Jake Miles Joseph Sunday, September 6, 2015 Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC Fort Collins, Colorado Mark 7: Paper Cranes: Radical Gestures

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1 Jake Miles Joseph Sunday, September 6, 2015 Plymouth Congregational Church, UCC Fort Collins, Colorado Mark 7: Paper Cranes: Radical Gestures Would you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the paper cranes of our hearts be good, pleasing, and colorful to you, Lord God, creator and maker and folder of all things --cranes and humans alike. Amen. I have here in my hand a very sacred little origami crane made by Sara Lea. I have named this crane Daphne and she is a very friendly crane indeed. In fact, Daphne wants to meet all of you. I am going to give Daphne to this first row. I then ask this row to continue to pass the peace crane from one row to the next then cross over to the other side and help Daphne make her way forward again to the front and all the way to our organist and liturgist. Today, we are literally passing the peace-crane from one to another. I have another crane for the choir aptly named Amadeus. Daphne in the pews and Amadeus will visit with those in the choir loft. As Daphne or Amadeus are passed to you from your neighbor, when it reaches your hands, observe the intricacy, the delicacy, the detail of the crane. And before you pass it along to your neighbor, I want you to think a blessing or a hope for peace in your life into the wings of the crane. Where do YOU need peace in your lives? Place that hope or that burden into the crane and then pass it along. Daphne can handle it. I promise she is strong. When you have the crane, notice that it is so light, observe that it so delicate, but the strength of the blessings and desire for peace in the stormy parts of our minds and our hearts is carried in its small wings. (Pastor comes down from the pulpit and hand crane to first row to pass along and does the same for the choir in the loft.) We are a stoic, educated lot here at Plymouth. That is not a criticism but rather a form of self-awareness in spiritually. It means that we need to work harder in certain areas in divinity school we called this our growing edges. Maybe today they are growing wings. This means that we carry a need for peace in our own selves, in our bodies (like everyone else), but it is often easier to offer prayer for others rather than for what we need or help others than help ourselves. We can articulate peace outside of ourselves easier than the peace we need for ourselves as individuals on this long and often bouncy journey of life. Whoever first called live a journey ( wherever you are on life s journey ), surely meant that life is like a journey in a wooden stagecoach bumpy and bouncy, dangerous, and hot and cold! This sort of journey was the way many early pioneers got to Fort Collins, Colorado. They certainly did not mean journey in the sense of a Pan Am 747 Clipper jetliner. Life s journey is often difficult, and we need moments of peace crane passing in our lives to catch-up with ourselves and find where we need God s help in establishing 1

2 peace within. This is especially true in the busy times like the start of a new academic and work year, the departure of a loved one, or a new job. Life s journey is a stagecoach journey (on the inside) even for well adjusted and well off mainline Protestants and there is no shame in having burdens to give to the Spirit of God represented today in the form of these cranes. The traditional symbol for the Holy Spirit is a dove or other bird. By placing our burdens on Daphne or Amadeus, we give them to God in the bird symbol of the Holy Spirit. Anxiety and stress really are for the birds anyway. Isaiah 26: 3, which Jesus would have known by heart says, Those of steadfast mind you keep in peace in peace because they trust in you. Jesus is trying to trust in God and maintain his sense of cool his peace when we meetup with him today in the lectionary reading from Mark 7: Those of steadfast mind you keep in peace in peace because they trust you. After all he is Jesus (Son of God) shouldn t he be the most peaceful one on earth in no need of comfort or vacation days or rest or peace cranes? After all, we are Plymouth church of Fort Collins the great open minded and enlightened and liberal of Fort Collins (the advocates and go getters) shouldn t we all have to have everything together all the time? Sometimes we think that we work for the realm of God for others to find the peace that we have already obtained. We are the care providers rather than the cared for community, right? Jesus is tuckered out. The Son of God is exhausted, we can imagine and maybe a little stressed and for good reason. So far in Mark, Chapter 7, between verses 1 and 23, (leading up to today s reading), Jesus has officially made enemies of all of the Scribes and the Pharisees and pretty much everyone else with whom he came into contact. He told them that; You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition. You have a fine way of rejecting the commandments of God in order to keep your traditions! Jesus had also thrown out the laws about cleaning pots and pans in certain ways and certain use of hands while eating of antiquity. Jesus then says that they misunderstand what it means to respect elders (mothers and fathers) and finally says that all purity laws are bunk and creates a whole new understanding of them via the spirit. Basically he made countless enemies, reinterpreted or rejected 10,000 years of built tradition and understanding. And then he does what? He runs away! Huh! What, you ask, Jesus doesn t run away! This is not how we understand our social justice super hero Jesus. Yes, he does. He runs. He might be terrified or at least exhausted. One thing we know about the Jesus of Mark is that in Mark Jesus is a very big introvert/ eccentric starving artist type (being fully God and fully human concurrently it turns out makes it really hard to make friends in middle school). Jesus needs a vacation. He has pushed himself too far without thinking of his own inner peace and need for rest. Scholar, William Barkley, says of this passage, The hour would come when he would face his enemies with blazing defiance [UCC], but that was not yet. Before it came, he 2

