Stumbling Around (Mark 9:38-50)

     Ok, so we’re still on that long road with Jerusalem, and as we saw last week, the journey is like a road movie—or a road movie’s like this journey—and like a road movie, it’s episodic, held together by the fact that they’re, well, on the road, and it’s held together by sometimes a pretty thin narrative. It’s as if Mark had heard some of the stories about Jesus, some of his teachings, and connected them together in a way that makes sense to him, in a way that fits the particular points the author wants to make. And scholars think that that’s exactly how Mark wrote the narrative, and you can see that especially well in today’s passage. The paragraph before, which we talked about before, ended with Jesus’ stunning pronouncement that whoever welcomes “one such child” welcomes him. And though the next episode isn’t thematically related, at least on the surface, it is linked by the phrase “in my name:” Last week, it was “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me” and in today’s passage it’s “whoever does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.”

So, maybe we ought to explore that phrase “in my name“ a little bit. These days, we end prayers “in the name of Jesus Christ” and sing about “at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow” etc. without even thinking about it, but historically—and especially in the ancient mind—the name of a person, place or thing carried power. That’s why it’s no trivial thing when God lets Adam name every living thing in the Garden of Eden—it symbolizes that humankind has real power, power to literally aid in the ongoing creation of the world. You might even say we are co-creators with the divine, albeit junior partners.

Today, a lot of us don’t really believe that sort of thing, that names confer power, but I wonder: might it be true? If we do something in Jesus’ name—invoking him, it’s called—does it impart more power to the action, give it more ”oomph?” We believe we draw on the power of the Holy Spirit in our work for God . . . does it make a difference if we invoke the Spirit directly, if we call on its name?

I’m not so sure it works like that, it’s a bit too much like a magic amulet for my taste, too much like holding up a cross to ward off a vampire . . . but I do know one way it makes a difference, and that’s when we do works in Jesus’ name or the name of God and people see us. It’s like the person who wasn’t really St. Francis said “Spread the gospel . . . in words if necessary.” When we do our charity, our good works, if we do them in Christ’s name, and people know it, we are spreading the Good News. We’re evangelizing. See how simple it is? And we don’t have to knock on any doors or accost anyone on the street and ask them if they know Jay-sus, either. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, you understand.)

Conversely, doing something bad or wrong in Christ’s name is like negative evangelism, it hurts the gospel. I don’t think the Christmas-day-1099 killing of 30,000 muslims in Christ’s name did the Gospel any good—for one thing, they have good memories—nor does idiots in hoods and crosses stringing up black folk says anything good about the savior, either. Any time anyone spreads hate, intolerance and bigotry in the name of Christ, anytime anyone excludes someone from church because of how they look or who they love, they do great harm to the cause of Christ. And it pains me to say that even today, two millennia after Jesus’ death and resurrection, there’s still a lot of that going down.

Anyway. To the disciples in today’s story, the guy doing the exorcism in Jesus’ name is drawing on Jesus’  power, and John—for once, it’s not Peter—expresses their dismay: “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he wasn’t following us.” Ignoring the following us thing—I don’t think anyone was following John —it’s easy to see jealousy at work here, a desire to fence off Jesus’ power and keep it for themselves. But you know what? There’s plenty of it to go around, Jesus grace is abundant and, like the Holy Spirit, it goes where it chooses, even to folks who aren’t tramping around Galilee in the disciples’ company.

And of course, Jesus knows this, and he tells them not to stop the guy, because nobody who’s doing deeds of power in his name will be able to say bad things about him, which is patently true, or he wouldn’t be doing them in his name in the first place. The guy will be a witness for Jesus, he’ll be spreading the Gospel in a positive way, providing what he’s doing is good. And casting out demons can hardly be bad . . .

It kinda puts religious sectionalism in perspective, doesn’t it? I mean, Christians have split for years into finer and finer cliques—called sects or denominations—over finer and finer theological differences. Jesus says whoever is doing good things in his name, leave them alone. Accept them as working for the good of the Gospel. I wonder how all the fights—violent and otherwise—over religious differences would have gone if Christians over the centuries had paid attention to this? The split into the Eastern and Western Church . . . the Thirty Years War, which killed a third of the German population . . . warfare over different ways of being Christian, different ways of doing Christ’s work have been distressingly common over the last two millennia.

Of course, denominations spring from all of this as well. All you have to do is look at a chart of splits within American Presbyterians to see this sort of thing. I call them “spaghetti graphs,” because they tend to look like a tangle of that particular pasta. In fact, our denomination has recently split over issues like who can or cannot be ordained, or can or cannot be married, creating another branch in the spaghetti logic of American Presbyterianism.

As a matter of fact, Jesus says, whoever is not against us is for us, another stunning statement, as Thaddeus the newscaster might say, and of course it’s been popular over the years, embedded in the public lexicon, but is it generally true? I mean, does it hold beyond the circumstances under which Jesus said it? Well, human beings generally act like it isn’t, witness sectarian violence, where folks cannot coexist because—on the surface, at least, they practice different faiths. The prime example these days is the crisis in Myanmar, where the Muslim Rohingya have been persecuted for decades by the largely Buddhist majority.

