is extremely important, revealing the core essence of their character and being in their opening actions and statements.  And Jesus’ first words in the Gospel of Mark, and therefore his oldest recorded words in the Bible, are, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”  It’s a simple statement, one that’s easy for us to skip over.  But as the first revelation of Jesus’ message, I’d like to take some time reflecting on it this morning.

 “Where are you from?”

It’s a common question, one of the first we ask people when meeting them.  Maybe we’ve visited their area and can strike up a conversation about our own experiences and impressions.  Maybe it’s somewhere we’re hoping to go, and we want to get some inside information on what to do once we’re there.  Maybe it’s somewhere new to us, and we have a ton of questions: “What’s the weather like?  What kinds of food do you eat?  What do people do for fun?”  Learning about a place helps us understand just a little bit more about the person and how they relate to their home.  Plus, it’s pretty a safe question—everybody’s from somewhere.

After reading today’s Gospel passage, I had grand ideas for a sermon about selfishness and how God would like us to rejoice when good things happen to other people.  The parable of the generous gentleman seems like a perfect setting for that, and it’s a message I often need to hear.  At some point in the future, I probably will preach that sermon.  But this week, once I opened my Bible to start studying our passage, something else struck my eye and started digging in my brain: the verse immediately before today’s Gospel used almost the exact same phrasing as the one at the end of our reading.