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“Scandals, Stumbling Blocks, and Stumblers for Love” |
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Sermon Preached By The Rev. Bruce Sanguin Mark 9:38-50 Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29 |
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Both readings today deal with the tendency of human beings to put obstacles in the way of the wild Spirit. Moses is exhausted, riding herd on an unhappy lot of Hebrews wandering, hungry and thirsty, through the desert. The people are, he complains to God, “too heavy for me.” So God anoints 70 elders with the Spirit to share the load. But two others who weren’t supposed to get anointed receive the Spirit anyway, and they start to act like prophets. This causes enormous consternation in the people. These two didn’t follow the rules. They weren’t in the tent at the appointed hour and they weren’t among the seventy chosen, so who exactly did they think they were, carrying on as though the Spirit was upon them? Moses shakes his head. At that moment in time, he’d be OK if the whole lot of them were anointed by the Spirit. He expresses the attitude of just about every clergy person I’ve ever met. The Spirit doesn’t play favourites. We’re building a culture here based on the belief that no one is safe from the Spirit, church members or not.
Similarly, a couple of disciples catch some nobody casting out demons in Jesus’ name, and try to stop him. Jesus, on the other hand, is fine with it. A demon is a demon is a demon. Think of a demon as any power that’s getting in the way of a deeper relationship with God. Who cares, says Jesus, who’s casting it out or if they are using my name. As long as the “deed of power” is for good and not ill, no problem. “Whoever is not against us, is for us”, Jesus corrects them. Does that phrase sound familiar to you? President Bush famously reversed the sentence structure, five years ago, threatening the nations of the world with his own version, or rather per-version, “Whoever is not for us, is against us”, a subtle, yet scandalous reversal.
Same words as Jesus, just scrambled in the service of Empire. It is the rhetoric of war. Empires like to divide the world up into black and white, good and evil, pure and impure. Allegiance is demanded, under threat of violence, withdrawal of favours, or economic penalty. Canada wisely decides not to support the criminal invasion of Iraq. We’re cast out of the in-group called the “coalition of the willing.” I wonder, would we be in Afghanistan today if we weren’t under pressure to join the club? I worked on a psychiatric ward for three years. The most dreaded diagnosis for the nursing staff was borderline personality disorder. It just took one patient with this diagnosis to wreak havoc on the whole floor. You always knew if a new patient was borderline because within a 24 hour period, they had the staff and the other patients at each other’s throats. They divided everybody up into two camps, the good guys and the evil-doers, the pure and impure. No middle ground. On a psychiatric ward, the damage can be contained. On the world stage, this attitude of whoever is not for us being against us, can spread completely out of control.
Notice, on the other hand, how Jesus’ attitude gives more latitude; it’s more conducive to peace. You don’t have to be one of his followers to be on his side. It’s a much more roomy, inclusive stance. No secret passwords, you don’t have to believe what we believe, do what we do, or join our gang. What matters is that as many people as possible engage in what Mark calls “deeds of power”. I don’t know exactly what Jesus meant by this, but knowing Jesus, it would have something to do with loving with all your heart and soul and mind.
Anyone with an open heart is a friend of Jesus, Jew, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. Anybody, religious or not, in possession of an extravagant love is a friend of Christ. We all know lots of people who would never darken the door of a church, and yet love with all their hearts. On the other hand, I know a lot of Christians, who are doing all kinds of deeds in Jesus’ name, but are they aren’t the deeds of power Jesus had in mind. For example, was the Pope acting in the spirit of Christ recently, when he chose to quote the words of a 15th century Pope which was militantly anti-Islamic? Could he really have been so naïve as to believe that the press would take the time to set this paragraph in context? It was an academic lecture for goodness sake. At best it was mischievous. At worst, it was scandalous.
The Greek word, “scandalons”, is translated in our Bible passage this morning as “stumbling blocks”. An action or statement is scandalous, that is, a stumbling block, when it incites others to sin. An intentionally provocative statement is scandalous. Scandalous behaviour often results in violence. When President Bush declared what amounted to an ultimatum, “whoever is not for us, is against us”, it was scandalous. It was a declaration of war. A hundred people die every single day in Iraq, and have been dying at this rate for the last five years. In one month more people die in Iraq than died in the attacks of 9-11. Think twin towers, month after month after month. The United State’s own intelligence confirms that there are there are now more terrorists in the world than before the “war on terror” began. This declaration of war was scandalous. It was a deed of power, but it’s not the exercise of power Jesus had in mind.
But let’s bring it closer to home. Stumbling blocks are not all external, are they? They are more than “cultural snares, economic enticements, social temptations, or political seductions.” (Bible Workbench, p.122, Herman C. Waetjen) We are forced to contend as well with inner scandals or stumbling blocks, attitudes and behaviours which alienate us from God, self, neighbour and the earth. Jesus says that if our hand, foot, or eye causes us to sin, we’d be better to excise the offending limb or organ, than to enter hell with all our body parts in tact. It’s a rather gruesome image, and we shouldn’t take it literally. Thank God, or we’d all be walking around with several missing bits, I suspect!
What he’s saying is that our spiritual nature is meant to govern our physical bodies. When we find ourselves using, say our hand, to take something that doesn’t belong to us, to hit a child, or to touch another inappropriately, it’s a sign that our physical impulses are governing our spiritual selves. Something is seriously out of whack.
Jesus invites us to look at both social, political, and economic stumbling blocks, as well as inner scandals, psychological, emotional and spiritual scandals that are causing us to be alienated from God and our own spiritual nature. Anything which keeps us from being intimately related to God and acting from a spiritual center is scandalous. It is an offence, because it is the cause of all sin. Each of us has our distinctive stumbling blocks which keep us from a holy intimacy. Followers of the Christ need to identify them, so that we can, by God’s grace, remove them.
This past week, I was reflecting on my own scandalous behaviour. I realized that one of my greatest stumbling blocks was fear of my own power. If I keep my self small, and dim my inner light, I won’t have to deal with my power. This kind of self-diminishment can pass for humility, but this is just as much a ruse of the ego as puffing oneself up. Here’s one of my stumbling blocks then, a true inner scandal; the illusion that it’s all about me, for good or ill. It’s all about God, of course. If my inner light, or yours’, want to shine like a thousand suns, then for God’s sake, let it shine! It’s a borrowed light, any way.
Which brings us back to where we started. You might be visiting the church for the first time this morning. Or you may be a relative newcomer, thinking that you don’t belong. You might be of a different faith. Well, here’s what we know. The Spirit doesn’t play favourites. We know that the Spirit of God is upon you, and that you bring as much light to us, as you’re ever going to receive from us. We know that our light is brightened by your presence. You don’t have to be a part of the in-group to be a vehicle of Christ’s love and peace. We know that. Bruce Cockburn ends one of his songs with what amounts to a benediction,
“Come all you
stumblers, who believe loves rules.
The church is nothing other than a movement of spiritual stumblers, dedicated to overcoming the scandalous attitudes, behaviours, and actions, within and without, which get in the way of the news which is too good not to be true, that we were made for love. The more we give into it, the brighter the light of the Spirit shines. Let’s go into the world and perform deeds of power, to make this world a better place. |