Or witness racism and homophobia, which almost by definition violate Jesus’ dictum. We’ve all heard stories about some person or persons minding their own business and being harassed by others because they are a different color or a same-sex couple. They can be clearly not bothering anyone—or in Jesus’ words, clearly not against anyone—and still be attacked. Humans don’t have a great track record of practicing what Jesus preached in this regard.

Well. If the first section of our passage deals with who is in Christ’s community—and it’s typically inclusive, even of people who aren’t in the community—the second section describes how to deal with one another within it. And it sounds barbaric to our modern ears, proving that even Jesus was capable of hyperbole. If any of you —the least of these he spoke about in the previous section—if any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea. And as we’ve seen before, what to put a stumbling block before a person is to scandalize them, to make them lose their faith, and that is a very serious thing.

In fact, if your hand scandalizes you, if it causes you to lose your faith, cut it off; if your foot causes you to lose your faith, cut it off; ditto for your eye: if it causes you to lose your faith, pluck it out, ‘cause it’s better to lose your eye—or your hand or your foot—than to be thrown into hell—literally, Gehenna, the Valley of Hinom, where they burnt their garbage—where the worm never dies and the fire never goes out. And though this is brutal language, we shouldn’t forget that this is hyperbole—exaggeration to make a point—and it may be metaphorical as well. It may be that Jesus is utilizing the common ancient way of speaking about a social group as a body, with its parts—eyes, hands, feet, etc.—representing members with various roles. And it may be an exhortation to remove these roles if they threaten the integrity of the community. It’s better to go without a seer, a prophet, than to be separated from God. It’s better to go without a hand, without a worker, perhaps, than to be separated from the source.

The fact is, everyone will be salted with fire, and salt is a preservative agent while fire is a transformative, an alchemical one, so he is speaking of preservation through transformation, through transmutation, perhaps. to a higher plane . . . but if salt has lost its saltiness, its preservative power, how can it be restored? If the community has lost it’s ability to preserve, its connection with the Source, how can it season anything? How can it preserve anything if it has lost its saltiness, aka that which makes it salt?

The fact of the matter is that if we as a community—or as individuals—lose our connection to God, if we are separated from our source, we lose our saltiness, our preservative ability. Fortunately, we have that salt, that source within, do we not? The same one in whose name we pray, the same one in whose name we do God’s work, he is the salt that seasons, the fire that transforms, and he abides in us—in is as individuals and communities—just as we abide in him. But though he is deep within, closer than a thought, we are often separate at the same time, we do not know how to access this divine spark. Rest assured, however, that he is there, snd that we can call on him at need, if only we will believe.  Amen.

Last and Least (Mark 9:30 - 37)

So, we’re continuing our march through Mark, so to speak, as Jesus and the boys trek through Palestine, healing and teaching and preaching, and it reminds me a little of a Hollywood road movie, the classic of which may be Easy Rider, about a couple of hippies riding motorcycles across America and irritating the locals wherever they happened to stop. Or maybe Smoky and the Bandit, with the late, great Burt Reynolds in a Trans-Am, running interference for a truckload of beer. The plot—such a it is—is always the same: some characters are placed in a vehicular conveyance—maybe a plane or a train or an automobile—and they interact with each other and the people they meet along the way. And before you get mad at me—how dare you compare Burt Reynolds and Peter Fonda to our Lord and Savior—that’s really not what I’m doing, I just want to point out the similarities between their stories and Jesus’ on a couple of levels.

First is the structure: both gospels and road movies are episodic, with the episodes—called pericopae by pointy-headed Biblical-studies types—tied together by a thin ribbon of road. Asphalt in the movies, dirt in the Gospels. In literature this kind of structure is called picaresque, and what overall plot there is can be called an “arc:” it starts somewhere and ends somewhere else. This is certainly the case in a location sense—it is a road movie, after all—but usually holds on different levels, as well: the characters learn something about themselves, say, or society learns something about them. In Smoky and the Bandit, Frog—played by Sally Field—gradually falls in love with Burt as they get physically closer and closer to Atlanta.

In Easy Rider, things get darker . . . the road trip becomes scarier and more dangerous until in the end, the protagonists are murdered. And of course, that’s the same thing that happens to Jesus—it’s the place we all know the story is going when we read these passages. And in one sense—again, don’t get mad—in one sense, it’s for the same reason: like the characters in the film, Jesus has irritated a peck of people over the course of his travels. In Easy Rider’s case, it’s the squares, the representatives of the dominant culture. In Jesus’ case, it’s the scribes and Pharisees and Temple authorities . . . the representatives of the dominant culture. In fact, this shows another point of similarity between the Gospels and road movies. The protagonists —Jesus and Smoky and the hippies—and what they do are often deeply counter-cultural. In Easy Rider, its drug use—among other things—and in Smoky and the Bandit, it’s speeding and hauling contraband and just general cussedness. In the Gospels, Jesus violates cultural and religious laws all over the place which, as I pointed out earlier this Summer, were equivalent to civil law in that day and age.

And that might be one reason that while traveling the Galilee Road, Jesus didn’t want anybody to know it. He’d certainly irritated enough of the authorities, and we know they were out to get him . . . perhaps he didn’t want to get arrested too soon, before he’d done what he’d come to do. Or perhaps it was a bit more complicated than that: as we saw last week, Jesus shut Peter up when he declared him Messiah, and it seemed to be because he didn’t want everyone to make the same mistake Peter did, expecting him to be an earthly king and all. One other time, you’ll remember, the people tried to kidnap him and make him king, and he quickly slipped that particular noose . . .

