Sermon: Great Big Stuff

First Presbyterian Church

October 13, 2024, Pentecost 20B

Mark 10:17-31

 

Great Big Stuff

 

 

In 2005 a new musical, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,  premiered on Broadway, another in a then-novel trend of musicals based on movies instead of the other way ‘round. The movie in question had starred Michael Caine and Steve Martin as competing con men; the musical debuted with John Lithgow and Norbert Leo Butz in those roles. As the novice grifter introduced to Lithgow’s high-class world, Butz gets the big song; when Lithgow, having grown tired of this penny-ante grifter, exasperatedly asks “what do you want!!??” Butz responds by gesticulating around wildly and shouting “I want this!!”, and then breaking into his big number that sums up everything he has seen and now wants for himself. It is simply titled “Great Big Stuff.”

It’s not the worst summary of one of the seemingly chronic conditions of our world; humans see, and then humans want. For example, it’s a driving premise behind an awful lot of the entertainment that passes by on our various screens, going back at least as far as reality-show predecessors like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or opulent prime-time dramas such as Dallas or Dynasty. (Yes, I’m dating myself, but I know many of you know what I’m talking about.) Sure, the dysfunction of the characters of those shows counts for a lot of the alleged entertainment value, but so does the “great big stuff” those characters possess. We see, and then we want. That’s been a defining characteristic of humanity in general for a very long time.

It's also worth acknowledging that the church has not been free of that inclination, in any age of its history. Just to throw out one example, you might remember the televangelist Jim Bakker (the one with two “k”s in his name) being at least as interested in accumulating wealth as in preaching. He is, however, hardly the only example of such divided loyalty, and emphatically not the last.

Of course, today’s gospel reading isn’t very hard to tie into this human predisposition. The man comes to Jesus and asks the question that sets off this encounter: “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” That phrasing is interesting in itself; to speak of “inheriting” eternal life might offer some suggestion of how the man has gained the “great wealth” (or the "great big stuff") we learn of a few verses later. Jesus’s answer is also curious. After the seemingly odd digression over being called “good,” he lists a few of the commandments and law. While many seem to get agitated about the man’s response that “all these I have kept since my youth” as sounding arrogant or prideful, given the examples Jesus gives it’s not that shocking an answer. Personally, I’ve never committed murder myself, and a lot of people can say the same, just to take one of those.

The story gets a little more interesting after that answer. It’s a bit of a jolt to read that “Jesus looked at him and loved him…”. That’s not a typical response in these encounters. At the minimum it seems that Jesus is taking this man at his word, and that this man is not one of those who will appear in coming chapters of this gospel who are trying to trick or trap Jesus with their questions. Jesus seems to believe this man is sincere in his searching, and one might also guess that Jesus knows what’s going to happen when he gives his final answer.

Let’s make sure we take in that whole answer: “You are lacking one thing: go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” Notice that the mandate here isn’t just about selling off those possessions, but also using the funds gained specifically to help those in need, and then turning to follow Jesus.

We know of course what happens next. The man goes away grieving, “because he had great wealth.” What we don’t know is what happens after that. When the man goes away, we don’t follow him; we are given Jesus’s words to his disciples about what had just happened. But we don’t know what actually happened to the man himself. 

In fact there’s a lot we don’t know about this man. Mark doesn’t even give the extra details that Matthew and Luke add, whereby we often call this person “the rich young ruler”; in Mark all he is is a man who “had great wealth,” regardless of age or social stature. We don’t know the nature of his possessions or his “stuff.” It’s entirely possible, given the Roman Empire setting in which this takes place, that among the man’s ownings are slaves tasked with overseeing his many possessions. We don’t know if there is family involved. We don’t know how far this man has come to see Jesus. 

But even more, we don’t know what the man does after he walks away grieving. For all we know, the man does exactly what Jesus tells him to do, sorrowing all the while. Maybe he’s one of those in the crowds that have accumulated around Jesus by the time he gets to Jerusalem. We tend to assume not, but we don’t know. What we do know is that he had "great big stuff", and the very idea of giving it up was shocking and grief-inducing to him.

The “shock” part shouldn’t surprise us. We are hardly the first age to assume that great wealth somehow means that God has particularly favored a person. The “prosperity gospel” might not have been invented yet, but those living under Roman rule were certainly led to believe that accumulated wealth and power and status were marks of divine favor from some deity or another. The idea of having to give up those seeming markers of divine favor likely made no sense in the eyes of this man or of anyone else listening to his exchange with Jesus. The attachment to his “stuff” was so strong, and so presumed to be so good, that Jesus’s words provoked a deep emotional reaction. 

After the man walks away, we get the rather famous line about it being easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. It’s one of the more quoted and quotable lines from Mark’s gospel, but also one that is easily misinterpreted. Is it merely the fact of being rich that makes it so hard? Or is it something about the condition of having many possessions that is the problem?