3 would seek peace and quiet of seclusion [in gentile territory]. So, then, the first tremendous thing, which meets us, is that Jesus is in gentile territory. Is it an accident that this incident comes here? 1 Jesus has flown the coop (no pun intended). The text says, in verse 24 that, he sent out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house, and did not want anyone to know he was there. In other places in the Bible, the Greek word translated here as went away is translated as withdrew (I, however, like to think of it here as Jesus ran like a bat out of heaven). Jesus needs peace too. Sisters and brothers, even Jesus needed to turn his cell phone off, not respond to s, and withdraw to find peace and to be effective. Jesus needed to take a minute to think about his peace cranes in his life. Moreover, Jesus has proverbially taken his passport with him and left friendly territory and gone into the land of the gentiles, according to scholars. This isn t like us going to Toronto or Canada somewhere that would be too familiar. This is more like he went to Cuba. Plymouth, even Jesus needed a time away and a time for peace in his own ministry: Self-assessment. While we pray and work for others, may we never forget to stop and find where we need peace as well in our hearts. For, as the text is about show, it is in the distant places and in the times of self-reflection that the best and most important ministry takes place. It is in this unlikely place with unlikely people in a time a space of peace that Jesus is suddenly interrupted with a somewhat usual request. Will you heal my daughter? A gentile woman asks him this. He has heard this before, but not from a gentile and especially not since overturning the purity laws a few verses back. Something is different now. Scholars differ on what happens next between Jesus and the women discussing crumbs, dogs, and who is worthy of God s grace. Some say Jesus is playing Plato/ Socratic method and asking clever question in the Greek dialectic style of creating small talk, but that he intended to offer healing and grace the whole time. That would in some ways be polite, since he is in their land (sort of like speaking Spanish if in Cuba). He is now outside of Jewish culture and in a Hellenistic context where that would have been the norm. This is certainly an interesting and somewhat boring hypothesis, but I do not believe that it matches the Jesus of Mark s Gospel. That is not the personality we get in this version of the narrative. Maybe it would work for Matthew but not for Mark. Others say that Jesus was caught off guard because she didn t have a male companion with her. This might be true in that ancient context, but the fact that he still engages in conversation at all (also not culturally correct) dispels that one for me pretty quickly. Jesus has just thrown out the purity laws and got stressed and left on vacation to remember what he was all about anyway. He is making changes that are unprecedented in his own culture. He is in a different place now being asked to include a whole different 1 William Barkley, The Gospel of Mark: The Daily Study Bible Series (Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Westminster Press, 1975),

4 group of people in his mission. He is already exhausted, and now even more people want his attention, time, and skills. What we are seeing here is the power of peace Verse 28 Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children s crumbs. Verse 29: Then he said to her, For saying that, you may go the demon has left your daughter. She went home, found the child lying on the bed illness gone. Then Jesus goes home back to Galilee. Notice that the woman does not get the crumbs she has asked for, but she gets the whole loaf of bread! No! She gets the whole bakery! It is in her bakery that we bake religion and worship as a church today and every Sunday. This is the legacy of that verse. We are the living legacy of Mark 7:29. People say many things about this text, but here is what I see: God experiencing life, in the incarnation of Christ, experiencing and living life as human in community is moved with compassion. This text, between verse 28 and 29, (somewhere in that second) the universe shifts and our faith in a still speaking, changing, living God has merit. Christ realizes here that there is an extension between the peace and change making work he has been doing on the inside of his community, and that it may extend to the whole world. In a time of peaceful retreat away from norms and expectations and phone calls, Jesus is able to find his center and fulfill his call as Christ. While I was on retreat in early August in Ghost Ranch, I discovered a cool little library they have in an old cabin building and borrowed a movie to watch in my cabin one night. It was a spiritually enlightening movie called, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, staring Judi Dench, and a bunch of people I had never heard of named things like Tom Wilkinson, Penelope Wilton, Maggie Smith, Ronald Pickup, Celia Imrie, Bill Nighy. In it, all of these British people are trying tying to retire affordably and are coerced into moving to India to spend their Golden Years at The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel in a far off and strange land. They think their identities are set in specific ways. They know their purpose. They are like Jesus before meeting the women in Tyre. The hotel for retirement is nothing like it was supposed to be in the pictures (so often the truth in life), but it is much more authentic to the situation of life and modern India. The hotel is mostly a façade filled with birds and big problems. But through encountering the locals, letting go of their colonial expectations, and finding a truer sense of their needs and their peace and their authenticity, the hotel is brought back to life (made more than just a showy façade like the people within it), and the residents become truly alive again in what they do with their lives. If you haven t seen it well don t bother now I just told you the whole story! Next time I do that in a sermon, I will say spoiler alert first. I promise. The text today not only reveals the moment in the Jesus (the God-meets-humans story) when we become part of it as Christians of every land and every language, but it shows something else too. It shows what happens in ministry, what doors are opened, when we take the time to step back and admit that we need peace in our lives too. We need healing 4

5 too. This is something of a Plymouth congregational trait. Do you know how many of you tell me during pastoral care that you are not comfortable with or accustomed to being the one who looks inside to see what parts of yourselves need peace? We can identify a need for peace from far away (1,000 miles or even in the pew next to us). How much practice do we have in seeking peace within and asking God to help us find that so that we might more wholly find our missions in the world, as Christ did whole on retreat in Tyre. Daphne and Amadeus (and all the cranes) are symbols of God s Holy Spirit in our midst. It is always with us to hear prayer and bring peace: the wings are light but strong and plentiful. May I have the cranes that have passed through the room? Gather the cranes and then pray from the middle of the room between the two segments of pews. Pray something like: God, I ask for blessing on these cranes and the prayers whispered to them today. May we know that your Spirit is always with us to sustain and support us in new ways and in peace. Amen. 5