Getting It Right in the Wrong Way (Mark 8:27-38)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on March 31, 2019, Fourth Sunday of Lent)

---

A Bad Defender, a Good Father

Running relaxes me.  The steady strides, the focused breathing, the outside world of squirrels and snakes and lakes and trees—all of this helps to clear my mind.  It is meditative.  I become attuned to the present in a way I am normally not.  Maybe for you, it’s not running but another activity: crafting, cooking, building something, gardening, washing dishes.  Whatever it is, I wonder if these mind-clearing activities are not sometimes forms of prayer.  I wonder if they don’t sometimes reset our mind in a good way—or perhaps even set our mind on divine things, as our scripture puts it today.

Last week as I was running-praying at Deep Run Park, I watched intently out of the corner of my eye a father and his son playing soccer.  The son, maybe five or six-years-old, was wearing a replica jersey of a superstar.  He was dribbling toward the goal without much control.  His father was playing defense—but not really.  When his son lost control of the ball, he did not swoop in and steal it as a good defender would have done, but rather he hovered in place and waited for his son to recover.  It was a delicate, loving dance.  At the end, of course, the son smashed the ball into the goal and wheeled away in celebration.

As I reflect on that tender scene, one in which I see my own childhood before me, I ponder a paradox.  There is such a thing as getting it right in the wrong way.  The father could have defended the goal much better.  He could have kept his son from ever scoring.  But to do that would have been getting it right in the wrong way.  To play to the best of his ability would have been to deny his son the opportunity to practice, to improve, to be encouraged.  It would have stifled his son’s dreams.  To be a great defender in that moment, would have been to be a terrible father.

The Right Words in the Wrong Way

Earlier this semester, I explored the book of Job with my students at VCU.  The book of Job is another example of getting it right in the wrong way.  After Job suffers great loss, his three friends come to share his grief.  For seven days, they sit with him in silence.  But when Job starts to air his grievances with God, they break their silence.  They answer each of his complaints with well-intended pious—today we might say “churchy”—comments.  Much of what they say, actually, bears close resemblance to what is said elsewhere in the Bible.  In other words, they get a lot of things right about God.  But what they say does not help Job one bit in his grief. 

We have all probably seen or experienced this in our lives.  Someone close to us dies, and a friend consoles us with well-meaning claims of faith: “He’s with God now.”  “You’ll see him again one day.”  “Things will get better.”  At the end of the book of Job, God intervenes and says to Job’s friends, “You have not spoken of me what is right.”  In other words, they may have been the right words, but they've been shared in the wrong way.  What Job needed was not pious consolation, but a companionship deeper than words—a companionship that his friends had shared with him the first seven days when they were silent. 

Satan Gets It Right

One of the curious patterns in the gospel of Mark is Jesus’ frequent admonition to his disciples and others to keep silent—not to spread the news. 

We see it in today’s scripture.  Jesus asks his disciples who people say that he is, and after a host of wrong answers, Peter gets it right: “You are the Messiah” (8:29).  In response, Jesus “sternly orders” them to not tell anyone.  Why in the world would Jesus want to keep the right answer under wraps?

We get a hint, I think, in the very next verse.  “Then,” Mark tells us, “he began to teach them.”  In other words, they need to be taught.  They have the right answer, but Jesus is afraid that if they were to tell people about him, they would get it right in the wrong way.  His concern is immediately confirmed.  When he tells his disciples that as the Messiah he will undergo great suffering and rejection and even death, Peter takes him aside and rebukes him.  “Jesus,” I imagine him saying, “You’ve got it all wrong.  The Messiah will bring our victory, not our defeat.” 

Jesus’ response shows just how wrongly Peter has gotten it right.  “Get behind me, Satan!”  The suggestion here is startling.  We all recognize Satan in the obvious shapes: greed, envy, pride, lust; racism, sexism, nationalism.  But here Satan takes the shape of the right answer.  Here Satan dresses up in his Sunday best, carries a Bible under his arm, quotes scripture with us, prays with us our prayers.  Here Satan gets it right—Jesus is the Messiah—but gets it right in a very wrong way.  The Messiah, according to Satan, means our success, satisfaction, security.  The Messiah, according to Satan, means we are on the winning side.

Call It Jesus Christ and the Way of the Cross

After Peter (or Satan) gets it right in a very wrong way, Jesus sets him and the disciples straight, which is to say he sets their minds not on human things but on divine things (cf. 8:33).  The Messiah, he says, is not about the self.  It’s not about us winning.  The Messiah is about the loss of the self for the sake of others.  Call it altruism, call it ego-death, call it selflessness, call it Jesus Christ and the way of the cross—call it whatever you want, but it’s the awareness that the self in fact makes life smaller, sicker, a shadow of death, and that the loss of self paradoxically makes life bigger, richer, and more abundant.  I think again of the father playing horrible defense, how on the level of the self he was getting it so wrong, and yet how on a deeper level he was getting it so right.  I think of a quarrel between friends, how winning an argument can satisfy the self and simultaneously strain the friendship of its joy and vitality, how we can get it right in such a wrong way.

