A Fulfilling Sign (John 6:24 - 35)

Let’s recap, shall we? Last week, we read John’s version of the feeding of the 5,000, with its boy, its five loaves and two fishes and its green, green grass. We saw how Jesus took a small amount of food—more than enough for the boy but not nearly enough for the crowd—and served all that multitude. And not only did they each get some food, they were filled, and the disciples collected baskets-full of left-overs in order that, as Jesus explained, “nothing may be lost.” Or, given the symbolism of the “twelve baskets of Israel,” so nobody might be lost.

Well, the people were so amazed that they declared “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.” And they were so impressed that they were fixing to grab him and make him king. Now. Jesus knew this kind of deal never works out, and that further, they’d be enraged when they found out just what kind of king they’d made, and so he beat feet back up the mountain to avoid the whole thing.

Meanwhile, with Jesus gone and all, the disciples went down to the Sea of Galilee, got into a boat, and headed for Capernaum, which was on it’s north shore. Peter’s mom lived there, if you’ll recall, and it was kind of a base of operations for Jesus and his ministry. Well, you know the story: it got dark and the wind started to blow, and they saw Jesus coming toward them walking on the water, and they were terrified, thinking he was some kind of ghost, but he told them “It is I: be not afraid,” and if I were preaching that passage, I’d explain that the Greek translated there as “it is I” is literally “I am,” which is what God called Godself up on another mountain, but I’m not so I won’t.

And now the people—the same ones he’d fed, remember—see the disciples getting into the boat, and also that Jesus isn’t with them—they hadn’t seen it when he’d given them the slip—so when some boats from Tiberius show up, they get themselves into them and go over to Capernaum looking for him.

Now, by this time, they’re getting a bit testy, and they think they own Jesus or something—after all, they’d tried to kidnap him and make him king—so they ask, with not a little snottiness, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” And Jesus answers their question with a typical, Johannine non-sequitur: “You don’t want me because you saw some signs, but because you ate your fill.” Jesus knows that a lot of people can do flash and dazzle—remember the Pharaoh’s magicians?—but not everything—or everyone—can fill you up.

It’s kind of like Hollywood’s obsession with computer-generated imagery. The wizards of Hollywood can make anything come to life, in living color and incredibly lifelike detail, so they do—and every year there’s a boat-load of CGI-heavy movies that are beautiful to look at but empty of heart and spirit. There are only one or two every year that have both lots of CGI and emotional and spiritual weight, because anyone with a big enough budget can do razzle-dazzle, but only a very few can fill you up.

It’s a metaphor for our modern society, isn’t it? We love the flash and dazzle, the shiny exterior, the red, red apple and ignore the squiggly little worm inside. Hollywood is the prime example: the #metoo movement has exposed its seamy underbelly—and much of corporate America as well. All the glitter, all the glamour, all the record-quarterly-earnings razz-a-ma-tazz is only a veneer for an abusive, white-male dominated culture.

Well. Jesus knows all that—after all, he’s had to deal with Herod, the Harvey Weinstein of Palestine—and he also knows that the bread that fills you up, the food that endures for eternal life —which he himself gives them through his relationship with God—comes not from fishing or farming or working as a day laborer. And when the crowd asks him what kind of work does get them this food he says “this is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he has sent.” AKA Jesus his own self.

Now. I always feel the need to drill down a little bit on this verb believe. I inherited a sign on my door—I presume it’s from Marsha—that says “just believe.” It doesn’t say what one is to believe, though its presence on a pastor’s door does give a clue. But it could mean believe anything, because it has no object. Here, of course, Jesus—the one whom God sent—is the object, but it’s not just “believe Jesus,” as in believe what he says, but “believe in Jesus.” And here’s what I’d like to ask: what does it mean to “believe in” Jesus? Obviously, it’s not literally believe in Jesus, like one might believe in Santa Claus. If it were, it’d be pretty trivial . . . after all, Jesus was right there with them, right there in front of them, it would be like believing in this pulpit or that chair. Does it mean to believe Jesus is the Messiah? That is, the Christ? Are we supposed to weigh all the evidence, all the pros and cons, and decide “he’s the Messiah, all right?” Is that the “work of God?”

Here’s a hint: the Greek word we translate as “to believe” is pisteuow, and the one for faith is pistos, and they sound alike for a reason: faith is a noun form of the verb. As a result, it might be possible to translate “believe in Jesus” as “have faith in Jesus,” but we don’t. And the question is why not? Well, here’s what I think: when Jesus said “believe in him whom God sent” it’s like he’s talking “all of the above.” Does he mean believe what he says? Yes. Does he mean follow his teachings? Of course. Does he mean act as his body on earth, both as individuals and together as the church? Undoubtedly. Does he mean trust in God’s promises, be open to the Spirit’s workings, live one’s life for the divine? Yes, yes and yes.

Our evangelical brothers and sisters have a saying—“give your life to Christ”—that catches the flavor, as does a phrase I heard recently: align yourself with Christ. This last approaches the goal of the perennial wisdom, that flows underneath all religions. That is, unification, or becoming one with God.

Well. After Jesus answers their question, after he fills them in on the work of God, they proceed to totally not get it: What sign are you going to give us so that we’ll believe? Apparently forgetting the sign they’d just been given—aka that they’d been fed in the wilderness—they ask for some good old flash and dazzle: “Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness,” they tell him, “as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” And once again he doesn’t answer with what they want to hear but with what they need to know: It wasn’t Moses who gave you the bread from heaven but God, whom Jesus calls “Father,” who gives them true bread from heaven which, in the manner of all bread, gives life to the world.

And of course, the people once again misunderstand—he’d just told them it wasn’t he who gives them the bread, and they proceed to ask him for it. And that’s when he comes out with the most iconic “I am” saying in John: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” It was just like Moses in the wilderness, only Jesus wasn’t Moses at all, but the manna. Or maybe Jesus was both Moses and the manna, the prophet and what the prophet brings.

And this is a good place to stop. Next week, we’ll continue our look at the bread discourse, and we’ll deepen our understanding of just what he means. In the meantime, meditate on his words, breathe them in and out, dream upon them in the watches of the night:  Jesus is the bread of life. Whoever comes to him, whoever believes in him, will never be hungry or thirsty again. Amen.

Blessings in the Tall Grass (John 6:1 - 15)

It was springtime, the time that Kings go out to battle, as Samuel once wrote, and also the time of Passover, which was very near. It was springtime, and the temperatures had not yet gone through the roof: it was just warm enough that I didn’t need an outer cloak, yet not so hot as I’d want to take it all off, thereby embarrassing myself, my parents, my ancestors, my spiritual leader and my fellow disciples. Not that I’d ever do such a thing, good Jewish boy that I am.

