18th Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 9:38-50

There’s a saying that, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

But in today’s gospel Jesus casts doubt on the old adage. Instead, he points out that the road to hell is filled with stumbling blocks: those things that we put in the way of others, and in our own way, that keep us from experiencing God’s presence, love, mercy, or the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

He tells the disciples, it’s better to drown than cause someone else to stumble, and that it’s better to cut off our own hands and legs and gouge out our eyes than allow ourselves to stumble.

The language is violent and graphic and it makes me uncomfortable. His words sound really harsh, and I prefer listening to Jesus talk about how much we are loved.

But his words are rooted in love. Jesus is speaking to his very own disciples, people who have been traveling with him and learning from him, and he is trying to get their attention, again, because they still seem more concerned about who gets the credit for the good works that are happening in Jesus’ name, than about whose lives are being transformed.

But the other reason I’m uncomfortable is all the talk about being thrown into hell.

In the gospel, Jesus is talking about a real place that you can find on a map: Gehenna. Its name comes from the Hebrew for the Valley of Hinnom and it was a place where atrocities including child sacrifice had taken place as far back as 7^th century BCE. In the first century CE it had become perpetually burning garbage dump outside Jerusalem’s city walls.

I believe in hell, less as a physical place or dimension, but I believe that hell is what we experience in our lives when we are separated from Divine Love. I believe that hell is what we create when we live apart from God’s will for us in our relationships with God, with our neighbors, and with the world. I also like what 19^th century Carmelite nun St. Therese of Lisieux once said; when she was asked, she answered that she believed in hell, but because of God's great mercy, she believed that it was empty.

Whatever you believe about hell, in Lutheranism, we recognize and name the destructive power of sin, death, and the devil in our lives and we appeal to God for strength and help to denounce the evil we encounter and confront the powers and principalities that contradict the Gospel.

And these are the things that Jesus wants us to pay attention to. Instead of worrying about what others are doing or saying, let’s examine ourselves and our own attitudes and behaviors, and let’s be attentive to the ways we influence others and affect their faith and lives.

In our lives we bear witness to the gospel – to the Good News of Jesus Christ, and the ways we show Jesus to the world matters. So what are the stumbling blocks we put in the way of others? And what are the ones we create to keep us from experiencing God’s presence, love, mercy, or the outpouring of the Holy Spirit?

Like the disciples, and as human beings, we tend toward exclusion. We silence people because they are different from us. Because they are women, or we don’t understand their accent, or they are old or young, or they didn’t grow up in the South and we don’t know who their daddy is. Or sometimes, because we do know who their daddy is, and we don’t like him. We watch whether people grew up on the right, or the wrong, side of the tracks and we think if we know one thing about someone, it tells us all we need to know.

It’s human nature. People are messy and it feels much safer to draw lines and stay in neat and tidy boxes, with people who are like us. But the problem is that every time we draw lines in the sand, we will find Jesus on the other side. Every time we create insiders and outsiders, guess where Jesus is? With the outsiders. With those who don’t have status. With those who don’t have power.

Jesus tells the disciples,

“Whoever is not against us is for us.” (9:40)

Even the person who thinks differently than I do about hell.

And the driver of the car whose bumper stickers I don’t like.

And the woman who on the court square holding her posterboard sign that says “Jesus loves you.”

So who is the person you want to dismiss or box out?

Jesus is here to say that God’s abundant love, mercy and power cannot be categorized or rationed. God is boundless. And when we start paying attention to how our lives reflect that Divine love and presence, we will be showing Jesus to the world.

Let us pray…

Good and gracious God,

Thank you for your Son Jesus who shows us again and again how much you love the whole world.

Help us pay attention to the ways we show your love and mercy to our families, neighbors and community.

Make us instruments of your peace where there is division, remembering that we are to bring Good News to the everyone we meet.