In today’s scripture, Jesus values the way that we live over the words that we say.  In fact, at the very moment that Peter stumbles upon the right words, Jesus tells him to shut up because he knows Peter’s got it in the wrong way.  After that, Jesus teaches his disciples the right way and invites them to follow him.  He effectively counsels them, “Less talk, more walk.”

Of the Church’s Survival and the Kingdom’s Arrival

In Matthew’s version of this passage, Jesus famously declares that Peter is the rock on which he will build the church.  I wonder, then, if Peter might not serve as an example for the church today.  Could it be that Jesus calls the church like Peter to focus less on its words and more on its way?

Author and Christ-follower Philip Yancey tells the heartbreaking story of a down-and-out prostitute in Chicago.  She confided with a social worker just how bad things had gotten.  She had started using her two-year-old daughter to support her drug habit.  But now she had spent the last of her money and was unable to buy even a scrap of food for her or her child.  The social worker was stunned speechless.  He was legally liable and would have to report the woman for child abuse.  But even so, he looked upon the woman with compassion and asked if she had ever thought of going to a church for help.  “Church?” she asked incredulously.  “Why would I ever go there?  I was already feeling terrible about myself.  They’d just make me feel worse.”

It is noteworthy, I think, that the broken and hurting in our world flee less and less to church and more and more to humble AA gatherings, soup kitchens, and other special communities that reach out compassionately to persons in need.  Could it be that like Peter the church sometimes proclaims good news in a not so good way, because it proclaims love in a prideful, overbearing, and impatient register?

I know from my conversations with you that Gayton Road is different from this caricature of church that I’ve sketched out.  Many of you have shared with me that the reason you began coming to Gayton Road in the first place was the warm welcome and humble, unpretentious character of our church family.  Even so, I wonder if Jesus’ words to Peter and his disciples might issue a healthy challenge to us as well: namely, to worry less about ourselves and more about our way.  To worry less about the survival of the church—the building and the programs that it houses and how many people fill the pews—and to ask rather how we are loving and building up our neighbors, especially the needful among them.  The point, after all, is not for the church to survive, but for the kingdom to arrive.

Prayer

Self-giving God,

Whose love is

Not a doctrine

But a person—

Show us your way

Of selflessness

And save us

From ourselves,

That we might

Share life abundant

With others

In your kingdom. 

In Jesus, who took up his cross:

Amen.

Again (Mark 8:1-10)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on March 24, 2019, Third Sunday of Lent)

---

How Can I Help?

This winter and spring I have had the opportunity to teach a course at VCU, “The Bible as Literature.”  Every Monday evening, I meet with around twenty students for three hours and we explore a passage in the Bible.  Three hours is a long time to spend with the Bible.  In the first class, as we were reading through the opening chapters of Genesis and we arrived at our first genealogy, one student moaned, “These lists are so boring!”  And not just the lists seemed boring.  I’ve discovered that one of the primary challenges of reading the Bible, for these students as well as for us, is to see that actually it’s not that different from our own world.  The story of the ancestral family—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—is not a stately portrait of pious heroes.  It is a messy sketch of the same joys and problems that fill our world: the laughter that accompanies baby bumps and new life mingled with the tears that flow from broken families and desperate futures.  It’s the paradox of God’s loving presence butting up against imperious human characters who are insistent on achieving their own will at any cost, by hook or crook.

In some of our classes, a spark will jump from the text and catch fire in the hearts of the students.  Such was the case when we read the story of Ruth.  Those who had suffered difficult loss in their own lives could feel the tragedy of Naomi and Ruth, who had both lost their husbands and lacked a real livelihood.  In the same way, they knew what the book of Ruth was talking about when it began referring to the force that would bring about new life, a force called “steadfast love,” which both Ruth and Boaz demonstrate, a force that is even stronger than death.

In other classes, however, there is no spark.  I look out on row upon row of impassive expression.  It feels like pulling teeth.  It feels like I’m in a desert with no morsel of interesting conversation to share.  How, I wonder, can I possibly help here?

How Quickly They Forget

I imagine we all feel this way from time to time.  Faced with what seems an impossible task or responsibility, we feel helpless, overwhelmed, incapable.  Someone in our family falls ill, and there’s nothing the doctors can do.  So what could we do?  Like the disciples in the desert facing the hunger of four thousand, we ask, “How could I possibly help?”  A friend of ours falls upon hard times, and we don’t have the resources to assist them in their difficulty.  Like the disciples in the desert, we ask, “How could I possibly help?”  Our vocation calls us into a circumstance where we know we are under-equipped or under-prepared for what is to come.  Like the disciples in the desert, we ask, “How could I possibly help?”

