I finally broke down and bought a new car this week. The Jeep has been a faithful member of our family for nineteen years and one-hundred and eighty-nine thousand miles. It’s moved me across the country three times, it’s gotten me through feet of snow and countless snowstorms. But recently it’s been a bit less reliable. Every few months or so something flares up requiring a trip to the shop and several hundred dollars. It was supposed to go in to the shop on Wednesday, because it no longer has a working turn signal, but Monday when it refused to start, yet again, in the parking lot of my physical therapist, that was it. But in all honesty, even sitting in the parking lot of the PT with a car that wouldn’t start; as I was on the phone with my best friend, venting my frustration before calling the tow truck yet again, I tried to rationalize if replacing the Jeep was really the right decision. “It’s been towed three times this year. Wait, no, only twice, this will be the third time.” “Wasn’t it towed at least once the winter before last also.” “Yes.” “OK, so we’re still looking at like an every six month pattern here.” Kelli texted me the first day I had the car, “did your car start this morning?” “It did!” To which she responded, “Your standards are too low.”
The truth is, and several of you have politely mentioned this to me, I’ve needed a new car for a while. There have been too many repairs, too many times needing to be rescued from the Meijer parking lot, too many bruised shoulders from the lift gate crashing down when I tried to put my bike in the back. I knew I needed a new car, but it was a hard decision to make. A new car felt frivolous, like a waste of money and resources. I’m frugal, to a fault some may say, and I didn’t want to spend the money on a new car when I had a perfectly serviceable old one. Car buying is also stressful. I didn’t want to go through the hassle of researching what I should get, figuring out a fair price, negotiating with a car salesman, all that stuff. So even though I really did need a new car, especially since the whole turn signal thing really meant the Jeep wasn’t even street legal anymore, I didn’t want one. So I put it off.
Needs and wants are complicated feelings. It’s oh so easy to mix the two up, or to let the wrong one triumph over the other. Which we know, but the more familiar side of that is probably mistaking a want for a need. Think about kids begging for a toy, “but I NEED it.” There are plenty of things we think we need, that really we just want. But harder, at least for me, to catch, and just as insidious, is the temptation to mix up a want for an actual legitimate need. I needed, if not a new car, at least to stop driving the old one. But I didn’t want to, and I worked really hard to convince myself that a new car was just a want, that with enough determination and effort I could get the old one to work, not a need.
I think we do this a lot with God. We talk a good game about needing God but at the end of the day I think we would rather just want God. Because if we need God then we are dependant and dependence is not a great feeling. Needing God is great when God is doing things we are comfortable with, when God is making us feel good about worship, or helping our neighbors, or doing the right things. When we can go to God with simple concerns, and however they turn out, it’s ok. Or that if we just work hard enough, believe strong enough, pray deep enough, are good enough, we could earn God’s love. But if we can earn it, that’s not a need, that’s a want. If we deserve it, that’s not a need, that’s a want. Or if it works when it’s convenient, again, that’s not a need, that’s a want. Our need for God is blind desperation. It is the hemorrhaging woman reaching out to touch Jesus’ cloak. It is Jairus the leader of the synagogue rushing through the crowd to beg for Jesus’ mercy. It is the stay of execution, the first breath of someone who was drowning, the light coming down the tunnel of a cave two miles under a mountain. We can ignore it, we can miss it, we can mistake it for a want, but it doesn’t change the truth of our reality. In Jesus, God has “set God’s seal” on us, and we can no more go without this love than we could go without air, because God is in fact the air we breathe.
Confusing want and need is not a modern problem, the crowd had it too. Our Gospel this morning picks up the morning after Jesus fed five-thousand on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. The crowd woke up and, like any of us would be in the morning, was hungry again. And remember, the reason Jesus fed them was because they were in the middle of nowhere with no access to food. The crowd woke up in the exact same predicament they had been in before, only this time Jesus wasn’t there. So they went after him. When they found Jesus, they had this super interesting conversation around the word “work.” Let’s slow down and walk through this, because I at least found it really powerful. So the crowd came to Jesus and asked, “Rabbi, when did you come here.” But Jesus, being Jesus, didn’t answer that question. Jesus instead jumped right to the heart of the matter, “you are looking for me not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” “Signs” is the word used in John’s Gospel to describe the miracles Jesus performed, because in John’s Gospel, these miracles were as much about what they revealed about who Jesus was as they were about the acts themselves. And normally, when Jesus performed a sign, those who witnessed the sign learned something new about the nature of God, and they believed. But this crowd, per Jesus, didn’t learn about God’s abundance, they just got their needs met. They were thinking transactionally, thinking small picture. But what Jesus was offering was bigger than that, it wasn’t transactional, it couldn’t be earned, it was only something that could be given, as Jesus explained, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures…which the Son of Man will give to you.”
Now, let’s be clear, food is a need. We need to eat or else we will die. Jesus is not offering some kind of bizarre diet plan where if you pray enough you can go without food. Nor is Jesus promising that if you believe enough you won’t be hungry. Hunger is a huge problem in our nation and in our world. ELCA World Hunger exists for a reason, we help stock and staff the food pantry at First Methodist for a reason, people need food. So this isn’t about actual, physical food any longer, this is about a different need. The need for faith, the need for belonging, the need to be a part of something beyond ourselves, the need for God. And that is a need that no amount of breakfast could fill, that no amount of money could buy. It is a need that could only be given by God. The “work” of this need is the work of receiving, of being willing to receive. Which, at least in my own experience, is hard work, maybe even harder work. I would much rather be the one earning, the one giving, then the one receiving. Yet the food Jesus was offering, he told the crowd, was food they had to receive.
To which the crowd pushed back. OK then, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Again, transactional thinking. Ok, if you’re not going to just give us the bread like last time, let us earn it. What do you need us to do? Jesus responded, reinforcing his earlier statement, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” Yet again Jesus did not tell the crowd what they were to do, but what God had already done. The work of God is that you believe. Because believing, remember is not intellectual accent to an idea, belief is about seeing. It is about entering into relationship even as you cannot understand. Even belief itself is a gift. Just like we do not choose to fall in love, belief is God’s work; it is a gift we receive. I think it’s from Mark actually, but it’s one of my favorite verses of scripture, “Lord I believe, help my unbelief.”
But the crowd, oh they were persistent, challenged one last time, “What sign are you going to give us then, that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing?” And again, Jesus reiterated, “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven.” It’s not a thing, this gift. It’s not something you can hold in your hand, or intellectually understand, or earn or do. It’s a gift, it’s given freely, you have it already, it’s yours. But again, the crowd, so literal, “Sir, give us this bread always.” To which Jesus responded, the first of what are called the I AM statements, these revelations of the nature of God and God’s love, “I AM the Bread of Life.”
What I love, and hate, about this passage is that I don’t understand it. Clearly Jesus wasn’t talking about food, because we do need food. And he wasn’t giving a statement of faith, because he said the work of God is that we believe, not that our work is that we believe. I don’t really know what Jesus is talking about here, and like the crowd I find myself leaving hungry, leaving unsatisfied.
Which, as much as I hate to admit it, is maybe the greatest gift. To leave hungry, to leave unfulfilled, to leave wanting more. Because that hunger assures me that there is more, that God has more, that I can have more. When I look around at the world, at the hunger, at the pain, at the fear, this hunger that is not physical but is spiritual presses me onward, pulls me inward, and pushes me outward, and that hunger feels like gift. It feels like grace. It feels like love. Hard grace, sure, not the cheap grace of peace, peace, when there is no peace, but the deep knowledge that there is food that will fill this need, that it is God, and that it is there. Just beyond my reaching, but also close enough to grasp. At this table we get just a taste of this bread. Not enough to leave us satisfied, but enough to keep us coming back, again and again, for the food which endures. Amen.
