Nehemiah’s Action | 21 April 2024

Texts: Nehemiah 5:1-13; Mark 3:1-6

One month from today, May 21, BREAD will rise and meet at the fairgrounds for our largest gathering of the year, the Nehemiah Action. 

We call this the Nehemiah Action because it is based on a story from the biblical book of Nehemiah.  Truth be told, I hadn’t really looked at this story until I had been through several annual BREAD cycles.  When I did, I was surprised and impressed at how closely what we do with BREAD is modeled after this 13 verse story.  So what I’d like to do is walk through this passage in Nehemiah chapter 5, and make some connections between it, almost 2500 years ago, and now, when we have a goal of turning out 2500 people to re-enact a contemporary version.  If you’d like to follow the text from Nehemiah, it is printed in your bulletin. 

A little bit of context: The story of Nehemiah takes place after a massively disruptive and traumatic period.  The people of Jerusalem and surrounding villages had seen their world collapse at the hands of the Babylonian armies – the holy temple, homes, the institutions of kingship and land useage – all destroyed, the people carried away in exile, with only the poor left behind.  But after several generations of exile, the Persians had conquered the Babylonians, and Cyrus the Great had declared for ethnic groups to return to their homelands to rebuild their cultures.

The story of Nehemiah is a story of that ongoing rebuilding process in and around Jerusalem, now about 100 years after Cyrus’s decree.  Like any rebuilding after loss and generational trauma, it was not always a smooth process.

Nehemiah 5:1 states, “Now there was a great outcry of the people and of their wives against their Jewish kin.”  Now we have to pause right away.  “A great outcry of the people, and their wives” – who apparently weren’t part of “the people?”  That’s reason for its own outcry, but we’ll have to enter the story on its own terms.  The prevailing event of this first verse is “a great outcry.”  There is a collective raising of the voice, signaling something isn’t right.    

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the outcry has an essential place in the redemptive work of God.  Way back under Egyptian slavery, the very first action to counter Pharaoh is that the people groan and “cry out” under their oppression.  It is this crying out that activates the Lord, who “hears their groaning, and remembers the covenant with their ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”  It is the outcry, of those experiencing hardship that initiates the movement, activates new possibility.  The cry awakens the consciousness of those previously unaware of the pain, alerts even God to the injustice, and causes God and those with ears to hear to remember who they are and what they are to be about. 

There’s a specific cause of the outcry in the fifth chapter of Nehemiah.  There’s a famine.  There’ve been some poor harvests.  People need to feed their families, and those with means are requiring those in need to put up their fields and houses and vineyards and children in pledge for grain.  The only way to get food was to offer your dearest assets as collateral – your land, the labor of you and your children.  And once those are gone, you’re stuck in debt slavery.  And it is their own kin who are doing this.  The people say in verse 5: “we are forcing our sons and daughters to be slaves…we are powerless, and our fields and vineyards now belong to others.”  A key purpose of the Torah was to keep this kind of thing from happening.  To not become like Pharaoh’s Egypt.  But it’s happening.  And the people – women and men – are crying out.

Outcry can awaken the consciousness of those within earshot of the pain.  It is the first signal that something is not right.  It can help us to remember our covenant and commitments.  It’s the first key moment of this story.  The outcry.

A second key moment is this appeal from the people in the first part of verse five: “Now our flesh is the same as that of our kindred; our children are the same as their children.”  This assertion of a shared humanity, a common value for life, is at the basis of morality.  “Our children are the same as their children.”  You can almost hear the chant “Black Lives Matter” as a direct descendant of this.  Or, “Refugees welcome.”  “Our children are the same as their children.”  Theologically, we also say that we are all created in the image of God, or that we are all children of God.  This moment is what makes the cry of the other a shared concern.  If we have the same flesh, and our children have the same value and aspirations, we are tied up in a common reality, and your cry becomes a part of my story.

What if we actually felt, and lived as if  “our children are the same as their children.”  Their children are the same as our children.  I think it would change everything, from schooling and health care access all the way up to foreign policy.   

There’s the outcry, and there’s the appeal that this affects all of us, adults and children.

Verse 6 is a pivotal part of the story.  Nehemiah says, “I was very angry when I heard their outcry and these complaints.”  This is the moment when the cry from the outside makes its way inside and lodges itself within the hearer.  If you hear the outcry, really hear it, you might get angry.  You might, like Nehemiah, get very angry. 

I don’t know when it was in life that I was introduced to the idea that anger can be a constructive motivating energy, but it has taken a long time for this to register.  I don’t particularly like being angry, and I just generally feel like a better person when I’m not angry.  I have even prided myself on being not angry.  The not-angry white guy.  Anger sometimes feels like a failure of will. 

The Hebrew language has a very physical/visceral way of depicting anger.  The literal translation for anger is to have burning nostrils.  It wouldn’t say “she was angry.”  It would say, “her nostrils were burning.”  Even God gets hot nostrils when God is angry.  Anger is hot, fiery, felt in the breath.    

Anger is a powerful force.  It can be destructive.  It can also be holy.  Mark chapter 3 is the only time in the gospels when it explicitly says that Jesus was angry.  Jesus is in the synagogue on a Sabbath and he brings forward a man with a withered hand.  And he asks everyone if it’s lawful to do good or to harm on the Sabbath.  And everyone is silent.  No one says anything.  Maybe no one wants to risk speaking up, or standing out. 

The only time in the gospels when it says that Jesus was angry is when people are offered an opportunity to do good, to speak up on behalf of a neighbor, and they are silent.  Mark says, “Jesus looked around at them with anger; he was grieved.”  How many paintings have you seen of an angry Jesus?  Not many.  Jesus proceeds to invite this man to stretch out his hand, which is restored.  Jesus gets hot nostrils and harnesses anger as an energy for healing. 

Jesus gets angry. Nehemiah gets very angry.  At BREAD house meetings in the fall we are asked the question, “What makes you angry?”  How we answer this question helps determine the area of focus for the coming year.  This year it’s affordable housing.  Hearing these stories draws me in to that hot creative energy of anger.  I am angry that out of state companies are buying up apartment buildings in Colombus, jacking up the rent and charging extra fees without taking good care of the buildings.  I am angry that property tax abatements for developments take money directly out of the pockets of our schools and social services.  I am angry that our housing authority has given control of the section 8 housing voucher program over to a private corporation – with profit motives, with horrible customer service at the end of an 800 number.  I’m trying to get better at getting angry in a Jesus kind of way.  A Nehemiah kind of way.

What makes you angry?

Nehemiah does something with his anger.  Something big, and, ultimately, constructive.  He does not hold his anger in, and does not try to deal with it as an individual.  Verse 7 says he called a great assembly. This great assembly includes the people affected by the problem, the ones who gave the initial cry, and the people with power to change the problem — the officials and, “the nobles.” 

Nehemiah has already lost his Mennonite cred by becoming very angry, but he goes a step further and speaks plainly in the face of conflict.  How unusual and refreshing to say it plain.  He tells the leaders directly: “The thing that you are doing is not good.”  This is the point in the program where I start looking down at the floor, or remember I need to check my phone for something.  But I’m learning there’s a difference between attacking a leader’s personal character, which this is not, and calling on someone to uphold their public duty to serve all people, which this is.  It’s a point where the tension that the people have been feeling in their lives is now made public, put out in the open.  You can feel the tension.

Nehemiah gives specific suggestions for how to address the problem: Verse 11: “Restore to them, this very day, their fields , their vineyards, their olive orchards, and their houses, and the interest on money, grain, wine, and oil that you have been exacting from them.”  It’s a pretty direct and specific request, complete with a tight timeline.  This very day! 

The very first Nehemiah Action turns out to be successful.  In front of that great assembly, accountable to the people they’ve been entrusted to lead, the officials agree to these requests.  They listen, and change course.  They are restored to their higher calling.  Nehemiah goes one step further and ensures there will be proper follow up to see it all happens.  The whole assembly ends with a collective Amen and expressions of praise. 

And every Nehemiah Action since then has gone just as smooth and been just as successful.

We are hoping for as many of us as possible in May to represent our congregation at this year’s Nehemiah Action.  Are we willing to listen for the cry, wherever it comes from?  To nurture the kind of consciousness that acknowledges we are all one kindred and our children are of equal value?  And as you experience anger at whatever it may be, to do the difficult and necessary soul work that enables that nostril burning anger to be an energy that leads toward healing, in the spirit of Jesus, in the spirit of Nehemiah.  To find a great assembly that takes us out of isolation.  A group that sings and praises together no matter the outcome.  To see this kind of solidarity as a continuation of our faith in the God who delivers slaves out of bondage, in the Risen Christ who invites us out of our guarded silence.  To join in spirit and in body with the great cloud of witnesses dead and alive who witness to the divine reign of justice and peace that is already being realized among us. 

That is, at least, the vision and purpose behind the BREAD Nehemiah Action,  And this story in the book of Nehemiah is the model that guides it.              

Mutual Aid and the Struggle for Life | 14 April 2024

Text: Acts 6

Locusts, beetles, land crabs, termites, ants, and bees.  This could be the beginning of a list of things you hope not to find in your house during a round of spring-cleaning.  These are also some of the creatures that show up in the first chapter of an old book by the Russian Peter Kropotkin called Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution.  I came across the book a couple summers ago in the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco.  When you’re in a cool bookstore in a cool city it’s pretty self-evident that buying a book there will make you at least a somewhat cooler person.  This one caught my attention because of the artwork bordering the text of each page, a 21^st century enhancement of a 19^th century book.  The author was new to me, but the topic was one I think a lot about, mutual aid. 

Peter Kropotkin was writing a generation after Charles Darwin published his theory of natural selection.  At the time, many of Darwin’s ideas were being interpreted as confirmation that life, at all levels, was essentially a battle of gladiators, with the strongest and fastest dominating the weak, winning the war of survival, living to fight another day (paraphrasing Thomas Huxley, p. 32 of Mutual Aid).  If that was how it’s always been, this had big implications on how successful human societies should function, and which people and peoples might be considered superior to others. 

Peter Kropotkin was one who thought this was not only bad politics, but bad science, a poor misreading of Darwin’s theories.  So he wrote a series of essays about mutual aid, which became a book.  His goal was to show how mutual aid, rather than each-against-all, was the basis for the flourishing of life.  Before getting to the human world of clans and guilds and cooperatives, he starts with the social insects.

