SERMON NINETEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST YEAR B WHO S IN? WHO S OUT? MARK 9:36-50 / SEPTEMBER 30, 2018 Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen. If your hand causes you to sin then cut it off. It is better to enter heaven with only one hand than to go into the unquenchable fires of hell with two hands. Yikes! What in the world do we make of these words attributed to Jesus?! For some of you, these words may bring to mind brimstone and fire preaching you heard if you once held membership in certain evangelical churches. Or if you re old enough you may recall such preaching such theology - within our United Church congregations. Episcopal priest David Henson grew up in such a church. He writes, I lived out my faith as a young man with a bible in one hand and an ax in the other. My tradition taught me that faith was primarily about... resisting sin and escaping divine punishment. In short, he learned to reduce his relationship with God to a transaction that provided him with divine fire insurance. Let me share some of his story with you as I believe it is helpful as we try and wrap our minds around this strange, even offensive, gospel text. This drive of Henson s, to avoid displeasing God and the divine punishment he believed would result played out in various ways. For instance, when 1
Henson was 17 years old, he decided to give away his entire 1990s rock music collection so he wouldn t be tempted by its swear words and sexual innuendo. His non-evangelical friends thought he had lost his mind; but they didn t protest too much when he was handing out Metallica CDs like Hallowe en candy. Less comically, was the time he broke up with his first serious relationship because he expected his girlfriend to add a spiritual component to their high school relationship and she was not interested. Henson reflects, I came to find out later, she was the wiser of the two of us, but it took several years to realize that. By that time, I had already hacked and cut away at my life, my friendships, all in the name of God and avoiding temptation. What I didn t realize at the time, however, was that as I was whittling down my potential temptations I was also whittling down, narrowing and shrinking, my understanding of God. God hadn t just become small, but small-minded, whose primary power lay in the threat of punishment rather than an empowering movement of love and grace. Faith and spirituality became about the rules, about right and wrong, about who was in and who was out, who was going to be rewarded by God and who was going to be punished. Of course, these concerns are not uniquely those of an evangelical perspective. This way of thinking cuts across all Christian denominations, including our own. This became so apparent to me when Dana, Arabella s mother, contacted me requesting baptism for her daughter. In the old days 2
well, not so old, just twenty years ago in my ministry and it is still the case in many United Churches some folks are in when it comes to requests for baptism and some folks are out. It used to be that at least one parent of the child to be baptized had to be, without exception, a member of the United Church in good standing. I wonder how many requests were denied in the past, children refused baptism, and the church become a stumbling block to these little ones, separating those who are in and those who are out. How many here can remember when children could not partake of the sacrament of holy communion until they were confirmed that is, reaffirm their baptismal vows by a public profession of faith, usually at age 13 or 14? And, of course, many here can attest to the days when it was not safe for LGBTQ people in many United Churches because of the rules of who was in and who was out. Further back, not even a hundred years ago women in the United Church were not allowed to be congregational ministers. Men were in; women were out. Church was part of that divisive attitude of deciding who was in and who was out. It should be no surprise then that these concerns present in our life as communities of faith are also concerns we find in the biblical writings. In fact, these themes run through the gospel text for today themes of reward and punishment expressed by Jesus, and concerns of belonging and exclusion by the disciples. 3
The disciples were worried about who belonged and who didn t. They seemed more concerned whether these things even great miraculous things were being done in the right and proper way than they were about the work of God to bring a welcoming and inclusive love to people. Prior to Jesus conversation with them, the disciples had been unable to cast out an evil spirit. And apparently, between that failure and today s text, they had witnessed an unnamed healer cast out a spirit in Jesus name even though he wasn t a part of their group. Instead of approaching this healer in gratitude and celebration that someone had been healed and made whole or even that their movement of God s kingdom was expanding beyond their tiny group, they criticized the man and told him to stop what he was doing. You can almost see Jesus shaking his head in frustration when he explains that it s actually a good thing when people are helped when they need help, no matter who is offering the help. Preserving the power of his own group was not a priority for Jesus. If good was being done by others, their actions were to be affirmed. Within the church, there is this constant tension between being inclusive and being exclusive, with serious questions to be faced. How far should a community go in relating to other people who are different, and how far should it go in excluding those who have different standards and values and customs? How far must a community go in isolating itself from outsiders to keep its values? How does a community keep its identity if it recognizes the validity of the different ways of other communities? How do people in a community welcome, truly welcome, those who are different without losing their defining distinctiveness? 4
