Random naked guy

Sermon preached at Luther Memorial Church, Lent 2013

Mark 14:43-52
“Immediately, while [Jesus] was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, arrived; and with him there was a crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders. Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, ‘The one I will kiss is the man; arrest him and lead him away under guard.’ So when he came, he went up to him at once and said, ‘Rabbi!’ and kissed him. Then they laid hands on him and arrested him. But one of those who stood near drew his sword and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though I were a bandit? Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not arrest me. But let the scriptures be fulfilled.’ All of them deserted him and fled. 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.”

Any normal preacher would read you this passage from Mark and proceed to tell you about why Judas betrayed Jesus with that kiss or about what Jesus means that the scriptures would be fulfilled. But I’m not much of a normal preacher. I still have too much of a twelve-year-old boy in me, so my eye focuses on that random naked guy at the end of the story, because that’s just plain weird. Mark throws in this one little detail: When Jesus was arrested, there was this fella wearing some kind of toga, and the soldier who had come for Jesus grabbed him, too. But they only grabbed the cloth and he got away scot-free. Naked, but free nonetheless.

There’s been plenty of speculation about why Mark includes the random naked guy in his gospel. The most common answer is that Mark was telling his reader’s something of his own experience: Mark himself was the naked guy, and including this bit in the story was his own confession. He’s telling us that he didn’t cut it when it came time to defend Jesus, and he wants his readers to do better. But I don’t think that explanation cuts it any better, at least not in how Mark wants you to respond. If this random naked guy was the author of the gospel and he’s confessing, it’s not to give you a moral lesson. Instead, it’s to say how the disciples responded to Jesus arrest, crucifixion and death started with him and that it didn’t get better. The random naked guy ran away to save his hide, if not his toga. Then Peter following at a safe distance wound up in the courtyard of the high priest where Jesus was being tried, and when he was confronted about his connection to the criminal inside, he denied ever knowing our Lord. By the time Jesus hung dying on the cross, no one was left. Everyone had turned away, clothed or not. Anyone in the story that you might have expected to stick by Jesus, including the eleven remaining disciples, had closed up the discipleship shop, shuttered their windows and barred their doors. And when Jesus was in his bitterest agony, hoping for some comfort from God, all he got was silence. So his cry was, “Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Everyone ran and hid, but only the random guy at the arrest was naked. He has good company in the Bible. When King David had the Ark of the Covenant brought into Jerusalem, he stripped down to his birthday suit and danced the goofy out of excitement at the presence of the Lord. When Noah finally got to leave the ark with its 40 days of mammal manure and bird guano, he promptly got himself drunk. His sons Ham, Shem and Japheth found him passed out and naked, they did what all good sons in that situation should do: They grabbed a cloak, walked into the tent backwards to avoid seeing anything that would embarrass old dad, and they covered him up. The most important naked folks in the Bible, though, can actually help us understand something about our random naked guy in Mark. Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden. That always poses a problem for illustrators of children’s Bibles, but naked they were and apparently that wasn’t a problem for God. But when our father and mother in the Garden sinned, they came to see their nakedness as a shameful sign of their sin. They made loincloths out of fig leaves and covered themselves, and they hid from God. They couldn’t fess up to what they had done.

If the random naked guy in Mark’s gospel is the writer himself, then he’s doing exactly the opposite of what Adam and Eve did. He’s not afraid to admit what shames him. He’s no better than Judas the betrayer or Peter the denier. He’s the naked guy who runs away. And by telling the truth about his inability to stick with the Lord, he winds up exactly where Jesus wants him, exactly where Jesus has a chance to do something with him, exactly where he can become the recipient of what the Lord has to offer.

In 1518, Martin Luther wrote a little document called The Heidelberg Disputation. It’s one of my favorite things from his pen, so of course I make the students in my class on Luther read it. And every time I teach the course, my students land on one thesis as their favorite. In Thesis 18, Luther says, “It is certain that we must completely despair of ourselves in order to become fit to obtain the grace of Christ.” What he means is this: Christ comes for sinners, not for pious religious people who have their act together. In the gospels, the people who are on the receiving end of his mercy are the down-and-out, the hopeless, the outcast, the lost and the least. It’s the people who have nothing to present to God who actually get the full measure of Jesus’ power and grace. It’s the paralyzed man who had to be carried to Jesus. It’s the woman caught in adultery. It’s a tax collector like Zacchaeus. It’s the Gerasene demoniac. And it’s every last dead person he encounters, from the dead son of the widow of Nain to rotten, stinking Lazarus whose body had lain in a tomb for four days.

