“John said to him, ‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’” This morning our Gospel reading seems to find the hapless disciples engaged in divine tattle tailing. “We saw someone…” I grew up with a sibling; I am all too familiar being on both the giving and the receiving end of that line. “We saw someone…”
As a kid it was always super frustrating when I would get in trouble for this line, because obviously, what I was reporting was something worth knowing. Surely my parents wanted my keen observations on all of the things my brother was doing that he was not supposed to. Certainly I was just trying to be helpful in pointing out the things that they couldn’t see.
But, shockingly, my parents never saw it that way. As the older child, if said incident was dangerous, there was some expectation that I should stop it. And if it wasn’t, then they seemed to feel that the best plan was for me to ignore it. They seemed to feel it really wasn’t any of my business what trouble my brother was getting into. His actions, for good or for bad, were their responsibility, not mine, and they did not need or want my help in raising my brother.
Jesus, it seems, also does not need the disciples help in policing workers for his mission. And actually, there’s an even deeper level of irony in John’s comment to Jesus this morning. So, this is Mark nine, verse thirty-eight, but listen to this story from just twenty verses earlier, Mark nine, verse eighteen. A man brought his son to Jesus saying, “Teacher, I brought you my son, he has a spirit…I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could not do so.” John is calling out someone for doing something in the name of Jesus that he himself could not do. It’s not like the guy has even done anything wrong. This would be like me complaining to my parents that my little brother had done my math homework for me.
Of course, John’s not concerned just because the guy’s casting out demons that John himself could not cast out—though, let’s be honest, pride is probably part of the problem here—John’s concerned because he doesn’t know who this guy is or whether he can be trusted. I mean, he’s not one of us, after all. Sure, right now it’s all ok, but what could happen in the future. What sort of trouble could this outsider cause?
We human beings are notoriously wary of outsiders. We have actually evolved to be that way, to trust people from our own group, who look like us, think like us, act like us, believe like us. This was a trait that served us well on the African savannah, where the thing that didn’t look like us could very possibly be a lion wanting to eat us. But our evolutionary tendency to prefer sameness is actually a hindrance to us now, and a hindrance to the spreading of God’s love. And that’s the problem Jesus pointed out to John in our Gospel text this morning. “Don’t stop him,” Jesus said. “Whoever is not against us is for us.”
Whoever is not against us is for us. That is a great sound bite. It sounds very noble and open-hearted and wise. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels even more unfair then why I should get in trouble for calling out my brother. I mean, think of it this way. Say we have a pie. No, say I have a pie. A whole pie. It’s delicious, it’s, I don’t know, pick your favorite type of pie. And then you come along. And you’re not trying to steal my pie. You’re not going to throw the pie in my face. You’re for me, you’re on my team. But now, I have to share with you my pie. So now, even though we’re on the same team, I only have half a pie. And even though we haven’t lost any pie and we’ve gained each other, it kind of feels like I’m losing. And I think that’s the disciples concern here. They are the disciples. They have Jesus full and complete attention. And then this interloper comes in and he’s casting out demons in the name of Jesus, and suddenly they have to share Jesus with someone else. So sure, demons are being cast out, and that’s great, but now there’s not as much of Jesus to go around.
I think we tend to view life this way. We live in a world driven by a fear of scarcity. As if it is some zero-sum game where if you have enough than I must not, so the only way for me to be ok is if I take it from you. This isn’t our fault, we’ve been trained, our culture has taught us that this is the way the world works. But guess what friends, this isn’t the way the world works. It’s not the way the world works, because it’s not the way that God works. God is not a zero-sum game, God is exponential expansion. God is I have a pie and you come and you bring a pie, and suddenly because this seems to be the way with potlucks, the freezer is full of pies. God is wherever two or three are gathered, there God is also. God is five loaves and two fish become a meal for the multitudes. God is eleven out-of-work fishermen start a movement that now counts two billion people. God is even death is not death, because three days after Jesus died he rose again, how’s that for abundance. Abundant life burst forth from the tomb.
This multiplication trick of God’s economy isn’t restricted to the Bible either. I mean, think of it in practice in our community. The world’s economy says the women of the Co-op can’t share because they already don’t have enough as it is. If they give away what they have, they will have nothing. But we see in God’s economy that by sharing what they have, they also get what they need, and everyone has enough. The world’s economy says we shouldn’t partner with St. Peter’s, because there’s only so many Lutherans in Battle Creek, and if we work together, there might not be enough. But at our Easter Vigil, we had exponentially more than we ever would have had if either congregation had tried on our own. The world’s economy may even say that we as a congregation shouldn’t exist. There’s only a handful of us, what value do we possibly add. But God’s economy says here’s a congregation that gives housing to the Co-op and Creating Change, that speaks out against economic injustice, that bought fourteen pigs for families in need. Here’s a congregation that wants its neighbors and everyone who comes through its door to know that they are loved and valued and precious in God’s economy, even as the world says they are not. It is a value system that we live out with our very existence in this neighborhood. By staying in Post-Franklin when so many others have fled, despite the very real possibility that we would do better economically in a more prosperous area, we are living out this promise that God’s economy works different from the world, and that God’s grace is most abundantly clear in the places and ways the world has chosen to ignore.
Of course, there’s challenge in this too. Because, if God’s economy is so much bigger and grander and more expansive than us, that means that sometimes God’s work is being done by people who are not like us, maybe even in ways we do not trust, maybe even by people we do not like. Today’s Gospel forces us to accept the fact that we cannot control where God might chose to act. But in fact God’s work may be done in the world in ways we wouldn’t do it by people we can’t keep tabs on. This means that the guy at the community meeting that won’t stop talking may have a good idea. That the hymn you can’t stand is probably somebody’s favorite. What feels like a waste of time might be the project someone else needs to be doing. It means we won’t always agree, and in fact it might be in our disagreements that God is choosing to work. We tend to want to harken back to a day when all Christians agreed with each other and everyone was on the same page, but there never was such a day, because the church is made up of people. Even the disciples bickered. Just last week they were fighting over who was the greatest.
Which, I think even that to a certain extent is OK, because think how boring and uncreative our faith would be if we all thought the same. Think about how little we’d get done if we all had the same ideas. The man casting out demons in the Gospel today was doing work that John could not, and Christ’s ministry was the better for it. Jesus ended his teaching to the disciples this morning not with a call to uniformity, but with the command to have salt. Salt is an interesting seasoning because its purpose is not to have its own flavor, but to heighten other flavors. We use salt to enhance how something tastes, to make the flavors pop, to bring out the brightness and the richness in a dish. So too do our diversities bring out the brightness and the richness of the kingdom of God. By working with others who are not like us we can find our own lives renewed, our own ideas refreshed, our own saltiness restored. And we too can do that restoring for others. So let us rejoice in the amazing multitude of ways that God is at work in this world, through us and through others. And let us be challenged, amazed, and renewed at a God so vast that God’s power would show up in such a diverse multitude of places. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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