The curious thing about our passage today is that it has already happened once before in the gospel of Mark.  Two chapters prior to this one, Jesus feeds five thousand.  Today, Jesus feeds four thousand.  Many scholars have assumed that these two stories are simply variations on the same incident, that Mark rather carelessly included the same story twice.  But others have pointed out that Mark does not seem so absentminded.  He introduces his story by saying, “There was again a great crowd without anything to eat” (8:1).  He recognizes that the same thing that happened before is about to happen again.  But why, we might still ask, would Mark want to tell this story when we’ve already seen its truth demonstrated once before?

I think it has something to do with the disciples.  The gospel of Mark is filled with pairs of stories: two stories about crossing the sea, two stories about feeding a large crowd, two stories about welcoming little children.  The same things keep happening, again and again.  And in the second story of each pair, we see quite clearly that the disciples come off none the wiser.  In our story today, the disciples’ question—“How can one feed these people…?”—shows how quickly they forget what Jesus has done before, how quickly they become overwhelmed with the impossibility of the task before them. 

The first time they had asked this question, Jesus had shown them that the only thing that matters is being faithful to the need.  Then they had only had five loaves and a couple of fish, but that was enough to feed the crowd.  The miracle is that when we are faithful, it is always enough.  Today we see the same miracle performed again a second time, as Jesus takes seven loaves and a few small fish and distributes them among the crowd.  And it is enough.  Again and again, being faithful with what they have is enough.  But in Mark, the disciples never learn this.  Again and again, they despair instead of trust.

When We Are Faithful, It Is Enough

When I read these feeding stories, I cannot help but think of Rhonda Sneed and her blessing warriors who regularly distribute what food they have among the homeless in our city.  The task before them is impossible.  There is no way that they can feed all the homeless.  But they do not despair and give up.  They do not ask, “How can one possibly feed these people?”  They simply are faithful with what they have.  And the miracle is that somehow it is enough.  Again and again, it is enough.  More than once, I’ve heard Rhonda’s homeless friends say, “It’s not just the food, you know.  It’s that she asks about us and gives us hugs and wants to be with us.”  Even when supplies are less than satisfactory, for every person they see, somehow, for that one day, for that one night, their visit and their friendship is enough.  Again and again, it is enough.

At the end of one of those nights when teaching felt like pulling teeth, I was ponderously packing my materials and preparing to leave when the last student in the room stopped before my desk and said, “You know…I had always thought of the stories in Genesis as outdated and barbaric.  But tonight they felt real to me, like the kind of stuff I live through.”

For me, that moment has become a reminder.  On the nights when it feels like that classroom is a desert and I have no morsel of interesting conversation to share, instead of asking, “How could I possibly help here?” I try to remember that even though the task seems impossible, God is calling me not to succeed but simply to be faithful to God’s call with what I have.  For when we are faithful, it is enough.  Again and again, it is enough.

I imagine that if you think back to impossible moments in your own life, like when someone in your family fell ill or a friend of yours fell upon hard times, you may discover something similar.  You could not solve the problem.  But when you were faithful, when you visited and sat beside and listened to your friend or family member, somehow that was enough for them, for that day, for that night.

That is the good news.  The disciples witnessed it in their own lives again and again, but even so they continued to despair instead of to trust in the face of each new difficulty.  In our own lives, we too will face the impossible from time to time.  May we not despair but instead remember the little miracles of the past.  And may we trust in the good news that being faithful is always enough.

Prayer

Compassionate God,

Whose call we hear

In the cries of the needful around us:

Encourage us

In the face of difficulty,

And remind us

Of the power of your love,

That we might be faithful

No matter the circumstance,

Trusting that through your grace

It is enough.

In Christ, who gives us all he has: Amen.

Broken Soil (Mark 4:1-20)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on March 17, 2019, Second Sunday of Lent)

---

Not Be Forgiven?

Why does Jesus tell parables?  Why does he teach using these short stories, these puzzles for the heart?

Our scripture appears to offer one explanation, but it’s one that I’ve never understood.  “For those outside,” Jesus says, “everything comes in parables” (4:11).  And then the passage continues, citing the prophet Isaiah in an apparent justification for these puzzles: “in order that they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven” (4:12). 

So that they may not be forgiven?  Jesus tells parables so that those on the outside will not be forgiven?  This is troubling to me for two reasons.  First, I am troubled that Jesus would wish for some people not to be forgiven.  Second, and to make matters worse, I would appear to be on the outside.  Jesus has just given “the secret of the kingdom of God” to his disciples, but I never get to hear what that secret is.  The gospel of Mark doesn’t let me eavesdrop on that conversation.  So I appear to be destined for incomprehension and unforgiveness.

