Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 27, 2009
Esther 7:1-6, 9-10, 9:20-22
Psalm 124
James 5:13-20
Mark 9:38-50
In today’s gospel lesson we witness a common phenomenon of human community. The question of who is in and who is out. This is the situation Jesus’ disciples find themselves in today when they complain to Jesus that someone is performing miracles in his name. I can just imagine their complaint. Who gives him the right to heal in Jesus’ name? He doesn’t belong to us. You have not given him the authority to do such a thing, Jesus. We need to stop him.
But I can also imagine Jesus’ response. What are you crazy? I don’t want you to stop him. First of all, he is doing something good; something that pleases God. And he’s giving me the credit for it. Can’t you see, my reputation only increases by his success, and God is pleased that another of his children has been healed. Don’t you get it? God would never be against anyone who does something good for someone else. Any kindness anyone does, whether they do it in my name or not reflects the kindness of God. Don’t you see, whoever is for us is not against us. So, you need to stop your complaining?
Well, it’s clear to me that the disciples do not stop their complaining because Jesus goes on to say some pretty outrageous things to make his point. I imagine that the disciples might have turned their complaint on Jesus. It might have sounded like this. Well, if anybody is allowed to heal in your name, why do you need us? You asked us to follow you so we could learn from you. We should be the ones teaching and healing in your name, not this man. He should be stopped.
But Jesus won’t hear of it. Instead he issues a slew of exaggerated images to make his point, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the disciples didn’t feel quite a lot of pain when he was done with them. I can just hear him now. “Don’t you even try to stop him; don’t even think about it. Anyone who puts a stumbling block before a person who wishes to do good in my name will have to deal with me, and the consequences will not be nice. In fact, it would be better if someone tied a boulder around his feet and threw him into the sea to drown, says Jesus. So you’d better think twice before putting a stumbling block in the way of anyone who is doing God’s work in this world. What is making you think such sinful thoughts. Is it your hand? Then cut it off. Your foot? Then cut it off. Is it your eye? Then tear it out. Otherwise, you are no better than the worm which does nothing but turn up the rotten dirt as he crawls through it. You only fan the very fires of hell you think you are avoiding. And you know what happens then, you lose your saltiness; you lose that ability to make a difference for God and for good in this world. So you’d better keep peace with the people who do the work of God; they might not be one of us, but they are, nevertheless, my disciples. They belong to God, they belong to me, and they belong to us.
Well, we don’t often hear Jesus using such exaggeration and being so intense with anyone, no less his disciples. I sure wouldn’t want to receive a lecture like that. Either Jesus was in a very bad mood that day, or his disciples did something bad enough to take him over the edge. But it might be that both things were happening. After all, Jesus’ response didn’t come out of nowhere. It was prompted by the serious nature of the complaint his disciples made to him. And what was their complaint against the man who cast out that demon in Jesus’ name? Simple. He doesn’t belong to us! The man was not one of Jesus’ followers; he was not one of them, therefore he was an outsider with no authority to be saying or doing anything the disciples believed were exclusive to belonging to them. So this man needed to be stopped. He needed to learn his place. And he needed to stay in it.
We have all experienced being in and out in our life. The experiences of being “in” feels good, and we often take it for granted. But the experiences of being outside groups we would, or could, or should belong to can make angry, or jealous, or fearful, or any number of feelings. The one group we all belong to, and the one we take most for granted in our family. Nobody can belong to our family, but us. You have to be born into a family, adopted into it, or invited into it. We all accept the “in” and “out” boundaries of a family group. Then there are the groups we belong to not by design. These groups categorize us by characteristics which are outside of our control—like race, ethnicity and gender. Belonging to such groups gives us certain rights and priorities and privileges within them, but they also come with their roles and responsibilities, and they all have their issues around being “in” and “out.”
Fixed groups tend to identify themselves by their obvious differences from each other more than they ways they are alike. And their unique qualities make it is clear who is in and who is out. Society carries certain expectations of fixed groups. We call them stereotypes, and we people in a particular group do not live up to our prejudices about them, we often become disappointed, or angry, confused or even amused by their actions—unless or until we learn to accept them for who they are. But even when we accept them they never truly belong. In know that for a fact. When I was a child, I played football and baseball better than any boy in the neighborhood, but I was a girl. And so I never truly belonged to world populated only by boys. Add to this my growing up in a large city, in a Polish, Irish neighborhood populated in large number by black and Hispanic families all of whom were Roman Catholic. My sister and I were the only kids with a Swedish and German ethnic background who had to travel clear across the city to attend a Lutheran church which kids I only saw on Sunday. You can be sure I experienced my share of being in and out—mostly out. We all belong to fixed groups and I believe we become more compassionate Christians when we remember what it felt like to have no choice about belonging and not belonging.