An example: He notes that every aspect of the life of ants is based on the principles of mutual aid, including food sharing.  He writes:

“Two ants belonging to the same nest or to the same colony of nests will approach each other, exchange a few movements with the antennae, and ‘if one of them is hungry or thirsty, and especially if the other has its crop full…it immediately asks for food.’ The individual thus requested never refuses; it sets apart its mandibles, takes a proper position, and regurgitates a drop of transparent fluid which is licked up by the hungry ant.  Regurgitating food for other ants is so prominent a feature in the life of ants (we could consider) the digestive tube of the ants as consisting of two different parts, one of which, the posterior, is for the special use of the individual, and the other, the anterior part, is chiefly for the use of the community” (p. 37).

I can’t say I ever anticipated ant barf making it into a sermon, but there you have it. 

His point isn’t that nature is always kind and cooperative, but, as he says at the end of the chapter, “mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle” (p. 47).

To make a transition from ant colonies and 19^th century Russian anarchists, to 1^st century Jerusalem, the practice of mutual aid is very much front and center in the opening chapters of the book of Acts.  It’s the beginning of chapter two where Holy Spirit floods the upper room where everyone is gathered for Pentecost.  They start speaking in many different languages.  Pilgrims from different parts of the world, visiting Jerusalem for the festival, hear them speaking in their own native language.  How could this be?  Peter preaches a sermon that this is the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified, but raised up by God, now the gravitational center of this multilingual community. 

By the end of the chapter 2, 3000 people have been added to the community.  And here, according to Luke, the author, is what it meant to be part of that community:

“All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.”   

This rather all-in form of mutual aid is restated in chapter 4: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold.  They laid it at the apostle’s feet and it was distributed to each as any had need.”

Luke may be giving us an idealized picture of the first believers, but it seems significant that mutual aid plays such a prominent role in the early church.  Strangers became friends.  Scattered peoples started acting like an extended kinship group.  Being a Jesus-follower had a direct impact on people’s economic lives.  They cared for each other.  Everyone gave what they were able and received what they needed.  All this happened apart from the transactional market economy. 

We could say this was counter-cultural radical behavior, or we could say it was a restoration of normal human behavior, in the Spirit of the Human One, the Son of Man, Jesus’ favorite title for himself.  Certainly it was practicing the commands of Torah.  Deuteronomy 15 instituted a redistribution of wealth every seven years so that “there will be no one in need among you” (v. 4).  Or even better, it’s the behavior of life itself, modeled by the ants and other cooperative beings much smaller and older than us.  It’s how life flourishes.  To put it in the words of Jesus.  “I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).

Whatever we call it, it was a challenge to sustain.  Acts chapter six is the reality check. 

Within this multi-lingual community of Jesus-spirited folks there were Hellenists -Greek speaking Jews –  and Hebrews – Aramaic-speaking Jews.  Acts 6:1 says, “Now during those days, when the disciples were increasing in number, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews, because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food.”  Maybe there was some historic tension between the two groups.  Or maybe this is just growing pains, the community expanding faster than its structures are built for.  Twelve apostles can only do so much.  And people aren’t giving through monthly pledges or by scanning QR codes.  Their offerings are actual food, brought to the gathering, physical items to be sorted, weighed out, and distributed. 

There are some signs of tension in the apostles’ response.  Verse 2: “And the twelve called together the whole community of the disciples and said, ‘It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables.’”  Maybe there’s a slight implication that their work of preaching and teaching is more important than administering mutual aid, waiting on tables.  Or maybe they’re practicing good boundaries, naming their gifts, staying in their lane, empowering others to do the good work that has simply become too much for them. 

They do some gifts discernment and form one of the first commissions of the church, chaired by a person of strong character and wisdom named Steven.  Six others, all with Greek names, are also selected.  The apostles offer them a blessing in a way that we imitate when we license or ordain ministers.  With a laying on of hands and prayer.  A beautiful picture of us doing just that with Sarah Werner appears in the most recent issue of Anabaptist World alongside an essay she wrote about disability and church. 

We get no more details in Acts about how this new division of labor works out, except that the disciples in Jerusalem continued to grow, and that Steven was a powerful leader.  So powerful, it turns out, he became the first recorded martyr of the church, which is to say that his life followed the pattern of Jesus in more ways than one.  Mutual aid is indeed a radical act.

Steven’s public stoning was overseen by a young man named Saul, who would later undergo a conversion and be known as Paul.  Paul would go on to travel around much of the Roman Empire starting little communities who lived in the Spirit of Jesus.  He would write letters that encouraged, among other things, the practice of mutual aid.  And so this ancient thread of abundant life through mutual aid continued to take new forms in new communities around the world.

The 16^th century Anabaptists saw themselves as reviving the New Testament church.  This included the practice of mutual aid.  In the centuries that followed this has ranged from groups who really do share all things in common, like the Hutterites; to Amish barn raisings; to Mennonite mutual insurance organizations.  Undergirding these practices is the belief that everything ultimately belongs to God.  We are merely the stewards of these resources.

One of the ways we practice mutual aid at Columbus Mennonite Church is through the Compassion Fund.  This is a fund, separate from the annual budget, that anyone can give to at anytime.  Our Shepherding Commission oversees the funds and shares the aid as needs come to our attention.  Not to complicate things too much, but Compassion Fund gifts usually involve a double form of mutual aid.  The Mennonite stewardship agency Everence has a sharing fund that matches funds given in mutual aid to our members.  This has enabled us to give out around an additional $15,000 in mutual aid over the past five years.    

The wider church also has a mutual aid fund to assist with congregations who can’t afford to pay health insurance for their pastors.  This year we’re contributing a little over $1700 to this fund, which is part of our annual budget.  So if you give an offering to the church throughout the year, a portion of that gift goes to help provide health insurance to pastors of less wealthy congregations.  

Our small groups are another way mutual aid and support is offered in less formal ways.  

These are relatively small things on the macro-economic scale, but there’s something beautiful about the smallness of mutual aid.  When the twelve apostles gave their blessing to Steven and the other six, they weren’t charged with restructuring the economy of the Roman Empire.  They were charged with seeing that those in their own community, fellow-Jesus followers, were cared for.  They were charged with collecting the gifts of God that others had released from their own stewardship to be redistributed as needed, so that there was no one in need among them.

Which is a pretty radical thing.  It is an alternative economic practice.  It does challenge a system that co-opts human cooperation to generate wealth for the few at the expense of the many, and at the expense of the earth.

Life is hard.  It is a struggle.  In our hyper-individualized culture, we can form a mini-culture of mutuality and aid.

When we do practice mutual aid, in whatever form, at whatever scale, we are joining in the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of Steven and the spirit of Torah, the spirit of earth community in creatures so small we can miss they’re even there, despite our entire evolutionary unfolding owing itself to the practices of mutuality they have honed for millions of years.   

In this Easter season, we honor mutual aid as a witness to the resurrection, life overcoming death, community persisting in the way of Jesus, the Risen One.         

Easter Encounter: Resurrection Mystery | 31 March 2024

Texts: Mark 16:1-8, ( ), (9-20)

In the oldest complete manuscripts we have, Mark’s Gospel ends at chapter 16, verse 8, with the women fleeing the tomb.

The vast majority of later manuscripts contain a longer ending of Mark, which appears in our Bibles, often with footnotes giving this information I’m saying now.

As some point, a shorter supplemental ending was also written.  Some ancient manuscripts contain the original ending, plus the shorter ending, plus the longer ending, which is how they appear in our Bibles.  We will hear these read now.     

Read: Mark 16:1-8, ( ), (9-20)

When I say Christ is risen! you say Christ is risen Indeed! 

Christ is risen. 

Christ is risen. 

There’s a joke I heard a while back about the difference between a lawyer and a preacher.  The difference between a lawyer and a preacher is that a lawyer spends all day looking at a stack of papers trying to condense it down to a few paragraphs, while a preacher spends all day looking at a few paragraphs trying to expand it into a stack of papers. 

It’s probably one of the very few jokes where the lawyer comes out looking pretty good. 

With all respect to attorneys and other skilled synthesizers of information, Easter invites, even requires all of us to live into the reality of the resurrection with the mind of the preacher.

Because all we have to go on in the New Testament about Easter morning is just a few paragraphs.  Or, as we’re wrapping up Mark’s gospel, it could be one paragraph.  This can feel both frustratingly inadequate to our inquiring minds, and perhaps, an enticing doorway into the mystery of the resurrection.

Gathered here in the mystery of this hour.

There are two great mysteries at the end of Mark.  And not just two mysteries, but two kinds of mysteries.

The first we’ve already mentioned.  What is the end of Mark?  The original ending, where the oldest full manuscripts we have come to a close, the final chapter about the resurrection, is short, a mere eight verses.  And not only is it short, but it’s strangely, uncomfortably, delightfully open ended.  Chapter 16, verse 8: “So they – the three women – went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Not only is it short, and not only is it open ended, but it includes none of the characters we’ve been following throughout Mark’s gospel.  All of those disciples Jesus called – Peter, James, and John, the rest of the twelve, blind Bartimaeus who gained his sight and followed Jesus on the way, the sick and lepers Jesus healed, named and unnamed– none of them are present on Easter morning.  Instead, it’s three women Mark has introduced just a bit before – Mary Magdelene, another Mary (so many Marys) and Salome.  We first meet them in Jesus’ final tortuous hours on the cross.  They’re looking on, from a distance.  In what feels like an Oh yeah, almost forgot, kind of moment, Mark tells us they had been by Jesus’s side this whole time, starting all the way back in Galilee, from the beginning.  When Pilate grants Joseph of Arimathea the body of Jesus to wrap in linen cloth and lay in a tomb, the women follow and see where the body is laid.  Keeping watch.  Staying awake, as Jesus had said.

It’s these three women who come to the tomb very early on the first day of the week.

Gathered here in one strong body

Not only is Mark’s ending short, and open ended, with characters we are barely know a thing about, but there is no appearance of the resurrected Jesus.  The stone is rolled away, the tomb is empty, and in place of Jesus’ body is, as Mark says, “a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side.”  His words are few, but dense, the kinds of phrases preachers and Jesus-followers have been unpacking for the last two thousand years.

“Do not be alarmed.”

“He is not here.” 

“He has been raised”

“Go tell his disciples”

“He is going ahead of you, to Galilee” There are at least five good Easter sermons embedded in those five short phrases. 

But no amount of sermonizing can change what Mark does and doesn’t say.  What he doesn’t say is that Jesus appeared to them and resolved all their questions.  What he does say is that the women “went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”  And, unless the original-original manuscript got cut off and lost to history, that’s where he leaves it. 

Gathered here in the struggle and the power.

