So. Let's recap our last few outings from Mark,
shall we? The first—and perhaps most
important—thing is that they are heading to Jerusalem, and we know what
happened there, don't we? And Marks’s
congregation, for which this Gospel was written some forty years after
Jesus’ death, knew as well. But as they followed him South, his disciples
didn’t, despite his having told them twice already. Twice before he'd told them what as going to
happen, that he would be be betrayed and killed, and then raised again on the
third day. And each time, they hadn't
believed him, or hadn't understood, or both.
And these two things—that they're heading to Jerusalem and that his
followers haven’t understood why—are important to how we understand this passage, and indeed all episodes in
this part of the Gospel.
In
particular, last week we looked at the 2nd time Jesus predicts his
death, and Mark tells us they don’t understand, and when they get to the house
in Capernaum he asks them what they'd been arguing about, and they are sheepishly
silent, because they'd been arguing about who was the greatest. And so he tells
them that whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all, and
as an illustration he takes a little child—certainly the worldly notion of one
of the last of all—and says “whoever welcomes one such child in my name
welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me,” i.e., God.
And
now we're ready to dive into today's passage which, note well, comes right after that line about welcoming one as
this in his name. And the disciples
come to him all in a snit, because they’d seen someone other than them doing things in Jesus’ name.
“Teacher,” says John, “we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we
tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” And can you see what links this to the last passage? It's the “in Jesus’ name,” of course. The disciples complain that some outsider is
casting out demons in Jesus’ name right after Jesus spoke about how welcoming someone
in Jesus’ name is like welcoming Jesus
himself. And the question is: is this
just a convenient transition, or are we supposed to link the two, to see that
casting out demons in Jesus’ name is somehow related to welcoming that same
name?
Well.
Jesus is having none of their clannishness: “don't stop the guy,” he says
“because whoever does a deed of power in my name will soon not be able to speak
evil of me. The doing of power in Jesus’
name changes a person, not only does
it change something in the object of
the power but it changes something in it’s subject
as well, in the one doing the power.
And that would presumably include the disciples, who had been doing
power in his name as well. I think that
in essence he’s saying that those doing power in his name are joined together
no matter who they are or where they're from. And he affirms it when he says
the now iconic “whoever is not against us is for us.”
Whoever
is not against us is for us . . . A pretty inclusive thing to say . . .
Buddhists, who are certainly not against us, are in fact for us. Sikhs, who are not against us, are for
us. Ditto Jews. Or Muslims . . . it certainly broadens things
out, doesn't it? It sure seems like it's at least one step beyond
welcoming those who do things in Jesus’ name, doesn't it?
And
I wonder if the disciples had any easier a time following that dictum than we
do today? Even within our own faith we seem to be always dividing the
field, dividing our fellow Christians into who is for us and who is against us. It was seen in the Reformation, where Christians
divided along Protestant and Catholic lines, and it's seen in the proliferation
of denominations across this nation today.
And it's been seen time and again in our own denomination around issues
like the ordination and marriage of gays and the authorization of the Iraq war.
One
of the saddest stories I ever heard was told by the executive presbyter of St.
Andrews Presbytery, where I was ordained.
It happened shortly after the reunification of the southern and northern
streams of our church, which had split over the Civil War. Congregations were given a five-year grace
period to leave the denomination with their property, no questions asked, and a
church in West Point, Mississippi decided to opt out. The executive presbyter, following the advice
of Paul to try to effect reconciliation, went down to talk it over with them,
and they refused to even pray with him.
And
that points to one of the saddest things of all: when Christians divide into
opposing camps they tend to demonize one
another. They tend to brand the others
as enemies of Christ, or the true religion, or something like that. At the very least, that something is defective in their version of the
faith. Isn't that what congregations who
leave the denomination are saying? Aren’t
they saying that there's something not right, not Christian about the group they're leaving?
But
the saddest thing is that it's not
even their fault, it's how human
cognition works. There's a saying in philosophical
circles: “All determination is by negation.” All determination is by negation. Whenever we determine something is true, it's
by determining that something else is not
true. Think about it: a logical
argument is a series of negations. If this is true, then that can't be, on and on, until the final conclusion of what is true is reached. It's the way our mind works: when a baby is
born, she doesn’t know differentiation. All is one to her, there is no difference
between her and mama or daddy or brother or sister. Then, at seven or eight months, she begins to
form a notion of self as different from
others, beginning with the discovery that she is different from her parents,
that she is not-the-mama and not-the-papa.