Who Gets It

As I puzzled over this worrying scenario, one thing stumped me more than anything else.  Why would Jesus not want someone to be forgiven?  Since the beginning of the gospel of Mark, the good news has always gone hand in hand with forgiveness.  When John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus, he proclaimed a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  When Jesus began his healing ministry, he not only healed body parts, he also healed hearts: he forgave people.  (At one of our Friday Lenten coffees, Amanda paraphrased Jesus’ forgiveness in a succinct, down-to-earth way.  It is saying: “I take you as you are.”) 

This problem perplexed to the point that I began to look for an alternative explanation.  Maybe I was reading this wrong, because everything else in the gospel would suggest that Jesus offers forgiveness for everyone who will welcome it.  Jesus takes everyone as they are.  So I perused what biblical scholars have to say about this passage, and here’s what I learned.  That troubling little clause at the end of Jesus’ speech, “in order that they…may indeed listen, but not understand,” need not be read as a part of Jesus’ speech.  We might read it instead as an aside by the narrator, as an explanation of how an ancient prophecy by Isaiah is still alive and true, because in this passage we will indeed see a group of characters who listen but do not understand: namely, the disciples themselves; that is, the privileged recipients of the secret of the kingdom, the insiders par excellence! 

Right after the disciples have heard the secret of the kingdom, Jesus says to them, “Do you not understand this parable?”  In other words, the privileged few who have the secret, the innermost of the insiders, are the very ones who hear but don’t understand, who see but don’t perceive, who refuse to turn around and be forgiven.  Like the rocky soil and the soil among thorns, they receive the good news but it is choked by their ambition, it falls away when persecution arises.

But those on the outside to whom all of this is an unexplainable mystery, somehow they get it.  The blind will see it.  The deaf will hear it.  The untouchables will touch it.

All the Love They Could Get

If I’m being honest, I think I’m a bit like the disciples.  When I read that they receive the secret of the kingdom and then realize that I do not have the secret, I get worried.  I want to know it.  I want to understand it.  I want to hold it, to master it.  I think the disciples were the same way.  I think they saw the secret of the kingdom as a mystery that they could master.  Later we hear them squabbling over power, about who will sit on Jesus’ right and left hand in glory.  Later we see them dismissing children as disruptions to their gathering.  They think they’ve got it, and others don’t.

A couple of weeks ago when we were sharing communion with the memory care residents at Symphony Manor, a couple of the residents didn’t quite follow the standard procedure of receiving communion.  Carol was carrying the cup, I was carrying the bread, and the residents were invited to take communion by intinction. When the bread and the cup got to Mr. Wright, he reached his hand into the tray and grabbed as many cubes of bread as he could.  I looked at Carol and I think I may have rolled my eyes.  Mr. Wright was not doing it right.  A few moments later, Eva, who had already received communion once, left her seat and hunted us down and helped herself to another piece of bread dipped in the cup.  I’m not proud to admit it, but in both moments I felt a twinge of agitation.  They didn’t get it.

But as I read today’s scripture, I can’t help but smile.  Because it was scripture repeating itself.  If anyone got it in the scripture, you’d think it would be the disciples, whom Jesus had just told the secret of the kingdom.  But they still don’t understand.  On the other hand, you have the outsiders for whom the good news is a parable, a mystery, and they are the ones who enter into new life.  If anyone gets it in the end, they do.  And if anyone got it at Symphony Manor, it was Mr. Wright and Eva, who took as much of the love of God as they could get.  For them, the good news was not something to know and control, something to legislate and set limits to, but rather something to be entered into and experienced and marveled at. 

Good Soil

What is it that makes for good soil?  It is not what our world values.  Our world values go-getters, can-doers, ambitious and competitive achievers.  But Jesus compares this attitude with thorns that choke the kingdom of its life.  Our world values a sure thing, security, stability.  But Jesus compares this impulse with the rocky ground in which the kingdom cannot take root and in which it will fall away when things become insecure.

What is it that makes for good soil?   In this passage, Jesus doesn’t say.  But I wonder if we aren’t given examples in the blind who see, the deaf who hear, the untouchables who are touched, the forgetful and forgotten across the street who remember something beyond the mind’s controlling reach.  Aren’t they all somehow representative of a soil that has been broken?  They’re not looking to get ahead in life.  They’re not looking for power.  They’re looking for friendship.  They’re looking for communion.  They have no blueprint for the world, no big plans to build.  They are, instead, of a more humble disposition.  They are broken soil hungry for life, receptive to the seeds of love, soil in which grows something quite splendid, if we are to believe the gospel.