This first mystery, Mark’s abrupt ending, has to do with what we can know and what we can’t know.  And because Mark leaves a lot unknown, it’s no wonder a shorter ending which ties up loose ends about the women telling the males disciples and Jesus appearing to them all, and a longer ending which summarizes the post-resurrection stories of the other 3 gospels, plus a bizarre reference to picking up venomous snakes without getting hurt, which would cause just about every biblical literalist to be a firm believer in the occasional metaphor – it’s no wonder these supplemental endings emerged in the following centuries.   

Unknowing triggers something in the deep recesses of our Homo Sapien brains.  We are curious creatures, and we like to know things.  And this can be a beautiful thing.  The quest to know is what propels scholars to pour over ancient manuscripts to better understand how a tradition develops.  Our quest to know the unknown is sending us brilliant satellite images from deep space capturing star-births and previously unknown galaxies.  The drive to know is how scientists created the vaccines that helped end a global pandemic of a novel coronavirus. 

Thank goodness for our quest to know and understand and discover more accurate models of how the world works.  And thank goodness for the spiritual maturity of coming to peace with the unknown.  Not needing to have a faith that requires certainty, but rather a faith that embraces the mystery of unknowing.  Even when it comes to resurrection.  What actually happened on Easter morning?  If only those security-obsessed Romans would have invented security cameras to have around the tomb, so we could see what actually happened.  Was Jesus’ body resuscitated?  Is that what resurrection is?  Something else? Can we be at peace with not knowing? 

When mystery has to do with the known and unknown, Progressive Christian faith is committed to affirming the good of both – valuing the quest for knowledge and understanding.  And honoring the unknown – a humility, even contentment with what we will never know in this lifetime. 

But that’s only one kind of mystery – the kind that deals with the known and the unknown.  The kind that has to do with how far we can and can’t expand our breadth of knowledge.

There’s a second kind of mystery.   And this is the kind of mystery I think Mark is especially wanting to lure us into by the way he ends his gospel.

The first kind of mystery has to do with the unknown.

This second kind of mystery has to do with the endlessly knowable.  Mystery as entering into and participating within that which is endlessly knowable.  Rather than breadth, this has to do with the depth dimension.

Gathered here in the mystery of this hour.

What if the resurrection of Jesus isn’t this one time exception to all the rules, when God reaches in from the outside and does something supernatural amidst an otherwise unremarkable creation?  What if the resurrection of Jesus, the bursting forth of Easter morning, is a revelation of something God, the Divine, the One Creative Energy which infuses all of reality, is always doing?  God is raising up life out of death.  Holy Spirit is raising up the lowly, overcoming injustice through forgiveness of debts, entrusting the truths of the universe to marginalized women.  Resurrection points us toward the endlessly knowable mysteries of life and steadfast love and deep kinship.

It is inherently unresolved and unresolvable.  There is no neat bow that can tie this thing up.  It can only point us in a direction – back to Galilee, or wherever that place is we’re overly familiar with, the one we thought we knew inside and out and frankly had stopped finding all the interesting.  Jesus goes ahead of you to Galilee, where it all started.  There you will see him. 

Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, and Salome seem to know these words and the empty tomb are not just about Jesus. They’re also about them.  And not just them, but, soon enough, when it is time to speak, about all who will join in the resurrection community. 

The first kind of mystery is one where we can still keep the subject at arm’s length – however much we think we know or don’t know.  This second kind reaches out its arm and pulls us in to itself.

To believe in resurrection is to live the resurrection.  As the Apostle Paul taught, by the grace of God, we are the body of Christ – the animated, Spirit-infused, living body of Jesus. 

Gathered here in one strong body

The endlessly knowable mystery is not restricted to some ancient manuscript and it is not some abstract proposition.  It is real flesh and blood bodies.  Bodies that have been raised up from death-dealing habits, into a new life.  We are part of the risen and rising body of Christ.  You could say it all in a short paragraph, and you could fill up scrolls and books and still not reach the bottom.           

Now that’s enough to inflict a heavy dose of terror and amazement into anyone.  At a loss for words.  Fleeing the tomb toward God knows where.    

The endlessly knowable Christ goes ahead of us.  The resurrection is something to be lived out.  How terrifying.  And how amazing.   

Spirit draw near.     

Fifth Encounter: Good News Amidst Apocalypse | 17 March 2024 | Lent 5

Text: Mark 13:1-8, 14-23, 28-37

Well, welcome to Apocalypse Sunday. 

This passage in Mark is sometimes called the Little Apocalypse.  That’s in relation to the big one, Revelation, the final book of our New Testament.  This apocalyptic sermon of Jesus in Mark 13, and its parallels in Matthew and Luke, is merely one chapter.

So, I guess welcome to Little Apocalypse Sunday, which sounds a little less ominous?

This is a passage that speaks of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, the warring of nations, refugees fleeing violence, false prophets, a blooming fig tree, and the importance of being watchful and awake. 

It’s a passage easily misused by authors appealing to an anxious audience about the details of the end of the world, sometimes including dates, even though Jesus says “about that day or hour no one knows” – not even the angels.  Not even Jesus himself. 

Although frequently identified with the future, it’s the chapter that very likely most closely describes the current events faced by Mark’s original audience.  In 66 CE a Jewish revolt in Jerusalem expelled the Romans and their Judean appointees out of the city.  The rebellion spread to surrounding areas.  A Roman contingent came down from Syria but was turned back by the rebels who proceeded to set up their own government.  In the next several years the Romans undertook a scorched earth policy that eventually led to deaths of thousands, the toppling of the Jerusalem temple and people permanently fleeing the city in 70 CE – pretty much everything described in Mark chapter 13. 

Most scholars believe Mark was written in this very window of time, after the rebellion had begun, but perhaps before it was definitively extinguished by the Romans.  It was a time when the call to arms was at its most intense, when nationalist fervor was at its height, when the end of the world as they knew it was near.  For those loyal to the Jesus movement rather than the temple-state, what might all this mean?  Was it possible to actively resist Roman imperialism and violent rebellion at the same time? Do we stay and fight, do we flee, or something else?  Put another way: What does it mean to live in apocalyptic times?

It’s the question burning at the heart of the community Mark is addressing.  It’s a question very much alive in the 21^st century.

My pledge to you is that this sermon does contain some good news.  Three points of good news, in fact.  Because when the world in crumbling, there’s nothing quite as stabilizing as a good ‘ole three point sermon.  There is good news in Mark 13 and there is hope in the apocalypse. 

But first, the end of the world.

I’d like to read a poem titled “Notes at the End of the World.”  And I should add that it was written by a 16 year old, a generation that will feel, more than mine, the effects of our collective rebellion against the earth.

Notes at the End of the World

Smoke streams the sky like a necklace

People stream the streets like smoke

Clouds are lost in the fog

But rain could not save us now

It would only wash the 

Birds’ choked bodies into 

The murky storm drains.

I am cloaked in

Air so thick I

Could almost fly

Dirt-stained wings stretched towards

Polluted heavens surrounded by

Air so thick I

Could almost drown

In the sea of it

Dragged down to

The very core.

And when I sleep

I dream of fire

And when I wake

I see it out my window

We are

A blue particle suspended in space

Trying its best

To set itself aflame.

The first point of good news is that apocalypse means unveiling.  We’ve come to use it to refer to catastrophe, utter destruction, the end of everything.  But the definition of the Greek word apocalypsis is to unveil, to reveal, to make known that which was previously hidden.  It’s why the last book of the New Testament, which opens with the words “The apocalypsis of Jesus Christ,” is called Revelation.  It reveals something. 

Apocalypse, and apocalyptic times are revealing times.  They tear away the veil, remove the façade, expose the mechanisms previously hidden from our eyes.  They help us see more truthfully. 

Kind of like a good poem.

So at the beginning of Mark chapter 13, when Jesus and the disciples are walking out of the temple, the disciples see one thing: “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!”  They aren’t wrong, either in their observations, or in their amazement at the feat of engineering, and skill and labor to build these wonders.  We pay good money to visit architectural wonders around the world.  I can still picture the view atop one of the Mayan pyramids of Tikal in Guatemala overlooking a vast jungle.  I can still feel the awe of being next to The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, a vast city on one side, Cairo, a vast desert on the other. 

But Jesus is not in a mood for tourism, at least not now.  He has only days – not months or weeks, but days left to live before he is executed by the same state apparatus that built those grand buildings the disciples can’t help but admire.  He knows that the human capacity for amazing creativity is met only by our capacity for destruction, and that a time of destruction is near.

“Do you see these great buildings?” Jesus responds.  “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”  It’s an unveiling that ties into what he says next about earthquakes and kingdoms rising and falling.  The things we think are the most solid, most unshakeable, most set in stone – literally and figuratively – aren’t as solid as they appear. 

On a geological time scale, it’s all just one more layer of shale pressed between other epochs of the planet.  On a human time scale, nothing is too big to fail.  There’s a fragility to our ways of ordering our world – economic, political, social – even if it appears on the surface as quite impressive.

Now this sure doesn’t sound like good news.  A lot of it isn’t.  But there’s something about this shift from apocalypse as catastrophe to apocalypse as an unveiling that is at the heart of Christian faith.  It connects directly with the theme of sight that runs throughout Mark.  A disciple is someone who was blind, who can now see.  And, in seeing, in truly seeing, is empowered to follow Jesus on the way.

The second point of good news amidst apocalypse is related to the first.  It has to do not just with what we’re seeing, but how to see it. 

When the earth does quake, when structures collapse; when, as the poem says, the air is so thick we could almost fly, or drown in the sea of it, What is it we’re witnessing?  Is this the end of everything?  The end of something? Or could it be something else? 

For Mark’s community, it was indeed the end of a world.  The center – Jerusalem and the temple, and the cultural, economic, and political world it upheld – the center did not hold. 

And yet amidst all this upheaval, Jesus offers two tender images of life.  One is of a fig tree just starting to push out leaves as the harsh days of winter turn toward summer.  The other is after a description of other harsh days, when Jesus says, “This is but the beginning of birth pangs.” 

Jesus had initially countered human creativity – the construction of large elaborate buildings – with human destructiveness – not one stone will be left on another.  But he comes back to the creative work of God – seen in the natural world and human mothering.  Amidst upheaval, there is a greater force at work – the fig tree survives the winter and produces leaves and fruit as the season turns.  Amidst very real suffering and loss of life, there is another kind of suffering producing life, the travails of labor. 

What if what we’re witnessing is something in the process of being born?  And what if our role is to come alongside, to comfort and support the great mothering spirit as she brings this forth?  Like a partner, like a midwife, or a doula. 

