Mark’s Sermon
by Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
Phil. 4: 4-9
John 15: 1-13
Mark’s sister Sue says that when Mark was about 11, he decided he wanted a desk for his room. He cut a deal with a local furniture store to buy himself a very nice desk for which he’d pay a dollar a week. So far as I know it’s paid off. Anyway, his mom wanted to check his desk drawers to find out what was in them, I suppose for the usual reasons moms do such things; and discovered to her chagrin that even though there was no lock on the drawer, she could not open it! And though she demanded an explanation, or a key, Mark never let her open it. It turned out that Mark had taken a drill, drilled holes on both sides of the drawer from underneath, and stuck nails in either side so it couldn’t be opened.
If you know Mark Scott, you know this story has to be completely true. Mark was brilliant, intelligent, funny, extraordinarily talented, and creative. He also had a tendency, just a slight one, to want to be in control, especially of his personal space. Those of us over the years who would make the mistake of remembering Mark’s birthday—or attempting to visit him when he was at the hospital—you know exactly what I’m talking about. One time several years ago when Mark had checked into physical rehab following a surgery, he did not check in under his own name, but under an alias. Only perhaps five people knew it. If you went there, and asked for “Mickey Mouse,” you’d be sent straight to Mark’s room.
We are today beneficiaries of Mark’s tendency to control things, even from the grave. He planned this entire worship service less than two months ago, arranging our guest musicians and the pieces played and the scriptures themselves. And as I prepped for this service, I was struck by these scriptures, how out of the norm some of them are for a service of witness to the resurrection. It is quite clear to me that Mark is trying to tell us something in these choices. And the trick here is to figure out where Mark hid the nails, so that we can unlock the drawer, and hear what he wanted us to hear.
And I want you to understand something: there is nothing that Mark wants us to hear today that is not of God. Mark Scott lived his life not simply for this church, but to the glory of God. Worship was not about him, not even this service, especially not this service. He wants our focus to be on Christ, on the good news of the resurrection of the dead. Nobody on earth could be better qualified to turn a time of mourning and loss into a powerful statement of what we Christians hold as the core and center of our faith: the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So I think I can say with some certainty that whatever Mark wants to say to us today, is what God wants to say to us today. So listen.
In our Gospel lesson, Jesus is preaching to His disciples as He is about to be arrested, tried, tortured, and executed by His enemies. You’d think it’d be a good time to become a bit self-involved and morose, but no, that’s not how Jesus is at all. He’s more worried about His disciples than He is about Himself. He’s trying to tell them something that it must be almost impossible for them to believe: that they will go on being united to God, that they will go on being united to Jesus, that they will go on being the church, after He is gone. He pointedly tells them how to be His friends after He is gone, and how to be friends to one another, as if He suspects that after he is gone rivalries and divisions and recriminations will tear them apart. He points them to His own example of giving up His life for the sake of others to say, “That’s how you are supposed to live. That’s how you’re supposed to be the church. This is how to be my friends, and friends to one another. Give your lives for one another.”
When I came to interview at St. Stephen nearly eleven years ago, I met Mark in his old apartment on Cantey Street. My first impression of him was, this man is huge. Even seated, that six-foot five frame seemed too big for his little living room with the organ in it. It wasn’t just that he was maybe a tad overweight—it was the tremendous size of his shoulders, which I assume was the result of decades of playing the organ. I remember thinking that if he’d set his mind to being a power-lifter, he’d break world records. (A funny thought to those of us who know how averse Mark was to exercise.) I confess I was intimidated by him. I’d heard he’d been here for thirty years, had worked fifteen years with the legendary Rev. Bill Jablonowski, that he had been the rock of the church and steady hand on the till for the fifteen years since, during interims and various ecclesial storms. I would certainly need Mark’s blessing if I were to be St. Stephen’s pastor; and nothing could be worse than if he decided that he would stand in my way.
Mark immediately put my mind at ease. “I know that because I’ve been here so long, I’ve accumulated a lot of power,” he said. “But I can assure you, I promise you, I don’t want it. I don’t like power, I don’t want to have power. I freely give it up. I want the church to thrive under a new pastor. That’s all I care about.”
And over the next ten years, I learned that was true. Mark had two top priorities: worshiping God and serving St. Stephen Presbyterian Church. All else went to the wayside. Mark made sacrifices–very personal sacrifices– that very few of us would have made for the sake of a place of employment, but that’s because for Mark, St. Stephen wasn’t his job, and you all were not his employers. For Mark, St. Stephen was a city set on a hill, a light shining in the darkness, a witness to Fort Worth and Tarrant County and the world about the glory and majesty and goodness of God. And you, his fellow church members, were his family. You were his friends. He loved you.