As I continue to chew on Jesus’ Sabbath example that we explored last week, his pattern of transgressing the religious routine in order to touch the need of the world, I ponder the possibilities for transformation.   Not us transforming the world.  But us being transformed by the needful around us.  Maybe the garden plots most prepared for God’s kingdom to take root are not in the safe spaces of our lives, but in the broken soil.  The broken soil of our individual lives, for sure, but also the broken soil in the communities around us.  For where there is brokenness, there is also openness—where God’s love might take root and grow and bear fruit, thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.

Prayer

Gardening God,

Ever-sowing your love

In our world:

Plow the surface

Of our hearts

And invite us

Into the brokenness

Of our neighbors,

That together we might bear

Your kingdom fruit,

Which is life abundant.

Amen.

The Threat of New Life (Mark 3:1-6)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on March 10, 2019, First Sunday of Lent)

---

How the Fun Faded

Years ago, when I was a student at Short Pump Elementary, my favorite time of day was recess.  No surprise there.  Recess was a class favorite.  For thirty minutes, we had the freedom to do pretty much anything we wanted, as long as we weren’t leaving school property or injuring our classmates.  Most of the time, I participated in the organized sports: kickball, basketball, soccer.  But every once in a while, when we had wearied of the regular sports, we would invent a new game.  We would determine a playing field, the objectives of the game, the obstacles, the teams.  And for a day or two, the new game was more fun than anything else that happened during recess.  

But invariably the fun would fade.  What began in a spirit of freedom and curiosity would soon become bogged down with rules.  Usually the children who invented the game were the ones who kept adding rules to it.  Past a certain point, the rules began to stifle the fun.  The game became less of an adventure and more of a predictable pattern—usually a pattern that favored the games’ inventors and preserved their status as its masters.  

The game was no longer about the fun, which had been the reason for inventing the game in the first place.  Now it was about playing in the right way, which is to say, the way that its inventors found most gratifying.

The Paradox of Institutions

I wonder if this is not a pattern that we see play out across all of life.  The longer that a movement lasts, the less it attends to its original inspiration and the more it becomes about us, about preserving whatever favors us, whatever is most familiar to us.  It is a paradox that we find at the heart of the word “institution”: a word that on the one hand refers to a beginning, an “instituting,” the start of something new and purposeful; but a word that on the other hand echoes with the connotations of self-serving bureaucracy, of paperwork and protocol whose purpose is to put everything into a program, to make everything predictable, to preserve a certain order.

Consider some of the primary institutions in our society: the school, the hospital, the police.  In each case, we sometimes see how the aim to preserve a certain structure of the institution contradicts the founding purpose of the institution.  We see how the institution gets in the way of its own purpose.

For instance, we’ve all heard teachers complain about standardized testing.  Do standardized tests really ensure the founding purpose of schools, which is education, or do they ensure standardized schools and standardized children? 

Visit a hospital today, and you’re likely to hear conversations about outrageous costs.  While nurses and doctors bind up wounds and pursue the founding purpose of the hospital, directors who stand at a far distance prioritize profits, sometimes out-pricing the very people they are meant to serve. 

And anyone who’s watched a few episodes of a contemporary crime drama knows that the police, who began with the purpose of protecting the public, often must also meet regular quotas.  When these quotas, which are intended to ensure productivity, take precedence over protecting the public, the institution risks cancelling out its founding purpose.

The Religious Institution:

From Serving God to Serving Itself

There’s a juicy example of this in the Old Testament when King Solomon begins to build the Temple.  This temple, remembers, is to be the house of God, a place where the God of Israel is honored above all else, a place where Israelites will come every year at Passover to celebrate the God who heard their cry as slaves in Egypt and who delivered them.   Who builds the Temple?  According to the Bible, King Solomon took a census and then conscripted nearly every foreigner in the land into forced labor.  The Bible uses the same word here for “forced labor” that is used earlier when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt.  In other words, to build a Temple that honors the God who hears and delivers slaves, King Solomon uses…slaves. 

In this example, we catch an early glimpse of what Jesus finds himself up against in our passage today.  The religious institution, which began with the purpose of serving God, ends up serving itself.  In conscripting slave labor for the temple’s construction, Solomon betrays the true purpose of its construction: it was not to glorify God, but to glorify Solomon.

How Could Such Good News Stir Up Such Bad Intentions?

Today’s passage in Mark concludes a series of controversy stories.  As Jesus begins his ministry, healing people and proclaiming the good news that the kingdom of God is near, he attracts quite a gathering.  On several occasions, the storyteller tells us that Jesus draws a striking contrast to the religious leaders of his day.  One can imagine why.  Rather than nitpicking over rules and regulations, such as how forgiveness is mediated or whom it is acceptable to eat with or what days a person should fast or what kind of actions can be performed on the Sabbath,[1] Jesus touches the need of the world around him.  He cares about people.  He wants them to have life abundantly.

