(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).
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