A Reading from the Acts of the Apostles.

Then after completing their mission Barnabas and Saul returned to Jerusalem and brought with them John, whose other name was Mark. Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the ruler, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off. (Acts 12:25-13:3)

Here ends the Reading.

I laughed out loud while reading Morning Prayer on Tuesday morning, as I sat in bed with a cup of coffee. Tuesday was the Feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist, a great and prominent saint: the author of one of the four Gospels; the patron saint of the Egyptian Christian heartland of Alexandria and of the great city of Venice, home of the Basilica di San Marco itself; a man whose name graces five Episcopal churches in this diocese alone. And this was the sum total of the text mentioning Mark in the New Testament reading appointed for the morning: “Barnabas and Saul returned to Jerusalem and brought with them John, whose other name was Mark.” (Acts 12:25) The rest of the story barely mentions him; when the Holy Spirit speaks to congregations gathered in Jerusalem, it is to say, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul.” Poor Mark is left behind.

It’s not that this reading was chosen poorly for a day meant to celebrate St Mark. In the New Testament, the figure of “Mark” or “John Mark” barely appears. He’s mentioned in passing on occasion in the Acts of the Apostles or in the letters of Paul. Mark (the same Mark? another one?) also appears in the First Letter of Peter, where Peter calls him “my son Mark.” But these men named Mark never speak a word. They undertake no heroic acts. They’re not commended for their great faith. They’re listed in passing, and otherwise passed by. Even the Gospel of Mark itself doesn’t contain the name “Mark.” Its text identifies no author; while ancient manuscripts circulated with the title, “According to Mark,” the evangelist does not reveal himself to us at all. Where Paul would begin a letter, by identifying himself (“Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God…” [Romans 1:1]), Mark simply dives right in: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” (Mark 1:1)

Like so many of the titans of the early Church, the details of Mark’s story are simply not known. This mysterious evangelist, who’s believed to be the first to write a Gospel, the first to record in written form the details of Jesus’ life so that they would be made known to future generations, leaves us knowing next to nothing about himself.

And I think he might have liked it best that way.

In my seminary New Testament class, on our final exam, we were given a few random verses from different books of the New Testament, and asked to identify or guess the book from which they came and explain our reasoning. So our study group collected, for each author, a few little “tells.” Mark was easiest: he writes with a plainness and immediacy that’s remarkable to see. (In fact, the adverb “immediately” appears 27 times in Mark’s short text; four times in the first chapter alone!)

Mark writes with focus, attention, and energy. His prose is not polished; there are very few frills. He is focused on, fascinated by, the person of Jesus and the story of this one year in his life. He can hardly spare a letter for description or context or a nicely-phrased way to set the scene: It’s all “Jesus did this, then immediately Jesus did that, then immediately Jesus did another thing.” You can hardly imagine Mark saying a word about himself, of all people, when there’s someone else’s much more interesting story to tell.

This might seem strange, in our era of artful author portraits and dust-jacket biographies, but to me, it seems like a relief. What matters, in the end, is not what Mark did or who he was. What matters is not his skill at building up the plot or the quality or polish of his prose. What matters is not the mistake he made when he was thirty years old, or his regrets about mistakes he’d made along the way. What mattered in the end, was the story he had to tell—a story so exciting and so strange he had to set it down immediately, his pen skipping along the page.

So here’s to you, Saint Mark, whoever you were. May we all be inspired to follow your example, sharing the good news of what God is doing in our world and in our lives. And may we all be comforted by the knowledge that, in a couple thousand years, whatever good or bad we’ve done, nobody but God will remember the details.

We’ve reached one of my favorite times of year.

I don’t mean in the church calendar, although I love the season of Easter as much as the next guy. (Did you know that it’s a season, fifty days long? There are even daily Easter devotionals, just like in Lent! You can sign up for one here.)

I don’t mean in the changing seasons; I do love this springtime warmth, although I have to admit that my eyes have been burning from ragweed all week long.

No, I mean something else. We’ve reached one of my favorite times of year: BAA jacket week.

It’s not so much the Marathon itself that I love about this week, although watching the astounding performance of world-class runners is fun. It’s not the vague feeling of regret I feel every year, never having run a marathon, and finding myself thinking yet again that maybe next year I will. No, it’s the fact that for this one week of the year, I almost literally can’t walk down the street without seeing someone half-limping down the sidewalk, proudly wearing the official Boston Athletic Association windbreaker they earned by running in this year’s marathon. And every time I see them I say congratulations, or give them directions, or just smile to myself. You’ve done a hard thing, I think to myself. Well done.

Not everyone is cut out for running a marathon. (Like I said, I never have.) But every one of you reading this has, I know, done a hard thing, and nobody has given you a jacket, and people may or may not have said, “Well done.”

I don’t know what it was, or when it was, or if it’s even over yet. Maybe you’re still somewhere on Heartbreak Hill. But every one of you has done a hard thing in your life, and here you are. Whatever it was, you endured it, or you are enduring, or you can’t imagine that you could ever endure it, but here you are. You’ve earned your jacket. And when I see you, I know, and I say to you (in my head—I’m not this weird), “Well done.”