Anyway. After the master’s sermon about how he was the Son of the Father, who’d been sent by the Father, and who’d been given the power to give life through the Father, not to mention the authority to judge by the father, we all piled into a boat and crossed the Sea of Galilee, and I don’t know that we did it to escape the wrath of the Temple authorities, but the sermon had been given in Jerusalem, and by crossing the Sea we were going into Gentile lands and thus out of their reach . . . just saying.

So we got to the other side, the Gentile side, and Jesus went on doing what he did: signs of the coming kingdom like healing folks and casting out demons, and just like on the Jewish side there was quite a crowd following us around, so that none of us could go anywhere and be alone, we attracted people like flies, and they occasionally could get a bit rowdy, as folks in crowds were liable to do, but mostly they made it impossible to get a spiritual moment in. As everybody knows, signs and miracles run on prayer and also on more prayer, and listening for God’s voice, and recharging the old batteries, then praying and listening some more, and . . . well, you get the picture, and with the crowd roiling and crashing around us we couldn’t hear one another much less God, so Jesus took us up to a mountain to get away from it all.

And like I said, the Passover was near, and next thing you know, the crowd was up there with us, and it was getting on toward dark, and Jesus turned to Philip and said “Where are we gonna buy bread for all these people?” And it was obvious to me that it was a loaded question—Jesus used those as teaching tools—but it must not have been to Philip, ‘cause he said “Two hundred denarii wouldn’t be enough to feed all these people,” and he was right: you could have over half a year’s wages and you still wouldn’t have enough to feed everybody even a little bit. But as I said, it was a loaded question, because Jesus already knew what he was going to do, and then Andrew chimed in saying there’s a boy with five loaves and two fish, but what good would that do? It wouldn’t even feed the front row.

And Jesus didn’t say anything about our cluelessness, he didn’t say “O ye of little faith” as he’d been known to do, he just smiled an enigmatic little smile and said “Get them to sit down.” And there was quite a lot of grass up there on the mountain side, which was unusual in that barren land, and looking back on it I think that was a sign in itself, a portent pointing to what was about to happen: the lush, unlooked-for green of the abundant grass foreshadowed the outpouring of abundant, unexpected grace we were about to witness.

So we sat them down in that wild, unexpectedly verdant green, and Jesus himself took the bread, thanked God for the bread, broke the bread and gave it to them there in the tall grass—and the fish as well—and everybody ate until they were satisfied, until they were sleepy and lolling and full, lying back in the grass and drowsing away the afternoon. And I remember that a profound peace descended upon us all: there was no sound but the soft calling of doves in the nearby bushes and the hum of insects in the grassy verge. A soft breeze blew and clouds scudded across the sky, and the afternoon was perfect, even with thousands of people crowded around.

And it seems to me now that the grace offered there was more than just the fish and loaves, more than just full bellies and sleepy eyes. It seems to me that that peace passed all understanding, passed my understanding, anyway . . . we were caught up in a bubble—no, that’s not right, for a bubble breaks when you penetrate its skin. We were caught up in some kind of, of energy . . . we weren’t locked away from the wilderness around us so much . . . the wilderness was still there, we were still in it, but wefelt a timelessness, a wonder, that was greater than just the miracle we witnessed.

Which was pretty amazing, don’t get me wrong. It was expansive, all-embracing, gracious, bounteous . . . people remember his raising of Lazarus, and rightly so, but this was just as miraculous, in my book. To be sure, Jesus gave life in the raising of Lazarus, but here he did the same, for what was life in the wilderness but bread? Was was it but fish? Do not doubt it: that was what Jesus brought to the multitude—abundant, overflowing life.

I know, I know: there are some, especially in these skeptic times, who discount the miraculous, discount the supernatural in all of this. They say that the boy’s giving up of his loaves and fish shamed all the others, that they brought out caches of food hidden somewhere there in the back country, which, when you think of it, would be kind of silly . . . why would anybody hide anything out there on the mountain in the first place? What purpose would it serve? At any rate, all I can tell you is what I saw: Jesus began to pass out those loaves and that fish, and he just kept on passing. I saw no pulling-out of hidden provisions, no passing back-and-forth of anything other than what was given to them by the Master. Jesus took five loaves and two fish, thanked God, broke the bread and passed it out. And it was enough.

In fact, it was more than enough—when we gathered up the leftover bread it added up to twelve whole baskets, an overwhelming amount, given that we started with only five loaves. But I guess that’s how God’s grace is: overwhelming. Abundant. Surpassing. Like at Jacob’s well, where the Samaritan woman got living water, gushing up to eternal life. Like at the wedding at Cana, where the wine filled the jars right up to the very brim, God’s grace is more than enough. I am sure that if the numbers of people on that mountain were to suddenly double, or triple, if all of the thousands already present were to go get their aunts and uncles and in-laws, Jesus would have taken those twelve baskets full and handed them out and there’d still be twelve left over.

And don’t think I didn’t get the symbolism of the number twelve. Twelve baskets, twelve tribes of Israel . . . despite all the threats and plots to kill him by the Jewish authorities, Jesus would gather up the Jewish people. Jesus said to gather up the fragments so that nothing might be lost, and he meant what he said. You know? And the more I think on it, the more I realize it applies to us all: in the wildernesses of our lives, when there doesn’t seem to be enough to nourish us, or slake our thirst, or calm the raging seas, Jesus is there, right there in the wilderness with us. I guess that’s why they call it good news. Amen.

Be Careful What You Promise (Mark 6:14 - 32)

Not for the first time—or, I suspect, the last—I disagree with the lectionary’s slicing up of our scripture into bite-sized chunks. Oh, I don’t disagree with the need to slice things up . . . after all, if we read the whole thing each Sunday, we wouldn’t have time for my pithy and cogent observations. And before you say “what’s your point?” let me just say that the lectionary ends our passage with verse twenty nine, and for reasons that will hopefully become clear, I chose to read through verse thirty two.

Anyway, this is another strange interlude, kind of like last week’s, a break in the main action, which has been following Jesus around as he goes about his ministry, healing folks and casting out demons . . . last week, the break in the action involved Jesus coming home and getting no respect, and sending the disciples out, two by two, to continue his mission. And while we concentrated last week on the homecoming, and the scandal that ensued, this week’s passage is arguably more related to the sending, and its establishment of the disciples as, as Paul would put it, members of the body of Christ.

