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Define: "One Of Us"
Pentecost 17B
September 26-27, 2009
Numbers 11; Mark 9:38-50
In the Name of Jesus. Amen. He was rather embarrassed when he told a [Christian pastor-friend] about it, but Abraham Moskovitz was also pleased. [The previous week]…he had just been the recipient of the annual “Christian Service Award” which is given annually by the local Ministerial Association. For some years now, Abraham Moskovitz has worked night and day, and given generously of his wealth, to uplift the lives of underprivileged youth in his community. So Abraham Moskovitz, Jewish businessman, sometime attender of the local synagogue, full-time philanthropist, is now a model of Christian service. “I feel a little strange,” Abraham told [his pastor-friend], being recognized for Christian service.” “Why should you?” [his pastor-friend] asked. “After all, we didn’t know what Christian service looked like until one of your brothers from Nazareth showed us.”1 When people are suffering, we can be neither exclusive nor impatient regarding those who work to stop human suffering, who give of their lives and their treasure to expel the demonic forces that destroy lives and societies. In the language of this morning’s gospel reading, such people belong to Christ, whether they know it or not – not because they’ve chosen Jesus, but because Jesus has chosen them. The fact that Jesus’ kingdom is bigger than our definitions of it opens us to the possibility, even probability, that the purposes of God are being achieved every day by those who don’t necessarily do it our way. We can’t dismiss them too quickly, especially given another fact, one which we confess nearly every Sunday: that we Christians sin not only by the evil that we do, but by the good that we leave undone. The Old Testament is also full of such affirmations. God refers to the Pharaoh of Egypt, as well as the conquering rulers of Babylon and Assyria, as God’s servants – even though they had no such intention or knowledge of being so. But God used even them to accomplish his purposes for Israel, for creating, disciplining, and bringing to faith God’s chosen people. It would seem another biblical affirmation is profoundly true: “God’s ways are not our ways.” In this morning’s Old Testament Lesson, Moses is suffering under the burden of leadership. No matter how strong his leadership, and despite the lavish blessings of God – I don’t know if you’ll be able to believe this! – the people continuously find something to complain about. Moses finally turns to God and says, “What could I have possibly done that was so awful as to deserve the burden of all these people on me? You created them! Why do I have to carry them around like babies? This is just too much. I can’t handle it anymore.” God provides him with 70 elders to help with the leadership responsibilities – God’s spirit rested on them, and they prophesied – that is, they discerned and proclaimed the will of God. But then, two other men in the camp, who had not been among the others when the spirit came upon them, experienced the same thing. The spirit rested on them, and they prophesied, creating jealousy about the other 70. “They’re not one of us! How dare they!” they complain to Moses. To which Moses responds, “If only all the Lord’s people were prophets…” What would it be like for an entire community of faith, an entire congregation, to share the burdens and joys of leadership? Imagine it. Not just the church council. Not just the clergy. Not just the paid staff. But everyone, everyone “prophesying,” sharing in the work of God’s people. Through baptism, all of us are made ministers, God’s prophets. Like the 70 elders of Moses’ day, in your baptism, God’s spirit was poured all over you, and you were given the power to be children of God, to be a blessing to the congregation, the community, the world in which you live. Unlike the days of Moses and the wilderness wanderings, in Jesus we are all anointed with the power of the Holy Spirit to do more than complain, to be movers and shakers in the family of God. Even so, Jesus’ words in this morning’s gospel leave us holding a rather sticky wicket. On the one hand, we are forever trying to cut God down to our size. One can hear about as much “we/they” language in Christian churches as at any political convention. We tend to want to think that “God’s people” are limited to people who only and already are within the church. At a staff meeting this summer, Stacy Johnson our Director of Youth & Family Ministries quoted Anne Lamott, author of the book, Grace (Eventually), who said, “You can tell you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” That’s the attitude the disciples display in this morning’s gospel text: “Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to prevent him because he wasn’t one of us!” To which Jesus replies: “Don’t forbid him. For he that is not against us, is for us.” Jesus counsels his disciples not to be too quick in pronouncing judgment on those who apparently do not share our particular way of doing things, not to be too quick to condemn or oppose what we don’t first try to understand. The requirement of conformity can become just as much of an idol as anything else and, in the