Jesus appears to his disciples after the Resurrection still bearing his wounds. He shows them the marks that have been left by what’s been done. And yet they’ve been transformed. The places of pain have become proof of the resilience of his life, and they remind his disciples and us that the power of suffering and death is never strong than the power of love and life.

You may not have visible scars. It may be that nobody’s ever given you a commemorative jacket. But I know that you’ve endured tremendous things, and come out on the other side. I know that for you, as for Jesus, the power of God’s love is stronger than anything else; that there is nothing that could ever separate you from God’s love; that when God looks at you, God sees you with eyes of compassion and love, and says, “Well done.”

The services of Holy Week originate in an ancient tradition of the churches in Jerusalem, in which services would be held on different days in different places in the week leading up to Easter, commemorating the events of Jesus’ last days in the very place they happened. These services became a kind of mini-pilgrimage, with the whole congregation traveling from place to place in the footsteps of Jesus.

Our Holy Week pilgrimage takes place in a single location, far from the original events. But it is no less a pilgrimage for that. We journey with Jesus and his disciples through this week, hearing the same old stories and wondering where they meet us on our own path this year. More than any other services of the church, our Holy Week services are full of drama and symbolism, of embodied and material realities that remind us of spiritual truths.

I hope you can join us for some part of our pilgrimage through Holy Week this year.

Palm Sunday — April 2 — 10am

We celebrate Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem with a parade of palms, and remember the crushing disappointment of his betrayal, arrest, and death with a reading of the Passion According to Matthew.

Maundy Thursday — April 6 — 6pm

As Jesus gathered with his disciples for a Last Supper together, we share a simple meal. As he taught them his “new commandment” to love one another as he loved them, and then humbly knelt to wash the dirt from their feet, we wash one another’s feet. As darkness fell and he went out to the Garden to pray, we strip the decorations and ornaments from our sanctuary and bring the Blessed Sacrament to rest in a Garden of Repose.

Good Friday — April 7 — 7pm

We remember again the events of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, trial, and death with a solemn service of readings and prayers, and venerate the cross on which he died and through which he destroyed the power of death.

Holy Saturday — April 8 — 12pm

One of the simplest, most austere, but most beautiful services of the year, the Liturgy of the Word for Holy Saturday reflects on the day in which Jesus rested in the tomb, and offers prayers drawn from our funeral services.

The Great Vigil of Easter — April 8 — 7pm

Our celebration of Easter begins with the kindling of a new fire and the retelling of the whole story of salvation, stretching from the moment of creation through Easter morning, followed by a festive celebration of the first Eucharist of Easter.

Easter Sunday — April 9 — 10am

We journey with the women who followed Jesus to the door of his empty tomb, and see their astonishment to find him risen, crying aloud our words of praise: “Alleluia! Christ is risen!”

A few weeks ago, I had a remarkable experience. One of our members asked me what I was going to talk about in that week’s Thursday-morning Lent discussion on prayer, and I said we’d be talking about intercessory prayer—in other words, about what it means to pray for other people. We got to talking, and she shared with me a beautiful image for what we do when we pray for someone else. I thanked her, and said I’d share it with the group.

Later that week, I sat down at my desk, and pulled out an article I’d been hoping to read by Brother Geoffrey Tristram, one of the monks at the Society of St. John the Evangelist, the Episcopal monastery in Cambridge. And right there, in his discussion of prayer, he quoted former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey using the exact same image for prayer.

Great minds think alike. So what was this brilliant image of prayer?

Brother Geoffrey writes: “True intercession is being with God with the people we love on our heart.  In The Christian Priest Today, Archbishop Michael Ramsey writes movingly about intercessory prayer, and he gives a great image for what we are doing when we pray for others, drawn from the Book of Leviticus.  Aaron, the high priest, would go into the Holy of Holies in the Temple wearing a breastplate on which were jewels representing the tribes of Israel, whose priest he was.  He literally went into the holy presence, the heart of God, carrying the people, represented by the jewels, on his heart.”

We come before the presence of God, carrying the people we love on our hearts. The essence of praying for another person is not praying for something, asking God to bring about the outcome we’re seeking. We do this, often enough, asking God to give them that promotion or to heal them of that sickness or to change or grow or maybe to forgive us, and that’s okay. But it’s not what’s really at the core. What’s at the core of prayer is holding someone in the love of God, and inviting God’s love to transform us both. And when our prayers aren’t answered—when the outcomes we’ve been praying for don’t occur—it doesn’t mean our prayers weren’t heard, or prayed.

This is a gift, because it means we can pray for a person without knowing what we’re “praying for.” We can pray when we don’t have the right words. We don’t need to come up with something to say, or even know what someone needs. We simply stand before God with the people we love written on our hearts.

And as Brother Geoffrey writes, “when we do this, something else rather wonderful can happen to us.  This kind of prayer can change us; it can mould and shape our own hearts.”

So if you’re still reading this, there’s your homework: take a minute, or five minutes, or fifteen seconds to pray for someone else. Don’t pray for anything. Don’t worry about coming up with words. Just hold them between your love and God’s, and be still.