Like we saw last week, he was teaching them the exact opposite of what everyone expected: he’d be betrayed, killed and resurrected which, resurrection aside, was not what anybody wanted. Now they come to Capernaum, one of his regular hang-outs (he’s likely staying at Peter’s mom’s house), and he asks them a question: “What were y’all arguing about on the way?” And they shuffle their feet, and look all shifty-eyed, because they’re embarrassed: they’ve been caught in the act, fighting about who was the greatest. And this just after we’re told a second time that he’d predicted his death. It reminds me of one of those classic Seinfeld episodes where the gang is so self-absorbed that when bad things happen to others, they make it all about themselves.

That’s why I imagine it’s with a heavy sigh and maybe a roll of his eyes that Jesus sits down and calls them over. And though this little detail would go right over our heads, folks in Mark’s time would know that by doing this, Jesus is assuming the formal attitude of a master teacher, and it emphasizes that what he’s about to say, it underlines its authority. So what he says next should carry great weight: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” And in fact, this is a cornerstone of Jesus’ teaching, and here is the first time he says it. But certainly not the last . . .

“Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” How countercultural is that? Back then, but especially nowadays. If everyone followed that rule, it would be difficult to implement free-market capitalism, wouldn’t it? I mean, doesn’t all that depend on being first? Striving to dominate in a market? Look at Apple, the first trillion-dollar American company, which ruthlessly aspires to world domination, and pretty-much achieves it. Or Amazon, which lost by just a nose in the trillion-dollar sweepstakes. What could be more emblematic of free market benefits than these two companies? And is that do bad? After all, a rising tide lifts all the boats.

Unless, of course, you’re the brick-and-mortar stores that Amazon has run out of business, that employed many more people in many more places than does Amazon . Or the thousands of third-world workers in near-slave conditions that make all those shiny Apple gadgets I love so much. Is this what Jesus means when he says the last will be first in the Kingdom of God? Because they certainly aren’t in the Kingdom of Humankind . . .

Of course there are multiple levels to all this, it could be that he’s talking on a more interior, spiritual, level. Perhaps we’re to be last in line, to put others before ourselves. Certainly that jibes with being the “servant of all.” Servants put their employers above themselves . . . and here Jesus is advising that we put everyone’s needs before our own, if indeed we want to be first . . . where? Certainly not in society, certainly not in the business world . . . where is this place in which to be first we need to put ourselves last? Are we talking the Kingdom of God here? Are we talking about being first in that spiritual and earthly realm?

Saint Benedict of Nursia saw it as being last in both physical ways—owning nothing, living simply—and spiritually as well. The heart of his celebrated Rule for monastic living is a ladder to heaven, which you ascend by becoming humble. It’s a ladder of humility, and the word itself derives from “humus” or soil, so in in a sense, you’re going “up” to heaven by going down. And one step on this ladder is giving up the desire to have the best of everything, to be first . . . that we must be content, as he put it, “with the lowest and most menial treatment.” Notice that there is a psycho-spiritual dimension here; elsewhere he says that we’re to be convinced in our hearts that we actually are one of the least of these. Because only if we’re convinced, if its more than just an intellectual proposition, can we live out Jesus’ admonitions.

And that brings us back to this passage, and Jesus’ illustration of it all—he takes up a little child. And again, the optics, as political types would put it, are important here. Details we might gloss over are important: first, he takes the child and puts among them, showing that it is one of them, a child of humanity. Then he takes the child up into his arms, and it symbolically becomes one with him: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me,” and the staging of the scene reinforces what he is saying, as the child who is at first among the disciples becomes unified with Christ.

Whoever welcomes one such child, whoever welcomes someone who is convinced she is last of all, who in fact knows no better, who is soaked in the innocent conviction that she will be taken care of, and at the same time is at the beck and call of everyone else, is everybody’s servant, welcomes Jesus. The child is an avatar, a model of Jesus, just as Jesus is an avatar of the child. But not just of the child, he’s is the avatar of the one who sent him, who is the Lord God, whom he calls Abba. In fact, in some way Christians have argued about for millennia, Jesus incarnated God, made Godflesh, so whoever welcomes one such as this child welcomes God into their hearts and lives as well.

Sisters and brothers, this is flat-out, pure-D Good News. We don’t have to go up on a mountain-top, or into deep meditation to welcome the Christ into our hearts. Nor do we have to chant Psalms, sing hymns or pray twenty-four hours a day. No—to welcome Jesus into our hearts and lives, all we have to do is welcome the last and the least, the innocent and naive, the powerless and weak. In other words, all we have to do is welcome one such as a child. Amen.

News You Can Use (Mark 8:27 - 38)

     When I began to prepare to preach on this passage, I was delighted to find that a recent archeological dig found a recording of a news report about this very incident! Unfortunately, there’s no video because it was before the invention of TV.