We pray in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

17th Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 9:30-37

Every couple of years a new gospel comes out. The Bible has four – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – but a variety of others have made their way onto bookshelves. You can read the Gospel according to the Peanuts or Dr. Seuss, Starbucks or Star Wars. The best of these illuminate how theology – the ways we talk about and understand God –manifests in pop culture.

Reading today’s gospel in Mark I recalled a song by Kenny Rogers called “The Greatest”. Maybe you know it. It tells the story of boy playing backyard baseball. He throws every pitch and swings at every ball. Every time the boy gets ready pitch, he tells himself, “I am the greatest player of them all” and every time he misses. But at the end of the song, after the third strike, he says, “I am the greatest that is a fact/ But even I didn't know I could pitch like that.”

While most of us hear the story of a boy striking out, the way Kenny tells it, the boy pitched a perfect inning - 3 up, 3 down – or maybe even a no hitter. Who is the greatest depends a lot on who’s defining what it means to be the greatest.

In the gospel reading, Jesus and his disciples are on the road and, teaching them, Jesus tells them a second time that he will be betrayed and killed, and he will be resurrected.

Mark tells us the disciples didn’t understand – they couldn’t understand – what Jesus was saying. A suffering Messiah was such a contrast to the images of Messiah that they had learned. Instead of a Messiah who would be victorious over their enemies, Jesus told them that he would die in the hands of his enemies.

And Mark says they were afraid to ask Jesus what he meant. They weren’t afraid of their teacher, but his words frightened them. His truth-telling threatened their sense of security and safety, their ability to protect themselves against the world, and against death. It exposed their fears and vulnerabilities.

Afraid to reveal their own lack of understanding, afraid they were the only ones who didn’t get it, afraid of being left out, the disciples started bickering, arguing about who among them was the greatest.

Like the disciples, we are afraid of what we don’t know. We are afraid of uncertainty and afraid of silence and rush to fill it with words, even when those words are arguments.

And watching the disciples, I wonder how many of us would confess to Jesus what things we argue about? In worship we remember that Jesus came into the world to love each one of us and to forgive us that we might all be restored to relationship with God. But when we leave our worship spaces we bicker and argue about who’s right or wrong and which decisions are faithful or unfaithful.

The gospel reminds us that even though the disciples didn’t answer him when he asked what they had argued about, Jesus knew.

Jesus knows how easily we are distracted from the gospel and yet, he doesn’t scold us or punish us.

Instead, he continues teaching, saying,

“Whoever wants to be first must be last and servant of all.”

Jesus reminds us to pay attention to what matters. And like Kenny, he reminds us that being the greatest might look different from what we expect.

Being the greatest isn’t going to look like awards or prizes, accolades or promotions. Instead, it’s going to look like helping when no one notices. It’s going to look like making space for those who do not have any status. It’s going to look like loving the person who isn’t useful or beneficial to you.

Because the God we come to know in Jesus is not a transactional God. This God is the One who sent Jesus to love every one of us and wants us to love everybody we meet.

This is the Way of Jesus Christ that we follow. It doesn’t follow the rules of the world we live in. It is a way of suffering and rejection, and when we follow Jesus, we must know that we cannot insulate ourselves from it or hide within the safety of our church sanctuaries. Wherever we find ourselves, we are called to welcome the least and be servants to them.

 Let us pray…

Good and gracious God,

we give thanks that you know our hearts and minds and love us still.

Thank you for your grace and mercy when we are afraid and lack understanding.

Thank you for your Son Jesus coming into the world that all may know your abundant love.

Show us how to be servants and to show love for every person in our words and our actions.

We pray in Jesus’ name.

Amen.

15th Sunday after Pentecost

 Mark 7:24-37

The pandemic has been compared to a foot race that began as a sprint and then turned into a 5K. And then we realized we were in a marathon, and now it has become an Ironman, a race where participants don’t just run of 26 miles but also swim 2.4 miles and then bike another 112. It’s exhausting.