Mark seems to offer a first-century version of “What Not to Wear.” In our day, Stacy London and Clinton Kelly on TLC tell contestants how to dress. And Mark in our gospel reading seems to know that if you want what Jesus has to offer, you can’t come to him wearing the wrong thing. And the right thing for your appearance with the Lord is always simply nothing. As the great hymn, Rock of Ages, says, “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling. Naked, come to thee for dress; helpless, look to thee for grace.” If the random naked guy is Mark, then he’s showing his reader more than his physical nakedness. He’s also showing his spiritual state. When you get asked about what you’ve done for the Lord and actually say, “Well. I guess I’ve got nothing,” then you’re at the place where, as Luther said, you can obtain the grace of Christ.

The summer after I graduated from college, I worked on a day camp staff for the Lutheran church camps in South Dakota. One week the six of us had run a camp near the town of Mitchell. We had done the camp for elementary-age kids at a lakeside camp that had been rented from the local Baptist church. On the last day of the camp week after all the parents had picked up their progeny, and after we had spent our last energy cleaning and putting everything back in shape for those Baptists, we six Bible camp counselors decided to do some fat-free swimming, if you know what I mean. The camp was on a secluded bay, and it was supper time, so no one would be out water skiing. The other five thought it was fine to stand with males and females with their backs to each other and leave their suits on the beach. But I thought better of the situation and grabbed an empty plastic milk jug. I waded out to chest-high water and put my swim trunks through the handle of the floating milk jug and kept ‘em handy. Apart from getting ribbed for being such a prude, all was well and good. Well, it was until all the Baptists drove into camp, parked their cars and walked toward the beach for their church potluck picnic. Now my fellow counselors who were certain of their own power and freedom were faced with the real possibility of the summer’s early end. How were they going to get their swimsuits, except to turn to the one whom they mocked for not being cool enough? Now they knew they needed the guy with what came to be known as “The Lucky Jug.” I donned my trunks, walked to the beach, snatched up the swimwear, distributed it to the proper people and the six of us still had a full summer on camp staff.

And that, my friends, is exactly what this season of Lent is about: knowing your nakedness and then relying on the one you mocked and killed to give you the life you thought you’d created yourself. And if it’s essential that we come to Jesus with nothing, absolutely nothing of our own as proof that he should regard us well, no Bible reading, no church attendance, no giving level, and not even any Danish genes, then Jesus promises to give you more. In a few weeks when you hear about his resurrection on Easter Sunday, you will hear about a bundle of cloth left behind in the tomb. The risen Jesus walks out of the tomb with a naked resurrected body, and he leaves his grave clothes behind for you. In fact, the word for the linen cloth the random naked guy left behind is the same word as the one for grave clothes.

In Galatians, Paul says, “For all of you who have been baptized have clothed yourselves in Christ.” When you’re at your wits end, at the end of your rope, and at the end of your life and have no other hope, you have this promise: Christ clothes the naked with his righteousness. Jesus, God in the flesh, wraps himself around your shame. Christ takes on sinners like you and me, and spins such fine garments for them that in the book of Revelation the hosts of heaven look at them and say, “Wow. Who are these people arrayed in white?” The answer is that they’re the ones who were brought low in life, the ones made naked and who knew it, the ones who came to Jesus in their need. Every time we baptize a baby and dress her in a white baptismal gown, it’s announcement that the nakedness of sin has been covered in Christ’s mercy. Every time you see a pastor in a white alb, it’s a proclamation that sinners like Russ and Greg have also put on Christ. And every time you see a coffin draped in a white funeral pall, it’s a promise that even the naked truth of death is covered over in the Lord’s resurrection mercy.

You gotta love that random naked guy who ran from the danger of Jesus’ arrest and, like you and me and sinners everywhere, found himself running right into the Lord’s arms. How else could Mark the naked runner have ever had the courage to tell the story of a God who comes in the flesh, who is abandoned and killed by the very people he’d come to save, and who rose from the dead with a glorious eternal obsession to clothe, claim and forgive sinners? Mark knew what it meant to have his sin covered over, and now so do you. You clean up so nice. Amen.