Yet at the end of today’s passage, after he has healed a man on the Sabbath, we read an ominous notice: “The Pharisees [that is, the religious leaders] went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him” (3:6).  Not only is this an ill omen, it is also an astounding revelation.  The Herodians are supporters of the Roman establishment.  For the religious leaders to be conspiring with them shows just how desperate they are, for the Jewish people deeply resented their Roman overlords. 

How could such good news stir up such bad intentions?  Why on earth would anyone want to destroy this man who heals and blesses and proclaims God’s favor?  What would drive the religious leaders to such great lengths, that they would consider combining forces with the Romans?

In a word: self-preservation.  Like Solomon years before, many of the religious authorities in Jesus’ day had lost the plot.  Despite their words to the contrary, they served not God but themselves.  I have a soft spot in my heart for these religious authorities, because I believe they were just like you and me.  I believe that they had fooled themselves, that they honestly believed their table manners and forgiveness formalities and Sabbath supervision honored God.  But Jesus exposes how far they have strayed from the purpose of serving God.  Because Jesus is a living, breathing expression of that purpose.  He embodies the spirit that they have forgotten, the plot that they have lost.  He touches the hurting.  He raises up the downtrodden.  He proclaims the love and forgiveness of God, the promise that God is near to everyone, if they would but trust in that good news.  He is a living reminder of what God’s purpose has always been, from the time before there was a law when God blessed Abraham to be a blessing to all the families of the earth, to the time when God heard the cry of a group of slaves and delivered them, to the time when God spoke up through the prophets to remind the Israelites that people matter more than protocol, that lives matter more than liturgy.

Jesus’ Sabbath Example

I wonder what Jesus would do if he showed up here one Sunday, or any church for that matter.  If the few examples we have from the first three chapters of Mark are any indication, he would cause quite a stir.  For one thing, I imagine he would address people in a raw and honest way, in a way that would probably disrupt proceedings but only in order that we might encounter one another in our raw and honest need.  I also imagine that when the service had concluded, he would ask what’s for lunch.  And I have to think he might raise an eyebrow at the Lord’s Table, unsure of why folks were eating only a wafer or cube of bread and taking only a sip of grape juice. 

Last week when I shared with you my sense that God is calling the church to a continual departure, so that it never takes shelter in the glory of its past (as Peter was tempted to do), so that it is always moving down the mountainside into a world of need, someone after the service very justifiably asked me, “And what exactly does that look like?”  What are you proposing?

As I read today’s scripture, I edge nearer to answer.  In the early chapters of Mark, Jesus continually affronts the religious establishment.  Not on purpose—I don’t think so.  Not because he’s a rebel and he wants to make a scene.  But simply because he cares more about God’s purpose than about the religious procedures and protocol, rules and regulations, that once expressed that purpose but now obstruct it.  He’s not so worried about when or if you fast, about how many fingers you lift on the Sabbath, about excluding anyone from the table.  Like us third graders on the blacktop, he’s not interested in playing a game that has lost its spirit.  He’s interested in the spirit that it’s lost, however it is expressed, whatever new forms it takes.  More than anything, he wants the hurting to know that God is with them, the outcasts to know that they belong, the sinful to know that they are forgiven, the troubled to know that a better world is on its way, the faithful to know that they don’t know it all.

What I’m chewing on is Jesus’ Sabbath example.  What Mark thought worth writing down when Jesus visited the synagogue on the Sabbath was neither what he preached, nor what psalms they sang, nor the prayers that they prayed.  What Mark thought worth writing down was how Jesus took the time to speak to a troubled man, how later he left the synagogue and visited with a sick woman and took her hand and raised her to new life, and in today’s scripture how he flouted the formalities of the religious leaders and cared for the man with the withered hand.  In other words, Jesus’ Sabbath example is disregarding the religious routine and touching the need of the world—the withering looks of the men in long robes notwithstanding.

I wonder…could we do that?  Could following Jesus mean leaving behind some of the familiar procedures and protocol on a Sunday so that we could touch the need of the world?  Consistently throughout the gospel, Jesus heals through touch, a reminder that the front lines of ministry are wherever we are in touching distance of others.  Could we reach out and hold the hands of our neighbors in the memory care unit at Symphony Manor?  Could we sit on a bench with the homeless and talk about…talk about God knows what, so long as they knew that we see them as brothers and sisters in the family of God? 

I’m reminded of one of the first things I learned about the ancient Israelites in my biblical history course in college: that they were a “semi-nomadic” people.  Could we be that, a semi-nomadic people trusting and following God, as we hop from place to place in our community on Sundays, sharing the love of God and whatever worship would be appropriate with our neighbors in need?