Mark is generally considered to have been the first gospel written, and it’s certainly the most direct and straightforward. But nevertheless, Mark was a master at creating meaning by juxtaposition, by which episodes he chose to place next to which others, and this is no exception: It’s not an accident that he places the story of the execution of John right after that of the commissioning of the disciples.

It’s constructed in the same way as a previous episode, the story of the dual healings of Jairus the synagogue official and the hemorrhaging woman. Remember? Jesus lands on the Jewish side of the Galilee Sea and he’s met by Jairus, who tells him his daughter’s deathly ill, and could he come to the house and heal her? And when Jesus and his followers head that way, a woman who’d been bleeding for twelve years—and thus was massively unclean—touched his cloak on the sly. And Jesus stops to heal her—aka make her clean—and they hear the official’s daughter has died, whereupon Jesus goes to Jairus’ house and heals her anyway.

And the juxtaposition of these two healings makes additional meaning, meaning that either story alone wouldn’t convey. First, it makes a statement about who Jesus’ ministry is for: it’s for both the comfortable insider—personified by the synagogue official Jairus—and the ultimate outsider, a woman (doubtless unattached) who has been considered untouchable in the same sense as the Indian caste of the same name (actually, since Gandhi, they’re not called that anymore). Second, the fact that it’s embedded within and interrupts the story of Jairus’ daughter hints at their relative importance: in Hebrew literature, the take-home lesson, the most important one, is often placed at the center of the action. And finally, there’s the connection of the woman’s twelve-year unclean-ness with the little girl being twelve years old. Do these two stories together say something about the nation of Israel which, after all, had twelve tribes?

And Mark uses a similar structure here to point to the importance of John’s beheading: the first part—the commissioning of the twelve, which we read last week, is interrupted by the tale of Herod and his execution of John the baptizer. And it’s even more obvious because of Mark’s rather clumsy narrative device: he says Herod gets wind of Jesus and thinks he’s John the Baptist resurrected and he should know, ‘cause he’s the one who had him killed in the first place. Then Johns beheading is recounted as a flashback. Mark has to work to include the story of John’s beheading.

So here’s the sequence: Jesus sends the apostles out, two-by two, Herod hears about it and we are told about John’s execution, and then the apostles return, exhausted, to tell Jesus what they’d done. And the ministry is so tiring, so stressful, that they need to go on a little retreat to rest up. Thus, the execution of John is embedded in the story of the disciples’ commissioning, it interrupts it, in fact. And it’s very placement and function as an interruption of the main narrative underscores its importance.

The scene is a party that Herod has given in his own honor—hey: somebody’s gotta do it—and all the hangers-on, hangers-out, stars and wanna-be stars, celebrities and wanna-be celebrities, yes-men, yes-women and toadies—especially the toadies—were there, lounging around in Herod’s ballroom, drinking Herod’s booze and hitting on his wife’s ladies-in-waiting. In fact, everybody who was anybody, or wanted to be anybody, was there: Roger—the dodger—Asclepius, star of stage and proscenium, was over by the window, hair pomaded to an impossible height, along with his fifth—or was it sixth?—wife, who was almost wearing a diaphanous confection that would have embarrassed Lady Godiva. On the opposite side was Bill—the shill—O’Rivera, the prime-time anchor at Hare News, the Governor’s favorite network. Bill was thinking that the party was so boring he’d have to make something up—hardly rare at his network—and was plotting over whom to slander.

Herod himself was bored: he’d long ago grown tired of his toadies’ antics, and he kept nodding off, head slipping off his hand, and starting himself awake. His guests pretended not to notice, because after all: he was the man upon whom all their fortunes lay, who had the ear of the emperor and the power of life and death over them all. He could do whatever he wanted.

The governor perked up his ears when they led his daughter Herodius in, and she was all decked out in her best toga—and was as cute s a bug’s ear to boot. Herod had a soft-spot for the little girl, and could deny her nothing, including the dance lessons the fruits of which she was about to demonstrate. And she did it so winsomely, so preciously, that the governor was completely overcome, along with all his wits and common sense, and he said: “I’ll give you whatever you want, even up to half my kingdom.”

Now, Herod fancied himself something of a scholar, which was why he’d kept John the Baptizer around so long. They’d get in these long theological discussions about all these arcane subjects which nevertheless were endlessly fascinating to Herod, and he kept putting off and putting off John’s execution for treason, for telling him what he should and shouldn’t do, because after all: he wasn’t going anywhere and he could kill him whenever he wanted, whenever he got bored with him, which would happen sooner or later, because Herod got bored a lot.

But because Herod was something of a scholar, he remembered his history, to wit: what happened the last time a ruler promised somebody up to half his kingdom. It was King Ahasuerus, who ruled one hundred twenty-seven provinces from India to Ethiopia. He went so gaga over Queen Esther that he told her “What is your request? It shall be given you, even to the half of my kingdom.” And the upshot of that was the loss of one of Ahasuerus’ favored advisors and oh yes: the incidental salvation of the Jewish people, which Ahasuerus could care less about, but there it was.

Even though he knew the story, as every Jew did, in the glow of pride at his little girl’s performance, he promised the same thing as Ahasuerus, but he thought: what the worst that could happen? After all, Esther was an adult woman; daughter Herodias only a little girl. What’s the most she could want? A complete collection of My Little Pony’s? There’s a Toys ‘R Us down on the Damascus Road. A real pony? Herod had a whole farm of them in Siluria because . . . well, don’t ask. The point was that yes, Herod had behaved rashly, maybe even foolishly, but hey: how bad could it be?

Of course, Herod wasn’t reckoning on his wife’s interference, and this is where the biblical proclivity to blame the woman for everything comes into play. So many times in the Bible a man’s foolish or evil behavior is blamed on a woman that I’m surprised that the saying isn’t “behind every woman hides a man.” Who really knows why she asked for John’s head? Was she angry with him for calling her adulterous marriage what it was? Was she in some way getting back at Herod for taking her from Philip? Because make no mistake: women were chattel, possessions, and she likely had no more say in the matter than she could’ve flown to the moon.

Maybe she was just exercising what power she could, which wasn’t much, but whatever it was, the story goes that big Herodias instructed little Herodias to ask for the head of John the Baptist. And Herod was deeply grieved, he hated to do it, just hated it, you understand, because he really liked John, he liked to listen to him, but hey: an oath was an oath, he couldn’t be seen as a weakling in front of all his guests, now could he? What would the media think? He could see the lead story on Bill O’Rivera’s newscast now: King Herod revealed as a welsher. Film at eleven. Much better to be seen as tough on crime, or on terrorism, or whatever John could be labeled by . . .