In a technical sense it wouldn’t necessarily have been hard for the man to sell all his stuff, give it away to the poor, and then come follow Jesus. It might have been an involved process to be sure, but you have to guess that if the stuff was good stuff, there would be people happy to buy it. Giving it away to the poor, again, would not be hard; in Roman society there were going to be plenty of poor people around. The hardest part might be tracking down Jesus to follow him once all those financial transactions were completed.

No, it’s not necessarily a hard task to accomplish. Involved, maybe complicated, to be sure, but not hard. What’s hard, of course, is the very idea of giving up the stuff, even if (maybe especially if) it's not the "great big stuff" from that Broadway show example. We get attached to it. It has sentimental value, sometimes. It gets connected to some special event or memory in our lives or family. It feels like giving up the stuff is giving up the memory.

Hopefully this reminds us of the lesson of this passage that is trickiest for the non-rich among us: you don’t have to have many possessions to be owned, so to speak, by those possessions. 

Our stuff, even if it's not "great big stuff," becomes our security, our comfort, maybe even our identity in some cases. Maybe it seems harmless to us. We can certainly point to others who have more stuff and fancier stuff and more extravagant stuff than we do, and perhaps hide ourselves from our own attachments by doing so. But do we still run the risk of being so attached to our stuff, so owned by our possessions, that we miss the kingdom of God?

There is that last paragraph of story, where Peter (rightly, in this case) points out that these disciples really didleave behind all their stuff to follow Jesus. Peter, James, and John didn’t even wait around to sell their fishing boats to jump on board with Jesus. And Jesus does in turn tell the disciples that their forsaking has not gone unnoticed; their sacrifices won’t be forgotten in this age or in the age to come. But even then, there has to be a precautionary note added, that even in that remembering and rewarding, there will be upsetting of the order of things – “but many who are first will be last, and the last first.” If you’re doing all of this sacrificing and selling and giving things away in expectation of being big number one in the end, you’re still getting it wrong. The reward is following Jesus. The reward is entering the kingdom of God. Period. Full stop. End of discussion. Ladder-climbing and gain-seeking and currying favor to gain more importance? None of this is part of the scheme in that kingdom, in this age or the age to come.

We are left with, in the end, a fairly simple question in the wake of this gospel story, one that is nonetheless dreadfully difficult and challenging to answer: what do we “own” that, in fact, owns us? And how do we give it away and follow - really, humbly follow - Jesus? 

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #35, Praise Ye the Lord, the Almighty; #720, Jesus Calls Us; #729, Lord, I Want to Be a Christian

Sermon: One Table

First Presbyterian Church

October 6, 2024, World Communion Sunday

Isaiah 25:6-9; Ephesians 2:13-22

 

One Table

 

 

You might have noticed that I've got my white stole out this morning, which is actually recommended for Sundays on which communion is observed. I don't usually do that, though. That’s because if the white vestments came out every time the sacrament should be observed in worship, we would never get to use any other vestments. There is no qualified religious authority or text that gives a good credible argument for why the sacrament should not be observed every time a congregation comes together for worship, even including such occasions as weddings and Services of Witness to the Resurrection. The first reactions against weekly communion came as anti-Catholic backlash in some Reformed areas during the Reformation, and over time that backlash morphed into the perceived “impracticality” of weekly observance, and sometimes into a desire to keep the Lord’s Supper “special,” which is to say, I guess, that nothing else about worship is “special.” But for today's occasion of World Communion Sunday, I'll use white.

The occasion of World Communion Sunday, marked today in many Protestant traditions, provides an occasion to critique those reluctances among many other things. It might be worth remembering that there is nothing else we do in worship that has quite the direct mandate as this sacrament, given most immediately by Jesus on the night before his death. The church at large was quick to make it the central feature of their gatherings, even if the teaching/preaching parts of their worship took up much more time. They sometimes got it wrong, as we see from Paul’s reprimand to the Corinthians in chapter 11 of his first letter to them, but they did it. It is, in short, a direct ministering of grace to his disciples, and to us who follow over the many centuries as part of the body of Christ.

I wonder sometimes if there’s something else at work in some churches’ reluctance to observe the sacrament more regularly. It’s a lot of work, especially when pandemic conditions have not forced these little two-sided containers of “bread” and “wine” upon us, to get together that much bread and (in most Protestant churches) grape juice for particularly larger congregation, to be sure. It’s also true that it takes time. There’s also the matter of the awkwardness of much theology about the table; is Christ really present in the bread and cup, or spiritually present (this would be the position of most churches in the Reformed tradition, like us Presbyterians), or is it all just symbolic? And there’s also the challenge of acknowledging Christ as the one who serves us all, when any idiot can look and see that I am not Christ, and nor is any other minister presiding at table this morning anywhere in the world.

But I wonder if the biggest obstacle for some churches is that this sacrament is something we share – not just among ourselves in one sanctuary, wherever we may be, but with all the church in all the world. That passage from Isaiah, with its references to "all peoples" and "all nations," reminds us that this vision doesn't merely date from Jesus's last meal with his disciples; it was the stuff of prophets' proclamations as well.

