A Little Starter Verse

It came to pass in those days that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized by John in the Jordan.  Mark 1:9

Good morning! Hey, we have the same temperature here as Juneau Alaska does right now. A famous writer wrote down some rules for novel writing, and the first was to never open with the weather. Good thing I'm not writing a novel to you this morning.

From our verse for today, it had been 30 years since the big events at Bethlehem in Judea, and people had forgotten all of that in their daily lives. Now along comes John the Baptizer preaching of the coming kingdom of God and repentance. One day while John does his usual thing in the Jordan river, a man from the unlikeliest of places, Nazareth, shows up and gets dunked. With only this verse to go on, there is no big story, no four gospels, no revelation, and nothing much for me to write to you on this chilly morning. We might as well talk about the weather if this were all we had been given from the days of our Lord. As we know, even the biggest of stories begins somewhere, and this verse from Mark is the introduction to the core of the greatest story ever told, that short ministry and death of Jesus of Nazareth. It is one story though that does not conclude with the death of the main character. 

And by faith we help to continue the story,

Bucky