As our scripture today suggests, what is good news can also be threatening news.  If we’re comfortable with the game, if we’re the ones in charge of the rules, then it might be difficult to acknowledge that the game is no longer what it once was.  But here at Gayton Road I don’t think we’re that beholden to rules.  We appreciate that different forms can express the same truth: that jazz or folk hymnody can both point us toward Christ, that lectio divina and analytical biblical study can both enrich our encounter with the Word, that questions honestly shared over coffee or ale might lead us into a deeper faith just as quickly as quietly ingesting bread and drinking grape juice.

Would you let me know what you think?  How all this strikes you?  Would you be willing to leave the sanctuary occasionally on Sunday to follow Jesus’ Sabbath example?

Prayer

Unruly Christ,

Whose law is love,

Whose love brings life:

Visit us this Sabbath day

With your raw and honest touch.

Inspire us—

That we might leave behind

Mandates that have lost their meaning

And follow you

In fresh and faithful expression

Of your love that brings new life.

Amen.

---

[1] These examples come from the controversy stories that precede 3:1-6, namely Jesus’ forgiveness of the paralytic (2:1-12), his eating with sinners and tax collectors (2:15-17), his disciples’ not fasting (2:18-22), and their eating on the Sabbath (2:23-28).

How We Lose (Mark 8:34-36)

(Meditation for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on March 6, 2019, Ash Wednesday)

---

Either Way, We Will Lose

According to Jesus, the question is not, “Will we lose?”  Either way, he says, we will lose. 

Many of us will try to win.  We join a gym to stay healthy.  We save money to secure our future.  We snap pictures to capture a moment and make it last forever.  But try as we might to save our lives, Jesus says, we will lose them. 

In fact, it almost sounds like Jesus is saying that the more we try to save them, the more we will lose them.  Which would make sense.  In the very act of preserving something for the future, we sacrifice the present.  In working the extra hour for the extra buck, we miss out on an hour of relationship with someone.   In exercising without pause and dieting to no end, we miss out on the simple pleasure of a lovingly made meal.  In taking picture after picture of a breathtaking sunset, we miss out on the mystical moment when the earth and perhaps our soul too catch fire with heaven.

Try as we might to save our lives, Jesus says, we will lose them.  Nothing lasts forever.  To try to make it so, only makes it worse.

The Cross

For Jesus, the question is not, “Will we lose?” 

It is, “How will we lose?” 

Because there is another way of losing. 

A way that does not grasp,

Does not clench,

Does not cling onto life with a death grip. 

Jesus calls this way “the cross.” 

For Jesus, the cross means love

And it also means letting go

And somehow it also means that the resulting loss

Is in fact not loss but life.

The very life you thought you lost in letting go,

You gained.

It’s not a thing to be explained

But a thing to be experienced,

With prayer and tears and hope

And whatever comes next.

Not Loss but Life

On our foreheads is the tale of two losses.

One loss is plain and simple. 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust:

Nothing lasts forever.

The other loss is in the shape of the cross,

Which means love,

Which counts loss not loss

But life. 

Traveling Mercies (Luke 9:28-43a)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on March 3, 2019, Transfiguration Sunday)

---

A Bit of Christianese

One of my strongest memories of childhood, engraved on my mind by countless repetition, is the dinner table.  The food changed from night to night, and our collective tastes evolved over the years, but a few things remained the same: our seats, the pot of tea, and holding hands together to share a blessing for the meal.  My dad or my mom would usually say the blessing, expressing thanks for the food before us and often asking for God’s care over the needful among our family and friends.  One particular variation of this daily blessing was the prayer that my mom would say when my dad was out of town for work.  She would ask God for “traveling mercies” for my dad.

“Traveling mercies” is such a common expression in the church these days that you might be surprised to learn it only emerged a little over a century ago.  I did a bit of research this past week and discovered a handy online resource, “Dictionary of Christianese,” which gives in-depth histories for “the casual slang of the Christian church.”  According to the Dictionary of Christianese, “traveling mercies” was first used in the late 19th century exclusively for missionaries on long journeys to remote parts of the world.   But as the trusty Dictionary of Christianese explains, “it wasn’t long before non-missionaries wanted these special prayers too. After all, why should ordinary lay people settle for just hedges of protection when they can have traveling mercies too? And so by the mid-20^th century, the expression ‘traveling mercies’ was being used by pretty much anyone who wanted prayer for an upcoming trip, whether the trip was specifically religious in nature or not.”[1] 

Departure

When Jesus ascended the mountain to pray, when suddenly the world was revealed in its dazzling eternity, so that the glory of days gone by mixed with the glory of the days to come, so that Moses and Elijah were seen confiding with Jesus—which is but a wonderful illustration of what we have seen all along, for hasn’t Jesus always been consulting the Law and the Prophets of Jewish scripture, texts which are here represented by the leading figures within them, Moses and Elijah?—when all of this happens, the stupefied Peter proposes preserving this glory and staying put.  He exclaims, “It’s so good to be here!  Let’s put up walls, roofs, buildings—we could stay!” (cf. 9:33).  But even as he’s talking, a cloud overshadows him and then encloses him, a tangible reminder of God’s mystery.  Just as a heavy fog on Afton Mountain can obscure our vision and bring us to a near halt on the highway, so in ancient Jewish tradition God is sometimes represented as a dark cloud, a mystery that halts us in our tracks, a mystery that we cannot fathom. 