I’m not sure everybody likes that. Particularly in this country, it’s kind of a thing for churches – especially those on the presumed cutting edge of contemporary worship – to pride themselves on creating a distinct “culture,” of worship and pretty much everything else. The implied promise is that You won’t find this experience anywhere else. That attitude, honestly, can turn up in a church whether it plays the hottest new songs on the CCLI worship music charts or fills the air with the sounds of Bach and Mozart. 

The Lord’s Supper, though, is not unique, and is almost designed to thwart uniqueness. You break bread and pass it around, and you pour out the wine or juice and share it too. The bread will be different in different places, but it’s hard to be terribly different about the observance of this sacrament. We kinda have to share it, and not just with that church a few blocks away we don’t like. We share it with a worldful of churches in places we don’t like full of people we don’t like, against whom we’d much rather discriminate.

Among many other things this sacrament, and this particular occasion of observing it, does to us is this compelling to see ourselves not as some kind of “special” or “unique” outfit but elementally as part of Christ’s body, the church.

We don’t necessarily like that. I know there are probably some churches in this town where I’d be horrified to sit through a worship service, and my own past traumatic experiences make it hard to conceive of participating in much of anything with some churches. But that’s not up to me, and those churches are part of the body of Christ too. So to with churches in Haiti or Lebanon or Gaza or Afghanistan (to the degree that any churches are allowed to exist there anymore) or any number of places in the world that too many of our leaders and people demonize at every opportunity. 

And yet here this particular table stands, one of many around the world where bread and cup will be ministered on this day, with absolutely no checkpoints or gates or gatekeepers, open to anybody to whom the Lord calls. It stands as an open rebuke to the likes of the “church growth movement,” a seemingly innocuous thing in recent decades that promoted the use of things like “market segmentation” to encourage churches to seek out their members in moderately affluent, middle- to upper-class, and almost exclusively white neighborhoods – “people like us” as many churches would put it.

There are Christians at tables around the world on this day who are, to say the least, not like us. The reading from Ephesians reminds us, though, that even we ourselves were “not like us” before the working of Christ’s mercy and redemption opened the good news up beyond the Jewish origins of its earliest followers. We “Gentiles” – i.e. anyone non-Jewish – were the outsiders. You might even borrow a Jimmy Buffett song line and say that we were the people our parents warned us about. Indeed, those in churches these days who want to keep folks “out” are only “in” by the grace of God, and they really don’t like being reminded of that.

If they don’t like that, they really won’t like eternity. The feast we keep today is, again among many other things, a foreshadowing of the great feast to come. It will be a real "y'all come" feast, with God's children from all over - "all peoples" and "all nations" - joining in.

But for now, until that day in glory, we keep the feast here in this one small corner of the body of Christ, one part of a world of Christ’s followers, seeking to be faithful and to bear witness. And we share this meal with Christians all over God's good earth, whether anyone particularly likes that fact or not. 

For the whole church in the whole world, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #504, We Come as Guests Invited; #---, When Christ's own body comes to table; #---, As we go now from this table 

I didn't think this was a literal thing...

Sermon: Know Your Place (in Creation)

First Presbyterian Church

September 29, 2024, Pentecost 22B

Job 38:1-11, 34-41; Romans 8:18-25

(note: above link contains all of Job 38-39)

Know Your Place (in Creation)

 

During the month of September, and sometimes into part of October, some Protestant churches observe what is called a "creation season," a period of Sundays in which scripture readings, liturgy, and sermons are chosen to guide Christians towards greater reflection on and understanding of creation as a work and gift of God, and the place we humans occupy as a part of God's creation. This year, your pastor was not quite on top of things to plan for a "creation season", but it seemed worthwhile to put forth at least one Sunday for worship and reflection on this theological reality. 

The thing about making plans for such a Sunday is that one can't know what'a going to happen between the time you make such a plan and that Sunday. In this case, nature offered forth one of its most brutal disasters in recent years in the form of Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm at landfall which brought destruction not only to expected places like the Gulf coast of Florida, but also into Georgia and the Carolinas. One doesn't expect a hurricane to trigger incredibly destructive flooding in the Appalachian Mountains region of North Carolina, but that precise thing is ongoing right now. Places suffering serious damage include the Montreat Conference Center, near Black Mountain, a site near and dear to the hearts of many, many Presbyterians.

To speak of creation and its theological implications in our time means not only acknowledging its sometimes-destructive power, but also acknowledging how human misuse and abuse have contributed to that destructive power. This isn't fun. There are those who refuse to acknowledge such a thing, no matter how clearly climate science speaks on the subject. We dare not come before the God of Creation, or the Christ we worship, with anything less than honesty; to do anything less is a profanation of the Lord's name.

Interestingly, one place in scripture in which creation is described and exalted, not only in its sweetness and light but also in its extremes and potential for harm, is in a book of the Old Testament which few people would think of: the book that tells the story of a righteous man who suffers mightily, betrayed by friends who accuse him of unrighteousness, but eventually demanding an audience of God to plead his innocence. We turn to the book of Job.