And
as the child grows, this is reinforced at every turn. Anybody who has ever watched Sesame Street
will remember Kermit singing “one of these things is not like the other” and
there’s 3 dogs and a cat, and they all have fur and four legs and a tail, but
three go “woof” and one goes “meow,” and the cat is defined by its difference
from the dogs. And the teaching
continues with greater and greater refinement, And there is nothing at all
wrong with this way of thinking. Not a
thing. Without logical, rational,
either-or thought, we wouldn't have cold medicines, or airplanes, or this iPad,
for that matter. Logical thinking is the foundation of the sciences, of
technology, of medicine.
The
problem is that our sense of self, our sense of identity, of who we are
becomes defined by how we are different
from everyone else. I've got black hair,
you have blonde. I’m fat, you're
thin. I’m white, you're black. Our self-identity is determined by how we are
not like every other, and conversely,
how they are not like us. And this would not be a problem if it weren't
for the need to justify how I am at
the expense of how people who are not-I are.
A funny thing happened when I was trying to come up with a set of physical
characteristics to illustrate this that are neutral in effect: I couldn't.
Blondes have been slandered as dumb, fat people as lazy, with no
will-power, and we all know how blacks have
been treated.
And
we aggregate in groups, in associations, in denominations with people who are
like us, and our tendency is to defend the bounds of our own group by
considering those in other groups to be inferior. And that's what the disciples are doing in
our passage: they ask Jesus to censure this guy doing the same work they are
doing, in the same name, and for the
same reason. They ask Jesus to exclude him, to ask him to stop, and all because
he isn't in their group. But Jesus says no: If anyone is not against
us they’re for us. If anyone is not
actively working against us, they are for us.
And
then he begins to indicate what he means by being against them, and it all revolves our old friend “stumbling,” which
we've seen before, remember? Jesus
sitting in his home synagogue, speaking with authority, causes his home-town
friends and relatives to stumble . . . And what I hate about this translation,
is that it renders the Greek here in such a wimpy way. The word they translate as “stumbling block”
is scandalidzo, from whence we get the word scandalize, and in Greek it has just that intensity, it has the sense
of causing someone to lose their faith.
And so Jesus chastises the disciples for trying to exclude—cut off,
perhaps?—someone doing their work, and tells them what really is worthy of condemnation: causing a
little one to lose their faith.
“You
think that’s bad,” Jesus is saying, “you think other
people doing good in my name is bad? Here’s what's bad . . .” And he proceeds
to tell them in terms so exaggerated
that they can't fail to get the point
. . . You'd be better off with a millstone tied around your neck than to
scandalize, to make a little one lose her faith . . . In fact, if there’s a
group among you—and here he uses the common ancient likening of individual
members and groups of the church as bodily organs—if there's some one or some
group among you that causes the whole to lose their faith, cut ‘em off, sever
relations with them for your own good. But
not some guy who is doing deeds of power in my name, for Pete’s sake . . . After
all, whoever is not against us is for us.
In
recent years, there's not been lot of that on display in the Christian world .
. . It's almost as if, by our behavior, we are determined to scandalize, to put
a stumbling block, in front of the entire world, to cause them to lose their
faith, to lose their religion, as R.E.M. put it. Then, on Friday I watched as Pope Francis led
a memorial service at ground zero, in front of the weeping wall that is a
remnant of the World Trade Center. And I
was astonished at its ecumenism, at how other faiths took part, not in a token
way, as is sometimes the case, but fully, in a substantial way. I watched as a rabbi stood with an imam to pray
in their own languages, reading from their own sacred texts. A Greek Orthodox patriarch and a Sikh, each
with magnificent headgear and beards. A
Buddhist monk and a Hindu cleric, even a Jainist, for heaven’s sake. And as I watched in awe, the Pope spoke of
reconciliation there among the wreckage, and finally, a cantor’s gorgeous psalm
sent chills up my spine.
On
Friday, Francis profoundly illustrated, even embodied, Jesus’ admonition that
whoever is not against us is for us, and it gave me hope. In these times in which faith and
spirituality are under attack for causing so much pain, so much strife, it was a
sign of a higher purpose, a greater good that is possible when the Spirit is
present. It was a sign that, as Jesus
knew, we can transcend our thinking in dualisms, our automatic dividing of the
people into those who are in and who are out, those who are good and those who
are bad, those who are for us and those who are against us. In the power of Jesus Christ, who dwells
within us through the Holy Spirit, who was surely there at ground zero, and
just as surely right here in this room, we can
overcome. Amen.