So he did it, or had an underling do it: he sent a soldier down to do the deed, and the dripping head was presented to the little girl, complements of her daddy, and Shen in turn gave it to her mom who, presumably, mounted it on her living room wall. And the disciples came and took his body, and laid it in the tomb, much like the Christ he had foretold would soon be.

And of course, that’s what this episode is: a foretelling, in literary terms, a foreshadowing, of the story of Jesus, who—like John—was executed at least in part for speaking truth to power. Every healing, every cleansing, every demonstration of the power available in this mysterious Kingdom of God through the equally mysterious Spirit of God, every miraculous deed we’ve seen so far in Mark’s gospel was a shot across the bows of the religious establishment and the Roman government. Each transgression of religious and civil law—no difference, remember—brought the authorities—both Jewish and Roman—closer to a killing rage. If they executed John just for telling Herod he’d sinned, how much more would they execute Jesus for all his in-your-face transgressions?

Well, I guess you can only be killed once, although a beheading seems like a much easier way to go than suffocating on a cross. And it goes to show you that Christianity didn’t start out being “safe,” as Peter and Thecla and Paul and Justin would discover. In point of fact, It’s why Mark very carefully—if somewhat clumsily—embedded an act of high cruelty within the story of the sending of the twelve. It serves as both a warning and a promise that the Christian faith can and will be costly even, as Paul would write, unto death on a cross.

I think if you are following Jesus, if you are doing what he did, using the same methods and tactics and theology that he did, there’s a good chance you’re going to at least get roughed up once in awhile. If the faith we practice is faithful, why isn’t it dangerous? Herod isn’t the only one who should be careful what they promise: when we promise to follow Christ, shouldn’t it mean all the way?

Of course, the same as it ever was, the flesh can be weak while the spirit is willing, and that’s why faith means, in the words of the old hymn, standing on the promises. The promise that Jesus will be with us, even unto the ends of the earth. The promise that he will send an advocate, a comforter, who will teach us with sighs too deep for words. And the promise that he will abide in and with use even as God is in and with him. And if that isn’t a promise one can stand on, I don’t know what is. Amen.

Home-town Boy Makes Good (Mark 6:1 - 13)

We’re still early in Jesus’ ministry, still early in the fulfillment of his mission which, as we noted last week, is defined over in Luke: it’s to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and let the oppressed go free. And up until now, we’ve seen him going about that mission: healing a guy with an unclean spirit and Simon’s mama-in-law, going on a Galilean preaching tour, healing a paralytic dropped down through a roof, teaching in synagogues, demonstrating against wrong-headed laws, teaching in parables, tangling with the weather, healing a demoniac, a hemorrhagic woman and a synagogue official’s daughter. . . and if you go back and look at his ministry up until this point—it’s easy to do in versions like the New Revised Standard, which have helpful headings that follow the action—if you go back and summarize his ministry, you’ll see a remarkable balance between teaching and practice, between saying and doing. Everywhere he practiced he taught and everywhere he taught he practiced.

And now we have kind of a strange interlude, where he comes to his hometown from Capernaum—by the sea—further inland to Nazareth. He comes to Nazareth and as was his custom, he heads to the synagogue and begins to teach. And “many who heard him”—aka his own people, his own family and friends—are astounded.  “Where did he get all this,” they ask, “What is this wisdom that’s been given him? Look all this stuff he’s doing, all these deeds of power . . .isn’t this the son of the carpenter and Mary? Don’t we know all his sisters and brothers, didn’t we ride him around on our backs, didn’t we dandle him on our knees?”. It reminds me of the reaction of some of my friends and family when I went to seminary . . . you? a minister? What about that time when . . . and they’d trot out some episode in our mutual past that wasn’t exactly ministerial . . . or when I got out of my dissertation defense, the last hurdle before a PhD, and all my teachers gravely shook my hand and said “Congratulations, Dr. Olson” and all my fellow grad students asked “Can we still call you jerk?” (I always answered “yes, but now it’s Dr. Jerk to you.”)

Familiarity breeds contempt, or so the saying goes, and that’s what seems to be going on here. A home-boy comes home, and people just assume he’s putting on airs, trying to be better than them, no matter if he is or not. And Mark says that they take offense at him, and it’s instructive, I think, to note that the Greek verb translated here as “to take offense” is scandalidzo,” from whence we get the word scandalize. Thus, we could render the phrase as “they were scandalized by him.” They were scandalized by his behavior, by his teaching and wisdom, by his deeds of power.

And it behooves us to explore a little bit the meaning of the word whenever we encounter it, because it’s importance in the New Testament far outweighs its frequency. So in what sense did Jesus’ actions—his healings and making clean and general making the last first and the first last—in what sense did what he was doing “scandalize” his homies? Let’s look at the anatomy of scandal: in its basic form, it involves two parties and an object, often called the model. Say Aunt Tillie is scandalized because young Mary is wearing white after Labor Day. The two parties are Mary and Aunt Tillie and the model is in this case a model of behavior: wearing white after labor day. And the scandal arises because Aunt Tillie—on the surface, at least—doesn’t think that Mary ought to be wearing white after labor day because it contradicts the model behavior.

But there’s a couple of things to remember here. In a scandal, it takes three to tango, not just two: a model, in this case a model behavior, and two people or parties or nations. So Aunt Tilly and Mary are both caught up in the scandal, not just Mary who is the perpetrator in Tilly’s eyes. And in fact, that brings up the second thing we should remember about scandals: it’s about two parties both striving to obtain the model. Tilly secretly would like to be able to wear white after Labor Day—she often says it outright: “I’d like to wear white too, but not everybody can be a fashion rebel.” And we should take her at her word: she really would like to do the forbidden behavior, but the rules—often what we call taboos—stop her. And what about Mary? She has reached out and taken the model behavior to heart, she has grasped it even knowing that it is taboo. She is contending for the model, in this case for the ability to break a taboo.

But there’s a third thing we need to know about scandals: they tend to be mimetic, imitative. That is, the two parties contending for the model want more than just to possess it, they want to—in some sense—be it as well. Thus, both Aunt Tilly and Mary want to be that person who flaunts the rules, who is—as Aunt Tilly calls it—a fashion rebel.

Theologian Robert Hamerton-Kelly calls the model in a scandal that which “both attracts and repels,” and we see it all the time, don’t we? Often, the most virulent haters turn out to be exactly the thing they are railing against. That’ always been apparent in religious circles: Jimmy Swaggart, the TV preacher and railer against adulterers. Guess what? Ted Haggard, the preacher who stood alongside presidents and bashed gays. Guess what? In politics, it has become equally obvious. Back when we lived in Mississippi, Governor Kirk Fordice carried the torch for “family values.” Guess what? More recently, Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina, also outspoken supporter of “family values.” Guess what?