What could Peter not fathom?  What did he not understand?  All the while he’s talking about building and staying put, Jesus and Moses and Elijah are talking about the exact opposite.  As scripture tells us: “[they] were speaking of [Jesus’] departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” (9:31).  Peter wants to stay put.  Jesus and Moses and Elijah are making plans for a departure.

What departure, exactly?  In this scene, Moses and Elijah and Jesus talk about departure as something that will happen in Jerusalem.  Because Jesus has already anticipated his death in Jerusalem, it seems likely that departure serves here as a euphemism for his death.  But in the Greek, that word “departure” is exodus.  So we might guess that departure actually has a deeper meaning here.  It could mean deliverance.  That is certainly what the exodus meant for Moses and the Israelites.

As we are left to ponder this mystery, the story departs from the scene resolutely.  The dazzle darkens, the glory disappears, and Jesus and his trusted disciples go down the mountain.  The next day is the stark opposite of mountaintop glory.  It’s dirt and difficulty.  We see a man foaming at the mouth; we see Jesus’ disciples faithless and helpless; we see Jesus’ patience tested, we see him bemoaning all the trouble and trials of an unbelieving generation.  But in the midst of all this, we also see healing.  Peter may have been astounded by the glory of God on the mountaintop, but the last words of this passage suggests that something even better has happened in Jesus’ departure, in his descent into the darkness, dirt, and difficulty: “And all were astounded at the greatness of God” (9:43).

Mercy Is on the Move

I cannot help but see a kindred spirit in Peter.  When good times are here, we want nothing more than to preserve them.  It’s only natural.  Conversely, when difficult times arrive, we look back longingly to the mountaintop moments, wondering why we didn’t stay, wondering what went wrong.

The dark cloud that halts Peter in his tracks, halts me too in mine.  I realize that when I look for the glory, when I try to preserve it, I’ve missed the point.  I’m mistaken.  What Jesus on the mountaintop teaches me is that the glory is not a stationary thing.  If glory’s not on the go, if it’s not marked by departure, then it’s not glory.  If mercy is not on the move, then it’s not mercy.  We see this today in the life of Jesus, but it’s as old as the story of God and humanity, as old as Abraham, who was told simply to “go” and be a blessing to others, as old as the Israelites whose existence is characterized perhaps best by journeying in the wilderness, sojourning among foreign nations, living on the road.

The expression “traveling mercies” is more profound than it knows.  For it means not simply the mercies we hope for ourselves on the road.  It means more deeply that mercy is meant to be on the move, that real mercy only ever happens on the road, when we share ourselves with others, when in dark and difficult moments where our patience is tried we nevertheless bless others and offer the healing of our loving touch.  Traveling mercies means that the mercies of God are not found at a final destination, but in a continual departure.

Traveling mercies makes me ask: Where am I going?  What am I called to leave behind?  What is holding me back from being faithful?

In an age of sharp and profound cultural shifts, these questions may be helpful for the church at large to ask.  I can only speak personally, but from my conversations with peers I believe very strongly that the younger generations share a deep spiritual thirst.  But they are not finding it quenched at church.  Could it be that sometimes churches are more concerned to preserve the way things are than they are to move out and touch the need of the world.  Could it be that they are more interested in seeing their own structures succeed, than they are in seeing the kingdom of God?  I must confess I am struck by how little of “church” today—meaning a building, an order of service, the structure of roles and responsibilities—how little of this actually discussed or defined in scripture.  There is much about church that has changed in its first two millennia, and much that will change yet.  While I cannot see the future or know what exactly that change will look like, I do sense a call, and it’s one of departure.  It’s one of going down the mountainside and touching the need of the world.  It’s one of death of resurrection, departure and deliverance.

Prayer

Mysterious God

Who is always on the move—

How grateful we are

For this church,

For all the ways

We have encountered your love

In this family of faith.

Inspire us with wonder

At your next departure,

At where your grace and glory

Are moving.

Embolden us to join you

Down the mountain.

In Christ, our companion.  Amen.

---

[1] Tim, “traveling mercies,” https://www.dictionaryofchristianese.com/traveling-mercies/, accessed February 25, 2019.