Specifically we turn to the thirty-eighth chapter of that book, in which Job finally gets his wish: God appears, “out of the whirlwind” and challenges Job to speak. Except, no, God doesn’t really challenge Job to speak. To be blunt about it, God challenges Job to shut up and listen.

Job had imagined something like what we would call a courtroom situation, in which Job would argue his case and convince God that his suffering was not right and not deserved.  Instead, God tells Job to get suited up and takes him on what amounts to a field trip through creation, for most of chapters 38-41. Even when Job tries to back down in the early verses of chapter 40, God is having none of it. Somehow, God’s answer to Job’s demands for justification is a cosmic nature hike.

God first interjects Godself into the ongoing debate with harsh words: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” In truth that could be directed at any of those involved in the conversation thus far, but Job is the one out front, and Job is the one who is going to take the heat here.

After challenging Job to put on his big-boy pants and get ready to be cross-examined, God takes off. In the course of chapters 38 and 39 we are reminded in short order that Job has been neither present for nor involved in: 

§  Measuring and laying the foundations of the earth, sinking the base of the foundation and laying its cornerstone, to the accompaniment of rejoicing from the stars and heavenly beings; 

§  Sealing up the raging rush of the seas “when it burst out from the womb” (that's some serious feminine imagery applied to a part of creation!), enrobing it in could and mist and fog, and setting its boundaries;

§  Ordering the dawn and the morning;

§  Plunging down into the depths of the sea and knowing its mysteries;

§  Knowing where light itself lives, where the snow and hail gather to descend upon the earth, carving out the channel for the rain and a path for the thunderbolt; 

§  Ordering the stars in their courses and constellations;

§  Calling forth the rain and lightning; 

§  Hunting down the prey by which the lion might feed its cubs;

§  In chapter 39, knowing the ways of the beasts of the wild, hooved animals and birds and the whole lot.

Like the Prodigal Son from the gospel of John, Job finds he cannot possibly contend with God and attempts to back down at the beginning of chapter 40. God’s not done, though. picking up again in chapters 40 and 41 with a downright rhapsodic celebration of two particular beasts, Behemoth and Leviathan. While some commentators try to equate them to native animals of the nearby Nile delta – the hippopotamus and the crocodile – they frankly sound more like creatures that should be featured in the Fantastic Beasts movies than anything we see walking around on earth. (It is after this that Job’s final reckoning with God takes place, but that’s the end of the book.)

It is wild and wonderful poetry, brash and exuberant and, yeah, a little proud in a way that a deity has a right to be. Truly, I do recommend that at some point you read these four chapters for yourself – not trying to discern the mystery or unlock some secret that will tell you when the Rapture is coming or anything like that; just read them as you might read from a book of poetry for once, and let the sheer beauty of God’s good creation wash over you and overwhelm your senses in its wildness and over-the-top breathlessness.

Still, though, we are left hanging, or so it seems. Yes, that’s lovely and all that, one might ask, but what about Job’s suffering? It’s still not fair. What does all of this have to do with that?

Theologians have grappled with this one for centuries, sometimes ending up in the theological equivalent of throwing one’s hands up in the air in resigned despair of ever coming up with an answer. I have no intention of claiming to be smarter or more gifted or more Spirit-guided than they; I can do no more than offer up one possibility, informed by other commentary. It’s deeply unsatisfying in a way and might even throw into question Job’s declared “innocence” in this whole matter, not to mention the our own. 

It is possible, that in all of this dialogue and diatribe and accusing, Job hasn’t even come close to asking the right question. (To be sure his “friends” have been even worse.)

There are many, many possible interpretations of this monologue from God here in chapters 38-41, more than can possibly be attempted in one sermon. However, the following takeaways from this monologue might be suggested, as a means of ordering what all of this means for Job, and for us, in understanding a human place in creation:

1) God orders creation for God’s own purposes and for the good of ALL creation – not just us humans.

This challenges us. This challenges how we read the Bible, and frankly how a lot of the biblical writers wrote. We tend to think that everything about creation is done for our own personal pleasure and comfort. We tend to sing songs and pull out Bible stories that make us the center of the universe. 

We’re not, not by a long shot. 

Look again at the creation as described here. It is broad and vast and unbounded and all the good words we say and sing about it without truly understanding what they mean. If we take this passage seriously, we have to understand that we are part of creation, and not masters of it. 

2) God orders and controls creation. God does not, however, tame creation.

Wild things are meant to be wild. God made them that way. Based on how Behemoth and Leviathan are described, God seems to like wild things that way. Not just the animals; wild winds, wild seas, wildness is a feature in the fullness of God’s creation, not a bug.

Also: remember The Lion King? The big hit Disney animated movie with all the creatures of the African savanna and the young lion with Matthew Broderick’s voice who had to learn to grow up and take his place as the head of the lion pride? Do you also remember the big song as this whole assemblage, this network of creatures, played out on the screen before us? What was it called?