The extraordinary can look so ordinary
Wednesday, August 8, 2018
Monday, July 23, 2018
The Lord is our Shepherd: A Sermon on Mark 6:30-34, 53-56; Jeremiah 23:1-26; and Psalm 23
One of the reasons I memorize the Gospel text each week is because in saying it aloud over and over again, parts of the text will pop in my attention differently than they do when I’m reading. And maybe it’s just that not being able to run these past couple weeks has me feeling really tired, but the part that caught me as I was memorizing this week was verse thirty-one, “Jesus said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’”
We had that weird interruption last week, so let me really quick remind you of where we’re at here. Two weeks ago Jesus sent the disciples out with his authority over unclean spirits. Verses twelve and thirteen from two weeks ago read, “So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.” As you can see, they were really busy last week while we were hearing that weird story about Herod and John the Baptist.
This morning, verse thirty started, “The apostles gathered around Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught.” “Apostle” comes from the Greek apostello, the verb to send, and literally means “the sent ones.” While “apostles” is a common title in Acts, this is the only time it shows up in any of the four Gospels. That Mark called them “apostles” here was to help bridge the gap between Jesus sending them in verse seven, and those who had been sent returning in verse thirty.
So they got back, they told Jesus everything they’d done, and he said, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest.” I read that line and instantly relaxed. Like, my shoulders physically dropped and I didn’t even know I’d been tensing them. I just felt this deep sense of peace, like oh my gosh, Jesus sent his disciples out to do this really hard work, and then he offered his disciples rest. He wanted them to have a break. Again, I may just be overtired from how not running has screwed up my schedule, but what a gift that verse felt like!
But then I kept reading. They went away on a boat to a deserted place, where of course the crowds followed them and were there when they landed. These poor disciples/apostles can’t catch a break! They’ve just gotten back from this hard journey they’d been on, Jesus finally gave them time to rest, and then the dumb crowd followed them. And what’s more, verse thirty-four reads, “As Jesus went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” Come on Jesus, the disciples must have been thinking, don’t encourage them! They’re like puppies, if you feed them, they’ll never leave!
Or, at least, that’s certainly what I was thinking. I was thinking, how selfish was this crowd that they couldn’t give Jesus and his disciples even a few moments break to catch their breath and eat some lunch! And what a bad model of self-care Jesus is showing here, working on his day off. But luckily for all of us, and especially me, I am not Jesus. Because getting a break is great and Jesus certainly wants for us to have times of rest, that’s why God invented the Sabbath after all, but what’s going on here is more than just about Jesus answering work email on the disciples’ day off. This isn’t about Jesus modeling something for us at all. What is happening here is Jesus demonstrating the very nature of God.
You may have noticed a bit of a shepherding theme throughout all of the readings this morning. Today is what some snarky theologians jokingly refer to as “bad shepherd” Sunday, to distinguish it from “Good Shepherd Sunday” in Easter. We’re all mostly comfortable with thinking of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, thanks to a million bad Sunday School posters, you know, the one with the strikingly handsome and decidedly light-skinned, blue-eyed Jesus dressed in white on a hillside of perfectly manicured grass and surrounded by pristine baby sheep. Which, I could go into all the ways that image is wrong, but that’s another sermon for another Sunday. The point is there is a distinctly political slant to this “sheep without a shepherd” line that is much deeper and more subversive than handsome German Jesus and fluffy sheep.
Since the time of King David, “shepherd” was a metaphor to describe the role of the king as the one who was responsible for looking out for God’s people. Just a little bit before the part of Jeremiah that we read, God described how leaders ought to “act with justice and righteousness… and do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow.” That’s how leaders are supposed to act, but more often then not, they don’t. Throughout all of the Old Testament, there is this persistent theme of these so-called “shepherds” being terrible leaders. The part of Jeremiah we read today starts out “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” The reason behind Jeremiah’s warning to the leaders was spelled out earlier in chapter twenty-two, “Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and makes his upper rooms by injustice; who makes his neighbors work for nothing.” The message of Jeremiah was a message to the Israelite leadership, who claimed the title of “shepherd” but thought only of themselves, while their “sheep,” the people of Israel, suffered. But in the midst of this judgment of the leaders, Jeremiah also offered a message of hope to the people. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when… Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety.” The promise of Jeremiah is that while human leaders fail and fall short, God in the end is in control and God will gather again God’s people. God will not abandon God’s people to bad leadership, to bad shepherding.
Flashing forward, when Jesus said the people were “like sheep without a shepherd” that was a political critique on the leadership. Because Galilee had a leader, they had a shepherd. You may remember him from last week, the thoughtful and trustworthy King Herod, please have caught the sarcasm in my voice. This is the guy who beheaded John the Baptist, even though it “grieved” him, because he didn’t want to appear weak. One of the jobs of an actual shepherd in first century Palestine was to protect the sheep from literal bears and lions, and Herod does not strike me as someone who’s going to stand up to a lion, metaphorical or otherwise, to protect his flock. As the John the Baptist story clearly demonstrated, with Herod as the leader, the people may have been better off shepherdless.
But when Jesus saw this crowd, “he had compassion for them… and he began to teach them,” and eventually feed and heal them. The word “compassion” comes from Latin and it literally translates “with suffering.” Compassion is not a feeling one can have from afar, to have compassion means to enter into the suffering of another, to be with them in their suffering. Jesus didn’t teach, feed, and heal the people in this story because he felt bad for them; this is deeper than that. Jesus had compassion on these shepherdless sheep because he was with them, because he was them. Compassion is what God did when God in the person of Jesus Christ took on flesh, was born in this world, and walked among us. And unlike Herod, Jesus put the needs of those around him above his own needs. He drew apart to rest, but when the crowd came after him, begging for healing, he healed them, he taught them, he fed them, he was with them. And eventually, he died for them. That is what it means to be a shepherd.
The point of this passage is a statement about who God is. That God is not a leader from afar, God is not a high-off deity whom we worship. Rather God is with us. Com-passion, with suffering, with us in our suffering. In the person of Jesus God came to dwell with us, and through the Holy Spirit God still dwells with us. In this bread, in this wine, in the water of baptism, and in the Word we hear around us, God is with us. Earthly leaders will fail us, we will fail ourselves, that is the nature of being human. But God, God will never fail. Because, “The Lord is our shepherd; we shall not be in want… Though we walk through the valley of darkest shadows, we need not fear; for God is with us; God’s rod and God’s staff, they comfort us… Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives, and we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Amen.
We had that weird interruption last week, so let me really quick remind you of where we’re at here. Two weeks ago Jesus sent the disciples out with his authority over unclean spirits. Verses twelve and thirteen from two weeks ago read, “So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.” As you can see, they were really busy last week while we were hearing that weird story about Herod and John the Baptist.
This morning, verse thirty started, “The apostles gathered around Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught.” “Apostle” comes from the Greek apostello, the verb to send, and literally means “the sent ones.” While “apostles” is a common title in Acts, this is the only time it shows up in any of the four Gospels. That Mark called them “apostles” here was to help bridge the gap between Jesus sending them in verse seven, and those who had been sent returning in verse thirty.
So they got back, they told Jesus everything they’d done, and he said, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest.” I read that line and instantly relaxed. Like, my shoulders physically dropped and I didn’t even know I’d been tensing them. I just felt this deep sense of peace, like oh my gosh, Jesus sent his disciples out to do this really hard work, and then he offered his disciples rest. He wanted them to have a break. Again, I may just be overtired from how not running has screwed up my schedule, but what a gift that verse felt like!