The metaphor of how to see what we’re seeing in apocalyptic times matters.  Jesus suggests that his followers see birth where others only see death.  Rather to mere empty branches, to see tender twigs holding all they need to sprout life. 

Apocalypse is an unveiling that enables us to see more clearly.  And the suffering we do see and experience is both the end of something and the birth of something. 

Neither of these is the kind of good news that eliminates the hard stuff.  It is perhaps the kind of good news that enables a community to endure, to keep its bearings, to stay grounded in more than the whims of the moment, in apocalyptic times. 

And so is this final point of good news. 

Jesus ends his little apocalypse with a parable about watchfulness. 

Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”  (Mark 13:33-37)

And again, what could sound like some far off future event, is actually the most pressing present reality of the text.  In those watches of the day – evening, midnight, cockcrow, and dawn – Mark has provided an outline for the rest of his gospel.  When Jesus gathers with his companions in the evening for a final meal.  When he is arrested and tried at midnight.  When he is disowned by Peter as the cock crows.  And when the women discover the empty tomb at dawn. 

Jesus isn’t urging his friends to be alert for some far off distant, maybe/maybe not grand arrival.  He’s urging them to stay awake, like in Gethsemane, as all of this unfolds around them.  As the apocalyptic moment of history, the crucifixion of resurrection of Jesus, takes place.  As great suffering is met with great love.  As the painfully predictable violent machinery of the state and religious establishment is met with the wildly unpredictable nonviolent mystery of the Divine. 

Keep alert.  Stay awake.  In the present tense.

What does it take to keep awake in apocalyptic times?

One thing that will jolt you awake is when your sixteen year old daughter shares a Google Doc with you of a poem she wrote for her AP Environmental Science class which begins with:

Smoke streams the sky like a necklace

People stream the streets like smoke

And ends with: 

And when I sleep

I dream of fire

And when I wake

I see it out my window

We are

A blue particle suspended in space

Trying its best

To set itself aflame.

Shared here with Lily’s permission. 

How do we keep awake and watchful through the evening, midnight, cockcrow, and dawn of these times?

Apocalpytic times don’t come with easy solutions.  But they do hold possibilities that enable a community to endure, to keep its bearings, to stay grounded in more than the whims of the moment. 

An apocalypse is an unveiling, a revelation of thing previously hidden from sight.

And what we can see is not merely suffering, but signs of tender leaves beginning to push out, and labor birthing something new. 

When we stay awake we join in solidarity with Jesus, who is in solidarity with the whole earth community.  Jesus, who said these words: “What I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

Fourth Encounter: A Good Question | 10 March 2024 | Lent 4

Text: Mark 12:28-34

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost ten years since we did the Twelve Scriptures Project.  For the slightly more than half of you who weren’t around then – or for those who were, but forget the details – the Twelve Scriptures Project was something our denomination, Mennonite Church USA, encouraged congregations to do.  The idea was fairly simple.  Put in the form of question, it was something like: Which twelve scriptures are core to your congregation?  Out of all the teachings in the Bible, which are foundational? 

The way we arrived at our twelve was to invite everyone to answer this question for themselves, kids included, leaving it slightly undefined whether the list was your personal twelve scriptures, or what you perceived as the twelve scriptures defining the congregation.  Several Sunday school sessions were used to share these lists, discuss, and compile the results, with the most common mentions becoming our collective Twelve Scriptures.

We then had a worship series covering each scripture, and a colorful artistic display that filled the front of the worship space.  That installation was then translated into a poster, which displayed the Twelve Scriptures and themes they represented.  A large version was in the foyer for many years, now refreshed and moved to the fellowship hall.  Smaller versions are still in Sunday school rooms.  A page on our website is dedicated to the Twelve Scriptures.  If you haven’t seen any of these displays, or just stopped noticing, it’s worth viewing, or viewing again.     

It was a meaningful, helpful project, inspired by a meaningful, helpful question: What is the core of our faith?  If we had to boil it all down, what would it be? 

Central District Conference leadership is currently thinking about doing another version of this project tied to our current theme of wisdom.  I think it will be harder to boil down all of our most cherished wisdom sayings not limited scripture to 12 or even 100, so we’ll see what shape that project takes.

This Lent we’re highlighting different encounters Jesus has on his way to and through Jerusalem.  Today’s encounter is with someone who asks Jesus this very question about what’s most important. 

Like last week, Jesus is in the temple.  A scribe hears Jesus addressing other questions, so steps forward with his own: “Which commandment is the first of all?”  Two thousand years before Mennonite Church USA conceived of the Twelve Scripture Project, this scribe proposed a One Scripture project to Jesus.  Out of all the teachings in the Torah, out of all the prophets have declared, What’s primary?  Which teaching summarizes all the others?

It’s a good question.  And it’s not unique to this scribe. 

An often-told story, recorded in the Talmud, tells of a gentile who came to Rabbi Hillel and challenged him to convert him, on the condition that Hillel recite the entire Torah – the first five books of the Bible – while the Gentile stood on one foot.  The Talmud says: “(Hillel) converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation.  Go study.”  (Shabbat 31a)   Significantly, Rabbi Hillel’s time as a moral leader in Jerusalem lasted up to the year 10 CE, when he died, which means his final years overlapped with Jesus’ childhood years.  They were sort of contemporaries.  

We don’t know if Jesus knew about that story.  The question Hillel speaks to, however, was a common one, worthy of the kind of exchanges and debates that all good questions provoke: Out of the many scrolls that have been written, which piece of instruction is primary?  Asked now to Jesus by a scribe, someone dedicated to the very work of carefully replicating all those many words and phrases, stories, legal material and poetry, the full swath of text that guided not just the “religious” life of his people, but the legal, ethical, domestic and public, personal and corporate life.  This scribe has not just seen it all, not just heard it all, but has meticulously written it all, perhaps multiple times, body hunched, eyes and mind focused, perhaps pondering, day in and day out, each word he was writing.  Out of every line and arc and twist his hand had made with the ink, which ones held the key to understanding all the rest?  Which verse was the blue flame in the center of the fire, burning hottest, illuminating everything around it?    

When asked a bad or trick question, Jesus would usually counter with a better question.  But this is a beautiful question, one Jesus had likely pondered himself.  He has a ready answer.

Mark 12:29 – “Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

It’s a passage from Deuteronomy and a passage from Leviticus, brought together into a single multi-faceted expression – technically a Two Scriptures Project, with one dense meaning. 

It’s the morning and evening prayer recited by every observant Jew to this day, the Shema: Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One – Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad, followed by the appeal to love the Eternal One with all one’s being, followed by a clarification that what this looks like is loving one’s neighbor as if it were one’s own self one is honoring.

It’s another way of summarizing all of scripture while standing on one leg.

It’s a beautiful answer to a beautiful question.

And incidentally, this passage from Mark was the top vote getter in our Twelve Scriptures project. Which was not only a very frugal two for the price of one selection, but when your top scripture is the one where Jesus names his top scriptures, you’re probably on to something.

The scribe affirms Jesus’s response – perhaps had come to the same conclusion in his countless hours of prayerful labor.  And Jesus tells him he is not far from the kingdom of God.  A rare affirmation for a scribe in the gospels. 

There’s something very powerful and necessary going on in this story that translates directly into our time.  The amount of “content” – as we now call it – the amount of content available to us is so vast it’s hard to calculate.  Terabytes and Terabytes of text and image, information, entertainment, and persuasion.  Far more than the many scrolls this scribe had at his fingertips, although, interestingly, after several centuries of books replacing scrolls, we seem to be back to scrolling.  And there are so many scribes, so many content creators, and content sharing.  We are not lacking for teachings and instruction, told from every angle. 

Which makes the question all the more important.  What of this is important?  What’s the signal in the noise?  What’s most important? 

There’s a project for you. 

As a project, it involves a lot of sifting and sorting out.  And funneling down, narrowing. 

Sometimes life will give us a big nudge or push into this project.  A few weeks ago Jon Lucas gave us a window into what this is looking like for him.  He brought his young son Henry up with him to lead the Children’s Time, sharing about how having Henry has caused him to rethink all his priorities, especially in relation to work.  Yeah, kids will do that.

And good work can do that too.  If and when one finds the place where one’s skills and passions intersect with something the world needs, there can be a clarity of purpose about the small but focused part one has to play in a much larger whole.

If you have ever had a near death experience, or walked alongside someone facing a terminal illness, you know how clarifying that can be, where the non-essential things fall away, and the good gift that rests at the center of your life becomes the gravitational point around which everything else must now orbit. 

Sometimes our spiritual practices can help us gain clarity without life having to clobber us across the head. There’s a grace, even a joy, in this narrowing.  When you ask the question – which commandment is first of all – and you actually get an answer, one that you know is as true an answer you’ll ever get in this lifetime, you are indeed not far from the kingdom of God.

Whatever the specifics of that answer – the faces, the tasks or non-tasks, the use of time – we are on the right track if it tracks with the answer Jesus gave to the same question.  It involves our entire being – heart, soul, mind, and strength, no part left out – in service to the Eternal One.  And it involves the good of our neighbor, which as Jesus illustrates elsewhere, might not actually be your friendly Mr Rogers type neighbor.  And it involves the good of ourself.  How can we love our neighbor as ourself if we don’t know how to love ourself?  Even better, you recognize that your selfhood doesn’t end at the borders of your skin.  The other is an extended part of our self, and in loving the other, we are loving and honoring the self that is greater than our small self,  We could call it the baby Henry revelation, the moment you realize a part of your self is looking back at you through a different set of eyes.  Love you neighbor as your self.

With so many options, so much content to scroll, so many demands on our time, it’s a beautiful thing to narrow things down to what is first of all.

And, paradoxically – because we’re talking about God here so of course there’s paradox involved – paradoxically, the great narrowing leads to a great expansiveness. 

Matthew and Luke also record this exchange but Mark is only one to include the Shema at the beginning – Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.  And I love that Mark does this.  Because the one thing, the one command, is what the scribe is after.  Which narrows things down and leaves a lot of other things out.  But the Oneness of God is vast and expansive and all-encompassing.  Being grounded in the one thing, puts us in union with the undivided oneness of God, the Spirit and Energy that pervades all things.     

Narrowing leads to broadening.  It becomes less about what we do, and more about how we are in whatever we’re doing.  Love takes countless forms.  It’s the one thing that can become all things.  It’s the closest human expression we have to participating in the oneness of God.  Love is the ultimate encounter. 