But you say: preacher. If this passage describes a scandal as you (and Mark) seem to think, what is the taboo Jesus is breaking? What is the model that his homies simultaneously desire to be and deride? Why, it’s that old human failing: the desire to be like God. You remember ol’ Adam and Eve? Desiring to eat from the tree of knowledge, and God says “Before long, they’ll be just like us?” Well, in this case, Jesus’ countrymen were jealous of his acting like a priest, acting like a stand-in for God, making clean that which is unclean, righteous that which is un-righteous. Curing the Garasene demoniac of his madness. Healing the hemorrhaging woman. Bringing the Temple official’s girl back from death, the ultimate unclean. The taboo Jesus broke—and to which all his friends and relatives themselves aspire—is acting like a priest which, of course, is acting like God. And if they couldn’t do it, why should Jesus be able to? After all, they say, is this not the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And, Mark says, they were scandalized by him.

Where are the scandals in our own lives? What do we envy our neighbors, our fellow church members, our co-workers? If we look within the ubiquitous framework of scandal, we can see it everywhere. A church stands empty, unused by anyone but the pastor and secretary 150 out of 168 hours in the week, yet when a program expands or a new program tries to get a foothold, the congregation gets all defensive. Rivalries for supplies, space and decision-making power tend to all be in this mold . . . we are envious of others for using space that often stands empty 90 % of the week. We are envious of session-members or other leaders the decision-making power, even when we consistently refuse to serve on session or committees. Scandal—the rivalry for something desirable—tends to tear up churches, it tends to cause dissension and strife within a community of God, it drives members to other churches, it makes others withdraw from service, it can even drive folks away from organized religion altogether.

As in our passage, scandals can be so debilitating that the ministry of God—deeds of power—is no longer possible in a particular church, even in an entire denomination. Witness, for example, the long-running conflict over ordination and marriage standards, which impeded the mission of the Presbyterian Church USA for decades, and continues to do so to this day.

But you know what? Christ came to show the futility of this kind of rivalry, to show that we don’t need to contend for God’s grace, that it’s freely given, that there is plenty enough to go around. Like those disciples of old, he confers his power and authority upon us through the Holy Spirit and sends us out, two by two, and three-by-three and congregation-by-congregation. And we are powered and empowered by that Spirit, and given the wherewithal to continue Christ’s ministry in our home communities and beyond. Amen.

Jesus Was a Refugee (Immigration Sunday)

The Presbyterian Church has designated today as Immigration Sunday, and the timing couldn’t be better. In fact, given that it was scheduled some time ago, long before the current mess, proves that even our own stodgy denomination can be prophetic once in a while. In the last weeks we’ve been treated to images of children crying alone after being ripped away from their parents, toddlers in cages and detention centers—a slightly nicer term than “concentration camps”—blooming in the wastelands. That has been the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. Even though the policy of separating children from parents was overridden by executive decree, the images have been burned into the national psyche, and there’s no plan to reunite the 2400 children still being held in the camps anytime soon.

Now, to complement the images of children alone in the camps, we have stories told by volunteers lawyers about their toddler clients—some as young as three—who are in immigration hearings by themselves, stories about their clients climbing on the table, bursting into nursery songs at the drop of a hat. The stories might be charming if the circumstances were less horrific, to wit: young children on trial. Alone, without anybody they know nearby.

Politicians and talking heads on all sides are always going on about what a complex issue immigration is, and I suppose that’s true, at least in the sense that there are a lot of moving parts. There are questions of refugees, asylum seekers, so-called “illegal” immigration, immigration quotas, border security, and I think it’s safe to say that it’s the defining political issue of the day, and will have a huge part to play in our elections for some time to come. And we who call ourselves Christians have two basic options: Option A, which is to put our heads in the sand and stand behind our duly-appointed government’s actions on the issue, and that’s certainly safe, it won’t ruffle any feathers, it won’t cause any fights or lose anybody any members.

But there’s another way to respond, we’ll call it Option B, and that’s to discern a Biblical response to the problem, and then and follow it, advocate for it, do something about it. It’s not as safe as Option A, but perhaps a bit more satisfying . . . after all, it assumes that our faith means something more than just fire insurance, or providing a place to come and feel good for a couple of hours a week. It means putting our faith in action, joining tens of millions of Christians world-wide who attempt to follow Christ’s mission statement, which is found in Luke, Chapter 4: bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.

Where we ever got the notion that Christianity was supposed to be safe and warm and fuzzy I have no idea. They killed prophets, for Pete’s sake, and crucified Jesus. They hounded Paul from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, and martyred him during Nero’s great purge. John the Baptist was beheaded after questioning the Emperor’s morals, aka sleeping with his brother’s wife. Perpetua was trampled by a bull and, when that didn’t kill her, beheaded for speaking about her faith. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed for opposing the lawfully elected leader of his government. And thousands more, all killed while living out their faith; not one of them worried about being too political, or mixing politics with faith.

For at least the length of this sermon, let’s follow Option B. First, Scripture, for one, is unambiguous as to how immigrants should be treated. Both the Old and New Testaments tell compelling stories of refugees forced to flee their homelands because of oppression. Exodus tells the story of the people of Israel, who were victims of slavery in Egypt. They were utterly helpless by themselves, but with God’s intervention, enabled to escape and take refuge in the desert where they lived as refugees for forty years. The Israelites’ experience was so painful, so frightening, that God ordered his people for all time to have special care for the stranger. It’s recorded in the book of Leviticus: “When an alien resides with you in your land, do not mistreat such a one. You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself; for you too were once aliens in the land of Egypt”. Notice the use of the same word we use: “alien,” only we often precede it with the pejorative “illegal.”

As a child, Jesus was a refugee, fleeing with his family to Egypt. And note that it was for the same reason that many seek asylum on our southern borders: they feared for their lives, running from a government hit squad. And though I don’t know about the Egyptians’ motives—they weren’t known for their kind-hearted treatment of visitors—I do know they didn’t send them back to face certain death, nor did they take Jesus away from Mary and Joseph and put him in a cage. And when Jesus grew up, he was an itinerant wanderer, a kind of perpetual immigrant, trudging from one nation to another: “Foxes have holes, birds have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

As an adult, he advocated unequivocally for the values of God, whom he called Abba: one of his core sayings was “love your neighbors as yourself,” which he elaborated over in Matthew when he said “whatever you do to the least of these, you’ve done it to me “ And children on trial without their parents, children in cages without their parents, anybody fleeing persecution and near-death, and anybody desperate enough for food and shelter to pay a smuggler to sneak them across the border qualifies as the least of these in my book. And Jesus makes it clear that we will be judged by how we fulfill this mission, how we feed and water and shelter the strangers among us.