[singing] Circle of Life?

Thing is, though, when you invoke that phrase – “the circle of life” – there’s something included in it that isn’t so much fun to think about. Part of the “circle of life” is no less than death. Death itself is programmed into God’s ordering and controlling of creation. As such, we should know suffering will happen, and not expect creation to get out of our way and avoid harming us at all costs. 

This thought leads to two related ideas:

3) If our lives seem disordered, we may need to examine whether we are truly living as part of God’s creation. 

Have we as humans lived our lives so determined on our own comfort and control that we have broken our relationship with God’s creation? Have we so separated ourselves from living with that creation, as part of that creation, that we do ourselves actual harm, set off illnesses and injury to ourselves and broken our very bodies and minds by our pursuit of dominance over and exploitation of nature?

And closely related…

4) If creation seems disordered to us, perhaps we need to look at someone other than God for a reason. Perhaps we should look in a mirror.

This is where it gets touchy for us, living as we do in a time where our relationship with creation, the struggle over living with creation or as part of creation against taming or dominating creation, is etched deeply within our very existence. This can be said of anyone living anywhere, but it stands out possibly most in the state where Julia and I used to live, the one known as the Sunshine State: Florida.

In the John Sayles movie Sunshine State, a developer who acts as something of a Greek chorus commenting on the movie’s action makes a few trenchant observations about living in Florida. People come to Florida, or at least some do, because of (what they perceive to be) nature, the “natural beauty” of the land.

Tricky thing is, though, if many of those people saw actual natural Florida, with swamps and wild grasses and prairies and alligators and mosquitoes the size of birds, they’d run screaming in the opposite direction. What they want is tightly controlled “nature,” highly groomed and manicured “nature” instead of the sheer wildness of God’s creation. That developer in the movie freely acknowledges that this is what he sells, describing it as “nature … on a leash.”

Trouble is, as we see too often and too easily these days, our attempts to “tame” nature and put it “on a leash” only make things worse.  We tame things with thoroughly unnatural chemicals and end up with red tide and toxic algae. We take out native plants and animals and bring in plants and animals that don’t belong here, and we end up overrun with the less desirable plants and invasive species (ask one of your south Florida friends about Burmese pythons). And yes, we overheat the earth so badly that, just for one most recent example, the Gulf of Mexico becomes a tropical pressure cooker, turning a fledgling tropical depression into a Category 4 monster (speak of a behemoth!) just in time for it to slam into the Florida Big Bend, which is only one example of such monster storms over the past couple of decades. Not to mention our nasty habit of thinking we tamed nature enough that we think it’s o.k. to build to the hilt right up on the coastline, right where those behemoth storms come crashing ashore.

If we think creation is disordered, yeah, we’d better look in the mirror. Norman Wirzba, now of Duke Divinity School, puts it this way in his commentary on Job:

An adequate understanding of creation and an honest estimation of our place within it require that we see creation in terms of God’s intention and scale. Attempts to reduce creation to the scale of human significance invariably result in pain to ourselves and in death to creatures around us.[i]

 

Let us be clear here; Job’s moral universe is being challenged for being entirely too small. And yes, Job’s presumed innocence is being questioned as well. 

For example: Lyle, what about those massive herds Job had kept before? Chapter 1:3 tells us Job had “Seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys” with his ten children feasting regularly and Job praying that they didn’t do anything stupid. For just one thing, how would that smell? 

I invite you to imagine the size of that stockyard. Imagine, if you dare, the smell of being anywhere near it, not to mention the amount of animal waste involved; that's an environmental nightmare. Could Job really manage those herds in a way that honored God’s creation around him? What was the effect of that massive operation on Job’s neighbors? Was Job actually that innocent, in the full scale of creation?

And what about us? What does our footprint do to others, even if we don't have that much livestock around?

We may need, in the end, to quit peering through the microscope focused ever so tightly on our own desires and comforts, and to spend time looking through the telescope that opens up God’s full bounty of creation to us. We may need to think less about how the world is crashing in on us, and more about how we’re crashing in on the world. It may be time for us to change glasses, go outside, and look at … everything, and ask not if it is ours, but where we belong in it.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless noted otherwise): #32, I Sing the Mighty Power of God; (Hymn sing) All creatures of our God on high, Every creature on your planet, #38 To Bless the Earth; #---, When earth is standing dusty dry; #37, Let All Things Now Living

 

 

---

[i] Norman Wirzba, “God’s Measure of Creation,” Christian Reflection (2001), 24-29.

From a video of the famous-to-Presbyterians Montreat gate, with floodwaters pouring through after Hurricane Helene, 9/27/2024.

Sermon: Like a Child to Jesus

(NOTE: This is the base of the sermon for Sunday, September 22; it was delivered in the much more informal setting of FPC's "worship in the park" service, and for several reasons was delivered even more off-the-cuff than usual, so it might not look like what you heard there if you were there.)