Thaddeus: This is Thaddeus Ames, Jerusalem Radio News, coming to you from our studios in the heart of the royal city. Tonight on JRN, an adorable donkey meets an even more adorable little girl. Marcus Elijah—great, great, great, great grandson of the prophet—marries an Edomite, shocking friends and members of this ancient, historic family.. And one-named superstar Phoebe is expecting a little bundle of felafel, and you’ll never guess who the father is . . . well, ok it’s her husband . . . But first: is he or isn’t he? Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter’s son from Nazareth, has been healing and teaching and exorcising his way across Palestine. Many observers think he could be preparing for a run for Messiah, a notion which he has until now discouraged. But a recent incident has fueled speculation once again. JRN correspondent Mordecai Jones is embedded at Caesarea Philippi with the Jesus entourage. Mordecai?

Mordecai: Thank you, Thaddeus. I’m outside the compound where Jesus and his retinue are staying, and all is quiet in this quaint village perched high above the Jordan valley. But though things seem calm, sources within the disciples tell me deliberations continue into the night. The latest round of controversy began when Jesus asked about his name recognition, how he is viewed by what we presume are potential voters: “Who are people saying that I am?”. And let me tell you, Thaddeus, the answers were all over the map. Thomas said people thought he was John the Baptist, even though everybody knows he was beheaded. James said “I heard a couple of shepherds say he’s Elijah, come back to life, or maybe one of the prophets, like Micah or Jeremiah.” Everybody laughed at that, because nobody who’d been with Jesus any length of time could believe he was a prophet.

Mordecai: But I have to say, Thaddeus, that Jesus looked a little worried, or maybe concerned, or maybe he just wanted a little reassurance, because he asked them “But who do you think I am?” And that’s when Peter—Jesus’ spokesman and most ardent follower—stepped up and said “You’re the Messiah, of course!” And immediately Jesus ordered them not to say anything to anybody. Back to you, Thaddeus.

Thaddeus: Thank you, Mordecai. Tell me: what do you make of all this? Why, if he’s running for Messiah, would he tell his followers not to say anything? You’d think just the opposite.

Mordecai:  Why indeed, Thaddeus . . . seems he’s not as interested in running as some potential backers might like. And what he said next muddied the water even more. He told them that he must—must, he said, as if it were a necessity—that he must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and scribes—basically the entire religious establishment—and be killed and after three days rise again. Those were his exact words, Thaddeus: “he will undergo great suffering and be killed.”

Thaddeus: That’s a stunning prediction, Mordecai. Not very reassuring to potential voters. In a recent Pew survey, fully eighty-seven percent of respondents wanted a Messiah like the last one: a mighty warrior who will lead the Israelites to glory. Predicting you’ll get killed doesn’t fit those expectations, to say the least. What could he have meant by that?

Mordecai:  It’s not completely clear, Thaddeus, but one thing is certain: it made Peter very angry. He took Jesus aside—grabbed him by the arm, no less—and tough they were out of earshot, it was obvious that he was rebuking the boss. And it didn’t make Jesus too happy, either: he immediately turned and looked at the others, to make sure they heard, and rebuked Peter right in front of them: “Get behind me, Satan”—that’s another direct quote, Thaddeus, “get behind me Satan, ‘cause you’re setting your mind on human things, and not those of the divine.”

Thaddeus:  Amazing, Mordecai, just amazing . . . he likened his trusted aid and confidant to Beelzebub. The adversary. The accuser. A stunning development in the Jesus campaign.

Mordecai:  Verily, Thaddeus, verily. And I can say that it really shook Peter up, too. Listen to an interview he gave JRN not long after:

Mordecai:  Peter, were you shocked when Jesus called you Satan?

Peter: Yes, yes I was. We had spent months together, Mordecai, months. I’d been with him through healings, exorcisms, Pharisee controversies, everything. I thought we were close, closer than just mere teacher and disciple, at least. Guess I was wrong.

Mordecai:  What did you talk about when you took him aside?

Peter:  Well . . . I admit I did most of the talking. I told him how disappointed I was that he spoke of going to his death, just like that, as if it were a foregone conclusion. We disciples want a Messiah—I’d just called him that, you know—we disciples want a traditional Messiah, you know? One who’ll kick some Roman booty and not look back. Not some, some . . . patsy, who’ll let himself be taken and killed.

Mordecai:  In other words, you rebuked your teacher.

Peter:  I suppose . . . if you want to put it that way. But he didn’t have to call me the devil.

Mordecai:  What did he mean when he said you were putting your mind on things of the world and not those of the divine?

Peter:  I have no idea. Maybe wanting him not to die? How is that “of the world and not of the divine?” And doesn’t the divine want us to be free and independent? After all, we are God’s people, we’ve been chosen and everything.

Mordecai:  All good questions, Peter. Thank you for your time.

Peter:  My pleasure.

Thaddeus:  Stunning interview, Mordecai, simply stunning.

Mordecai:  Indeed, and to make things worse, shortly after that Jesus called a crowd together and told them things that were pretty peculiar for a man who would be Messiah. Things like if any want to follow him they must deny themselves and take up their cross. And people who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life will save it , which when you think about it, doesn’t make a lot of sense. And how many citizens of Judea want to deny themselves anything?

Thaddeus:  Not many, I’ll wager. Well. Stunning developments in the Jesus campaign. Next, Timmy was in the well, but a plucky dog—a collie, it is believed—has rescued him. But first, a word from our sponsor Coliseum Toothpaste, the Roman way to brush your teeth.