But then I kept reading. They went away on a boat to a deserted place, where of course the crowds followed them and were there when they landed. These poor disciples/apostles can’t catch a break! They’ve just gotten back from this hard journey they’d been on, Jesus finally gave them time to rest, and then the dumb crowd followed them. And what’s more, verse thirty-four reads, “As Jesus went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” Come on Jesus, the disciples must have been thinking, don’t encourage them! They’re like puppies, if you feed them, they’ll never leave!
Or, at least, that’s certainly what I was thinking. I was thinking, how selfish was this crowd that they couldn’t give Jesus and his disciples even a few moments break to catch their breath and eat some lunch! And what a bad model of self-care Jesus is showing here, working on his day off. But luckily for all of us, and especially me, I am not Jesus. Because getting a break is great and Jesus certainly wants for us to have times of rest, that’s why God invented the Sabbath after all, but what’s going on here is more than just about Jesus answering work email on the disciples’ day off. This isn’t about Jesus modeling something for us at all. What is happening here is Jesus demonstrating the very nature of God.
You may have noticed a bit of a shepherding theme throughout all of the readings this morning. Today is what some snarky theologians jokingly refer to as “bad shepherd” Sunday, to distinguish it from “Good Shepherd Sunday” in Easter. We’re all mostly comfortable with thinking of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, thanks to a million bad Sunday School posters, you know, the one with the strikingly handsome and decidedly light-skinned, blue-eyed Jesus dressed in white on a hillside of perfectly manicured grass and surrounded by pristine baby sheep. Which, I could go into all the ways that image is wrong, but that’s another sermon for another Sunday. The point is there is a distinctly political slant to this “sheep without a shepherd” line that is much deeper and more subversive than handsome German Jesus and fluffy sheep.
Since the time of King David, “shepherd” was a metaphor to describe the role of the king as the one who was responsible for looking out for God’s people. Just a little bit before the part of Jeremiah that we read, God described how leaders ought to “act with justice and righteousness… and do no wrong or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow.” That’s how leaders are supposed to act, but more often then not, they don’t. Throughout all of the Old Testament, there is this persistent theme of these so-called “shepherds” being terrible leaders. The part of Jeremiah we read today starts out “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture!” The reason behind Jeremiah’s warning to the leaders was spelled out earlier in chapter twenty-two, “Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness, and makes his upper rooms by injustice; who makes his neighbors work for nothing.” The message of Jeremiah was a message to the Israelite leadership, who claimed the title of “shepherd” but thought only of themselves, while their “sheep,” the people of Israel, suffered. But in the midst of this judgment of the leaders, Jeremiah also offered a message of hope to the people. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when… Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety.” The promise of Jeremiah is that while human leaders fail and fall short, God in the end is in control and God will gather again God’s people. God will not abandon God’s people to bad leadership, to bad shepherding.
Flashing forward, when Jesus said the people were “like sheep without a shepherd” that was a political critique on the leadership. Because Galilee had a leader, they had a shepherd. You may remember him from last week, the thoughtful and trustworthy King Herod, please have caught the sarcasm in my voice. This is the guy who beheaded John the Baptist, even though it “grieved” him, because he didn’t want to appear weak. One of the jobs of an actual shepherd in first century Palestine was to protect the sheep from literal bears and lions, and Herod does not strike me as someone who’s going to stand up to a lion, metaphorical or otherwise, to protect his flock. As the John the Baptist story clearly demonstrated, with Herod as the leader, the people may have been better off shepherdless.
But when Jesus saw this crowd, “he had compassion for them… and he began to teach them,” and eventually feed and heal them. The word “compassion” comes from Latin and it literally translates “with suffering.” Compassion is not a feeling one can have from afar, to have compassion means to enter into the suffering of another, to be with them in their suffering. Jesus didn’t teach, feed, and heal the people in this story because he felt bad for them; this is deeper than that. Jesus had compassion on these shepherdless sheep because he was with them, because he was them. Compassion is what God did when God in the person of Jesus Christ took on flesh, was born in this world, and walked among us. And unlike Herod, Jesus put the needs of those around him above his own needs. He drew apart to rest, but when the crowd came after him, begging for healing, he healed them, he taught them, he fed them, he was with them. And eventually, he died for them. That is what it means to be a shepherd.
The point of this passage is a statement about who God is. That God is not a leader from afar, God is not a high-off deity whom we worship. Rather God is with us. Com-passion, with suffering, with us in our suffering. In the person of Jesus God came to dwell with us, and through the Holy Spirit God still dwells with us. In this bread, in this wine, in the water of baptism, and in the Word we hear around us, God is with us. Earthly leaders will fail us, we will fail ourselves, that is the nature of being human. But God, God will never fail. Because, “The Lord is our shepherd; we shall not be in want… Though we walk through the valley of darkest shadows, we need not fear; for God is with us; God’s rod and God’s staff, they comfort us… Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives, and we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Amen.
Thursday, July 19, 2018
Conversation Points for Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• This is the only time Mark referred to the disciples as “apostles” (apostello meaning “to send”), a term Luke will use exclusively in Acts. Here Mark used it as a reflection of them having been sent in v. 7.
• In v. 34, the reference to “sheep without a shepherd” calls on a common metaphor. Moses prayed for the people to have a leader so they would not be “sheep without a shepherd” (Numbers 27:17). The prophets criticized kings for not shepherding the people (1 Kings 22:17). Ezekiel spoke of when God would be the shepherd (Ezekiel 34:5-6).
• Jesus acts as shepherd by feeling compassion, teaching, and (in the story we’ll hear next week) by feeding.
• The word “compassion” is used eight times in the Gospels to refer to Jesus’ attitude toward humanity; compassion is an essential truth about God. To have compassion for another is to suffer with them, it is not something that can be experienced from afar. Jesus, the Word made Flesh, is the tangible sign of God’s compassion.
Works Sourced:
Hall, Douglas John. “Mark 6:30-34, 53-56: Theological Perspective.” Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 3. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.
Perkins, Pheme. “The Gospel of Mark.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• This is the only time Mark referred to the disciples as “apostles” (apostello meaning “to send”), a term Luke will use exclusively in Acts. Here Mark used it as a reflection of them having been sent in v. 7.
• In v. 34, the reference to “sheep without a shepherd” calls on a common metaphor. Moses prayed for the people to have a leader so they would not be “sheep without a shepherd” (Numbers 27:17). The prophets criticized kings for not shepherding the people (1 Kings 22:17). Ezekiel spoke of when God would be the shepherd (Ezekiel 34:5-6).
• Jesus acts as shepherd by feeling compassion, teaching, and (in the story we’ll hear next week) by feeding.
• The word “compassion” is used eight times in the Gospels to refer to Jesus’ attitude toward humanity; compassion is an essential truth about God. To have compassion for another is to suffer with them, it is not something that can be experienced from afar. Jesus, the Word made Flesh, is the tangible sign of God’s compassion.
Works Sourced:
Hall, Douglas John. “Mark 6:30-34, 53-56: Theological Perspective.” Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 3. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009.
Perkins, Pheme. “The Gospel of Mark.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Monday, July 16, 2018
Interruption: A Sermon on Mark 6:14-29
I just want to name right here that this is Gospel text is a weird one. It’s weird enough the way we heard it this morning, this gruesome story of court intrigue, sex, violence, and power. The timing itself of telling the story is also weird. You may remember from the first Sunday of Lent, when we read Mark chapter one, verse fourteen, “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the Good News,” and we talked about how John’s arrest served to remove him from the scene and open space for Jesus’ ministry to begin. John’s job was to proclaim the coming of the Lord and then get out of the way, and his arrest was the tool to make that happen. So now it’s chapter six, which in the rapid-fire pace of Mark’s Gospel is well in the future, when Jesus’ ministry is well established, and only now do we hear what happened way back in chapter one, when Jesus was still in the wilderness waiting to call his first disciples.