Second Encounter: Servanthood and Sight | 25 February 2024 | Lent 2

Jesus is on the road to Jerusalem.  At this point, he’s walking ahead of the others.  Mark writes: “they were amazed, and those who followed were afraid.”  Amazed, perhaps, because Jesus had just told a wealthy man that in order to follow him he had to sell everything, and redistribute his wealth to the poor.  Afraid, perhaps, because Jesus keeps telling them – now for the third time – that once they arrive in Jerusalem, the Human One will be handed over to the authorities and killed…and after three days rise again. 

Jesus was walking ahead of them, but James and John break away from the group and come forward to Jesus with a request about being Jesus’ right and left hand men – places of honor, power, and succession, perhaps.  

With the other 10/12ths of the disciples now listening, quite upset at James and John, Jesus says this: “You know that the ones who are considered the rulers by the Gentiles (Romans) show off their authority over them and their high-ranking officials order them around. ⁴³ But that’s not the way it will be with you. Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant. ⁴⁴ Whoever wants to be first among you will be the slave of all, ⁴⁵ for the Human One^[e] didn’t come to be served but rather to serve and to give his life to liberate many people.”    

You may have heard that last line in other translations as “give his life as a ransom for many,” which has led to some lousy theology about God requiring Jesus to suffer death or be punished so we don’t have to go to hell if we don’t believe the right things.  This translation does a better job of getting to what Jesus is talking about.  He’s talking about liberation.  Liberation for many people – including the disciples, who are stuck in the deep ruts of how power is usually exercised.  Including, unfortunately, us. 

This is a story about liberation from that stuckness, liberation from spiritual blindness.  It has everything to do with these encounters with servanthood, and sight.

The idea of leadership as service reaches back well before the gospels.  Five hundred years before Christ, in China, Lao Tzu wrote this in the Tao Te Ching:

“The highest type of ruler is one of whose existence the people are barely aware. The Sage is self-effacing and scanty of words. When his task is accomplished and things have been completed, All the people say, ‘We ourselves have achieved it!’

If we can jet from 5^th century BCE China to 20^th century corporate American without getting whiplash, the phrase “servant leadership” was made popular in the US by Robert Greenleaf.  His writing became something of a movement that impacted how corporations and governments talked and thought about leadership. 

Greenleaf worked for AT&T for forty years.  Over those decades he became weary of the authoritarian type of power he experienced in US institutions.  So he took an early retirement in 1964.  He committed himself to researching and writing about leadership ethics.  From this he wrote a highly influential essay called “Essentials in Servant Leadership.” It included these words: 

“The servant-leader is servant first… Becoming a servant-leader begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first… The best test, and the most difficult to administer, is this: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?  And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?”  Citation HERE.

If you’ve ever had a boss or supervisor or mentor or parent who has been this kind of servant leader, you know what a gift it is.

Robert Greenleaf’s mention of the least privileged highlights the potential subversiveness of prioritizing service rather than, say, the bottom line, or holding power for its own sake. 

There’s a great scene in the movie “Gandhi” where Gandhi is meeting with other Indian leaders.  His nonviolent campaign had caught the attention of the British, still occupying India.  They have just passed legislation to imprison any Indian with possession of materials considered seditious, with Gandhi’s writings at the top of the list.  In this scene, Gandhi is meeting with Hindu and Muslim Indian leaders in an upscale house, six of them total, discussing how to respond.  The conversation centers on whether to respond violently or more passively, until Gandhi speaks up and says he has never advocated for passive anything.  He gets up from his seat and says he’s with those who believe they should never submit to unjust laws.  “Our resistance must be active and provocative,” he says. 

He then approaches a seventh person in the room, an Indian servant standing at attention, ready to serve tea.  Gandhi takes the tray from him, and says to the others, “I want to embarrass all those who wish to treat us as slaves….all of them.”  He proceeds to serve tea around the room as he proposes a national day of prayer and fasting, which would not-coincidentally shut down the economy and administration of the entire country.  A larger point being that liberation from an empire is incomplete if we ourselves aren’t liberated from lessening the humanity of others. 

This seems to be the kind of all-encompassing subversive conversion Jesus is calling for – had been calling for.  The teachings, the healings, the casting out of harmful spirits, the parables, the crossing over to the other side of the sea, and back again, the feeding of the thousands in the wilderness, telling the wealthy man that he should redistribute his wealth to the poor, the heading toward Jerusalem – all this for the purpose of liberation.  Liberation for the least privileged, and folks with plenty of privilege.  Liberation from the kind of power Rome exercised, which shows up in all levels of human relationships, even those closest to us.   

Despite all this, so close to the end now, the disciples still can’t see it.  They don’t see, or hear, or understand, which are all used interchangeably throughout Mark.  This is made painfully clear in this exchange with James and John and the other ten.  Rather than blame them, we would do well to identify with them in our still not-quite-getting-it.

So if the Human One came not to be served, but to serve, and to give their life as liberation for many, what does liberation look like?  We have plenty examples of what it doesn’t look like, then and now.  But what does it look like?   

Well, there’s one more story before Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, and it’s pretty simple.  They arrive in Jericho, the last town outside Jerusalem, and on their way out they encounter a blind beggar named Bartimaeus, who asks for mercy, throws off his cloak as he rushes to Jesus, says he wants to see again, regains his sight, and follows Jesus on the way. 

I’m intrigued just as much with what Mark doesn’t say about Bartimeaus.  We don’t know who this person is.  We don’t know how he heard of Jesus.  We don’t get any details of what the healing was like, except that “he regained his sight,” and we have no idea what happens to him once he follows Jesus “on the way.”

We do know that he was blind.  And we know that he knew he was blind.  And this is what sets him apart from the other disciples.  He knows he can’t see, so rather than request power from Jesus, he requests sight.  And that’s what liberation looks like.  Someone who knows they can’t see, and in that very knowing and calling out for mercy, regains their sight.     

We have to careful here.  Physical blindness is not a spiritual deficiency.  On the contrary, often those with a disability are able to perceive things others can’t, like Bartimaeus.  In Mark, sight serves as a metaphor for understanding the gospel of liberation – something the 12 disciples do not yet have, but Bartimaeus does.  Discipleship is “A way of seeing” as Chris W. talked about two weeks ago.    

We can carry this all the way through the end of Mark with some better theology around the crucifixion of Jesus.  For those of us still entranced with Roman style of power, Jesus’ violent death is a great unveiling.  To confess Jesus as human and divine and to witness his crucifixion is to see how the power of domination is ultimately an assault on humanity and divinity.  To experience the resurrection is to see there is a power even deeper than this, which rises up from death and offers life to all.       

That’s the cosmic vision Mark has in mind.  That’s where we’re headed on this road.  Resurrection is the ultimate encounter. 

But I want to end with something on a smaller scale – the scale of our daily lives, and what it might mean for us to live a life of service – to see with the eyes of the heart a bit more clearly.  I’ll take another cue from Chris’s sermon and end with a poem.  This one was sent to me this week by CMCer Susan A..

It includes the imagery of cupped hands, so as you listen, I invite you to cup your hands in front of, and receive these words:

Clearing

by Martha Postlethwaite

Do not try to serve
the whole world
or do anything grandiose. Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is yours alone to sing
falls into your open cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to the world
so worthy of rescue.

First Encounter: Wealth and Letting Go | 18 February 2024 | Lent 1

Text: Mark 10:17-31

On February 24, in the year 1208, a young man sat in a chapel listening to a sermon.  It was based on Jesus’ instructions to his disciples as he sent them out to spread his message:  “Take no gold, nor silver, nor money in your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor a staff…whatever town you enter, find someone in it who is worthy, and stay with them till you depart.” 

The young man was the son of a wealthy cloth dealer.  He had already begun to question the smooth, comfortable path he had inherited.  As his earliest biographer, Thomas of Celano tells it, that day, in that chapel, was the decisive moment.  Hearing Jesus’ words as a direct personal calling, he discarded his shoes and walking staff.  He began wandering the countryside and villages, preaching Jesus’ message to anyone who would listen.  We know him now as St. Francis, or Francis of Assisi – the peace-loving proto-Anabaptist, lover of birds and brother sun/sister moon, to whom is attributed the much-used prayer that begins, “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace…”       

It’s almost as if the story of Francis is the story of the biblical rich young man – with an alternative ending.  In Mark’s gospel, it’s the only story where Jesus invites someone to follow him, and they choose not to – a discipleship rejection story.  Rather than “your faith has made you well,” Jesus tells him something like “your wealth has made you ill.”  For the wealthy young Francis, it was a resounding Yes to the discipleship way, which had ripple effects across medieval Christianity, still felt in our time. 

When we hear stories like this, my hunch is we have a tendency to react in one of two ways. 

One is to see this as a unique calling to a select few.  Jesus, the great physician, diagnoses this young man as being possessed by his possessions; offers an extreme prescription for an extreme condition: Sell all you have and distribute it to the poor.  It’s a different ask than, say, Zacchaeus, who volunteered to give half his possessions to the poor and pay back four times anyone he had defrauded.  Or the many female disciples who, we are told, financed Jesus’ ministry out of their own resources.  Someone, after all, has to own and maintain those houses the wandering disciples are going to stay in when they enter the village.  And Saint Francis was, well, a saint with a special calling to revive the church.  

So one way to react to this story is to see it as just not applying to the majority of people – people like us.

The other primary way to respond, I’m imagining, is to see this as the truest form of Christianity that we simply don’t live up to.  Mennonites might have an added tendency to feel this way since we humbly pride ourselves on taking Jesus’ words seriously.  Jesus said “blessed are the peacemakers,” and “turn the other cheek,” and even “love your enemies.”  We don’t always know how to do this, but rather than try to explain it away we understand him as talking directly to us, his followers.  So when Jesus says, “sell all you have, and give it to the poor, and then come, follow me,” he’s sure talking to us.  But we’re just not quite willing to go all in.  We want to follow Jesus, but we also want – and need – our cars and clothes, our jobs and Roth IRAs.  So, in our minds, at least, we’re sort of second class disciples, feeling a slight nagging tinge of guilt, but not near enough to sign the deed of our house over to an impoverished person and just see where this discipleship adventure will take us. 

Either way – it’s a unique calling not for us; or, it’s a calling for us, just not, you know, for us – it keeps this story at arm’s length.  Either way, it’s not really for us.

Well, that’s no fun.  Of course it’s for us.  Maybe or maybe not in a Francis of Assisi kind of way, but it’s part of the gospel, and it’s for us.  And not just us as individuals, but as Mark is want to do, this story has something to say more broadly and symbolically about wealth and privilege, about how the kin-dom of God as a present this-moment reality is just very, very different than societal norms.