___________

Well. That is, ah, stunning. It seems the media back then could be just as clueless as they can be today. More to the point, it’s pretty obvious that the disciples, if Peter is any indication, are clueless as well. Of course, this shouldn’t come as any surprise to any of us, they never really get it, from the day they’re called from their homes and jobs and families to the day when they scatter like quail at the crucifixion.

And this episode points out that they really don’t know him at all. Peter says he’s the Messiah—note that Jesus doesn’t confirm it, just tells him to shut up—but as the story continues, it becomes painfully obvious just what the major sticking point is. Like our newscasters, Peter has a completely mistaken idea about what kind of Messiah Jesus will make. Human society, maybe even human nature wanted a warlord, a conqueror, a political leader who will make Israel great again, like it was under King David, the greatest of all to hold that job. Like any occupied nation, Israel chafed at the rule of their overlords. So much so that several decades after Jesus’ crucifixion, the Israelites revolted. Which turned out pretty much as you might expect, with Jerusalem in ruins.

That’s what Jesus meant when he told Peter his mind was on things of the world: it’s code for thinking in human terms, in ego terms. In terms of what he might call the self. And we all do it, don’t we? Or at least, not wanting to speak for anyone else, I do . . . like a lot of folks, I tend to think in terms of winners and losers, getting up the old ladder of success. It extends to our country, too: we love thinking of ourselves as the greatest nation on earth, even as people in every other nation think the same about theirs.

But beyond all that, this passage is about the mental pictures we have about something or someone, the image or idea of a person versus the reality. Who do you think I am, Jesus asked the disciples, what image or idea about me do you have? We get some idea about somebody or something, and it colors our all our thinking, and from there, our actions. Peter’s idea of Jesus was so at odds with the reality that he reacted violently when confronted with the truth, he pulled Jesus aside and rebuked his rabbi and friend, the man who had given him new purpose and new life.

What images of Jesus do you have. Maybe it’s Jesus the free-marketeer, defender of the capitalist way. Or perhaps Jesus the purveyor of prosperity doctrine, which says we are prosperous because we’re good, because we’ve done what God likes. Or Jesus the social justice crusader, or—my new favorite—Jesus the sage, who out-Buddhas the Buddha himself. The point is, we all have concepts and notions of who Jesus is, and they mediate how we as Christ-followers behave towards ourselves, others, and the rest of creation. Today’s passage shows the consequences of that kind of misconception.

And speaking of Buddhists, Zen master Lin-ji once famously said “If you see the Buddha on your way, kill him.” What he meant by that is that if we have a concept or notion about the Buddha—or anybody, really—that prevents us from seeing reality, that prevents us from experiencing that reality, we must extinguish that concept. And in our passage, Peter needs to extinguish (or “kill”) his notion of the Christ as military leader and earthly king, because it’s getting in the way of his seeing, his experiencing the truth.

How do we do that? How do we extinguish our concepts and notions that get in the way of seeing and, more importantly, experiencing the risen Christ? Prayer. Prayer and practice. Practice and prayer. Every time we prayerfully discern what Christ would have us do, then do it, we participate in his life, we experience it, and somehow—and don’t ask me how—our false ideas and notions slip a little more away.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus, as the old hymn goes, but do more than that: experience him, do what he did, that’s what he meant by giving up ourselves and following him. Those who do will find that the things of the earth, our ideas and concepts our ego has constructed, will go strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace. Amen.

Border Crossings (Mark 7:24 - 37)

     Jesus was tired.  Weary.  Worn out.  Done in. He was weary to the bone, and what he did when it got to him was what a lot of us do, and that’s get away from it all.   He went up on a mountain, or got into a boat on the ocean . . . just like we do, he escaped from his responsibilities as teacher and went away for awhile.  This time, he goes into the region of Tyre and enters a house, and he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s there.

Why was this a getaway, you ask?  Well, although today we don’t generally know the geography well enough, Mark’s audience would’ve been keenly aware of this point: Tyre was Gentile territory.  So was Sidon, for that matter, where he goes in the second half to heal the deaf man.  Tyre and Sidon were in Gentile territory, and so Jesus was retreating from his own people—remember, Jesus was a not a Gentile but a Jew.  And that he should do that was entirely understandable:  he’d not been making much headway with them at all . . . he’d fed a bunch of them—Mark says it was 5,000 men, which meant upwards of 15,000 people total—and he’d taught the crowds about the kingdom of God.  He’d healed the sick with such compassion that wherever he went, people brought them and laid them at his feet.

And then came the Jewish leaders, and it was like cold water on it all: here he was, feeding and healing and teaching and leading, and religious folk were concerned that his disciples were eating without washing up.  As we saw last week, it was a little more serious than that: their tradition—not the Torah itself, mind you, but their interpretation of it—their tradition made it mandatory that everyone washed up before supper, and truth be told, it derived from the purity laws in the Torah, about what was clean and unclean, but it was picky, you know?  It’s like what can happen in a church that’s been around for awhile, and after a great celebration, a great evidence of God’s acting in and around it, and people come up and complain about the little, picky stuff, like, oh,  the bulletin had a mistake, or somebody forgot to pick up something or clean up after themselves . . . and what it means is that they’re not happy, usually about the way things are going, but they dare not say it, so their irritation comes out in the picky stuff.