Then there’s the summary statement of Jesus’ entire mission: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” How many of us would want our neighbors to do unto us as we’re doing to our Southern neighbors? How many would like them to forcibly separate us from our children, to send families back to be murdered in their beds, or to face sure starvation? Can I have a show of hands?

Not only did Jesus preach inclusive justice but he practiced it as well: he healed the child of the Syrophoenician woman, certainly a stranger in a strange land, and gave water to the Samaritan at the well. He told stories about good strangers to folks for whom the only good stranger was one who was deceased. And he welcomed the little children into his warm and forgiving lap, it didn’t matter where they were from or what their parents had done.

You know, I often hear Romans 13 quoted to justify obeying secular law: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” Never mind that this has been used to justify everything from feudalism to slavery to Apartheid, it is clear from his life that Paul didn’t intend for this to mean laws that are unjust, that go against the word of the Lord. As we’ve already noted, Paul disobeyed authority right and left, refusing to knuckle under to orders to quit preaching the fledgling Christian faith which was, remember, illegal until 313 CE. But Paul wasn’t the only one: Peter was crucified upside down for breaking the law, and Christians were routinely tortured and murdered for doing the same. Sometimes we say piously that these people were martyred for their faith, but this kind of whitewashes what they did. What actually happened was that they were executed for disobeying the law, for preaching and practicing an illegal religion.

In all this, they were simply following the Gospel, as embodied and modeled by Jesus himself, who had no problem disobeying the law right, left and upside down. He disobeyed all kinds of laws from working on the sabbath to eating with outsiders to driving those hard-working businessmen off of the Temple grounds. And as we talked about a few weeks ago, he often disobeyed the law in very public, in-your-face ways, ways that Henry David Thoreau would label “civil disobedience.” So based on the record of Scripture, the idea that Christians must obey all the laws of the land, including those that go against the will of God, is just not tenable.

Well. We’ve just about covered the first part of Option B—discerning the Christian stance—and it’s pretty simple, really: treat the least of these, treat those tired and weary yearning to be free, as you would treat Jesus if you met him on the street. Heck, treat anyone as you would treat Jesus if you met him walking down the street. Treat the people trying to come into this country to have a better life, treat those seeking asylum from brutal governments, treat the children living in cages, without their parents involvement or presence as you would treat Christ. In fact, do unto others as you would have them do unto you . . . that summarizes all the laws and all the prophets you ever heard of.

Now, on to the second part: doing something about it. And this is where it gets personal, both in terms of us individually and as a local community of Christ. I’ve done what you hired me to do, and that’s interpret scripture to the best of my ability, and relate it to y’all in words. But you know the saying: preach the Gospel in words, if necessary, so I’ll tell you what I’m doing, and invite you as individuals to join me. I’m working with two organizations intimately concerned with immigration issues, one local with national connections and one national with local connections. The local one is the Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center (IJPC), headquartered in Over the Rhine, and the national group is The Poor People’s Campaign, the revival of Martin Luther King’s organization. Both are headed by Christians: IJPC by Roman Catholic nuns; The Poor People’s Campaign, as in Dr. King’s day, is led by clergy. Both are dedicated to grass-roots change through education and demonstration. If you are not down with the latter, with public action, they offer excellent educational opportunities, especially the local IJPC. Another way to contribute is financially, because they are chronically short on funds. I would be glad to introduce anyone interested to these organizations and help them get involved.

Of course, there is another way to speak out on the subject—really, anything that you feel goes against the mission statement of Christ—and that is to vote. Although we in our country believe—rightly—in separation of church and state, that doesn’t mean we can’t bring our Christian convictions into the voting booth. Really, if we believe in preaching the Gospel in words only if necessary, how can we not? So, what I do is examine the platform of every candidate, regardless of political party, and compare it to the mission statement: bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free. Amen.

Satan versus Satan (Mark 3:20 - 35)

Last week, we discussed Jesus’ early ministry, and saw that it was almost all healing, all the time: healing demoniacs—aka casting out demons—healing lepers, healing the disabled . . . and because of it, he began to draw huge crowds, so huge that they mobbed his house, and that they had to lower the man with leprosy down through the roof, because they couldn’t get in the door. We also saw him attract the attention of the religious authorities, who didn’t like what he was doing for a number of reasons, not least of all that he was breaking the law. Not to mention that he challenged their authority, always a dangerous thing with an entrenched, hierarchical administration.

We also saw that Jesus wasn’t exactly subtleabout it, either. He declared sins forgiven, he healed on the Sabbath, he even healed on the Sabbath in the synagogue, for Pete’s sake. Talk about rubbing their noses in it . . . and don’t think they didn’t understand, the religious authorities, don’t think they didn’t know what he was doing, that he was deliberately provoking them, and they couldn’t help themselves: they began to plot against him.

And by this week, we can see that things have escalated; not only are the religious authorities criticizing him on theological grounds—how dare he forgive sins!—but they’re calling him demon possessed, a very dangerous escalation indeed. As our passage opens, we’ve skipped over some stuff—healing some more folks by the sea, commissioning the twelve—and now he’s back at the house, snowed in by people again; nobody can even eat, there are so many. And you can just imagine what kind of people are out there: all the unclean in the world. The crazies, the addicts and the differently abled. The sexually diverse, the disfigured, and those whose bodies had been whittled away by war. It looks like a great, seething mass of unclean, a great writhing sea of outsiders, and every one of them is clamoring to get in the house.

Is it any wonder Jesus’ family is concerned? Is it any wonder that they are worried? They think he’s gone round the bend, that he’s become the leader of a demented parade, the ring-master of a dark circus of other. They try to restrain him, to hold him back—for his own good, of course—because the neighbors are beginning to talk, they’re beginning to say “This guy is out of his ever-loving’ mind!”

And that’s when the religious authorities pounce, just at the moment they might get the most support—nobody said they were stupid—and they say “He has Beelzebul and by the power of that leader of demons he’s casting out demons.” Noticed that by the first century the figure of Satan had evolved from the adversary to the king of the demons, and here they are claiming Jesus was under his sway.

Now, this is more than enough to get him strung up, but Jesus makes a pretty clever argument in defense: “How can Satan cast out Satan? I mean, think about it: if a kingdom is divided against itself, it can’t stand. Just like if a house is divided against itself, it won’t be able to stand, either. So, if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.” And you can see just how Jesus got ‘em, can’t you? If he’s not a minion of Satan, the have no case. But if he is, then Satan’s rule is surely coming to an end. Gotcha!