So the timing is weird. And then, read in the context of the rest of Mark’s Gospel, it stands out even more. Immediately before this is the reading from last week, where Jesus sent out the disciples two by two and gave them authority over unclean spirits. So listen to the flow of this. We’ll start with the last two verses from last week, verses twelve and thirteen. “So they—the disciples—went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cure them. King Herod here of it—one would assume the “it” here being what the disciples were doing—for Jesus’ name had become known.” He remembered how he had beheaded John the Baptist, the story we just heard, which ended: “When his—John’s—disciples heard about it—John’s beheading—they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.” And then verse thirty starts: “The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all they had done and taught.” Back to the mission of the twelve without missing a beat! The story of the beheading of John the Baptist could literally be lifted completely out of the Gospel of Mark without any break in the story. In fact, one could argue the narrative would have more continuity without it. So why in the world did the writer of Mark include this interruption?
Honestly, I think part of the reason this story is included here is precisely BECAUSE it is an interruption. Hear me out, because especially as we just read this story on its own what I’m about to say is going to come across as pretty callous, but in the whole context of the Gospel of Mark, “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” the beheading of John the Baptist barely registers more than a blip in the narrative. This violent story of intrigue and manipulation and grasping for ill-gotten power is nothing more than a breath to give time for the disciples to return to Jesus to share how successful they were in their mission, how many unclean spirits they cast out, how many sick people they cured. What the placement of this story does is it reduces King Herod, the feared tyrant of Galilee, his conniving wife, the courtiers and officers and even the puppet master Rome itself to their rightful size in the story, nothing more than a failed attempt to distract from a movement that cannot be controlled, the spreading of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God throughout the world. For the people of Mark’s time, Herod was front-page news. But twenty years, two-hundred years, two-thousand years later, and we only know about Herod in relation to Jesus. By telling this strange and gruesome story in such an off-handed way, Mark is recasting Herod and all of the seeming power players of the time as little more than a side-show attraction to the main event of the world-shaking good news that is Jesus.
What this story assures us is that the Kingdom of God cannot be stopped. Herod, feared by so many as an all-powerful ruler, kills the messenger, and it doesn’t even register in the story. It warranted a sentence in chapter one, the writer of Mark had to look back on it in order to include it at all. The very worst thing the very worst people can do cannot stop God from completing the work of being in relationship with God’s people, with God’s world.
Horrible things happen in this world. You don’t need me, or Herod, to tell you that, you know. This story of trickery, hypocrisy, and unfolding excuses of distortion and lies to prop up a power structure that only benefits the few at the top, and even those few live in constant fear of its destruction and demise, a system that leaves innocent people crippled, even killed, in its wake, the world Herod lived in, the world Herod created, it’s our world. We have more than enough examples of people in power looking out for only their own well-being, more than enough examples of fear-mongering, more than enough examples of “thoughts and prayers” that never lead to action. “The king was deeply grieved,” but it didn’t stop him from protecting himself, and John the Baptist died as a result, friends we know this, because we see it. And yet, what the on-going story of Mark assures us is the very worst thing the powers of the world can do, the most evil, twisted, self-serving action, still cannot stop the movement of God in the world. Herod did this horrible thing, and the misfit band of the disciples, who couldn’t even cross a lake without getting completely freaked out even though they’re fishermen, still managed to cast out many evil spirits, cure many who are sick, and return to Jesus to tell him about it. The worst thing that can happen is never the last thing that will happen. We know that from this story about John, and we know that because of what will happen to Jesus. Jesus too, like John, will be laid in a tomb by his disciples, killed at the hands of the Roman authorities who thought they’d finally succeeded in snuffing out the mission of God forever, and we all know how that story ended. Three days later, an empty tomb and salvation for the whole world. Friends, weird as this may sound, the story of John the Baptist should give us comfort that there really is absolutely nothing that can happen in this world that can separate us from God. Like Paul wrote in Romans, not “death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing can stop the movement of God in the world. Herod tried, the Romans tried, but God cannot, God will not be stopped. Whatever you are facing right now, whatever struggle you are up against, whatever adversity is breaking your soul, whatever holds you captive, whatever suffering you are enduring, this story promises that God is still with you, God is still moving, and there will be life on the other side of whatever it is. Thanks be to God who gives us such a confident victory. Amen.
So the timing is weird. And then, read in the context of the rest of Mark’s Gospel, it stands out even more. Immediately before this is the reading from last week, where Jesus sent out the disciples two by two and gave them authority over unclean spirits. So listen to the flow of this. We’ll start with the last two verses from last week, verses twelve and thirteen. “So they—the disciples—went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cure them. King Herod here of it—one would assume the “it” here being what the disciples were doing—for Jesus’ name had become known.” He remembered how he had beheaded John the Baptist, the story we just heard, which ended: “When his—John’s—disciples heard about it—John’s beheading—they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.” And then verse thirty starts: “The apostles gathered around Jesus, and told him all they had done and taught.” Back to the mission of the twelve without missing a beat! The story of the beheading of John the Baptist could literally be lifted completely out of the Gospel of Mark without any break in the story. In fact, one could argue the narrative would have more continuity without it. So why in the world did the writer of Mark include this interruption?
Honestly, I think part of the reason this story is included here is precisely BECAUSE it is an interruption. Hear me out, because especially as we just read this story on its own what I’m about to say is going to come across as pretty callous, but in the whole context of the Gospel of Mark, “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” the beheading of John the Baptist barely registers more than a blip in the narrative. This violent story of intrigue and manipulation and grasping for ill-gotten power is nothing more than a breath to give time for the disciples to return to Jesus to share how successful they were in their mission, how many unclean spirits they cast out, how many sick people they cured. What the placement of this story does is it reduces King Herod, the feared tyrant of Galilee, his conniving wife, the courtiers and officers and even the puppet master Rome itself to their rightful size in the story, nothing more than a failed attempt to distract from a movement that cannot be controlled, the spreading of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God throughout the world. For the people of Mark’s time, Herod was front-page news. But twenty years, two-hundred years, two-thousand years later, and we only know about Herod in relation to Jesus. By telling this strange and gruesome story in such an off-handed way, Mark is recasting Herod and all of the seeming power players of the time as little more than a side-show attraction to the main event of the world-shaking good news that is Jesus.
What this story assures us is that the Kingdom of God cannot be stopped. Herod, feared by so many as an all-powerful ruler, kills the messenger, and it doesn’t even register in the story. It warranted a sentence in chapter one, the writer of Mark had to look back on it in order to include it at all. The very worst thing the very worst people can do cannot stop God from completing the work of being in relationship with God’s people, with God’s world.
Horrible things happen in this world. You don’t need me, or Herod, to tell you that, you know. This story of trickery, hypocrisy, and unfolding excuses of distortion and lies to prop up a power structure that only benefits the few at the top, and even those few live in constant fear of its destruction and demise, a system that leaves innocent people crippled, even killed, in its wake, the world Herod lived in, the world Herod created, it’s our world. We have more than enough examples of people in power looking out for only their own well-being, more than enough examples of fear-mongering, more than enough examples of “thoughts and prayers” that never lead to action. “The king was deeply grieved,” but it didn’t stop him from protecting himself, and John the Baptist died as a result, friends we know this, because we see it. And yet, what the on-going story of Mark assures us is the very worst thing the powers of the world can do, the most evil, twisted, self-serving action, still cannot stop the movement of God in the world. Herod did this horrible thing, and the misfit band of the disciples, who couldn’t even cross a lake without getting completely freaked out even though they’re fishermen, still managed to cast out many evil spirits, cure many who are sick, and return to Jesus to tell him about it. The worst thing that can happen is never the last thing that will happen. We know that from this story about John, and we know that because of what will happen to Jesus. Jesus too, like John, will be laid in a tomb by his disciples, killed at the hands of the Roman authorities who thought they’d finally succeeded in snuffing out the mission of God forever, and we all know how that story ended. Three days later, an empty tomb and salvation for the whole world. Friends, weird as this may sound, the story of John the Baptist should give us comfort that there really is absolutely nothing that can happen in this world that can separate us from God. Like Paul wrote in Romans, not “death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing can stop the movement of God in the world. Herod tried, the Romans tried, but God cannot, God will not be stopped. Whatever you are facing right now, whatever struggle you are up against, whatever adversity is breaking your soul, whatever holds you captive, whatever suffering you are enduring, this story promises that God is still with you, God is still moving, and there will be life on the other side of whatever it is. Thanks be to God who gives us such a confident victory. Amen.