And because Jesus knew what was what, he knew what was going on: the synagogue leaders couldn’t complain about healing and feeding and teaching, so they went to the little stuff, but he knew they weren’t buying into the program, the leaders of his own religion: he’d been out ministering, and seeing the power of God working in mighty ways, and they come up to him and say: “uh, the disciples didn’t wash their hands . . . and they doubtless didn’t clean up the communion bread, either, or put the kitchen back into order.”  And you’ll remember that right before our passage, right before he retreats to the land of the Gentiles, where there were no pesky Pharisees, Jesus gets into a long, argument with them—and to fully appreciate our passage, it’s important to note that the argument is all about purity, about holiness, about what makes a person that way and what makes her not, or—more subversively—what makes a people pure and what makes them not.  And Jesus does something shocking in that conversation with the synagogue leaders, he tells them that it isn’t what goes into people that makes them unclean . . . and the implications of this are so shattering to the ancient worldview that Mark says it outright: by doing this, by saying it wasn’t what goes into people that makes them unclean, he declared all food clean.  Oy vey.

So anyway: this wrangling with his own people, with the very people he came to free, was very tiring, and Jesus was heartsick and in need of a respite from it all, so he goes on a retreat to the land where his people weren’t, to Tyre and Sidon, the land of the Gentiles, and in Tyre he tries to hole up in a house, but—as do many of his attempts to get away—it doesn’t work.  Even in the land of the unclean, the land where people wouldn’t know a messiah from a hole in the ground, he couldn’t get away.  A woman whose little daughter was dying came and bowed down at his feet.

And in telling this story, all of a sudden Mark shifts our attention away from Jesus onto the woman, as if he wants his readers—back there in the first century and us here in the twenty first—to be very clear who she is.  And the first thing we notice is what she does: she falls down at his feet.  She gives him deference, she recognizes him for a man of power.  Does she know he’s the messiah?  No. She’s a Gentile.  Does she care that he’s the messiah?  Nope.  But she has hope, she’s heard of this man, even in Tyre, and she has hope that Jesus can save her little girl.  Would any of us do any less?  I don’t think so . . . and the Syrophoenician woman must have been desperate, at the end of her rope to even approach this bumpkin Jewish preacher.  For that was how he appeared to her: the Jews, with their insistence on only one God, were viewed as quaint by many of the more sophisticated Gentiles.

And she was probably sophisticated, or at least wealthy: when she goes home, after Jesus has healed her daughter, we see that her child is in a bed, and only the most well-off could afford one of those.  But for Jesus’ part, from the perspective of his faith, she had more than one strike against her: first of all, she was Syrophoenician, a Gentile, and it was greatly frowned upon for him to have any truck whatsoever with her because of that, a teacher was not even expected to be in the same room with an outsider like her, but the second strike was that she was a woman, and that by itself would have gotten him in trouble, being in the same room with a woman, alone. . . and you remember those Pharisee scolds?  The ones who got mad just because Jesus and his disciples hadn’t washed their hands?  Well, they would’ve gone off the deep end over this.  The fact that Jesus even had spoke with her was, like, the worst.

And the brazenness of it all, the unclean, foreign woman, having the temerity, the chutz-pah, the gall to approach a teacher like Jesus.  Women didn’t approach teachers, they weren’t even allowed to sit at their feet.  Good Jewish women knew their place . . . no wonder Ezra and Nehemiah were so gosh-awful insistent that good Jewish boys marry only good Jewish girls.  And here this Syrophoenician hussy was, begging the master, the Teacher to heal her daughter.

So you get the picture: right after wrangling with his own people about what’s clean and unclean, and declaring all food clean, he goes off for a rest and he’s accosted by somebody who is the walking embodiment of unclean.  So maybe he can be forgiven if his response is a little snippy.

But is it?  Is it really snippy?  He answers this woman with a theological point that is entirely correct, from a Jewish standpoint: “Let the children”—that’s the Jewish people, the children of God—“be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  It was common theology that Jesus came first for the Jews, and then the Gentiles.  Jesus even says something along those lines over in Matthew.  And unlike these days, when we’re uncomfortable at the thought that Jesus would call anyone a dog, Mark’s audience would have thought “Quite right.  Quite right.”  The analogy—for that’s all it is—the analogy is very apt: the Jews are the children of God, and they come first, and everybody else is inferior.

And over the years, everybody—including yours truly, I know it’s hard to believe—has gotten hung up on this . . . how could Jesus gave called this poor woman a dog?  Well, we say, times were different, which is true, and only we in today’s world would get upset about this, and that’s true as well, but all of this misses a huge point:  that Jesus answers her at all!  She’s a woman, remember?  Not eligible to be taught like males at all, much less engaged in rabbinic argument.  Regardless of the analogy Jesus uses—and granted, it’s one that doesn’t sound too good to our ears—isn’t the point surely that he answers her at all?  It’s this that would have shocked Mark’s audience, the congregation to which he wrote his Gospel, not the dog remark.  Jesus—a teacher, whom Mark’s people believed to be The teacher, you understand, the anointed Son of God—in a theological debate with a gentile and a woman. He engages her in theological debate, just like he did the Pharisees, just like he does men, he engages with her in rabbinic badinage.  In other words, he treats her like an equal!