As Mark introduces it, this encounter happens as Jesus is setting out on a journey.  Soon we’ll learn this journey is headed to Jerusalem, where Jesus will confront the unjust collusion of power between the religious and political authorities, which will result in his execution by the state.  This year we’re sticking with Mark’s gospel all the way through Easter.  Our Lent theme highlights this journey Jesus makes and the encounters he has along the way. We are invited to find ourselves in each encounter. 

This is the first encounter of these encounters.

Mark 10:17 “As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  It’s that last phrase, “eternal life” that likely grabs our attention.  But Jesus doesn’t get past the first word: good.  “Why do you call me good?” Jesus asks back.  “No one is good but God alone.”  Well, this is an awkward way to kick off a conversation, especially for theologians trying to explain why Jesus doesn’t want to be called good or God. 

More contextually, this man is offering Jesus deference, a gift of public honor to someone who can perhaps give him something back – an answer to his question.  Whether it was intended as flattery or genuine respect, Jesus introduces tension by refusing the gift.  Now Jesus doesn’t owe him anything.  And when Jesus does proceed to answer his question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” he gives him nothing new to work with, reciting the basic commandments that informed Jewish life – You shall not murder, commit adultery, steal, bear false witness, or defraud.  Honor your father and mother.  Synagogue school 101.

In the marketplace of dialogue exchange, the man had offered Jesus a million-dollar honorary title, and asked for an answer to a million-dollar question.  Jesus takes the million-dollar bill, writes the ten commandments on it, and hands it back to him. 

But this man – again, out of a genuine quest for truth or a wish to maintain his own honor – we don’t know which one – persists. He says “I have kept all these since my youth.”

And do you know how Jesus responded to that? 

When this very wealthy man wondering how he can inherit eternal life says that he has kept all the commandments since his youth, Mark says Jesus looked at him….. and loved him.   Wow.

Yes, Jesus loves everybody, but this is only place in Mark’s gospel, besides when Jesus says you should love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself – this is the only other time when love, that word agape, is even mentioned – in all of Mark.  This non-disciple is the only person Mark feels compelled to tell us, Jesus loved. 

And that’s when Jesus says the really hard thing – the thing we still can’t wrap our heads around.  Tells him to liquidate all his assets – land, animals, houses, Roth IRAs – everything, redistribute it to the poor, and come join his band of social misfits on their way to Jerusalem for God-knows-why.  We can take Mark at his word that, upon hearing this, the man was shocked and went away grieving.  That’s straight out of the NRSV. “He was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”  And the disciples who witness this are shocked.  And we should be shocked too. 

I’ve had an evolving relationship with this story over the years.  As a youth who took the Bible very seriously, I was pretty sure it meant my life needed to head in the direction of becoming St. Francis 2.0.  Falling in love and getting married re-arranged some priorities, and then the year I turned 28 I became fully entrenched in a very non-Francis path.  Within the span of that one year I got my first full time job –  a pastor, opened my first retirement account, bought a first house and acquired a mortgage, and welcomed our first child.  Ironically, the year I became a professional Christian, which is kind of a pastor-joke, was the year my life took a decided turn away from that particular path of Christian discipleship described in Mark chapter 10. 

As I’ve embraced this householder stage of life, I’ve wondered how this story might sound different as an older adult.  If you are an older adult – you can self-identify, or not – you are living more closely with these questions of when and how to sell or give away your possessions.  Call it downsizing for Jesus.  Ironically again, it’s when one may feel that their best contributions to the world are behind them, at least professionally, that one can be more easily freed up to live a life closer to this form of discipleship – less encumbered by possessions, less restricted by every day obligations, more free to wander and engage in whatever encounters this brings about.  There’s a whole dense body of tradition in Asian Indian culture that celebrates these latter stages of life which are for everyone: the forest walkers and, finally, the renunciants.  The final two stages of life, and there’s only four.  The first two are the student and the householder.  And then the forest walker and the renunciant.      

Beyond all this, the part of the story I find most intriguing these days as a first world person who has had a pretty smooth path, all things considered, is the part of that man’s initial question that can get missed all together.  What must I do to inherit eternal life? 

Inherit is a word that has to do with the circumstances we’re born into not of our choosing.  In the ancient world, people weren’t wealthy because they had a brilliant idea for a tech start up.  This man, especially if he was a young man as Matthew says, would have inherited his wealth.  He was born into a family that controlled resources like land and labor, able to increase their holdings, typically on other’s misfortune – in a pre-industrial world where the pie stayed the same size, such that the more one had, the less others had. Now he wants to know how to inherit eternal life.  Which isn’t a great question, but it’s good enough to drive him to run up to Jesus and ask it.    

What if this is a story especially for those of us who have been born into circumstances of relative wealth, or with plenty of opportunities to accumulate wealth?  It’s a different world now, where the wealth pie can theoretically grow for all, but we know well the series of historical injustices that we’ve inherited.  What if we, like this young man, like Francis of Assisi, are invited to become dissatisfied with merely walking merrily along this smooth, comfortable road we have inherited?   

Jesus looks at us, and loves us, despite how hard it is for us to love ourselves.  Loves us so much, that he gives us a lifetime of work all in one helping.  Let go of everything.  We’ll all get there eventually.  But Jesus’ words are inescapably urgent for our current reality, and the possibility he calls the kingdom of God.  The present, now, kingdom of God in which we are all kin, the people and the nonhuman world on which we depend.  The kin-dom of God is defined not by an economics of accumulation, but an economics of justice. 

And we’re not there.  But if you want to follow Jesus, that’s where he’s headed, so we either follow or we don’t.  .

The young man doesn’t.  He goes away grieving because he has many possessions.  But I’m not willing to give up on him as a potential disciple.  Grief is a powerful force.  Grief takes time.  Grief, well grieved, matures into increasing clarity of what must be done now.  Grief, well grieved, can even empower us to live more fully into this new life that has opened up in front of us. 

This is the first encounter of Lent, and it’s quite a mix: the commandments, eternal life, wealth redistribution, inheritance, love and grief.  We walk this road with one another.  We walk this road with Jesus.    

“We Are Many” | 28 January 2024

Text: Mark 5:1-20

Where, oh where to begin?  This story of the Gerasene Demoniac is at times troubling, puzzling, and probably profound if we could only cut through the layers of cultural distance and hear it like Mark’s original audience 2000 years ago.  Or maybe they were just as baffled as we are.

Speaking of 2000, Why not start there?   

If you’re an animal lover, or just paying attention, it’s hard to get over those 2000 pigs rushing down the bank of the Sea of Galilee, drowning in the lake.  One minute they’re feeding peacefully on the hillside, the next they’re dead in the water.  All this with the seeming approval of our dear, precious, kind Jesus, who agrees to the plea bargain of the unclean spirits to possess the pigs rather than be cast out of the country.  If you’re a pig farmer, or grew up around pigs, you might be further scratching your head, knowing that pigs are excellent swimmers. 

Or, we could start a bit after that, with that wonderful phrase about this man post-possession – when he is sitting down with Jesus, “clothed, and in his right mind.”  It’s a good goal for anyone at the beginning of a day, to be clothed and in our right mind.  And if we manage the first, we don’t always pull off the second.  But he does, with Jesus’ help.  You’d think it would be something to celebrate after all he’s been through.  But when the townspeople come to see, Mark says they were afraid.  Afraid of what?  This man had been a nuisance at best, a terror at worst, howling night and day, harming himself with stones, breaking chains intended to restrain him.  But now he’s better.  He’s presentable.  He’s calm.  Maybe he’s even having full conversations at an appropriate volume.  What’s to fear?

We could start where the story itself starts.  Jesus and his disciples are getting off the boat, having crossed the Sea of Galilee.  Mark says they were now in the country of the Gerasenes, which is odd, because that town was 30 miles inland.  But the attention to geography fades quickly as they are immediately confronted by this man.  Along with the details of his condition I already mentioned, we’re told that he lives among the tombs, and that he has an unclean spirit.  For Jesus and his fellow Jewish companions, the tombs themselves would have been a source of uncleanness, not to mention those pigs.  Whereever they are, they are off the beaten kosher path.  Upon seeing his visitors come ashore, the man quickly runs from shouting distance all the way up to Jesus and bows down.  He then proceeds to shout “at the top of his voice,” begging Jesus not to torment him.  It’s a fair request from someone whose main interaction with people was them trying to chain him up. 

Or maybe we need to start even further back.  Last week Sarah Augustine continued our walk through Mark’s gospel by highlighting the parable of the growing seed in chapter 4.  It’s a chapter full of parables, drawn from the natural world, spoken to the vast crowds gathered around Jesus.  Mark notes that “he did not speak to them except in parables.”  Like the rest of Jesus ministry up to that point, all of this takes place around Jesus’ home region of Galilee, on the west side of the Sea of Galilee.

But then, abruptly, Jesus says something we haven’t heard yet:  “Let’s go across to the other side.”  Jesus had been in parable mode, so it’s tempting to shift away from that mindset, to stop listening for symbols and deeper meaning and just take things at face value – Now they’re going for a boat trip.

But if there’s one thing to know about Mark, it’s that he, as an author, never really leaves parable mode.  These stories are structured in a way that the structure itself has symbolic meaning.  The Sea of Galilee serves as this buffer zone between the familiar territory of Jewish Galilee on the west, and the unfamiliar territory of the Gentiles on the east, populated by unclean tombs and people, and swine.  It’s not actually how that world was perfectly divided, kind of like how you don’t actually get to the country of the Gerasenes right when you land on shore, but this is the symbolic world Mark offers.       

It’s a rough passage to the other side.  This first time, at the end of chapter 4, a great storm arises and almost sinks the boat until Jesus calms the waters.  In a later crossing, Jesus will, memorably, walk on the stormy water.  In Mark’s telling, the point isn’t so much a nature miracle, as it is an illustration of the turbulence one always faces when one decides to cross over to the other side. 

If you’ve ventured that journey yourself, you know what he’s talking about.  Perhaps you’ve headed to the other side by admitting, for the first time, powerlessness over an addiction.  Perhaps by letting go of religious certainties, crossing over into unchartered spiritual territory.  Maybe coming out to your family was the other side you decided you had finally arrived at.  Or it could be something brought on you with no choice of your own, like moving from childhood into adolescence, which we’ll celebrate in next Sunday’s Coming of Age service for our six graders.  Perhaps you have left a stable and perfectly sensible career to follow an inner calling.  You can decide to go to the other side, but there’s no guarantee you’re going to make it there alive.  Stormy waters await.  And if you do make it, you better be prepared for someone shouting in your face as soon as you get off the boat.    