Sunday, July 8, 2018
They Shall Know There Has Been a Prophet Among Them: A Sermon on Ezekiel 2:1-5 and Mark 6:1-13
The story of Jesus sending out the disciples two by two holds a special place in my faith journey for a couple of different reasons. The first is a bit of a snarky one from seminary. When my best friend and I were assigned to internship sites on opposite ends of the country, me in upstate New York and her in southern Arizona, we used to refer to this story to jokingly complain about the ELCA internship assignment process. How come Jesus sent the disciples out two by two, and ELCA interns get sent out alone?
The second, more serious reason, this story holds deep meaning for me is from a few years ago, when you all offered me a call here, and I was trying to decide if I should take it, or stay at the place I was. In the middle of my discerning this story came up in the lectionary, and I stumbled across a poem by Jan Richardson called “A Blessing in the Dust.” The introduction to the poem reads, “Knowing when to stay, knowing when to leave; this is one of the most challenging invitations for discernment that we will ever encounter. There are times… for leaning into the resistance that meets us; times when God calls us to engage the difficulty and struggle that will shape and form us in a way that ease and comfort never can… And then there are times for leaving; times when—as Jesus counsels his disciples—the holy thing to do is shake the dust from our feet and leave behind a place that is not meant for us. This blessing is for those times.” That poem got me through the hard decision of leaving people that I loved, but whom I could really serve best by moving on. And while let me first assure you that I share this story having no intention of moving anytime soon—I like it here, I feel like we’re doing good work together, and that the Spirit still has plans for us—that poem still hangs in my office as a reminder that not every struggle is worth pushing through. Sometimes when places or things are not working out, the most holy thing we can do is let that thing go so we can try something else.
Friends, I hate this piece of wisdom from Jesus. I, you may have noticed, am maybe a little bit stubborn. To a fault even, as evidenced by my gimping around the last few weeks on a hip injury I totally caused myself by trying to run through soreness. When I meet resistance my go-to response is to push harder, totally convinced of my own ability to muscle through whatever has held up the process. If I set out to reach a goal, stopping anywhere short of success feels like quitting, and I don’t like to feel like a quitter.
This is true in my own personal life, but I think it is even more true as the church, both as a local congregation and a wider community. The stakes feel so high these days, as a congregation can we continue to survive in this place, and as the church will we have the courage to speak out against injustice? And when things don’t work, when the law passes despite our lobbying efforts, or we have to call the roofer for the fourth straight time because he will not fix the leak over the walkway, or no one comes to the event we planned, it can feel like we’ve fallen short, like we haven’t leaned in hard enough to whatever the Spirit was calling us to.
But if that’s how we sometimes feel when we can’t get things to work, imagine how much more pressure the disciples must have felt when Jesus sent them out with authority over unclean spirits. They had just seen Jesus calm a storm at sea, cast a demon out of a man, heal a woman with a touch, and bring a child back to life. And now Jesus is all, ok guys, your turn. Wait, what? And the disciples may have been uneducated fishermen, but they were not layabouts. Just take the example of the three Jesus took with him when he healed Jairus’s daughter, Peter, James, and John. Peter was definitely a jump first, think later guy. And in chapter ten, James and John will try to convince Jesus they should sit on his right and left on the throne of glory, these guys were ambitious! So when Jesus sent them out with authority over unclean spirits, you better believe these guys were ready to rush headfirst into any unclean spirit they came across, success at any cost. This works until it doesn’t. If they were to come across an unclean spirit more powerful than them, or a town that didn’t welcome them, this single-minded persistence could bog them down for the entire rest of the mission. So what Jesus did with this wisdom to shake the dust off their feet and move on is he reshaped for them what success looks like. Success, perseverance, said Jesus, is not accomplishing one-hundred percent of every single task all of the time. Rather success is the ability to persist in the face of failure. To lean in when it is the time for leaning in, but also to move on when it is the time for moving on. And with this wisdom the text tells us the disciples “cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.” They didn’t cast out all the demons, but they did cast out many. They didn’t cure all the sick, but they cured many. And the mission of the twelve in Mark’s Gospel was an unmitigated success, for many were healed and many were set free, and many is not all, but it is a lot more than some or none.
Ezekiel received a similar reframing of what success meant in the Old Testament reading for this morning. In this account of Ezekiel’s call to be a prophet, the voice of the Lord told him that the success of his prophetic mission lay not in how his message was received, but whether it was delivered, for “whether they hear or refuse to hear… they shall know there has been a prophet among them.” Jesus also modeled this different measure of success immediately before he sent the disciples out, when he traveled to Nazareth and the people didn’t respond to him, and “he could do no need of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” Because, yeah, still Jesus. But still, even in shaking the dust from his feet and moving on, Jesus went first. He didn’t push the people of Nazareth to recognize him, refuse to leave until they bowed at his feet, or give up the whole mission in frustration. He demonstrated for the disciples how to move on. And guess what friends, that the people of Nazareth didn’t follow Jesus that day does not mean that they did not eventually become followers. There is a thriving Christian community in Nazareth to this day, I know this to be a fact because I have been to Nazareth and seen it. Trying again does not mean the thing you’re trying to do will not happen, it just means it may not happen at the time, or in the way, that you might have liked or planned.
Jesus gave the disciples authority to cast out demons. What can be missed in this is Jesus didn’t give the disciples their own authority, he like co-signed them under his own. Like if you take out a rider on your insurance for someone else, if they get hurt, you’re the one who’s responsible, Jesus was still holding the liability insurance on the disciples. Last week I talked about how the work of salvation is our work, and that’s true, but this passage reminds us that while we get to do the work of salvation, we ourselves are not the savior. We get to help, because Jesus is awesome and knows we need to feel busy and important, but at the end of the day it’s really not on us. So just because we can’t get something done, doesn’t mean it won’t happen, it may just mean it’s not our job or the right time. This for me feels like freedom. It is space to begin before we are ready, to take the first step though we don’t know where the journey is headed, to try and fail a thousand times, and still get up and try again. Because what we know about resurrection is death is never the end, and if it looks like the end, it’s really only the next beginning.
Dear friends in Christ, what the mission of the twelve tells us is that to be a disciple means to get to try stuff, and fail, and try again the next day. It means to head out without luggage, because who likes to drag a heavy suitcase with all your baggage behind you anyway, and chase the open road, knowing that whether you are welcomed or not, whether the message is received or not, “they shall know there has been a prophet among them.” Thanks be to God. Amen.
