Dear Saints in Santa Fe, and other far-off places,

Greetings in the name of Jesus Christ, of whom Mark wrote about in the first gospel ever, anywhere.

“What in the world am I doing here?”

These words marked my beginning in ministry uttered late at night in a basement of the church I was called to after seminary while trying to get some sleep on a youth room couch, staring at the ceiling and shaking my head, as various high schoolers were running around me and making way too much noise when they should have been asleep hours ago.

My arrival earlier that afternoon, from a divinity school set on a hill in New Haven to a large and prosperous congregation on Chicago’s north shore, was not going as planned, and long dreamed about, as I was immediately greeted by excited staff and breathlessly told the high school youth group work trip would be cancelled if I didn’t fill in and take the place of the youth leader who had bailed, just that afternoon. It starts tonight and you leave with thirty kids tomorrow, along with a few anxious adult volunteers who thought it might be best to bail too.

There I was. Three years of seminary training and gospel visons to an old couch in the basement of a church with super-charged teenagers who would not go to sleep. “What in the world am I doing here?”

Welcome to ministry.

“The Beginning . . .” That’s how the gospel begins, this new genre that added to the Jesus stories that were passed around in letters and by word of mouth. “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

Mark didn’t write these words in a Jeffersonian-style chapel at one end of a tree-lined quad for privileged students from across the world in a relatively safe neighborhood. He was writing for his life, for the life of the world that knew way too much hardship and violence at the hands of the Roman Empire who had finally and brutally ended four years of a Jewish rebellion. Jerusalem and the Temple lay in smoldering ruins. So did life and hope. Shattered. Gone.

This is where the Gospel begins. Where devastation meets promise. Where despair meets hope. It tells the story of a new empire of compassion and love that replaces the present one. Our present one. (It is always about the present one.) Where marginalized and hurting people get the best seat. Where all people (who would God leave out, really?) get an embossed invitation to a dinner party where God makes a banquet feast out of leftovers. Where God opens wide loving arms for children traumatized by war and captivity in Gaza, in Ukraine, on the border, in shelters, in homes of neglect and abuse, and in church basements where youth don’t run around much anymore.

So, this Sunday, we begin again with the start of Advent where we wait with great anticipation for God to do what God does, and be who God has always been: personable, loving, funny, heart-broken, hopeful, and persevering, who amid conflicts, troubles, and trauma (and the angst of a recent seminary grad staring at a church basement ceiling), delights in new beginnings, the world’s and our own.

Grace and peace,

Harry