Jesus says “Let’s go across to the other side” and this story of the Gerasene Demoniac, as it’s called, is what happens on the other side.  In case we missed it, at the end of the story, Jesus immediately crosses back over.  He will return later.  But for now, this is the other side.

So maybe that’s where we start.  We start by crossing over, with Jesus, to the other side.  It’s a miracle just to get there.  And we made it, alive, terrifying as it was.  And what awaits will most certainly be puzzling, troubling, and probably profound once we get our balance on land. 

On the other side, things are not always as they first appear.  As troubling as this individual is, coming from the tombs, shouting, there would be some comfort in knowing he is just that, an individual.  A troubled singular person in need of help.  Perhaps we can consult the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, name the pathology, and begin to reintegrate him into the good order of civilized society.  Surely this is what he, and the townspeople he lives near, have been hoping for this long time.  Surely this is what Jesus intends to do by healing him.

But there’s no need to go digging for a diagnosis.  When Jesus asks him to name himself, he already has the answer.  “My name is Legion,” he says, “for we are many.” 

The singular individual is a plural.  He’s many.  There’s a whole village in there. 

Legion referred to one thing – the largest military unit of the Roman army – a contingent of several thousand soldiers.  A legion enabled the occupying power to possess the land, which is to say, to control it, to order it for its own purposes, often against the will of those it was possessing.  Legions upheld the good order of civilized society.  A legion was many, and their presence was felt everywhere.

On the other side, things are not always as first they appear.  But they do reveal themselves in new ways.  If being possessed by a legion is the source of order and the good life and prosperity and contentment, as everyone knows, why is Legion, the one possessed, so…disorderly….so discontent…so violent and uncontainable….why does he make his bed among the dead?  Why is the Legion we meet the opposite of what we thought legions were doing for us? 

Jesus knows what he’s dealing with here.  And he had been reading up on the principles of nonviolence.  He recognizes that the human being in front of him is indeed a human being, just like him, just like his companions, albeit possessed by a harmful power.  A harmful power that possessed not just him, but whole region.  It was indeed many.  And it’s the harmful power Jesus confronts.  It’s the harmful power that will meet its end, from which Jesus liberates.  It’s the harmful possessing spirits that will be cast out.  And it is the humanity of the person, and potentially the whole community, that will be restored.

It’s hard to tell how subversive Mark is being here.  Is he going so far as telling a story about Jesus symbolically casting out the entire Roman possession of ancient Palestine?  No more legions, no more occupation, no more lies about what makes for a good and orderly existence?  It does make for pretty good knee-slapping Jewish humor for Jesus to get rid of the occupying Roman army and the legion of pigs all at the same time, drowned in the sea just like Pharaoh’s army long ago. Those poor pigs though.

It does explain why the townspeople are afraid rather than relieved when they find this formerly possessed man clothed and in his right mind.  They had been pretty convinced they were in their right mind, but now that order has been upset.  What if they too had been possessed without knowing it?  What if the order they bought into meant they too had been making their bed among the tombs, even though they couldn’t see them.  The man has been restored to wellbeing. But the community is suddenly off kilter.  What are they going to do without Legion? 

They beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood, which he does, crossing back over to the other side, leaving them and this man to sort through this new reality. 

There are many places one can begin to better understand this story – the swine, being clothed and in one’s right mind, coming ashore and the first encounter with this man, crossing over to the other side. 

But here is a pretty good place to end.  To stay on that other side, even after Jesus leaves, and to ask the kinds of questions those townspeople had to ask.  What might be possessing us without our knowing?  What if the order we have bought into is an agent of death rather than life?  Can we even imagine a life held together by something other than the legions?

Jesus will return, back to the other side to check in on us.  He will spread a feast for the multitude, a story that Mark tells twice, once on one side of the lake, and the other on the other side.  We won’t have it all figured out yet, but we will all eat our fill, with an abundance of leftovers.  And we will wonder whether this is the picture of the community we’ve been searching for.        

Yours is the Kin-dom | 14 January 2024

Texts: Mark 3:1-21,31-35

Back in March of 2020 David Brooks wrote a long essay for The Atlantic called “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.”  That title is only slightly misleading.  Brooks isn’t against the nuclear family – a married couple and their kids.  He acknowledges the benefits that have come with less rigid extended family structures.  But he does lay out a pretty good case for why the isolated nuclear family unit is less than ideal.  I won’t recap his whole argument, but do recommend reading the essay.  Here are a few highlights:

The nuclear family peaked around 1960, when over three quarters “of all (US) children were living with their two parents, who were married, and apart from their extended family.”  Today’s reality looks much different, and 1960 was a massive shift from a century before when “roughly three-quarters of Americans older than 65 lived with their kids and grandkids” – a much more historically normal arrangement across cultures.  Brooks names the small window of 1950-65 as “a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.”  Yet that’s the ideal that stuck.    

He writes: “If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children… The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.”

The family is where we care for each other.  It’s a place where we relate in non-transactional ways – we don’t swipe our credit card every time we sit down for a meal.  Family units are safety nets.  When one member gets sick, others fill in as needed.  If a member has a disability, they can contribute in other ways without being defined by the disability.  It’s in families that children learn who they are and are given support to become who they might be.  In families, we are free to drop our public persona and, quite literally, kick off our shoes.  Families are messy places, and where we practice unconditional love. 

We need all this so much that when biological families aren’t this for us, whether nuclear or extended, we seek out ways to re-create this through chosen families – or “foraged families,” as David Brooks calls them.

For those of us living in 21^st century America, perhaps with some living memories of mid-century 20^th century America, reading the Bible is a cross-cultural experience.  This is very much the case when it comes to issues of kinship and family.  When Mark notes that Jesus’s mother and his brothers and sisters were standing outside the house where he was staying, trying to get his attention, Mark is evoking a kinship network common to many cultures around the world, but mostly foreign to our own.        

Although we might imagine Jesus as this unattached, wandering teacher and healer, he was very much embedded in a family network, like everyone in his time.  There’s that story early in Luke where the young Jesus gets left behind in Jerusalem as his parents travel back to Nazareth after the Passover festival.  It takes Mary and Joseph a whole day’s journey before they realize Jesus isn’t with them.  This is not a commentary on their poor parenting, but on the nature of extended kinship groups.  Surely he was playing around with his second cousins 100 yards ahead, or hearing stories from his great-uncle-once-removed a hundred yards back.  Maybe helping his great-great aunt carry her load in this large caravan of interwoven kinship bonds.  When they get curious and start looking for Jesus among the relatives, sure enough, he’s not there. 

Both Matthew and Luke list long genealogies for Jesus that speak not only of bloodlines, but storylines.  Who your father is and who his father was is even part of your name.  Like James and John sons of Zebedee.  Or, more directly, Bartimaeus, which means son of Timaeus.  It tells others about your craft, your place in the community, your obligations, even your personality.  It’s not that you’re an individual who happens to be in a family, it’s that the family is made up of persons, and you’re one of them, helping keep the family going from one generation to the next.

When your father is part of your very name, it’s worth noting when the father is the one who goes missing.  Mark 3:31: “Then Jesus’ mother and brothers came and, standing outside, they sent to him and called him.”  Scholars have suggested that Joseph’s absence here means he had already died.  They’ve also pointed out that, by mentioning Jesus’ siblings, Mark was apparently unaware of the later church doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary.  All this gets repeated just a few chapters later when Jesus is back in Nazareth, his hometown, along with his brothers James and Joses and Judas and Simon and sisters, who don’t get named.  The townsfolk refer to Jesus as “the son of Mary.”  It was not customary – or kind – to refer to a grown man as the son of his mother.  Reading the Bible is a cross-cultural experience.

So what’s going on here, when Jesus’ nuclear family, minus Joseph, embedded in the larger kingship system, is standing on the outside, trying, through the crowd, to have a talk with Jesus?  Well, Mark already told us a few verses earlier:

“Then Jesus went home, and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat.  When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’”    

Jesus is likely the oldest son, the firstborn, and his father is likely dead, and he has certain obligations to fulfill for his kinship group that don’t involve attracting such big crowds he can’t even eat.  But even with those likelihoods aside, we have a situation in which the entire meaning of kinship, and what it means to be embedded in such a network of relationships, is up for grabs.    

If you’ve been around this congregation for a while you’ve probably noticed that we often do a thing with the phrase kingdom of God.  When we write it, we replace the g in kingdom with a hyphen.  When we speak it, we say “Kin-dom of God.”  One reason is our evolving commitment to gender inclusive language.  Just because empires typically had kings and were called ‘kingdoms,’ doesn’t mean God’s empire is led by a male deity. 

Beyond that, kin-dom shifts the metaphor entirely, while holding true to the core message of Jesus.  Rather than use the language of empire to describe what God is up to in our world, it uses the language of family, an extended kinship network that breaks the bounds of anything previously practiced or imagined.  I think there is some loss in not holding up the kingdom of God as an alternative vision to the kingdom of Rome, and all the political implications that go with that, but we still use that language some too.

This passage in Mark 3 is one of the key foundations of the kin-dom of God.  When Jesus is told that his mothers, brothers, and sisters are asking for him, he does a pretty surprising thing.  He asks a question that seems to have an obvious answer: “Who are my mother and my brothers, and my sisters?”  Well, everyone knew the answer to that, including Jesus but of course he’s doing a Jesus thing and providing new possibilities to old questions.  Mark says he proceeded to look around the room at everyone who was sitting around him.  He’s looking at those sisters and brothers from other lineages, those fathers of other clans, those children of other mothers.  All those eager faces that had crowded in to hear a fresh word and perhaps glimpse a new reality in their lives. 

“Here they are,” Jesus says.  This is my mother.  And you are my sister.  And he is my brother.  I’m family with whoever does the will of God.  Which is to say, the family I’m giving my loyalty to is open to anyone. 

It’s not that Jesus is rejecting his family outside – he cares for his mother even in his dying breath on the cross when he asks John to care for her as if she is his own.  It’s not that Jesus is going to write a piece for The Atlantic – The Mediterranean? – titled “The extended kinship system was a mistake.”  It’s that he believes kinship is so vital — belonging to one another, caring for one another, having an extensive network of non-transactional relationships and practicing unconditional love – that it shouldn’t be limited to who your father and the town where you were born.   The Kin-dom of God is this all-encompassing reality that effects all relationships, including our bloodlines and storylines.  Maybe Jesus is out of his mind.  Maybe he’s on to something.    

