September 21, 2025
• Dr. Rev. Rob Fuquay
St. Luke’s UMC
September 21, 2025
Heroes of Hope
Self-Hope
Acts 15:36-39; Colossians 4:10; 2 Timothy 4:11
The first week of this series I opened with a football analogy and that afternoon the Colts won their first season opener in 12 years. Then last week, I opened with another football illustration, and that afternoon the Colts pulled out a game and for the first time in 16 years are 2-0. This week people have said things like, “You better have a football illustration this Sunday or else!”
So here you go. Shaquem Griffin helped lead the University of Central Florida to a perfect season in 2018 and then was drafted by the Seattle Seahawks in the 5th round. He played four seasons before retiring from football in 2022. That’s impressive but not necessarily a remarkable career. What stands out about Shaquem Griffin? He has no right hand. When he was four years old he had to have his hand amputated because of a condition at birth. He learned to play with one hand. He credits his father who never let him use being one-handed as an excuse for not thinking he could excel in life, even in football. He taught him to believe in himself.
Or how about Derik Smith. As a kid he dreamed of playing college football, but then found out he had a cancerous tumor in his right leg and had to have part of it amputated when was 9. In the aftermath, he regretted the decision. He asked his mom if he could reverse it and get his leg back…
Guess what the name of the college is he played for? Hope College, of course.
Emily Dickinson wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” Often the hope that inspires us to soar comes from someone who loves us, maybe a family member, someone who won’t let us quit on ourselves.
In the first two weeks of this series we considered biblical stories of hope that involved national crises. Jeremiah facing the doom of Babylon’s invasion yet buying land at ground zero to say people will prosper there again. Then, last week, we looked at the next chapter in Israel’s history, the dispersed Jews who lived in Persia after they conquered Babylon. An evil ruler attempted a genocide against the Jews and would have succeeded had it not been for the queen, a Jewish woman named Esther, who acted courageously because her uncle said, “Who knows that you are in your position for such a time as this.”
Today, we turn inward. Sometimes the crisis we face isn’t on the news, it’s personal. It’s the hope we need to keep going, to not give up, and so today we consider the story of a character in the New Testament named John Mark and how his life was changed by hope and how that hope came through a family member who would not let him quit on himself.
Let us pray…
The story of John Mark is the story of the first victim of church hurt. It is the story of a person wounded by a church leader, but it is not just a victim story. It is the story of someone who persevered and did not lose faith and went on to be an advocate of hope.
In the early days of the church, in the Book of Acts, when people were coming to faith, the believers met in the home of a woman named Mary, who had a son named John Mark. This home was the location of the first church. There is a Syrian Orthodox Church in the old city of Jerusalem today that claims to be this location. I visited there several years ago. The priest gave me a tour and led me to the basement below the sanctuary to what is believed to be the remains of the home of Mary. I imagined people crammed into this room listening to one of the apostles tell the stories of Jesus by candlelight.
I pictured John Mark, a young boy sitting there. What he must have felt. Being inspired by the faith of these adults, sharing their personal encounters with Jesus, telling what Jesus did, telling stories of how the Holy Spirit was using them to carry on His work. How John Mark must have soaked up the energy and excitement of that place.
Do you have such a place in your spiritual history?...
John Mark must have been inspired by his early church experience, because when his cousin Barnabas came through Jerusalem with the Apostle Paul, they took him with them to Antioch where the Christian faith was exploding. Antioch is where the term Christian was first used. It was there that Barnabas and Paul were sent by the church to carry the faith the other lands, and they took John Mark with them…until we read, “Paul and those with him sailed from Paphos and came to Perga, in Pamphylia. There John Mark left them to return to Jerusalem.” (Acts 13:13, NCV)
John Mark left them mid-journey. We don’t know why. Some commentators speculate that he got sick. Others say he got home-sick. After all, he was still young. But I wonder if it was something else.
Paul was a very driven personality. Remember, before he became Christian, he oversaw the stoning of the Christ-follower named Stephen. Paul was ambitious and people-skills were not his sweet spot. God instantly changed Paul’s direction when he became a believer in Christ, but that didn’t immediately change his temperament. We will see in a moment the impact of Paul’s anger and stubbornness.
So you wonder, did John Mark chafe under Paul’s supervision? Could Paul have been so demanding and impatient with John Mark’s youth, that he pushed him too hard? That John Mark couldn’t take it anymore and bailed and went home? Could John Mark have been the first person wounded by the church?
Is it really that hard to imagine? Can you relate to a time in your life when you were inspired by the church? You came to faith; the power of community surrounding you was life-saving; you felt you would explode with joy and wanted nothing more than for people to share the feelings you felt! But then, the very source of that joy became the source of your disappointment. An over-bearing leader, an abusive volunteer, a person who violated your trust, an obstinate group of leaders, robbed your hope, made you want to bail, and flee to a home that did not include church.