And I’d be remiss in my pastorly duties if I didn’t point out the dead-on applicability of this particular parable to today. As a nation, it’s well-attested that we’re more divided than ever; our elections have become as close as a razor’s edge. Our national discourse has devolved into mud-slinging and fist fights, so partisan that we all seem to be lurking behind barricaded gun emplacements, lobbing fire at one another without thought to what’s best for the country. And what’s that Jesus is saying about what happens to divided houses?

And take the church—please!  (apologies to Henny Youngman). In the good old PCUSA, we’re already not standing. We’re shedding churches like fleas and losing missions like a house afire. And contrary to what the conservatives, say, it’s not about the liberals, and contrary to what the liberals say it’s not about the conservatives. It’s what happens when a house is divided. Funds begin to dry up and energy is diverted away from doing the legitimate work of God. It’s no wonder that Paul agreed with Jesus that unity is much more important than purity.

Well. Jesus finishes the parable up by explaining just why he’s casting out all those demons: nobody can enter a strong man’s house—that’s Satan—without first tying him up, and that means tying up his power, which is is contained in all those possessed people, all those people running around doing Satan’s will. You need to hit ‘em where it hurts, and in this case that’s cutting off Satan’s power on earth, manifested in all those possessed souls. Only unlike earthly rulers, unlike Kings and Princes and Presidents, Jesus doesn’t destroy human beings who are opposed to him, he doesn’t kill the folks possessed by powers they cannot oppose, he doesn’t slaughter soldiers caught up in the power struggles of their rulers. Instead, he sets them free, he gives back their will and self determination.

Finally, he manages to get in a swipe at the all the religious authorities calling him the devil: Every kind of blasphemy can be forgiven but one, he says, and that’s blaspheming the Holy Spirit. And the way Mark has structured this passage makes it clear that for him at least, for the Mark, this means mistaking the work of the Holy Spirit for that of demons, for the work of the forces of darkness. Which is what the scribes are doing with him: the Holy Spirit was working through Jesus, and they’re saying it’s the work of the devil. And in case we doubt what he’s talking about, Mark even adds an explanation of why he said it: “because they’d said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.’”

And from the very beginning, this has been a problem passage, maybe because it’s been taken out of context so much. It even worried the early Christians, enough that some fifteen years later, Matthew felt he had to “clarify” the issue, modifying the statement and it’s content to fit what he thought it meant. Today, this is certainly in the top five of anxiety-producing Jesus quotes: people worry about what it means, and wonder if they’ll inadvertently do it some day and be consigned to points down below, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. They make lists of the things that might be the unforgivable sin so they can avoid even getting near doing them because, you know . . . crackle, crackle, crackle.

And the problem may be our tendency to elevate every little saying of Jesus into the doctrinal stratosphere, as if we need to build a pillar of theology every time hen opens his mouth. I swear, if one of our gospels mentioned that he was hungry, we’d construct a theology about Holy Hunger, or something. And while that is not a bad impulse—one that Mark and Matthew apparently shared—maybe the saying Mark remembered was just a jab at the authorities. After all, in those early days of his ministry he was doing plenty of that.

But Mark’s explanation—that of ascribing to the devil the work of the Spirit— does kind of fit into the overall theme of house divided, especially if we take into account the revelation over in John that the Holy Spirit resides within each one of us. If we deny the work of the Holy Spirit within ourselves, if our ego, or false self, or id, or whatever you want to call it, blasphemes the Holy Spirit, if it refuses to acknowledge it or work with it, if we claim all of what we are is because of ourself and not the Sprit within, then well. We certainly are a house divided, we certainly are cruising for a fall.

Well. His family shows up, his mothers and brothers (without Joseph: is it after his death?) and the folks sitting around him—who are inside the house with him—tell him they’re outsider, and he gestures to those who are inside, to those who are insiders, that they are his family, because they are with him, because they are doing the will of the God. And of course, the situation is graphically represented by inside and out, his biological family is outside and his followers are in.

And this pretty much blasts all those Christian family values views out of the water, with their emphasis the supremacy of a “traditional family with a mother and father,” when they make the biological family into a moral fetish which politicians can cynically use to divide us even further. Jesus’ family—by his ownnwords is about as untraditional as it comes, consisting of everyone who does God’s will, everyone. There’s no requirement of race, creed, color, sexual orientation, gender identity or even religion. There’s only one criterion—that they do the will of the creator.

Wow. Family . . . whether you know it or not, whether you believe it or not. And Jesus didn’t even say you have to believe that he’s God incarnate, that he will rise from the dead, or except him into your heart or anything like that. You just have to do the work of God. Mother Theresa, family. Mahatma Gandhi, family. Elie Wiesel, Martin Luther King, Gautama Siddhartha, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, anyone who feeds the hungry, anyone who heals the sick, anyone who clothes the naked: family. Anyone who does the will of God is Jesus’ family, and therefore oursm as well.

I’m not talking about salvation, I’m not talking about where you go when you die. I am talking about who’s in and who’s out, but not of heaven or the country club or the church. I’m talking about the family of humanity, siblings of the Son of Humanity, who is Jesus the Christ. And everyone who does the will of God is in that family, no exceptions, no ifs ands or buts. If that’s not good news, I don’t know what is. Amen.

Jesus Put the Rad into Radical (Mark 2:23 - 3:6)

     Several years ago, on National Public Radio, a Jewish man remembered being on a train to a Nazi death camp as a young child. He and his siblings are hungry, so his mother buys them food, but all that’s available is non-kosher meat. Her son asks her why she’s crying; she tells him that she has kept kosher all of her life but now she’s going to die, and she’s crying because her children are young and have not had a chance to live. His mother was a devout Jew, but nevertheless knew that, kosher or no, it was her duty and right to feed them what she could. In fact, Jews have never permitted Torah observance to override decisions to save life.

And you’ll notice that in today’s passage, in neither case is the situation dire. The disciples aren’t presented as starving, or as even particularly hungry: they’re just wandering through a field, idly plucking cobs along the way. Neither was there anything urgent about the man with the withered hand. As far as we know, he’d had one for a long time; it surely wouldn’t have hurt anything to wait until after the sun went down to heal him, until after the Sabbath was over. These stories are not about emergencies overriding Torah observance: there was no necessity for Jesus to break Sabbath rules.