The second, more serious reason, this story holds deep meaning for me is from a few years ago, when you all offered me a call here, and I was trying to decide if I should take it, or stay at the place I was. In the middle of my discerning this story came up in the lectionary, and I stumbled across a poem by Jan Richardson called “A Blessing in the Dust.” The introduction to the poem reads, “Knowing when to stay, knowing when to leave; this is one of the most challenging invitations for discernment that we will ever encounter. There are times… for leaning into the resistance that meets us; times when God calls us to engage the difficulty and struggle that will shape and form us in a way that ease and comfort never can… And then there are times for leaving; times when—as Jesus counsels his disciples—the holy thing to do is shake the dust from our feet and leave behind a place that is not meant for us. This blessing is for those times.” That poem got me through the hard decision of leaving people that I loved, but whom I could really serve best by moving on. And while let me first assure you that I share this story having no intention of moving anytime soon—I like it here, I feel like we’re doing good work together, and that the Spirit still has plans for us—that poem still hangs in my office as a reminder that not every struggle is worth pushing through. Sometimes when places or things are not working out, the most holy thing we can do is let that thing go so we can try something else.
Friends, I hate this piece of wisdom from Jesus. I, you may have noticed, am maybe a little bit stubborn. To a fault even, as evidenced by my gimping around the last few weeks on a hip injury I totally caused myself by trying to run through soreness. When I meet resistance my go-to response is to push harder, totally convinced of my own ability to muscle through whatever has held up the process. If I set out to reach a goal, stopping anywhere short of success feels like quitting, and I don’t like to feel like a quitter.
This is true in my own personal life, but I think it is even more true as the church, both as a local congregation and a wider community. The stakes feel so high these days, as a congregation can we continue to survive in this place, and as the church will we have the courage to speak out against injustice? And when things don’t work, when the law passes despite our lobbying efforts, or we have to call the roofer for the fourth straight time because he will not fix the leak over the walkway, or no one comes to the event we planned, it can feel like we’ve fallen short, like we haven’t leaned in hard enough to whatever the Spirit was calling us to.
But if that’s how we sometimes feel when we can’t get things to work, imagine how much more pressure the disciples must have felt when Jesus sent them out with authority over unclean spirits. They had just seen Jesus calm a storm at sea, cast a demon out of a man, heal a woman with a touch, and bring a child back to life. And now Jesus is all, ok guys, your turn. Wait, what? And the disciples may have been uneducated fishermen, but they were not layabouts. Just take the example of the three Jesus took with him when he healed Jairus’s daughter, Peter, James, and John. Peter was definitely a jump first, think later guy. And in chapter ten, James and John will try to convince Jesus they should sit on his right and left on the throne of glory, these guys were ambitious! So when Jesus sent them out with authority over unclean spirits, you better believe these guys were ready to rush headfirst into any unclean spirit they came across, success at any cost. This works until it doesn’t. If they were to come across an unclean spirit more powerful than them, or a town that didn’t welcome them, this single-minded persistence could bog them down for the entire rest of the mission. So what Jesus did with this wisdom to shake the dust off their feet and move on is he reshaped for them what success looks like. Success, perseverance, said Jesus, is not accomplishing one-hundred percent of every single task all of the time. Rather success is the ability to persist in the face of failure. To lean in when it is the time for leaning in, but also to move on when it is the time for moving on. And with this wisdom the text tells us the disciples “cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.” They didn’t cast out all the demons, but they did cast out many. They didn’t cure all the sick, but they cured many. And the mission of the twelve in Mark’s Gospel was an unmitigated success, for many were healed and many were set free, and many is not all, but it is a lot more than some or none.
Ezekiel received a similar reframing of what success meant in the Old Testament reading for this morning. In this account of Ezekiel’s call to be a prophet, the voice of the Lord told him that the success of his prophetic mission lay not in how his message was received, but whether it was delivered, for “whether they hear or refuse to hear… they shall know there has been a prophet among them.” Jesus also modeled this different measure of success immediately before he sent the disciples out, when he traveled to Nazareth and the people didn’t respond to him, and “he could do no need of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” Because, yeah, still Jesus. But still, even in shaking the dust from his feet and moving on, Jesus went first. He didn’t push the people of Nazareth to recognize him, refuse to leave until they bowed at his feet, or give up the whole mission in frustration. He demonstrated for the disciples how to move on. And guess what friends, that the people of Nazareth didn’t follow Jesus that day does not mean that they did not eventually become followers. There is a thriving Christian community in Nazareth to this day, I know this to be a fact because I have been to Nazareth and seen it. Trying again does not mean the thing you’re trying to do will not happen, it just means it may not happen at the time, or in the way, that you might have liked or planned.
Jesus gave the disciples authority to cast out demons. What can be missed in this is Jesus didn’t give the disciples their own authority, he like co-signed them under his own. Like if you take out a rider on your insurance for someone else, if they get hurt, you’re the one who’s responsible, Jesus was still holding the liability insurance on the disciples. Last week I talked about how the work of salvation is our work, and that’s true, but this passage reminds us that while we get to do the work of salvation, we ourselves are not the savior. We get to help, because Jesus is awesome and knows we need to feel busy and important, but at the end of the day it’s really not on us. So just because we can’t get something done, doesn’t mean it won’t happen, it may just mean it’s not our job or the right time. This for me feels like freedom. It is space to begin before we are ready, to take the first step though we don’t know where the journey is headed, to try and fail a thousand times, and still get up and try again. Because what we know about resurrection is death is never the end, and if it looks like the end, it’s really only the next beginning.
Dear friends in Christ, what the mission of the twelve tells us is that to be a disciple means to get to try stuff, and fail, and try again the next day. It means to head out without luggage, because who likes to drag a heavy suitcase with all your baggage behind you anyway, and chase the open road, knowing that whether you are welcomed or not, whether the message is received or not, “they shall know there has been a prophet among them.” Thanks be to God. Amen.
Tuesday, July 3, 2018
Conversation Points for Mark 6:1-13
Study Format:
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• For the last two weeks, we’ve heard Jesus perform powerful miracles: calming a storm, exorcizing a demon, healing a woman, and bringing a child back from the dead. In addition to demonstrating Jesus’ power, those miracles provide a contrast to the reception Jesus received in his hometown, with the people who should have known him best.
• Jesus’ ministry in Nazareth began the same way it did in Capernaum, with Jesus teaching in the synagogue (1:21-22). But unlike Capernaum where he cast out a demon (1:23-28), in Nazareth his teaching was met with doubt and he left without performing a “deed of power” (6:5).
• The reference to Jesus’ mother and siblings returns the question first raised in chapter 3, to what family does Jesus belong? Once again Jesus’ family is identified as those who follow him and who do the will of God rather than his biological family.
• V. 3 is the only evidence in scripture of a possible occupation for Jesus. The word translated as carpenter is tektōn, which would have been anyone who worked with wood or other hard materials. As a craftsman in prosperous Galilee, Jesus’ family would have been of a middle class status, not an impoverished tenant farmer or day laborer, but not of the educated class either. Villagers commonly resented those who tried to cast themselves above their status, as the people of Nazareth might have felt Jesus was doing by teaching in the synagogue.
• The Gospel of Mark does not include a birth narrative, and the belief in what’s known as the “perpetual virginity of Mary” developed later, so the writer of Mark doesn’t have to make sense of Jesus having siblings. The point of this is not to create a family relationship with Jesus, but to demonstrate the scandal of Jesus presenting himself as a teacher when those he grew up with knew him to be a carpenter.
• V. 6 says that Jesus was “amazed” (thaumazō) at their lack faith. Thaumazō is the same word used to describe the crowd’s response to Jesus casting out the demon in 5:20. It is ironic that Jesus’ response mirrors the crowd’s.
• After Jesus left Nazareth, he took another preaching tour of Galilee. On this second tour, the disciples whom followed him the first time are now sent out in groups of two to expand the mission.
• The disciples were successfully able to carry out the mission Jesus sent them on, but they do not have their own independent authority, they work under the authority of Jesus.