First Presbyterian Church

September 22, 2024, Pentecost 18B

Mark 9:30-37

 

Like a Child to Jesus

 

 

The more time you spend in the gospel of Mark, the more you are forced to confront something rather basic and unavoidable about Jesus’s disciples: they don’t seem to be very smart. To borrow some vernacular expressions on the subject, they’re dumb as rocks, or dumber than a sack of hammers, or as dumb as dirt. They show, throughout the gospel but especially in this central section, as they are following Jesus to his ultimate fate in Jerusalem, that they just don’t get it, and they keep showing that they just don’t get it over and over again. 

We might ought to consider a slightly different possibility about the disciples, though. Maybe it isn’t that they don’t get it; maybe it’s that they don’t want to get it.

You know the type. We live in a society where such refusal to comprehend basic facts is now not only obnoxious, but also deadly. These days it’s hard not to wonder how long it will be before folks start deciding that, say, the law of gravity is a hoax, and start taking it upon themselves to defy gravity. You get the idea. If they don’t like a fact, they deny it, no matter how hard the consequences. 

And to be fair to the disciples, the particular fact that they are struggling with is a deeply troubling and painful one. Jesus has now said it twice, as recorded by Mark, and there’s one more statement coming in the next chapter. Mark 8:31 records Jesus’s first proclamation of his inevitable rejection, suffering, death, and resurrection. This is the occasion on which Peter, in one of his rare “get it right” moments, has just proclaimed to Jesus that “you are the Messiah”, only to turn around and rebuke Jesus for this seemingly contradictory proclamation – and get rebuked himself with “Get behind me, Satan!” for his trouble. 

Now here, at the beginning of today’s reading, Jesus is at it again. The “Son of Man” will be betrayed into human hands and killed and will rise again three days later. Do the disciples not get it, or do they not want to get it?

It’s worth remembering what has happened in the interim. Chapter 9 begins with the transfiguration of Jesus, as witnessed by Peter, James, and John (though not the rest of the disciples). Upon coming down the mountain, they encounter a father pleading for healing for his son, which the disciples so far have failed to accomplish. They then head toward Capernaum, and it is on this journey that Jesus returns to this unpleasant theme. The disciples, perhaps remembering the rebuke Peter got last time, don’t answer. Did they not understand, or did they not want to understand?

When they arrive at Capernaum, Jesus asks a seemingly out-of-the-blue question: “What were you arguing about on the way?” Their non-answer is telling, and you have to figure that Jesus knew exactly what they had been arguing about. 

Let’s be clear: that such an argument might come up at this point isn’t that shocking if you remember the context we just noted. Remember, Jesus singled out Peter, James, and John to go up the mountain with him when he was transfigured. Meanwhile, the rest of the disciples were left to contend with this child they could not heal. If you ask me, that’s a situation rife for some posturing about importance and greatness, even among “good church folk”; Jesus’s “favorites” lording it over the ne’er-do-wells who couldn’t get that healing right. And besides, it’s a good way to avoid thinking about that disturbing thing Jesus keeps saying. 

Jesus is ready to quash this kind of thinking straight away. The statement is direct and unequivocable: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” The statement is shocking enough, in the context of the Roman Empire in which Jesus and his disciples lived. A society in which status and honor were of paramount importance would have no room for talk like this. A good Roman citizen would have greeted this statement from Jesus with more disdain than the old baseball manager Leo Durocher seemed to show for “nice guys” in that quip that keeps him remembered, the one about how those “nice guys” finished last. Last was last. Last was nothing. Last had no honor or status or importance or worth at all. 

Perhaps still sensing that the disciples didn’t really get it, Jesus resorted to a demonstration. He singled out a small child and called the child over to him, took the child in his arms (maybe even picked up the child), and said the really shocking part: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

Now here’s where we have to stop and adjust our readers.

The moment a child is invoked in scripture, our tendency is to get all mushy and sentimental (especially in this setting when there simply are not children attending church here very often if at all). To hear this scripture as it was meant to be heard by Mark’s readers and hearers, we have to fight off that tendency vigorously. We can’t let ourselves slip into saying “awwww…” at the sight of Jesus taking the child in his arms. That’s not going to allow us to hear what Jesus is saying.

While we've seen enough to know that parents were likely to do whatever they could to save their child (remember the Syrophonecian woman from Mark 7, or Jairus pleading for his daughter in Mark 5), in Roman society, a child’s importance depended upon the child’s age. If the child was old enough to work around the house or in the fields or in the family’s business, the child was useful. Until that age, the child was essentially dead weight, a mouth that had to be fed and cared for by its family, and of fully no status whatsoever outside its own family. Jesus calling and taking the child in his arms – a child of no relation to him – was roughly equivalent to Jesus singling out and embracing the lowest and most menial of slaves, people of no status in Roman society. And it was this – the complete lack of societal status or honor or importance – that was being singled out here, not the cuteness or preciousness that we tend to ladle onto our perception of children. 