Toward the end of his essay, David Brooks makes a non-profound observation that had more profound implications than I was anticipating.  He notes, unsurprisingly, that there is a direct linkage between affluent nations and the reduction of extended family ties, not just in our biological families, but in the amount of people we share life with in family-like ways.    

Then, he drops this line: “The market wants us to live alone or with just a few people. That way we are mobile, unattached, and uncommitted, able to devote an enormous number of hours to our jobs.”

It makes me think even more that the Kin-dom of God is the right framing for our time.  Just as Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God as the alternative vision to the primary ordering power of his day – the Roman Empire, so the Kin-dom of God presents an alternative vision to the primary ordering power of our day – Consumer/Conformist Extractive Capitalism.  To be loyal to the Kin-dom of God is to take one’s cues from a different set of priorities than the system that wants to extract everything, including one’s time and energy, for its own profit. 

How dense of a global network of non-transactional relationships grounded in spirituality does it take before the current economic model destroying our planet starts to shift?

Next week Sarah Augustine, a Native American/Mennonite woman from the Pacific Northwest is going to be our preacher.  She’ll be speaking about reverence.  She’ll draw from the next chapter of Mark, chapter 4, in which Jesus speaks of the natural world, seeds and soil, as a revelation of the very thing he’s talking about.  The web of kin-ship in God’s green earth extends well-beyond the human world to everything that sustains life.  The sun, the moon, trees, and air are also our mother, and our sisters, and our brothers.  I think St. Francis had a thing or two to say about that.  What if we actually believed that and lived accordingly?

To only slightly modify Jesus’ first words in Mark: The Kin-dom of God is very, very near.  Repent, and believe the good news. 

Starting with Solitude | 7 January 2024

Text: Mark 1:12-2:4

Today’s readings from Mark begin with Jesus alone in the wilderness, and end with Jesus surrounded by so many people a group of friends has to remove part of a roof just to get to him.  There’s enough that goes on in between it’s hard to keep pace. 

Jesus emerges from the wilderness with a message so short it can almost fit on a bumper sticker: “The time is fulfilled, the kin-dom of God has come near.”  Mark, and Jesus, call this, simply, good news, or gospel.  Jesus proceeds to recruit two sets of brothers, all fishermen; teach in a synagogue and cast out a harmful spirit; restore one of those brother’s mother-in-law back to health; go on a campaign across his home region of Galilee proclaiming his message and driving out more harmful spirits; restore a man with a dreaded skin condition back to full fellowship in the community; and land in a house where people are so eager to be in his presence they’re willing to dismantle whatever barriers there may be between them and him – in this case a thatched roof.  All that and we’re just barely out of Mark chapter 1.  Very soon the crowds will get so dense Jesus will need to get into a boat and push out into the Sea of Galilee in order to teach those on the shore– as if there isn’t room left for him on land to even stand.      

Of the four New Testament gospels, Mark is the fastest paced, the shortest and, very likely, the first written.  When the generation that’s been telling these stories for decades is close to dying off, you better hurry up and find a way to piece it all together. 

It’s no surprise some of the urgency of the task shows up in how the final text reads.   Better get used to it.  The Narrative Lectionary has us sprint-walking through Mark till Easter.

Stories of a formerly unknown figure rising to mass popularity aren’t especially unique.  But there’s a break in the crescendo of Mark chapter 1 that seems significant to the Jesus story.  Verse 35: “In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.”  Simon and his companions have to actually hunt him down and remind him of the obvious: “Everyone is searching for you,” they say.  Indeed. 

It wasn’t the first, and it won’t be the last time Jesus pursues solitude.  It’s what he’s doing when 5000 people go searching for him and forget to pack a lunch, so Jesus feeds them with five loaves and two fish.  It’s what he’s doing before he meets a Syro-Phoenician woman who disrupts not just his solitude, but also his self-understanding, afterwards expanding his mission to the Gentiles.  It’s what Jesus does in the Garden of Gethsemane when Rome’s soldiers are closing in, and he knows the end is near.

It appears, amidst the growing crowds and conflicts, Jesus is always trying to return to the place where he started, right after his baptism – the solitude of the wilderness. 

Seeking solitude is a good practice for the beginning of a new year.  Whether or not you’re into New Year’s resolutions.  Whether or not you find January 1 a mostly arbitrary point to change calendars.  Here we are at the beginning of something, and here we are with an opportunity to have that something that we give ourselves to be defined by more than whatever the strong current of culture or habit would have us do.  Or, to make a more direct reference to Mark, more than what the crowds want or expect. 

Solitude, and the open heart and listening ears we bring to it, is one of the most powerful practices we have to make ourselves available to the deeper currents of soul and spirit that flow within us. 

I’ve shared before about our family’s usual way of ending one year and beginning the next – we make the long drive out to Western Kansas to celebrate Christmas and New Years with Abbie’s family.  When we’re mostly there, about 1/3^rd of the way into Kansas on I-70, after passing through the Flint Hills, the landscape flattens out even more, the sky keeps getting bigger, and towns are so spread out they start advertising themselves hundreds of miles in advance.  And I hear those perennial Advent words of Isaiah still fresh in my mind:, “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low, the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.”  It’s a remarkable way to end a year, driving straight into some kind of fulfilled prophesy.  Like the first words of Jesus in Mark: “The time is fulfilled, the kin-dom of God has come near: repent and believe the good news.” 

This is it.  This is the time you’ve been waiting for.  It’s all right here.  Can you believe it?!

As an Ohio native, used to being surrounded by remnants of the Eastern temperate forest, it’s the massive sky and open landscape that get me every time.  If life at home feels full and a bit closed in, that space feels spacious and unhurried.  Big enough to hold anything – like the year ahead. 

Kansas is an ancient seabed that dried up around the time the dinosaurs went the way of the dinosaurs.  Now one can stand in an ocean of wheat and prairie grasses, as long as the wind doesn’t blow you over.  When you can breathe air at the bottom of the sea, anything feels possible. 

It’s a place that draws you into solitude even if you’re surrounded by people.  It’s a good time to listen to the open spaces within oneself.  It’s a good time to consider one’s life on the scale of millions of years.  It’s a good time to let solitude teach you how to close up one year and enter the next.  It’s that return, time and again, back to the wilderness. At least that’s how I’ve experienced it over the years – the gospel according to Kansas.  Maybe each of you have a place like that.  I hope so.

It may seem risky or misguided to prescribe solitude in a culture that has been diagnosed with an epidemic of loneliness.  This is a very real problem and I think about it often.  I worry about it for my kids and parents and culture.  Maybe worrying about other people’s loneliness is a way of avoiding one’s own loneliness. 

This is one of the gifts I think the church has for the world.  At our best, we’re a community that shows up and takes care of each other, despite not being related by blood, or having the same hobbies, or whatever it is that usually draws people out of their separateness.  It’s the kind of community Jesus was calling together when he went around Galilee speaking and touching and welcoming and driving out harmful spirits.  The kind of work he knew needed to be sustained with solitude.   Which is different than aloneness, and certainly different than loneliness. 

It was the poet Marrrianne Moore who wrote “The cure for loneliness is solitude.”  Loneliness cuts us off from others, shrinks our world, but solitude expands it, puts us in deeper communion with ourselves, our ancestors, the nonhuman world, God.   

When Jesus enters solitude, Mark says he prays.  Which is another way of saying he communes with the most spacious, most life giving, most generative aspect of reality he can fathom.  He is away from the crowds, but he is anything but alone.  He’s kneeling on earth that catches seeds and multiplies them into a harvest that feeds the multitudes.  He’s breathing in 70 million year old molecules that have been circulating since the time Kansas looked like a vast Sea of Galilee.  Exhaling them for the olive trees to take their turn.  He’s saying ‘your will be done,’ and he’s not saying this to Caesar or the crowds or his ego, but to a great Mystery he’s still coming to terms with.          

In solitude, we are perhaps more connected to what is real and what is good and what is worthy of our life energies, than we are when we are in the flow of village life, surrounded by people and tasks.  We are anything but alone.  The cure for loneliness, the poet says, is solitude. 

Solitude may be exactly what the Spirit prescribes, sometimes whether we like it or not.  The same word used for Jesus casting out, driving out, throwing out, the demons and harmful spirits throughout the Galilean countryside, is the same word used for the Spirit casting, throwing, Jesus into the wilderness in the first place after he’d been baptized by John in the Jordan River.  Mark  1:12: “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.” 

In his first recorded instance of solitude, Jesus is essentially exorcised from society by the Spirit, and, having been cast out by the Divine Spirit, becomes filled with that same Spirit in such a way that when he re-enters his culture, he does so with a power and perspective he would not have had had the Spirit not cast him out in the first place.  In other words, the God-given gifts of his solitude go with him as he does what he knows he must do, as he proclaims and lives out a kin-dom that has indeed arrived.  And he returns to that solitude in regular patterns in order to replenish those very gifts that need to be given through him.

What if, when Jesus calls the fishermen to follow him, when he takes his ailing mother-in-law by the hand and welcomes her into discipleship, he is asking them to follow him not just among the crowds, but into a life that includes solitude and prayer?

So, this year started a little different….Rather than going to Kansas for New Years, Kansas came to us – as did Pennsylvania and South Carolina, the other places Abbie’s siblings and kids live.  Our first year of hosting the family holiday gathering.  And I’ll just tell you that having a guys’ night out at Pins Mechanical at Bridge Park Dublin with four elementary aged nephews squealing with glee at the free arcades and cheap pin ball machines, almost loud enough to hear them over the blasting greatest hits of the 90s and a thousand other people all around you is indeed a good time but isn’t quite the same as going for a solo jog into a massive Kansas sunset, pondering geological time and the fulfillment of prophesy.    

Sometimes you have to work a little harder to find your solitude. 

It’s the first Sunday of 2024, and if you haven’t yet found your solitude to begin the year, this service could be it.  Take a deep breath and tune in to the currents of soul and spirit flowing deep within.  Let this guide you during these days of war and rumors of war, in your work and your play, your relatioships with those dearest to you and those it takes every ounce of will to love.  And be prepared, the Spirit might exorcise you from the flow of daily life at any point into the gifts of solitude.     

Jesus said the time is fulfilled, the kin-dom is here, believe the good news.  Solitude is a way of getting in touch with this deepest of realities, then living as if it is indeed true.  It that spirit, we’ll have an extended time of silence, three minutes, before singing our response song.