Zach Lambert is a pastor and author of Better Ways to Read the Bible. In it he shares how during seminary he went to work at a mega church in Texas. He learned after arriving that this church had sanctions against women being in leadership, and unwritten rules for people of color. LGBTQ+ people were not even allowed to be members. He writes, “Pretty soon my disillusion with the Bible spread to my role at the church as I watched our pastoral staff weaponize the scriptures in ways that lent spiritual authority to prejudice, partisan politics, and oppression.”
He goes on to describe a foreboding experience on his first day on staff. The executive pastor took him of a tour of the 140-acre campus. As they stood in the balcony of the worship center that could seat 7500 people he said,
“Zach, you have three things in your life right now: your wife, seminary, and this church. You simply won’t have enough time and energy to give all three of them what they need from you. You’re going to have to cheat one of them.’ Then he gave me such an intense look that his face forever burned in my memory, and he said, ‘Zach, I don’t care which one you cheat, but do not cheat this church.” (pp22-23)
The pastor no longer works in that church or denomination. He went on to serve a different church that became a United Methodist congregation!
But do you have your own experience of disillusionment? Of being wounded by power in the church? Is it hard to imagine that this could have happened to John Mark?
We don’t know for sure why John Mark left Paul and Barnabas mid-journey, but we do know how Paul felt about it. When he and Barnabas returned to Antioch, they made plans to go on a second journey, one that would take them even further. Barnabas wanted to take John Mark , “But Paul decided not to take with them one who had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not accompanied them in the work.” (Acts 15:38) And here is where we see the power of Paul’s personality. He got into such an argument with Barnabas that they parted ways and as far as we know they never spoke again.
That’s especially sad when you consider Barnabas was responsible for Paul becoming an apostle. It seems like such a sad end, but as we learned in the first week of this series, hope always gives us new life.
Barnabas took John Mark and they conducted their own missionary journey. Paul took Silas and went another direction. Now fast forward about a decade. Paul wrote to the Colossians and made this curious mention,
“Aristarchus my fellow prisoner greets you, as does Mark the cousin of Barnabas, concerning whom you have received instructions; if he comes to you, welcome him.” (Col.4:10) What? Paul is asking them to welcome someone he didn’t even want around? It gets even better. A few years after that, when Paul was in prison and would not be free again, he wrote Timothy, “Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is useful to me in ministry.” (2 Ti. 4:11)
Now how did we get there? How did we get from Paul being willing to separate from Barnabas, to whom he owed his entire ministry, because of the failure of his cousin, John Mark, to Paul saying “he is useful to me?” In a time when Paul was imprisoned, when he was probably discouraged, he wanted John Mark around? How did we get there?
Here's the truth, we have no idea. But we can hypothesize. We can imagine that Barnabas took his cousin at a very low moment, when he was no doubt discouraged and perhaps disillusioned, and Barnabas poured into John Mark. He let him know he was not a failure. That the cause they were serving gets clouded sometimes by people’s behavior, by human sin, that we’re all broken and need mending. And Christ is bigger than any of the things that get in his way. That’s why they are there, to share that Christ brings hope to a broken world, but he brings that hope through broken people. So we keep going and don’t give up, and that includes giving up on ourselves. We’re all broken vessels, but God never gives up on us.
I believe that’s the story of what happened, not because I can prove it’s true, but because I believe that story is true. I believe that when the church gets it right, it has a great story to tell.
Remember the little gesture and rhyme you might have learned as a child? Here is the church and here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people. Did you learn that as a child? Its such a great reminder. The church is the people. It’s not an institution. At least its not meant to be. Its people. People are the church. And people mess up. People get it wrong sometimes. But people can also get it right, and its through people that God brings hope.
When the church gets beyond politics and power and control and remembers that the church is the people, all people, and that we all for just folks looking for hope, then we have a good story to tell.
Do you know that story?
The other day I sat down with Pastor Jevon to talk about his story, or at least an important part of it.
The hope we have to offer is big, yes. It speaks to the challenges of our world and what’s happening in it, yes. But at the same time it is a personal hope. It is a hope for our own lives that God cares about each of us and wants to use to share hope with others. We have to know that. We have to believe it. And when we so our story gets better and we then we have a great story to tell.
That’s what John Mark did, you know. He’s lasting legacy was the story he told. He wrote the first Gospel, the Gospel of Mark. It is believed this became a source document that both Matthew and Luke used to write their gospels….
“A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.” (Mark 14:51-52)