But that’s how I’ve heard it preached, as a way of distinguishing between compassionate, life-giving Christianity and lifeless, heartless, rule-bound Judaism. In fact, it’s pretty clear that Jesus is deliberately provoking the religious authorities in this story—he even has the gall to compare himself to David, that greatest of Jewish kings, whose glorious return every good Jew awaited. And he doesn’t just heal the guy on the Sabbath, he does it in the synagogue, the local center of Jewish life. Taken together, the whole episode—the Sabbath corn-picking and healing—seems designed to say to the Pharisees “Put that in your (corn-cob) pipe and smoke it!”

It helps to understand that these are the final episodes in a series of conflict-stories that begin Jesus’ ministry. After calling his first disciples, he hit the road, healing the sick and casting out demons. In the Capernaum synagogue, he cast an unclean spirit out of a guy, then healed Simon’s mother-in-law at her own house, along with a whole bunch of other Capernaum-ites. And after embarking on a preaching and healing tour, his fame spread, so that by the time he returned to Capernaum, people were coming from far and wide to be healed.

His fame began to catch the attention of people other than those in need; in particular, the local religious authorities. And as he holed up in Capernaum, the place he’s staying was mobbed by desperate people and a few synagogue employees—scribes—to boot. And as they lowered a paralyzed man down through the roof, Jesus casually said “Son, your sins are forgiven.” And the scribes were thinking “how dare he! Only God can forgive sins” and Jesus, in a perfect state of non-dual oneness, knew exactly what they’re thinking, and healed the guy anyway.

Then, on a pleasant lakeside stroll, Jesus came across Levi and said “Follow me.” Now, Levi was a tax-collector, a Roman collaborator, and therefore unclean, and don’t think the lurking religious authorities didn’t notice that, and don’t think they didn’t notice when he sat down for supper at Levi’s house and broke bread with other unclean people—sinners, in the parlance of the times—as well. And Jesus just looks at them and says: “I’ve come to heal sick folks, not those who are well.”

Finally, some religious types noticed that although John the Baptizer’s people were fasting, Jesus and his people weren’t. “Why do John’s and the Pharisees’ disciples fast, but your’s don’t?” And he answered them with a wedding metaphor—you only fast after the bridegroom (that’s him) has left—and one about new wine in old wineskins, a sure sign that he didn’t think that the old religious rules didn’t fit the new stuff he was teaching.

And it’s clear that none of these things are forced errors, none of them are things he had to do. He didn’t have to throw in that incendiary comment—Son, your sins are forgiven—that threatened the scribes’ power. He didn’t have to eat at Levi ’s house, stuffed to the gills with tax collectors and other miscreants just guaranteed to make pharasitical blood boil. He didn’t have to give up fasting . . . it certainly wouldn’t have hurt him, and everybody knows it’s good for the soul.

And now, as we’ve seen, he doesn’t have to let his disciples pick that corn or heal that guy—in the synagogue, for Pete’s sake—on the Sabbath. It’s almost an in-your-face kind of thing, designed to catch the religious authorities attention. It’s almost like . . . a demonstration.

Mahatma Gandhi, the famous leader of Indian independence, was well known for his philosophy of non-violent resistance, What is perhaps less well-known is that he based it largely on the teachings and actions of Jesus Christ. And in the past, when I’ve thought of this, I’ve thought of the usual suspects: turn the other cheek, which Gandhi particularly quoted, which forces your attacker to treat you as an equal. Go the extra mile, which causes the oppressors to break their own laws. And give your undergarments up as well as your coat, to embarrass oppressive lenders.

But I’ve slowly come to realize that almost every public action he did amounted to non-violent resistance. Healing the twelve lepers. Feeding the five thousand. Even turning over the tables in the Temple, which hurt no one, freed a bunch of innocent creatures, and made his point that the sacrificial system was coming to an end. All of these episodes went against the grain, against the religious and secular powers that be.

And the last one, with the tables, underscores an important point: although Jesus—and Gandhi’s—resistance was non-violent, it most certainly wasn’t passive. It always involved doing, it always involved action. Turning the other cheek. Going the extra mile. Turning over the tables. All things you have to do, actions you have to take. That’s one reason Gandhi called his philosophy satyagraha which can be translated “truth action” or “truth force.”

And there’s one other thing: many of Jesus’ actions, including sabbath corn-picking and healing, were against the Jewish law called Torah, especially as interpreted by the religious authorities. It was against the law for anyone other than a priest—as the duly constituted representative of God—to forgive sins (aka declare someone clean). Associating with sinners—aka those who were unclean—made ones own self unclean, a cast out from society. And before you say these are religious rules, not civil, so it’s not the same thing, remember: everything was civil in those days, there was no separation of state and religion. Jewish laws were civil laws, and vice versa. What Jesus was engaged in was civil disobedience, as Henry David Thoreau called it: breaking a law to demonstrate or prove a point.

Well. If Jesus was demonstrating, if he was actively—but non-violently—resisting, what was he demonstrating against? What was he resisting? His famous statement “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath” gives us a clue, but it’s more broad than that. Look at the pattern of his first days in ministry. He heals Simon’s mama and a bunch of others at her house, and tours the countryside, curing people of their demon possession and leprosy. He establishes his home base in Capernaum, then heals some more.

And what are the religious authorities doing during this time? They’re griping about Jesus usurping their priestly authority by declaring the forgiveness of sins. About him associating with people they—and their religion—don’t want him to associate with. About him doing—and not doing—what their religion would have him do and not do. While Jesus is healing, the religious authorities are worried about their religion.

Part of this is the very human desire to hang onto authority. In a real sense, they are trying to keep their jobs. After all, even scribes and Pharisees have to eat. But underlying all that, there is the matter of what they actually worship. The great theologian Jiddu Krishnamurti put it this way: “You use a typewriter to write letters, but you do not put it on an altar and worship it. But that is what you are doing when organizations become your chief concern.”

We Christians have a name for that, don’t we? We call it idolatry, the worship as if it were God of something that is not. And we Presbyterians are really good at doing that. Take it from me, as someone who has served on sessions and Presbytery committees for a very long time, we Presbyterians are second to none in worshiping their religion—and our local churches—rather than God, right up there with Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews.

Sisters and brothers, we often divide our strivings into content versus process, into what we do versus how we do it. In his public ministry, Jesus showed us how to fuse the two. He was a rabble rouser, a demonstrator, using tactics, using processes copied and used to great effect by folks like Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He knew that without pressure, and public pressure at that, nothing ever changes.

But at the same time, he embodied what he preached, he demonstrated—in his acts of resistance—the very thing that he was advocating. His public actions—against the powers that be—embodied the message he was sending. Healing the sick, feeding the poor, forgiving the sins is what religion is for, not the other way around. Religion is the typewriter, not the one who is doing the typing. Religion is for humanity not humanity for religion. Amen.