The United Church of Canada, at this present time, is struggling with this very issue. One of the primary goals of the church is to become more and more an intercultural church to be welcoming and inclusive of persons of different races, ethnicities, cultures. But what happens when certain societal norms or cultural values seem to be in opposition to the norms or values of the established faith community or even interpreted as in conflict with the way and teachings of Jesus? After all, church communities are bound together not just by common interest or mutual enjoyment and support of one another, but by convictions about the fundamental issues of human existence, what we believe most deeply, what gives value and meaning to our existence, under what obligations we live, how we define and achieve the good life who we are. To be sure there are so many positive aspects of being part of a strong, close faith community. But there are risks as well. The expectations and demands of a social order, and a particular way of doing things, of relating to one another, may restrict the freedom and creativity of some. The way we have done things in the past may not be suitable for the challenges and opportunities of the future. A strong community may be so focused on itself that it loses the capacity to relate to those outside. The danger a strong faith community faces is the temptation to establish and maintain that boundary between who s in and who s out. In defining the unknown miracle worker as an unwanted outsider, the disciples had clearly missed the point. 5
So, Jesus offers them two exaggerated scenarios for understanding what the life of faith is all about. On the one hand, Jesus explains that if anyone offers a cup of water to another their divine reward is assured. On the other hand, Jesus explains that if we re to avoid punishment, we should cut off whatever body part causes our temptation. Now, we understand we aren t supposed to take these sayings literally. These are exaggerations; hyperbole - both the cup of water and the self-mutilation. If they were to be taken literally, none of us would have eyes and probably not many limbs between us. We most certainly wouldn t have any tongues left, but that might not be such a bad thing because it would mean you wouldn t have to listen to any more sermons. But I do think Jesus is saying something profoundly important about the way we understand faith. Notice how ridiculously high the bar is when faith is centred in the avoidance of punishment and the pursuit of a perfect life without sin. You ll have to cut off parts of your body and disfigure yourself. Essentially, Jesus is saying if you want a perfect life, the only way you will be able to do that is incapacitate yourself completely, to go through life so mutilated and so maimed you literally can t do anything but exist. Now, notice on the other hand how ridiculously low the bar is when faith is centred in acts of generosity. One cup of water. That s it. One cup is enough for an eternal reward. The way of water and the way of the ax. One cuts and divides, maims and kills. The other cleanses and revives, refreshes and gives life. Even today Christians disagree on how God would have us live. For some, faith is a holy mission to hack and chop away at what they consider sinful. Others 6
believe God calls us to offer water to a world thirsty for healing, for grace, and for generosity. But really, what does the world need most: another cup of water or another ax? We ve seen what it looks like when we take an ax to the world. In fact, it frequently seems to be the philosophy of the ax that creates the need for a cup of water. War and violence in the Middle East, in Iraq and Syria, hacked away at the stability of the region and has led directly to the mass exodus of Syrian refugees who then were in need of a cup of water from the world. In this country, families have been hacked apart by policies of assimilation, colonization, the creation of reserves and residential schools. What does a cup of water look like to one of the millions of refugees in the world? What does a cup of cold water look like to Indigenous peoples whose rights are not honoured and whose lands are mistreated? What does a cup of cold water look like in the church in this church? Well, I believe we have witnessed one instance of this today as Arabella received the waters of baptism. The sacrament of baptism proclaims that she and her parents and her family are those who are in, not out. While baptism is an entry point into the universal church; it signifies the prior love of God for Arabella and her family. Arabella was, before her baptism, and is now, and will remain a beloved child of God; this holy day simply proclaims publicly that wondrous truth that Arabella, and all humankind, in fact all creation, is beloved by God. And the baptismal water reminds us of the 7
ever-present lifegiving blessings of God. Who s in? Who s out? By God s grace we are all in. See what love God has for us that we should be called children of God and that is what we are Arabella is, and you are, each and every one of us is God s child with God s love flowing into us like cleansing, refreshing, life-giving water. Thanks be to God. Amen. Resources: Pastoral Perspective by Harry B. Adams in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 4, pp. 116-120. Editors: David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor. Westminster John Knox Press. Louisville, Kentucky. 2009. The Way of Cold Water: A Homily on the Hyperbole of Heaven and Hell by David R. Henson, in Edges of Faith. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/davidhenson/2015/09/the-way-of-cold-water-a-homilyon-the-hyperbole-of-heaven-and-hell-mark-938-50/ September 23, 2015. 8