To a group of disciples who had been caught arguing about who was the biggest deal or the most important or the greatest, Jesus offers this challenge. The one who would be greatest among you must be willing to welcome one like this – of no honor or status or importance whatsoever – as if you were welcoming me. And when you do that, you are not just welcoming me, but the One who sent me as well. 

It’s not just a Roman thing to be obsessed with status or rank or with associating ourselves with “important” people. Any society you can think of has had its own obsession with that rank or status-seeking. It’s still not good.

It is in exactly that kind of world that this message comes crashing, throttling our pride at just how important we the church are in the world and how much power we hold in the greater society. Let’s be clear that Jesus is wildly unimpressed with how many politicians jump at our bidding or how many athletes stick John 3:16 references on their equipment. Are we welcoming the child? The homeless person? The unwed mother? The migrant farmworker? The ones with no status, no importance, no significance at all in the larger world we the church are so busy trying to impress?

If we aren’t welcoming them, can we truly say we are welcoming Jesus?

Only when the church – the whole church – can look upon the ones of no importance to society and see them as Jesus saw that child, and the whole church can welcome them the way Jesus welcomed that child; only then can we claim to be following in the way Jesus taught. At the last, we’re only getting this business of following Christ right when the world looks to us like that child looked to Jesus.

For learning to welcome the ones who don’t matter, Thanks be to God. Amen. 

Sermon: Crumbs

First Presbyterian Church

September 8, 2024, Pentecost 16B

Mark 7:24-37

 

Crumbs

 

 

I’m not going to lie to you, folks. This is my least favorite sermon passage ever. I dare say I may never preach this passage again. But then again, I said that before, and somehow, I couldn't stay away from it.

After all, there is something of worth, and actually a lot for us to learn from this passage. There is healing that happens, and there is a remarkable show of faith that any person should be humbled to see. There is an opening up of Jesus’s ministry on earth that starts in this passage. In fact, one can argue that this passage is one of the most important turning points in this gospel to which the lectionary directs our attention this year.

Still, there is no way I can make verse 27 sound good.

Can I understand how it might happen to us humans? Certainly. 

In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis has the senior demon Screwtape make the point to his mentoree that human beings, despite their reputation, can actually be quite patient and endure a great deal of stress and pressure. Rather, the great impatience, the great explosion and emotional eruption most often comes when we humans think the pressure has finally relented only to have some other unexpected imposition appear. Screwtape gives the example of an emergency room doctor or nurse who might endure a full shift of trauma after trauma, one patient after another, with no release and no break, and successfully hold it together throughout the entire shift. Then, on the way out of the hospital, that same doctor or nurse might explode with seeming rage at being tripped up by a stray dog. 

Maybe you’ve known something of that experience.

I don’t necessarily want to say that’s what happens here, but there is something about the setup that makes such a scenario plausible, or at least plausible for us humans. Jesus has been through a lot since we last spent time in this gospel: the death of John the Baptist; the feeding of five thousand; the incident of the disciples’ panic on the Sea of Galilee and Jesus’s walking on water to save them; another round of healings of multitudes of people; and a big spat with a group of Pharisees from Jerusalem (we heard some of that in last week's reading). That’s a lot to cope with, and we humans might find the stress and pressure a challenge, but we deal with it because we see a light at the end of the tunnel – a break from the stress – and we hold out until then. For Jesus, this hoped-for release was an escape to the region of the city of Tyre, roughly in what we would call Lebanon today. Although there were some Jews there (presumably including the person at whose house he stayed), perhaps Jesus thought getting away to this primarily Gentile city region might offer some relief. Or so he might have thought, only to have this woman – this Syrophoenician woman, a term that conjures the most ancient enmities of the Hebrew people - somehow get into the house and threw herself at his feet to beg for healing for her daughter.

And, according to this line of reasoning, Jesus snapped, and fired off what was a pretty vile insult at her. To say “first let the children eat," as Jesus does initially, is to echo pretty standard Jewish thought of the time about the Messiah and salvation – the Jews would be “fed” first, then the rest of the world. It's a little out of step with our post-incarnation theology, but at the time it would make sense.

But to repeat the next line – “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs” – is just flat-out ugly. Think of the kind of ugly things a southerner might say about “Yankees” in, say, the 1860s or thereafter, or the kind of slurs many whites used against blacks in the Civil Rights era and before (and frankly after too). And that simply isn't a thing we can comprehend Jesus saying. Doesn't fit the image of Jesus we carry around. 

To understand this, you need to understand that dogs were, in Jewish thought of the time, unclean. A good Jewish family of the time would be horrified at the idea of having a dog in the home at all, much less as “part of the family” as we regard them today. To speak of Gentiles as “dogs” (even in the diminutive form as this Greek word is, something like “puppies” or “doggies” but not exactly) was to call them something about as ugly and impure as possible – perhaps not quite on the level of pigs, but close.