• Sending missionaries out in pairs seems to have been common practice in early Christianity (Jesus called two brothers (Mark 1:16-20), Acts has Peter and John (Acts 3:11, 8:9) and Barnabas and Paul (Acts 11:25-23)). It could also be part of the Deuteronomic law that required two witnesses to testify (Numbers 35:30; Deuteronomy 19:15).
• 6:8-11 gives instructions for how the disciples were to act during their travels. Mark permitted a staff and sandals, which differed from Luke and Matthew who did not. But Mark did not allow an extra cloak, which would have provided warmth at night. This would have forced the disciples to depend on someone to house them. Since they were not permitted to carry money, the missionary work was not to be a money-making expedition. Requirement to stay at the first place that housed them kept them from seeking better accommodations elsewhere.
• Shaking the dust off one’s feet was a gesture of cursing a place, even stronger than washing one’s hands.
Works Sourced:
Perkins, Pheme. “The Gospel of Mark.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
1. Read passage aloud. What did you notice in the reading? What words or phrase caught your attention?
2. Read passage aloud a second time. What questions would you ask the text?
3. Read passage aloud a third time. What do you hear God calling you to do or be in response to this text?
Interesting Ideas to Consider:
• For the last two weeks, we’ve heard Jesus perform powerful miracles: calming a storm, exorcizing a demon, healing a woman, and bringing a child back from the dead. In addition to demonstrating Jesus’ power, those miracles provide a contrast to the reception Jesus received in his hometown, with the people who should have known him best.
• Jesus’ ministry in Nazareth began the same way it did in Capernaum, with Jesus teaching in the synagogue (1:21-22). But unlike Capernaum where he cast out a demon (1:23-28), in Nazareth his teaching was met with doubt and he left without performing a “deed of power” (6:5).
• The reference to Jesus’ mother and siblings returns the question first raised in chapter 3, to what family does Jesus belong? Once again Jesus’ family is identified as those who follow him and who do the will of God rather than his biological family.
• V. 3 is the only evidence in scripture of a possible occupation for Jesus. The word translated as carpenter is tektōn, which would have been anyone who worked with wood or other hard materials. As a craftsman in prosperous Galilee, Jesus’ family would have been of a middle class status, not an impoverished tenant farmer or day laborer, but not of the educated class either. Villagers commonly resented those who tried to cast themselves above their status, as the people of Nazareth might have felt Jesus was doing by teaching in the synagogue.
• The Gospel of Mark does not include a birth narrative, and the belief in what’s known as the “perpetual virginity of Mary” developed later, so the writer of Mark doesn’t have to make sense of Jesus having siblings. The point of this is not to create a family relationship with Jesus, but to demonstrate the scandal of Jesus presenting himself as a teacher when those he grew up with knew him to be a carpenter.
• V. 6 says that Jesus was “amazed” (thaumazō) at their lack faith. Thaumazō is the same word used to describe the crowd’s response to Jesus casting out the demon in 5:20. It is ironic that Jesus’ response mirrors the crowd’s.
• After Jesus left Nazareth, he took another preaching tour of Galilee. On this second tour, the disciples whom followed him the first time are now sent out in groups of two to expand the mission.
• The disciples were successfully able to carry out the mission Jesus sent them on, but they do not have their own independent authority, they work under the authority of Jesus.
• Sending missionaries out in pairs seems to have been common practice in early Christianity (Jesus called two brothers (Mark 1:16-20), Acts has Peter and John (Acts 3:11, 8:9) and Barnabas and Paul (Acts 11:25-23)). It could also be part of the Deuteronomic law that required two witnesses to testify (Numbers 35:30; Deuteronomy 19:15).
• 6:8-11 gives instructions for how the disciples were to act during their travels. Mark permitted a staff and sandals, which differed from Luke and Matthew who did not. But Mark did not allow an extra cloak, which would have provided warmth at night. This would have forced the disciples to depend on someone to house them. Since they were not permitted to carry money, the missionary work was not to be a money-making expedition. Requirement to stay at the first place that housed them kept them from seeking better accommodations elsewhere.
• Shaking the dust off one’s feet was a gesture of cursing a place, even stronger than washing one’s hands.
Works Sourced:
Perkins, Pheme. “The Gospel of Mark.” The New Interpreter’s Bible Volume VIII. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995.
Sunday, July 1, 2018
Salvation is Now: A Sermon on Mark 5:21-43
Our Gospel reading for today is a story about Jesus healing two very different women. One is little more than a child. A girl about twelve years old, she is the daughter of the powerful leader of the synagogue. A man so well-known and highly regarded that everyone knew his name, Jairus was certainly more used to being begged for help than he was to begging for help himself. But when his daughter took sick, a sickness that no amount of money or power could solve, Jairus didn’t hesitate to run to Jesus, fall at his feet, and beg Jesus to come, lay his “hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” And Jesus went to Jairus’s home, took the girl by the hand, raised her up, and once she was up, told the crowd gathered to get her something to eat.
But before Jesus reached Jairus’s house, he was stopped by another woman. Unlike Jairus’s daughter, this nameless woman was alone, with no one to speak on her behalf. And while the girl had spent twelve years in a family of privilege, this woman spent twelve years suffering from an affliction that would not quit. The girl had a father who would beg on her behalf, while the woman had spent everything she had in search of healing, only to end up worse off, physically, financially, and eventually socially. The nature of the woman’s illness meant her suffering was more than physical. Such an illness left her ritually unclean, forced to the edges of society with no one to care for her, no one to fight for her, no one to even be with her. And in that way the nameless woman and Jairus were the same, two people with nowhere to turn, no hope to cling to, falling at the feet of Jesus hoping a miracle could take place. The actions of these two people show us that faith is not intellectual ascent to a set of ideals. Sometimes, as theologian Matthew Skinner puts it, faith is utter desperation, like rushing through a crowd saying this is my last chance, and I don’t care if I get in trouble, I’ve just got to touch him.
And like Jesus was on his way to heal Jairus’s daughter, Jesus healed the nameless woman. Unintentionally maybe, but she too was healed. And after Jesus spun around in the crowd and demanded, “who touched me,” and the woman came forward and admitted her desperate action, Jesus responded with the same words Jairus had asked for, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go at peace, and be healed of your disease.”
The story of Jesus healing two women is certainly good news enough in itself. But there’s something else going on in this story that keys us in to an even more powerful message of promise. If you remember last week I talked about how the Sea of Galilee functions as a boundary in Mark. And this story starts with Jesus crossing again in the boat to the other side. This detail is meant to highlight the reader that this story has something to do with border crossing. After Jesus crossed the sea, he met, and healed, two women from completely opposite ends of society. One from a family of wealth and power, one nameless and destitute; one with others to speak for her, the other with no one to advocate for her but herself; one only twelve, the other who’d suffered for twelve long years. And Jesus’ response to the two women is the same. He called them terms of endearment, daughter and little girl, terms which indicated their place as part of his family, he touched them without regard for his own ritual cleanliness, for both death and bleeding were causes of impurity, and he made them well. With these two stories, which Mark tells not just next to each other, but enmeshed within each other, Jesus lays out the borders of the Kingdom of God. The borders of God’s kingdom include both the powerful and the powerless, the wealthy and the destitute, those who can advocate for themselves and for others and those whom society has silenced. The Kingdom of God is defined by none of those boundaries. The boundary that defines God’s kingdom is desperation, the faith that comes from finding oneself in a place of helplessness and reaching out blindly for the hope beyond hope.