But the groups we belong to by choice are a different story. They give us the most freedom and latitude for belonging to them. The groups we choose to join reveal a lot about who we are, what we believe, and what really matters to us. We join sports groups or groups for recreation, we join special interest groups because of our work or our leisure enjoyment. We join groups for public service, for learning, for adventure. We join groups to affiliate with people who are like us, and with people who enjoy the same things as we do. We become fans of our favorite team or media stars, we join an ethnic club or a political organization. We join on-line groups like Facebook. We join secret societies and exclusive clubs. But joiners have one thing in common; we can choose whether we want to be in or out.
Groups we choose to belong to are important because they help us become that unique person God created us to be. And they serve God’s most important purpose in creating us: relationship. God made us for relationship and he made us for belonging. And the most important lesson we can take from our gospel lesson today is this: circumstances of birth and genetic predisposition can fix our place in a group, and keep us from joining groups not like ours, but no one can keep us from belonging to God. Even churches and religious societies can keep us from belonging to them, but they can’t keep us from belonging to Jesus. Unlike our Jewish and Muslim brethren, we are not born into our faith tradition; we are baptized into it. And even if our parents make that choice for us when we are children, we have a choice about practicing our religious faith when we become an adult. But by virtue of being baptized into the body of Christ in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we always belong to God, and to Jesus, and to the Spirit who dwells within us, even when that Spirit seems to be lying dormant within us.
I confess that knowing I belong to God is a great comfort to me in my present vocation, because I get so many messages which tell me I do not belong. My age, my gender and my faith tradition have been a stumbling block to those who do not accept that women should be priests, those who think that I am too old to be a vital leader of a religious community, and those who judge my faith tradition to be inadequate if not downright heretical. And even if I wanted to, I would never be able to belong to a faith tradition or serve a church as its priest who would not accept my gender, my age, or my ordination as a priest of the Episcopal Church. And I can only imagine how much it would add to my difficulty if I were openly gay, or partnered in a life-long commitment of marriage or civil union, if I were sound of body and mind but mentally or physically challenged, or if my beliefs and religious practices did not meet the personal and parochial standards of a people who claim exclusive right to religious truth. And yet, I pray in Jesus’ name; I preach in Jesus’ name; I baptize in Jesus’ name; I consecrate the elements and distribute them to you in Jesus’ name; I heal in Jesus’ name; I bury in Jesus’ name; I minister to the sick and the needy in Jesus’ name. And, do you know what? Except for the sacramental work of being a priest, so do you. You belong to the priesthood of believers. And no faith community has the right to decide whether you are “in” or “out” of communion with God.
Jesus’ message for the church in today’s gospel lesson is the message he proclaims throughout his ministry. It is the message of radical inclusivity. It is the message that all of us belong to God, and anyone who serves God’s purpose for their life, anyone who supports Jesus by serving his mission and ministry in this world belongs to him…like that lapsed church member who works tirelessly to feed the hungry at the soup kitchen; the homeless man who shares a meal he receives with another; the Jewish and Muslim teachers who build schools and teach each other’s kids, the atheist who rides his bicycle around the world as an ambassador of peace, the black cab driver who gave his kidney to the white woman he drove to the hospital regularly for dialysis, the gay hospice volunteer who cares for those who are dying; the soldier who puts his gun down to care for the sick, and wounded and hungry children of a village, the Asian entrepreneur who funds projects to restore the earth and its environments to health…and so on. Jesus would tell us that all such people who do God’s work in this world belong to him, they belong to God, and they belong to us.
We know what a blessing it is to be a Christian; to belong to God by virtue of our baptism, but today Jesus wants us to know that God uses any and all of us who serve his purpose for good in our world. Today Jesus reminds us that we are not an exclusive club with the power to decide who is in and who is out. And we are not to create artificial stumbling block to those outside our church who serve God’s good. Otherwise we are just a club, exercising our right and our privilege to decide who is in and who is out, when God has already decided that for us. We need only to keep our minds and our hearts and the doors of our religious communities open to those who would join us in the work God is giving all of us to do. After all, it is God who owns this vineyard. Anyone who works for him cannot be against him, or us!