You’ll find all manner of efforts to try to soften the blow in the theological commentary literature (I get reminded of this in turning to the commentaries a pastor uses as an aid to sermon preparation). To use such a reference, some will say, should be understood strictly metaphorically, and not as a direct insult to the woman. This is nonsense; members of any minority group aren’t going to care about whether the use of the n-word, or the word once used as the name of Washington’s NFL team, is strictly rhetorical or metaphorical, and neither should this woman be expected to understand being called a “dog” differently than if it were uttered at her by any other Jew. 

Other commentators suggest that this is a “test” of the woman; Jesus is probing to see just what she understands about him or how far she is willing to go to have her daughter healed. This wouldn’t be out of character; Jesus engages in such exchanges with other interlocutors at other places in the gospels. Still, if I’d engaged in a “test” like this during my teaching career, that career would have ended a lot sooner than it did (and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't last long in ministry of any kind either). Furthermore, Mark didn’t really drop us any clues that this was the case; no “to test her, he said…” or “he said, with a chuckle…” or any such thing. Just the bald-faced words.

The latest such attempt to come along in the literature suggests that, rather than being poor, the woman was in fact quite well-off - part of a Gentile ruling class that lorded it over poor rural Jewish folk in the region surrounding the city. At the minimum, I guess, Jesus would at least be "punching up" at an oppressor rather than "punching down" at the oppressed, but it takes some spectacular rhetorical gymnastics to come to that conclusion. The words are simply there, and they are ugly. 

What we can say, though, is that the Syrophoenician woman’s response is absolutely amazing. She takes the Jewish insult and reframes it for the Gentile setting. Unlike Jews of the time, those in the larger Greco-Roman world were somewhat inclined to take in dogs as domestic animals, “members of the family” – something like pets. One might think of the mosaic found in the ruins of the volcano-destroyed city of Pompeii, depicting a vigilant dog with the inscription "Cave Canem," or "beware of the dog." So while a Jewish family would have been horrified to find a dog in the house at all, a Gentile family might well have a pooch lapping up the crumbs from the table (or being slipped a little more than crumbs by children who don’t care for the meal; maybe you’ve seen that before…). So, from the completely submissive position this exchange has forced upon her, she responds – still calling him “sir” or “Lord” – that the dogs – she, her daughter – could still eat the crumbs the children left behind, and with this answer apparently blew Jesus’s mind. He sends her home with the word that the demon was gone from her daughter, not because of her faith specifically, but because of her answer.

This woman, it seems, has got ahold of something that others who have encountered Jesus may have missed. He is a powerful healer and exorcist of demons, to be sure; but her dogged persistence – pun intended – suggests that she gets that there is more to this Jesus, something besides just the ability to heal. It isn’t fleshed out, but there is some understanding that not many seem to have grasped, certainly not the disciples at this point.

We also can’t escape the fact that the story of Jesus takes a distinct turn at this point, a turn through Gentile territory. On his way through the primarily Gentile territory of the Decapolis, or “ten cities,” the crowds bring to him a man who was not only deaf, but also stricken with a speech impediment so that he could not speak language. All they hoped for was that Jesus might “place his hand on him,” but even with this Gentile Jesus goes far beyond – he takes the man aside, touching both ears and tongue (yes, also spitting), and uttered a word; instantly the man’s ears were opened and his tongue loosed. No hesitation about touching an “unclean” person, no hesitation about old purity laws that called spittle disgusting; just a deliberate and unequivocal act of healing.

Pretty good for crumbs under the table. 

It’s a recurring theme in the gospel of Mark that Jesus’s ministry on earth was the ultimate manifestation of “the kingdom of God come near,” part of Jesus’s own words all the way back in the first chapter, at the beginning of his public ministry. What happens in this moment in Mark’s gospel reminds us just how uncontrollable, how unrestrained this in-breaking of God’s kingdom really is. It cares not one whit how we build human traditions atop divine revelations that come to obscure those divine revelations (remember the Pharisees from last week's reading). It does not respect our self-appointed boundaries. And it dares challenge us for not sharing our bread, or refusing those in the most need even the crumbs that end up under the table. 

It was just a week ago that we came to this table here. It’s a table that reminds us of a Lord who gathered with his followers around tables large and small, teaching and feeding and healing even when at the end of his physical strength, finally giving them at one last table a gesture of bread and wine to hold in their hearts and minds and souls. When we come to this table, those tables speak to us, remind us of Jesus and bring us to the table with Jesus, not just to share this bread and this cup, but to share the Lord’s presence, all the blessings of the table, with all around us, the ones who need it most, even those desperately searching for the crumbs under the table. 

Even from a moment that seems inexplicably ugly (no, I can't explain why Jesus said this) can come a moment of transformation, a moment of healing, a moment of kingdom-breaking-in that upends our expectations, unsettles our comfort zones, and undoes our human certainties. The words we often hear at the table, “the gifts of God for the people of God,” point us to this truth; we can’t keep those gifts to ourselves, no matter how much it upsets our expectations. The gifts of God are indeed for the people of God; indeed, for all the people of God.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal): #385, All People That on Earth Do Dwell; #203, Jesu, Jesu, Fill Us With Your Love; #610, O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing