Nearly thirty years ago this week, in
the fall of 1989, I was in the first few weeks of a life-long journey of
learning and education in Mrs. Webb’s Kindergarten class at Windham Elementary
School in Daleville, Alabama. Little did I know, though, that 200 miles away,
over six hundred people packed themselves into a room decorated with stained
glass and appointed with nice, wooden furniture in order to (at least in some
of their minds) determine the fate of one of their partners (some of you were
there), You see, thirty years ago this past Tuesday, September 25, 1988, this
church elected two women to serve as deacons: Peggy Hamby and the late Dean
Norton. It was a decision that caused a bit of an uproar with the Calhoun
Baptist Association, leading to a vote to bar this church from the association.
One of the pastors present at the meeting addressed the messengers (those
officially recognized as representatives in such meetings) and said, “God
created man to be head of the house. The Bible says a deacon is to rule his own
house. That would mean that if a woman was elected a deacon, she would have to
rule over her husband,” which, in his mind, meant that this church’s decision
was unbiblical, against the teachings of Scripture. When the vote was taken,
331 messengers voted to expel our church; 269 voted against.
Just
prior to that vote, however, Lee Messer (a long-time member, deacon, and lay
minister in this church) said these words: “Regardless of tonight’s action, we
will continue to support the Calhoun Baptist Association through our gifts,
service, and prayers in the collective evangelical and humanitarian goals of
the association. Our church has and will continue to promote the ‘harmonious
working together of churches’ within the association. We will continue to
aspire, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to consummate our objectives of
reaching people, discipling believers, and strengthening missions both at home
and abroad.”[1]
Now,
I wasn’t there. Some of you were. I can’t help but think, though, that maybe it
felt a bit like those 331 folks (and countless others) were saying to Jesus,
“We saw someone doing good work in your name, and we tried to stop them, because they weren’t with us.”
Doesn’t it feel just a bit like that? Of course, we’d never find ourselves on
the giving end of that, would we? Not like those first disciples of Jesus,
right?
Mark
doesn’t give us a ton of narrative detail here. I mean, it’s telling (I think)
that he places this scene in the same line with the disciples’ argument about
who’s the greatest, extra-best disciple, but Mark doesn’t really let us in on
the details of their encounter with this rogue exorcist or what it was that
prompted their telling Jesus. Maybe they wanted to try to sound “holier,”
purer, in contrast to this other person whom Jesus obviously did not know. I do
wonder, though, what prompted the whole thing—why these disciples felt that
they had to shut this guy up—why did they feel like they had to stop him?
Maybe
they were on a working lunch break, a collective debriefing of the work Jesus
had sent them out to do way back in chapter 6, when Jesus “began to send them out two by
two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits… So they went out and
proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with
oil many who were sick and cured them.”[2]
Maybe they had finished lunch and as they were leaving the restaurant, laughing
about that one time in that one place, they noticed him across the street,
surrounded by a bunch of folks. Maybe he was wearing a WWJD bracelet, might’ve had
a Bible in his hand, but there he was, casting out demons—doing the work Jesus
had sent them to do. Maybe it was
jealousy that caused them to stop him: I mean, he was casting out demons, and if you look back just a few verses in
chapter nine you’ll read a story there about a man who brings his son to Jesus:
“Teacher,
I brought you my son; he has a spirit that makes him unable to speak; and
whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth
and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could
not do so.”[3]
Surely Jesus’ disciples don’t stop this man because it looks like he’s doing
the actual work they’re supposed to be doing, right? I mean, that’s not the
kind of thing that happens today is it?
I
recently read the story of another pastor who had been serving a small
congregation right out of seminary. He had done his best there. When he
arrived, the church had about fifty or sixty folks meeting for worship, most of
them in their latter years of life. Through his leadership and efforts, the
church began to show signs of growth: they were up to around eighty or so in
worship, had baptized close to a dozen folks in three years—more than anyone
could remember in recent years. But there were folks in that church who thought
the pastor was wrong; they didn’t like him. So, they made his life miserable;
claimed the church was falling apart (contrary to all the evidence around
them), interrupted him with complaining phone calls while he was at home or on
vacation, one member of this little gang even accused this pastor of having an
affair! It became so much that one Sunday he had made up his mind to end his
life that morning in his office. His son walked in as he was tying the
noose…instead of his life, the congregation got his resignation. A few folks
were jealous that the church was actually growing and thriving, just not the
way they thought it should and with little or no help from them. Surely Jesus’
disciples didn’t stop this man because it looked like he was doing the actual
work they were supposed to be doing, right? Surely they weren’t embarrassed,
envious, or frustrated because he was doing what they were supposed to be
doing…right? Because they thought that his success, his effectiveness surely
meant their failure?
Well,
maybe they just didn’t think he was doing it the right way. After all, there’s
a right and wrong way to do things isn’t there? I mean, you’ve got to follow
the guidebook, stick with tradition, technique, and tried-and-true methods of
success. You can’t go off-script, off the beaten path, forging your own way,
especially not when it comes to the Lord’s work! It’s like that time at a
Backyard Bible Club, I was sitting beside a little boy during the craft time.
We were making what they called “Salvation bracelets,” you know the kind: a
piece of leather or string with different color beads that represent different
things, so you can tell the “plan of salvation.” Anyhow, this boy proceeds to
skip the whole order, the whole color scheme in fact, and puts some pink beads
on with some red beads, clear beads, etc. The craft instructor stops him, tells
him he’s doing it wrong, that he can’t tell the story about Jesus with those
beads and those colors, to which he says, “Well, I was just making it for my
momma.” I feel pretty sure he could tell his momma the love of Jesus.