And that right there is good news enough. Salvation through Christ is for everyone is about as good of news as there is. I could say Amen and sit down right now, and this sermon would have done its job. But in this text there’s more than that, this text gets into the nature of what salvation is, of what it means when we say we are saved by Jesus. But to catch that, we have to get into the weeds a little bit, because the NRSV translation obscures the message. When Jairus came to Jesus, he begged that his daughter would be “made well.” And when the nameless woman touched Jesus, she wanted to be “made well.” And he said her faith had “made her well.” The word translated “made well” is the Greek word sodzo, it’s the same word Mark used in the passion story, when Jesus hung on the cross and the crowd jeered, “he saved other, and he cannot save himself.” So what Jairus begged for, and what the woman sought and received, was to be saved. They were pleading for salvation, pleading to be set free. So often in American Christianity we think about and talk about salvation as some fuzzy future promise, that in the great by and by we will be set free from sin and death and live forever with Christ. And salvation is that, it is the promise of eternal future. But this story shows us that salvation is more than that. Salvation is immediate, it is right now. When Jesus healed the woman of her bleeding and raised Jairus’s daughter from death, he wasn’t offering them some promised future; he was restoring them to life right now. Yes Jesus cares about the eternal salvation of our souls, but he cares just as much about our bodies in this moment. Salvation is eternal, but it is also immediate. Jesus loves you not just forever, but also right now.
And guess what, dear people of God who love to work. The specific piece of good news for you in this story is because salvation is a present reality, we the community of believers have a role to play in God’s saving action. When Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter, he told those who witnessed to get the girl something to eat. And when Jesus told the hemorrhaging woman her faith had saved her, he told her, aloud so that all the crowd to hear, “Go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” “Go in peace” was a ritual Jewish blessing, and by saying it Jesus was indicating to those gathered that this woman was no longer ritually outside of the community, and their role now was to treat her as part of it. Jesus started the process by healing the woman, by raising the girl, but the work now belonged to the community, to feed the girl, to reintegrate the woman.
Dear people of God, the work that we do in caring for each other and the world around us is not just good work, it is saving work. Illness and death are only some of the ways one might find themselves isolated and outside of the community, and when we bridge those divides and bring people back in, we are literally doing the work of salvation. What that means, dear people of God, is that the Franklin Food Pantry is not only about feeding physical hunger, it is about physically demonstrating to those on the margins that they are not marginalized by God. Giving Freeze Pops to neighborhood kids is about creating community and expanding the kingdom of God beyond these walls. And the Roadrunners club, and the fact that so many of you got here today by carpool is because this is how we make salvation tangible for each other. Dear people of God, you have been saved. And you get to save others. Because salvation is for everyone and it is happening right now. Thanks be to God. Amen.
But before Jesus reached Jairus’s house, he was stopped by another woman. Unlike Jairus’s daughter, this nameless woman was alone, with no one to speak on her behalf. And while the girl had spent twelve years in a family of privilege, this woman spent twelve years suffering from an affliction that would not quit. The girl had a father who would beg on her behalf, while the woman had spent everything she had in search of healing, only to end up worse off, physically, financially, and eventually socially. The nature of the woman’s illness meant her suffering was more than physical. Such an illness left her ritually unclean, forced to the edges of society with no one to care for her, no one to fight for her, no one to even be with her. And in that way the nameless woman and Jairus were the same, two people with nowhere to turn, no hope to cling to, falling at the feet of Jesus hoping a miracle could take place. The actions of these two people show us that faith is not intellectual ascent to a set of ideals. Sometimes, as theologian Matthew Skinner puts it, faith is utter desperation, like rushing through a crowd saying this is my last chance, and I don’t care if I get in trouble, I’ve just got to touch him.
And like Jesus was on his way to heal Jairus’s daughter, Jesus healed the nameless woman. Unintentionally maybe, but she too was healed. And after Jesus spun around in the crowd and demanded, “who touched me,” and the woman came forward and admitted her desperate action, Jesus responded with the same words Jairus had asked for, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go at peace, and be healed of your disease.”
The story of Jesus healing two women is certainly good news enough in itself. But there’s something else going on in this story that keys us in to an even more powerful message of promise. If you remember last week I talked about how the Sea of Galilee functions as a boundary in Mark. And this story starts with Jesus crossing again in the boat to the other side. This detail is meant to highlight the reader that this story has something to do with border crossing. After Jesus crossed the sea, he met, and healed, two women from completely opposite ends of society. One from a family of wealth and power, one nameless and destitute; one with others to speak for her, the other with no one to advocate for her but herself; one only twelve, the other who’d suffered for twelve long years. And Jesus’ response to the two women is the same. He called them terms of endearment, daughter and little girl, terms which indicated their place as part of his family, he touched them without regard for his own ritual cleanliness, for both death and bleeding were causes of impurity, and he made them well. With these two stories, which Mark tells not just next to each other, but enmeshed within each other, Jesus lays out the borders of the Kingdom of God. The borders of God’s kingdom include both the powerful and the powerless, the wealthy and the destitute, those who can advocate for themselves and for others and those whom society has silenced. The Kingdom of God is defined by none of those boundaries. The boundary that defines God’s kingdom is desperation, the faith that comes from finding oneself in a place of helplessness and reaching out blindly for the hope beyond hope.
And that right there is good news enough. Salvation through Christ is for everyone is about as good of news as there is. I could say Amen and sit down right now, and this sermon would have done its job. But in this text there’s more than that, this text gets into the nature of what salvation is, of what it means when we say we are saved by Jesus. But to catch that, we have to get into the weeds a little bit, because the NRSV translation obscures the message. When Jairus came to Jesus, he begged that his daughter would be “made well.” And when the nameless woman touched Jesus, she wanted to be “made well.” And he said her faith had “made her well.” The word translated “made well” is the Greek word sodzo, it’s the same word Mark used in the passion story, when Jesus hung on the cross and the crowd jeered, “he saved other, and he cannot save himself.” So what Jairus begged for, and what the woman sought and received, was to be saved. They were pleading for salvation, pleading to be set free. So often in American Christianity we think about and talk about salvation as some fuzzy future promise, that in the great by and by we will be set free from sin and death and live forever with Christ. And salvation is that, it is the promise of eternal future. But this story shows us that salvation is more than that. Salvation is immediate, it is right now. When Jesus healed the woman of her bleeding and raised Jairus’s daughter from death, he wasn’t offering them some promised future; he was restoring them to life right now. Yes Jesus cares about the eternal salvation of our souls, but he cares just as much about our bodies in this moment. Salvation is eternal, but it is also immediate. Jesus loves you not just forever, but also right now.
And guess what, dear people of God who love to work. The specific piece of good news for you in this story is because salvation is a present reality, we the community of believers have a role to play in God’s saving action. When Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter, he told those who witnessed to get the girl something to eat. And when Jesus told the hemorrhaging woman her faith had saved her, he told her, aloud so that all the crowd to hear, “Go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” “Go in peace” was a ritual Jewish blessing, and by saying it Jesus was indicating to those gathered that this woman was no longer ritually outside of the community, and their role now was to treat her as part of it. Jesus started the process by healing the woman, by raising the girl, but the work now belonged to the community, to feed the girl, to reintegrate the woman.
Dear people of God, the work that we do in caring for each other and the world around us is not just good work, it is saving work. Illness and death are only some of the ways one might find themselves isolated and outside of the community, and when we bridge those divides and bring people back in, we are literally doing the work of salvation. What that means, dear people of God, is that the Franklin Food Pantry is not only about feeding physical hunger, it is about physically demonstrating to those on the margins that they are not marginalized by God. Giving Freeze Pops to neighborhood kids is about creating community and expanding the kingdom of God beyond these walls. And the Roadrunners club, and the fact that so many of you got here today by carpool is because this is how we make salvation tangible for each other. Dear people of God, you have been saved. And you get to save others. Because salvation is for everyone and it is happening right now. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)