| Scriptures: | Numbers 11:24-30 Mark 9:38-50 |
“All-e, all-e outs in free!” Remember that? (I guess this is my month to start with references to our childhoods after last Sunday’s “Sticks and stones may break my bones…..”) Can you get your mind – well, really, your feelings – back into what it was like when you were playing a game of tag, and you had hid out there all by yourself, maybe starting to feel a bit lonely because the “It” person hadn’t found you yet (although, of course, there was that opposite feeling of exultation that you had chosen such a good hiding place), and then from afar off that welcoming cry: “All-e, all-e outs in free!” You can come in and join the others. You are no longer one of the “outs”.
We really enjoy feeling like we’re one of the “ins”, don’t we? Kids, of course, are notorious for setting up “in” groups and “out” groups – for having clubs with sometimes the most arcane rules for joining. As children become adolescents cliques and social hierarchies and fraternities and sororities become the norm, and if you are not part of the “in” crowd most often you are shunned – making friends with “in” crowd people becomes next to impossible. My college campus was about 90% organized into fraternities and sororities, and, boy, was a frat man looked down on if he befriended – or worse yet, dated – an “indie” (independent).
But such sorting out doesn’t stop with childhood, adolescence, and college years. Adults like to form clubs and cliques as well, sometimes including secret societies – and woe betide the member who divulges some of the groups inner workings to a non-initiate. In my home town it was Kiwanis vs. Rotary vs. Jaycees – so much so that these were the groups who sponsored three of the four teams in the first Little League I was in (the fourth was Chevrolet -- not quite sure how a commercial company got included in there).
And as you’re very much aware, the church is not immune from this tendency to function as “in” groups and “out” groups. Over the centuries religious groups have set up hierarchies and a sense of exclusiveness – the “inner” temple or “holy of holies” which only the cognoscenti can enter – the mysterious groups with their handed-down secrets (Dan Brown has made quite a living off of this with The Da Vinci Code and now his latest The Lost Symbol centering on groups like Opus Dei and other secret Catholic sects). Even within any given local church individuals are set aside as elders or deacons…or Board and Church Council members…and other members of the congregation sometimes feel they are left out of the decision-making process.
The most obvious manifestation of Christianity’s separation into “ins” and “outs” is our multitude of denominations and the resulting tendency to feel that our way of doing things is better than anybody else’s. Mary Charlotte Elia tells this story about an early pastorate of hers:
“I once served a mid-sized PCUSA congregation whose members loved to loathe the non-denominational church across the street. Although we never bothered to visit this congregation, we considered their community to be everything that ours was not. We prided ourselves on our high liturgy and lofty intellectualism, and we condemned them for worshipping in a manner we considered insubstantial and for attracting a membership we deemed infantile. We even complained about the increased traffic resulting from heavy attendance at their services!
Instead of responding to the success of the neighboring church with a reevaluation of our own programs, we clung to our old habits. We increased only in bitterness and self-righteousness rather than in membership and ministry. One wonders what opportunities were missed because we, like the disciples, considered those Christians outside our community to be competition rather than partners in Christ's service.”
“Like the disciples.” Rev. Elia’s meditation on her Presbyterian congregation takes us into our gospel story from Mark. John says to Jesus: “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” John. Does that strike you as odd? Not Peter. Not James. We are not used to hearing John making a challenging statement. In fact one commentator notes that this is the only affirmation the disciple John makes in the entire Gospel of Mark. He hasn’t had anything to say up to this point and he dares not say anything after this! Certainly, he wouldn’t want to after Jesus’ response: “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.”
Now, that’s the different way around from the way we are used to hearing that saying. The human tendency is to exclude – to think and feel that if you’re not doing it the way I want it done or the way I think it should be done then you are against me. John (and, by extension, the rest of the disciples) were concerned not so much that this exorcist was doing the good work of casting out demons but rather that “he was not following us”. He was not one of us. He was not an insider.
But Jesus, as we’ve known all along, bears the message of inclusion. He is bringing into our consciousness the radical thinking that this is not an “us” vs. “them” world. Or, at least, it doesn’t have to be. Oh, we’d like it to be, wouldn’t we? It’s so much easier to function if there are those people who are like us, who are with us, who are right-thinking kinds of people – and then there are those “others” who are different, who are “them”.
At the Committee on Ministry retreat last weekend that David Krueger-Duncan and I attended one of the difficult case studies that was presented as the kind of thing a Committee on Ministry would have to deal with was that of a fundamentalist pastor who had been called by a more conservative UCC church (yes, there are such), and in his statements to the Committee on Ministry he made it clear that he did not believe that women or gays should be ordained. He was asked to take a polity course in order to be exposed to the rationale that has been advanced over the years by the United Church of Christ as to why such ordination was legitimate and desirable, but he remained firm in his “against” belief. The question before a Committee on Ministry is: should he be granted standing within the Association when his beliefs are at odds with most of those who make up that Association? Or, to put the question the other way around, is the United Church of Christ truly such a “big tent” or “big umbrella” denomination (as our incoming General Minister and President Geoffrey Black emphasized during his acceptance speech at General Synod) that those with such strong differences of belief on what for many of us is a fundamental principle can still belong in it? I’m going to leave that conundrum with you and let you mull on it for now without telling you how the discussion on that case study came out. But this case study sure indicated to me how difficult an intention toward inclusiveness can be at times.