I imagine this is the kind of weariness Jesus was feeling when he left Galilee where he had been arguing with religious leaders. He just wanted to find a place where he could go unnoticed. But Mark tells us that wasn’t possible. Word of the healings and miracles that Jesus had done had reached even the northern region of Tyre on the Mediterranean – the place we know today as Lebanon. And that’s where the Syrian woman, a Gentile not a Jew, found Jesus.

Like the synagogue leader Jairus in Mark 5 who fell at Jesus’ feet and begged repeatedly for his daughter to be made well, this Gentile woman bows down to Jesus and begs him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

But this time we don’t witness Jesus’ compassion. He doesn’t go with the woman; instead, he rebukes her, telling her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.” (Mark 7:27 NRS)

Anytime we diminish a person and call them names, we are failing to see that person as a wholly beloved child of God, with all the dignity and worth that we each have. Hearing Jesus use this insult and turn his back on someone in need is uncomfortable.

Many have tried to soften his words or find a way to excuse him, but there really isn’t any acceptable explanation. His words are ugly, and he says them to make the woman go away.

Ironically, Jesus has just been teaching about how evil comes from our hearts when he abruptly dismisses this woman. We can’t know why he spoke the way he did –whether it was because she was a woman or a Gentile or if there was some other reason, but he provides a real-life example of what happens when our hearts are left unguarded. Our heartless words and actions inflict pain.

Thankfully the story doesn’t end there. The woman doesn’t leave. She doesn’t let Jesus off the hook.

She has heard about the powerful acts he has done in his ministry and, because she has heard, she believes she and her daughter are included in God’s kingdom. She doesn’t argue that her daughter should come before the Jewish people, but that God’s abundance is great enough for all who are in need. She is willing to receive a smaller portion of God’s mercy and to believe it is enough.

The woman’s humility and willingness demonstrate her faith that God’s gracious actions are for her too.

And something in her words opens Jesus’ heart, and he is able to hear what this woman is saying. After he listens, he tells her that she will find that the demon has left her daughter. (Mark 7:29)

One lesson we learn here is from the woman. Like the psalmists who lament to God, crying out because they are suffering and then calling on God to be the God they have witnessed in history, she has witnessed what God has done in others’ lives, so she calls on Jesus to share the abundance that God has provided because she knows he can. God’s love and mercy is for every one of us.

The second lesson is one we learn from Jesus. Their conversation shows the importance of listening to those we think don’t belong. We all belong to God and we all have value and worth in God’s sight. Jesus shows we can learn from those who come from outside our familiar traditions and places.

Listening well is a spiritual practice.

To listen well to another person’s story, without judgment or commentary, without advice-giving.

To listen for the feelings and themes of life that person is sharing.

To listen for faith, for the words of hope, healing and opportunity.

To listen for the “story of the soul” – for how the pieces fit together.

This spiritual listening is a practice of “listening for our connectedness, our common ground, the deepest realities of which we all are a part.”

When we listen well, we recognize we are all members of one family – regardless of our differences– and one community. [i]

And it is in that listening that we open ourselves to transformation. The obvious transformation in this gospel is that the daughter’s demon is cast out, but Jesus too is changed through this encounter with the woman.

We may be as uncomfortable with a Jesus who can change as with one who slanders, but this gospel witnesses to us how God’s Word works as it reaches people who desperately need to know they are not hopeless. It witnesses to us how we need to guard our hearts so that we won’t harden them against others. It witnesses to us that it is possible to change how we think about people we have dismissed or turned away from, and how God can work in us all to God’s glory.

And that is Good News.

Let us pray…

Good and gracious God,

Thank you for your Son Jesus who although without sin experienced all that we do in life, and shows us the way to new life, full of grace and mercy.

Thank you for showing up in people who are different from us and teaching us to listen well to their stories, recognizing how we are all one human family, created and loved by you.

Forgive us when we are hard hearted.

Transform us by your Spirit that our ears and eyes will be opened to Your presence in our lives.

We pray in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

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[i] Craig Rennebohm. Souls in the Hands of a Tender God: Stories of the Search for Home and Healing on the Streets. 78-79.