hands of Satan, can work to defeat the purposes of God very handily. Now let’s be clear. Religious tolerance, Christian openness and acceptance, is not a lazy acceptance of any- and everything. Jesus is not saying, “Anything goes,” or “It really doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’re sincere.” It matters very much what one believes. The Holocaust in Europe, apartheid in South Africa, slavery in the early years of the United States, genocide and terrorism all remind us starkly that simple sincerity of one’s belief is not the bottom line. Christians need to know enough about Jesus, enough about Scripture and Christian discipleship, to be able to use our brains, our powers of discernment, to tell the difference between “sincere belief” and the demonic. There was a lot of “tolerance” among Christians in Germany as Hitler rose to greater and greater power on a nationalist platform built, at least partly, on hatred of Jews and others. Patriotic German Lutherans ridiculed the Confessing Church, of which the martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a part, as being unpatriotic when it rose in resistance to, and criticism of, Hitler’s institutionalization of hatred and bigotry. German Pastor Martin Niemoeller was one of the most respected Protestant leaders in Germany. Niemoeller was a leader in the Pastors' Emergency League, which denounced the abuses of Hitler’s dictatorship in other public actions and sermons that finally led to his arrest in July, 1937. There were then a few honest judges still functioning in Germany, and when the court let him go with a slap on the wrist, Hitler personally ordered his incarceration. Niemoeller was in a concentration camp, including long periods of solitary confinement, until the end of the war. After the war, active in international church affairs, Niemoeller made preaching trips across the United States. At that time he brought the message of caring about what is happening to others, often driving the point home with a confession of his own blindness when the Nazi regime rounded up the communists, socialists, trade unionists, and, finally, the Jews. The quotation is now famous: First
they came for the communists, and I did not speak out --
because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a socialist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a Jew; Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak out for me. What had masqueraded as tolerance proved to be deadly cowardice. Christian openness and acceptance is altogether different than “It really doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you’re sincere.” It calls for discernment. And Jesus gives us an important principle to help us: “There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name who can, at the same time, speak ill of me. For whoever is not against us, is for us.” This calls for scrutiny, careful thought on our part. Who are we to forbid someone from preaching the good news of Jesus Christ, even if that person isn’t “one of us” – however we define that phrase. I have often said, being a disciple of Jesus Christ doesn’t mean we check our brain at the door. In an interesting paradox, Jesus calls us to a certain intolerance as well in this morning’s text. He asks us to face what we wrongfully tolerate in ourselves. What do we do, he asks, which causes another believer to stumble? When do we betray Jesus by our commitment to protecting our lives and our goods according to what we want, even when it negatively affects others or even our church? We are so easily seduced by the materialism of the society in which we live, by advertisements which argue powerfully and persuasively that more “stuff” is the ticket to happiness and respect and, as one ad and a recent song both bluntly state, “Guilt is a useless emotion.” Using a literary device called hyperbole – that is, obvious exaggeration in order to make a point – Jesus counsels us to, in effect, “cut our losses” rather than hang on to attitudes and values which harm the poor and the powerless, and which conflict with our loyalty to Jesus and his teachings. Our prejudices, our relentless self-interest, our misplaced trust serve to destroy us and those around us as badly as any knife taken to our bodies. Our unexamined tolerance of such sin in ourselves undermines the redeeming work of Christ’s kingdom every bit as much as any of the other things we’ve mentioned this morning. Jesus gives us a hard word this morning. He calls us to cut loose the prejudice, self-centeredness, and jealousies which so often disfigure our lives as disciples of Jesus and as Christian congregations. He asks us to tolerate less darkness in ourselves, and more of the light of Christ in others. Both tasks require submitting ourselves to Jesus, to obeying God when God commands us to love God first and others next. Both tasks require more than a passing familiarity with Scripture. Both tasks teach us that God’s love and God’s mercy – that Jesus himself – is bigger than our comfortable definitions. Amen. _____________________ William Willimon, Pulpit Resource, July-Sept., 1994 Rev. Joan Gunderman, Senior Pastor
Lutheran Church of the Cross, Nisswa, Minnesota |
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