Our Hebrew Scriptures story that we heard today is a nice parallel to the Mark passage. Again, there’s a calling out or being set aside: Moses gathers 70 elders who are the special ones – the “ins” – the ones who are supposed to prophesy. Two men who were “outs” – that is, not part of the 70 – with those wonderful names of Eldad and Medad (I bet some of you remember them from Bible school days) decide that the spirit has come upon them and they are going to prophesy as well. Then comes that all-too-human element: a tattle-tale (we’re back to kids’ games again…or maybe it’s not just children): “And a young man ran and told Moses, ‘Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp.’” We can almost hear the whining self-righteousness in his voice. Again, like John, it’s a rather unlikely key assistant who seeks to get Moses to stop this: Joshua the son of Nun (that’s one of the all-time classical bits of Bible humor: Joshua didn’t have any father – why? because he was the son of Nun).
And Moses rebukes him just as Jesus does John: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” Moses sees beyond the strictures of “only these 70 are qualified to prophesy because they have been set aside” to a more all-encompassing view of how the spirit of God wafts throughout the world, sometimes settling on the most unlikely of sources.
Someone in a chat room reflecting on the lectionary passage from Mark has summed up where we are quite effectively:
“Someone is casting out demons in Jesus' name who isn't part of Jesus' own circle, and the disciples want him stopped. They appeal to Jesus, as Joshua did to Moses about the elders who prophesied without official authorization. Like Moses, Jesus refuses to see this as a threat. Jesus welcomes good being done in his name, even when it is not under his control. The circle we form around Jesus' word must be able to value good being done in ways we wouldn't do it, by people we can't keep tabs on.
“The church strives against letting its identity as the body of Christ turn it into a private fraternity. Our baptismal identity helps us differentiate between God's intentions and the world's presumptions so that we can find peace with all people. With Jesus we transcend exclusiveness….. That's the message that preserves and flavors everything around us. When we lose it, we have lost everything. We can embrace the good 'wherever' it appears; our task is to say repeatedly, ‘That's what Jesus is all about!’"
This attitude of the disciples which tends toward exclusiveness (“he was not following us”) Jesus sees as a stumbling block, and in the rest of our passage he admonishes the disciples not to let such stumbling blocks be a part of their ministry with these rather gory images (metaphors, really) of cutting off your hand or your foot or tearing out your eye. His point is that by behaving and believing in such a way they are misusing the gifts that God has given them. The gifts of God are to build up rather than tear down.
Those of you who were here last week and heard me struggle with the passage from the epistle of James are perhaps aware that I’ve stayed away from using the lectionary text from James this week – the last week that we have James in the lectionary. However, James is right on target on this point. The passage is from the fourth chapter. It begins in James’ usual diatribe manner: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil….. Draw near to God, and God will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded” (4:7-8) (you see why I didn’t particularly want to deal with this passage, right?).
But then James does something of a right turn and comes to an admonition that is at the heart of Jesus’ gospel: “Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters….. There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. So who, then, are you to judge your neighbor?” (4:11-12) Who, then, are you to judge someone else? That’s what John and the disciples are doing. That’s what Joshua is doing. That’s what Jesus and Moses are concerned about. John and Joshua are overly concerned about how others are behaving, especially in terms of the fact that those “others” are not part of the “in” group. We are not to judge others; we are to look into our own hearts.
The driving image for Mark in our passage is that of salt – but salt used in a couple of unique ways. First, there is this very peculiar statement in vs. 49: “For everyone will be salted with fire.” Huh? What could that possibly mean? When I first read that what popped into mind was what happens when salt is poured into an open wound – that certainly burns like fire. But what Jesus may well be alluding to here is that when we do act in an inclusive rather than exclusive way, not judging others for the actions they take, we will suffer persecution, we will be ostracized, we will be seen as naďve and foolish – such persecution is a salt like fire. But second, he then goes on in vs. 50 to the other meaning of salt – its preservative and seasoning qualities. Do not lose these qualities, Jesus is saying. Becoming a true disciple is to die to our ego, to accept others outside of our group, to take responsibility for what Jesus calls “these little ones”. He then concludes with this wonderful phrase: “Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.” All those disputes among the disciples about who is the greatest are now to be over. Instead of fighting for position and power we need to be serving, accepting others, accepting our responsibility for the little ones. We need to be too busy being servants and salt for the world to be bothered about our status with others – by worrying about who is “in” and who is “out”. In this way we will accept rather than judge and in truth “be at peace with one another”.
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
September 27, 2009