And while we say “Quite right, why shouldn’t he?” Mark’s first-century auditors’ heads would have exploded, it was so outside the pale, it so overturned the rules of the world.  And because she answered him well, with an answer that showed she understood her real place, that she understood her place in the Kingdom of God, her child was healed.  Far from punishing her, far from cursing her as in “how dare you say anything argumentative to the master”—as doubtless his disciples would have said—he says “because you have said this, your child has been healed.”  The Syrophoenician woman’s child was healed because her mother was already participating in the Kingdom of God.

I’ve made a lot of the timeline in this sermon, of where this fits into the overall scheme of things, the overall flow of Jesus ministry, because I think it is absolutely pivotal.  This story—and the one after it, also about a healing in Gentile territory—comes as part of a discussion of purity, of what is clean and what is not, what is common and what is not, and it’s bookended by stories of great feeding and healing . . . the timeline goes like this: Jesus feeds the 5,000, he heals and teaches all over Galilee, he engages in theological argument with the Pharisees over who’s pure in which he implicitly declares all food pure, then he engages in theological argument with the avatar of impute, the ultimate outsider, an unclean woman with an unclean, demon-possessed daughter, then he declares them pure, and after healing another Gentile, he feeds another crowd—in the next chapter—only this time they’re Gentiles, and this time there are 6,000, there being after all more Gentiles in the world than Jews.

And it’s clear to me what has happened: Jesus first declares all food pure, then he declares all people pure, women and foreigners and outsiders, people not like the male, ruling class of religious people of the day.  Jesus declared all people pure, all people wanted, all people clean, in that little scene with the Syrophoenician woman and her sick child.

Jesus declared all food clean, and we modern Christians have no trouble following that . . . most of us love our bacon, after all.  But why do we have so much trouble following the other? Go into any protestant church, any Catholic church, for that matter, and look around.  Who is not there?  Who are not in positions of power, in position of authority, and who just flat-out isn’t there?  Jesus Christ has declared all peoples pure, but the church came along not too many years later and begun shutting folks back out once again.  The most obvious example are women: Jesus engaged a woman as an equal, as a rabbi, as a leader of the synagogue, and yet most Christians in the world belong to churches that exclude them from ordained leadership.  That’s just the most obvious example, I’m sure you can think of others . . . who are the Syrophoenician women of the modern Christian church?

But as an old preaching professor of mine used to say, always leave ‘em with the gospel, and there is good news in this passage, and it’s the same as that which convicts us, to use a good old Baptist phrase.  Jesus declared all people pure, the Syrophoenicians and the Greeks, Jews and Gentiles.  Good, church-going community pillars and murderers on death row.  Jesus declared everybody pure and therefore welcome in the Kingdom of God, welcome to participate in the life-giving nature of his reign on Earth.  And the good news, of course, is that that also includes us.  Amen.

Forest and Trees (Mark 7:1 - 23)

     Amy Howe, a parish associate at a Memphis church, tells a story a lot of pastors can relate to. She came into her office one Sunday morning to find a note on her desk: “It seems that our youth don’t know how to spell any better than they know the Bible.” When she looked out her door, she could see the offending specimen: a bulletin board created to welcome church members back to Christian Education. It was a happy-looking thing, brightly colored and flamboyant, and it invited everyone to attend “Sunday Skool,” spelled S-k-o-o-l. Reverend Howe said the misspelling was obviously done to attract attention, and admits to being irritated about the note because she knew for a fact that the youth had sacrificed part of their Saturday to make a welcoming banner. And most of us pastors can relate to this because most of us have had it happen to us, some petty complaint that completely ignores the big picture.

And I think Jesus feels a bit irritated at the Pharisees’ and scribes’ complaint. They come upon him and the disciples having dinner, in a moment of relaxation, and some of them haven’t washed their hands! And rather than saying “what’s for supper?” or “excuse us for disturbing you,” they ask “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” They completely miss the forest for the trees, they miss the deeper message: Jesus’ followers had sacrificed a lot to follow him. Some have given up families, some careers, and others worldly status. It would only be understandable if Jesus were a little ticked off on their behalf.

Beyond that, he probably knows what most pastors do, that when a complaint is that petty, it’s rarely about what the complaint is about. In the case of Pastor Amy, it may have been jealousy about too much money or pastoral attention on the youth, or the youth director, or even the pastor, and in Jesus’ case, well, the Pharisees were never his biggest fans.

Anyway, Jesus knows a teachable moment when he sees one. Quoting Isaiah, he says “This people”—Ouch! This people!—honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’” And Jesus isn’t dissing the Torah here, he isn’t downplaying the received Law of God . . . it’s not commanded by scriptures that everybody wash their hands (and dishes and pots and pans) before they eat, just the priests. But the Pharisees had generalized it to include everybody, and that’s how Jesus can say they’re “teaching human precepts as doctrine.”

And you can hear Jesus’ irritation in his reply: “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites,” and that’s not any nicer an accusation in those days than it is today. It comes from the Greek words for “acting out a theatrical role” and “pretending,” and refers to the disconnect between the moral values and standards that we espouse and those that we actually practice in our behavior.

But how’s that hypocrisy? How is extrapolating from scripture to additional rules—something every denomination has done since time immemorial—how is that not practicing what you preach? He goes on, in an unmistakably sarcastic vein: “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!” And as example he uses an apparently common practice of denying support to your parents because you’ve declared resources Corban, or dedicated to God.