Maybe
this guy just wasn’t doing it right. Maybe he didn’t offer an invitation after
the exorcism. Maybe he didn’t say “in Jesus’ name” the right way. Maybe he was
from the wrong part of town, was wearing the wrong clothes, from the wrong
political party, affiliated with the wrong groups, or (heaven forbid) he went
to the wrong school or no school at all. Either way, though, you’ve got to do
things the right way, right? Jesus doesn’t seem to think so: “Do
not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon
afterward to speak evil of me.” “If he’s doing it for the right reason,
if he’s really doing it in my name,
he won’t be able to speak evil of me, to take advantage, to lead folks too far
down the wrong path.” After all, Jesus says, “Whoever is not against us is for
us.”
Now,
I want you to pay careful attention to how Jesus says that. Notice he does NOT
say, “Whoever is not for us is against us.” No, that implies that everyone has
to be alike, on the same page, conformed to the standards of one another. What
Jesus says is “Whoever is not against us is for us.” That implies that there
are folks who aren’t in the same category, doing things exactly the same way,
believing all the same things, thinking all the same ways as one another who
are, in fact, “for” the work of Jesus. “Whoever is not against us,” Jesus
says, “is for us,” but why are so many of his followers then and now
so eager to find somebody to be against?
I
suppose there’s some comfort, some strange comfort, in having someone to call
“other,” someone to be against. I suppose if you can point a finger at someone
who is different, someone you judge to be outside the purview of what is
accepted, there may be a temptation to believe that you yourself are somehow
better than that person. I guess we need to find those whom we’re against or
those who are against us so that we can name someone, something, some movement
as an enemy, a target for our own deflected sense of failure, someone upon whom
we can throw our fears, frustrations, and anxiety. It’s an age-old practice
really: when things weren’t going so well for the Roman emperor Nero, he blamed
the Christians and set fire to Rome; when once-wealthy, white slave owners in
the South began to lose money after the Civil War, it was all too easy to place
the blame on the newly-liberated slaves, to dehumanize them and create a
narrative that has fueled hate to this day; when the Germans struggled to find
prosperity in the wake of World War II, the Nationalist Socialist Party and its
charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler focused the blame on the Jewish people of
Germany, claiming that they were at the heart of a conspiracy to take over the
world and ruin the German people. It seems to just be woven into the very
fabric of human DNA: when things don’t go the way we want them, when someone
else seems to be thriving while we’re staying still or declining, we label them
as “other,” as outsiders disrupting our way of life, or worst of all, we call
them enemies and fight them.
Now,
I don’t think the disciples intended to fight this other exorcist, but I do
think they saw in him an easy way to focus their frustrations with their own
failures. And I think Jesus knows what’s at the heart of their confession here.
I think it’s why he says to them, “For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a
cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose
the reward.” What does that mean? It means that the line of fellowship,
the line of cooperation is drawn—not by shared beliefs, doctrines, or
interpretations—but by the very acts of care, generosity, and love. After all,
if anyone is really against us, if anyone is really attempting to thwart the
good work Christ is calling us to do in transforming this world by the lived-in
reality of God’ love, if anyone is really holding us up from what Jesus calls
us to do, it’s us. We are the
ones—the only ones—who hold the power to prevent us from sharing God’s love
with the world, from doing the work to which Christ has called us, and it’s us—the
ones who are so quick to call on Jesus’ name—who are responsible for making
sure others are empowered and encouraged in doing the good work of Christ.
That’s exactly why Jesus says, “If any of you put a stumbling block before
one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a
great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.”
In other words, “If any of you who think you’re doing my work, cause someone
else to give up, to call it quits, to question the very work they’re doing and
the nature of their relationship to the One who has called them to do it—it’d
be better for you to be dragged to the bottom of the ocean to drown!”
We
can get caught up—can’t we?—in believing that what matters is whether or not
others are doing right, whether or not others are living the way we think they
ought to be living, whether others are falling in line with our understanding
of Scripture, our understanding of the world, our understanding of a live well-lived.
We can get so caught up in how someone else offends us or our sensibilities
that we forget that the worst offender is us. That’s the point of these
gruesome, graphic words from Jesus: “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it
off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go
to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut
it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be
thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is
better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes
and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never
quenched.” Now, can I tell you something? I’ve known a lot of fundamentalists
in my life who claim they follow a literal interpretation of Scripture, but
every last one of them had both hands, both feet, and both eyes!
Now,
I think there are some folks who want to get all caught up in Jesus talking
about Hell (lit. Gehenna), fire that never quenches, an all that jazz, as if
this is some grand proclamation by Jesus about eternal, conscious, physical
torment, but what is at the heart of his words is a deeper, more sobering
truth. Yes, Jesus talks about fire, about someone being thrown “whole hog” into
hell, and that’s actually the point: this fire is for those who are so
concerned for their own well-being, so convinced of their own
self-righteousness, that they refuse to separate themselves from it, so they
are separated from God, because they’d prefer to be separate from others—others
they are so deeply convinced are themselves deserving of separation and hell.
To them (to us) Jesus says, “For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt
is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt
in yourselves, and be at peace with one another." In other words, everyone
gets a little taste of this fire, for it burns away our ignorance and
selfishness, seasoning us in the saltiness of Christ’s love, in the peace that
can only come when we stop looking for the differences in others, for their
shortcomings, the ways they don’t fit, the ways they are out of line with our
expectations—the peace that can only come when we realize that those who aren’t
against us are for us—and there are more for us than we can ever imagine,
including Christ himself. Amen.
[1] People Who Shared a Vision: History of the
Church at Williams: 1850-2000. P.99.
[2]
Mark 6:7, 12-13
[3]
Mark 9:17-18
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