When we got word that Mark was dying, I’d just begun a sermon series on the story of Moses in Exodus. Throughout the series I couldn’t help making connections between Mark’s forty years of leadership in the church and Moses’ forty years of leadership of God’s people. Like Moses, Mark was a reluctant leader. He emerged in that role in the wake of Bill Jab’s retirement and the difficult times that followed. Mark became for all intents and purposes the pastor to many of you, the church’s anchor.
Like Moses, Mark has watched one generation pass and another rise in the church. He has seen so many of you grow up in the church, starting from his children’s choirs. I was moved by a picture that Mary Margaret Sapp placed on Facebook of Mark with her twin boys when they were first born. Mark had been there from when Mary Margaret was herself a child in Peggy and Tommy’s arms.
Like Moses, who often argued with God in Person in defense of the people, Mark has been willing to apply all his natural stubbornness and argumentativeness in order to move heaven and earth for the good of this congregation.
There is another way that Mark reminds me of Moses. Moses penetrated the mystery of God, the smoke and the fire and the darkness and the OTHERNESS OF GOD. And that was key to what Mark did for us in worship. He said that it was mystery that worship is all about—about finding what Peter Gomes called the thin place between our world and the world beyond–raising the curtain on the unseen, penetrating that veil, thin as gossamer, that separates humanity from God. There have been times when Mark’s organ playing absolutely transported us to the throne room of God—the mysterious, the unknowable, made somehow near and powerful and as close to us as our very souls.
It is a point of great sadness to me that Mark has died when he did. After years of bad health, Mark had gotten himself into better shape than he’d been in years. He’d lost weight, he’d regained a ton of energy, and best of all, he was excited and hopeful about the church and it’s ministry. Mark saw the church on an upswing. He loved our emphasis on community outreach. He was excited about new ways to involve children and youth in music and worship, and very excited about the possibilities of the new hymnal. He was excited by the new leadership emerging, by newer members who work well with and appreciate the older members of the church. “Good churchmen,” he called them. That’s what the church needed, he thought: good churchmen. And women. Mark would often talk of “good churchmen” as the people who willingly put aside their own interests for the larger good of the church—people who understand that self-sacrifice is at the heart of the Gospel: a value that Mark himself adhered to.
And then, the news of his cancer. And Mark, aware that despite himself, despite his desire not to be held in such an archetypal role, realized that some people might think that the church would suffer when he died, and he wanted to make sure that no one would make that mistake. “The church will go on and do wonderful things without me,” he told me once. “I’m just sorry I won’t be there to see it.”
That, I guess, is the saddest comparison to Moses: that, like Moses, Mark won’t get to see the Promised Land that he hoped for. But also, like Moses, he was thankful, and we can be thankful, that he helped put us on the right path.
This sermon has already spent a lot more time talking about Mark than he would personally like. But you know what? He’s not here to stop me. He’s not here to tell me not to tell you what a wonderful friend he was, what a wonderful colleague and inspiring worship co-leader, how he was really more like my brother, and how grateful I am to have known him.
Mark spent his last couple of months inspiringly upbeat. Oh, not all the time, as those of you who so lovingly cared for him can attest—but still. I asked him once if he wanted me to bring him a keyboard he could play in his bed and he said, “No, that reminds me too much of work. I have other work I need to do now.” His focus was more on the spirituality of the new stage he was in, and discovering God in new ways in the process.
But his focus was also very much on this message that he is sending us through this service today. Christ is the root and vine from which St. Stephen and its ministry find their life, and this branch of the vine, St. Stephen, will continue to bear fruit because of it. The future is bright. This is why Mark also included our reading from Philippians today: “Rejoice in the Lord… Finally beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about those things.” Mark certainly himself took that attitude as he approached death. He told me recently, “I look back on my life with tremendous gratitude. Every day I’ve gotten to get up and go to work at a job I love, with people I love, and feel like I’m making a difference in the world. How many of us can really say that?”
But the future is bright, ultimately, because Jesus Christ is the vine, a vine that remains healthy and vibrant, the vine that is the source of life itself. It is Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, that assure us that Mark is himself now a participant in the heavenly worship of the Lamb on the Throne; he is playing the organ for the wedding of heaven and earth–no “Wedding March,” if you please! Mark doesn’t arrive in the fulness of God’s Kingdom by his own merit, but by the merit of Jesus Christ, who lived for him, died for him, and lived in him in this life, and rose again from the dead so that Mark could live eternally with Him. It is Christ the vine who is the source of our life–as individuals, and as the people of God. Christ the vine is the source of all life, in this world and the next. This mystery—that God’s life is in us and with us, that Jesus Christ is somehow united to us, is the mystery that Mark Scott’s music and worship leadership opened up to us. There is this world, and there is God’s world, and only a veil, thin as gossamer, separates us. By God’s grace, Mark has passed that veil. By God’s grace, so shall we all. Amen.