And that’s clearly hypocrisy in Jesus’ book, because of the commandments in the Law to honor your father and mother—those are clearly from God, they’re in the Scripture, for Pete’s sake! They profess to follow the commandments of God, yet do not honor their father and mother. I guess it’s hypocrisy in my book as well.

And Jesus doesn’t like hypocrisy one tiny, little bit. Don’t be like the hypocrites, he says, who sound a trumpet before themselves, who pray loudly in public, who spread ashes on themselves when they fast so they can get that fashionable starving-waif look. He calls them "whitewashed tombs:” pure on the outside, dead on the inside. Oy vey!

Jesus knows that few things can derail the mission of God faster than hypocrisy. If people see that you don’t practice what you preach, then . . . well. When I talk to ex-church-goers, or never-been-churchgoers, the number one thing they cite is the hypocrisy of church folks. They see them profess concern for the poor, yet hoard their finances like misers. They see them support war when Jesus was clearly a pacifist . . . they don’t call him the Prince of Peace for nothing. And they see them piously quote Jesus about adultery and then support politicians who cut a mile-wide swath through half the women in the country. I myself have been guilty of that, supporting a president who abused his power because his political views corresponded with mine. (That was in the nineteen-nineties, in case you’re wondering.)

Anyway. Up till this point, Jesus has been talking to insiders: his disciples, the scribes and the Pharisees. But now he gathers a crowd, indicating the general importance he attaches to what he’s about to say. “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.” And while Mark interprets this as Jesus declaring all foods clean, and he might have been right, I rather think Jesus has bigger fish in mind. Right at the outset, he castigates the religious authorities for being concerned with outer conditions—whether they washed their hands or not—then goes on to complain about their lip-service to God while their hearts—the seat of the soul to the ancients—are far away. And now he’s saying what goes in from the outside can’t defile—like dirt and food—but it’s what’s inside that matters.

And by extension, the outer trappings of religion —ritual, hymn-sing, public praying and the like—isn’t an indication of what goes on in our hearts, either. We already know what Jesus thinks about ostentatious public prayer . . . and what does he tells us to do instead? Go into our rooms, close the door and pray to God in secret . . . and the God who sees in secret will reward us. And it’s useful to ask: reward us how? Could it be that we’ll hear God speaking to us as well? It’s hard to hear the Lord when we’re in public, when we’re doing all the talking, struggling not to embarrass ourselves and say something stupid.

Well. Any of Jesus’ disdain for empty ceremony, for meaningless religious observance, for not seeing the forest for the trees is nothing new, it’s squarely in the prophetic stream in which he waded. In another part of Isaiah, God—through the prophet—chides the religious authorities of his day: “Is such the worship that I choose,” God asks, “a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?” And you can imagine the elders bowing their heads at the proper time like nodding reeds, oh-so-chicly humble in designer sackcloth and ashes, sort of like all the tailored black we saw yesterday at John McCain’ funeral.

In that Isaiah passage God goes on to say what worship he does choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, undo the thongs of the yoke . . . to share our bread with the hungry, bring the homeless poor into our house . . . and take care of our own kin. And that gives us an insight into Jesus’ own words . . . he’s not just talking literally, narrowly, about only what comes and goes into and out our out of our mouths—I.e., food and drink and words—but in larger terms as well. He’s not talking just about wagging tongues or kosher meats, but about external observance, observing the traditions of the elders—washing this or that item, singing this or that hymn—versus what you actually do, how you obey the commandments of God.

And like Isaiah, for Jesus it’s all about actions . . . not just the literal words that tumble out of our maws. Of course, he mentions slander and deceit, which are often couched as words, but his list of evil intentions mostly result in actions: licentiousness, adultery, murder . . . all actions that arise in the heart. This list is very like one of Paul’s lists of fruits of the flesh, like the one in Galatians, and like that one, it concentrates on things that harm community. In fact, the example he uses to support his claims of hypocrisy—using man-made rules to get around supporting one’s parents—undercuts the family unit, the foundation of first-century community.

Our passage records a teaching of Jesus that moves from the relatively trivial—Pharisitical complaints about dirty hands—to hypocrisy to community discord and disruption, and does this mimic a progression that happens to organizations? I think it might, and you can see it in all kinds of denominations. Rules are set up to provide structure and order, which can provide obvious benefits—hand-washing, for example, has obvious health consequences of which even pre-scientific cultures were aware. Structure leads to hierarchy—somebody’s got to decide on the rules and then enforce them—which leads to calcification, rigidity and protection of positions of power. All these things are inimical to true community.

They crop up in local congregations, too . . . the leadership gets arrogant and too used to having its own way. Groups within silo themselves up, protecting resources and turf . . . especially when they are in short supply. There’s nothing more vicious than a choir protecting its own (that’s a joke). Jesus says that it is from within us that all these things come, all these evil intentions, as he puts it.

When you look inside of us, you might see these things, latent—forming what the Buddhists call seeds, that require the proper watering, the proper conditions to flower. But you know what? If you look there—really look—you also find Christ himself, you find the Holy Spirit, who Paul says holds everything together. Christ holds rocks together, trees, birds of the air, and he holds us together as well, or he can, if we’ll only let him. That’s why they call it “good news.” Amen.