Isaiah 52:3-10, Mark 9:30-50 (Proper 21B)
When Dr. Martin Luther King was about to wrap up what was to be a four minute speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he heard the voice of Mahalia Jackson behind him, urging him to tell the crowd about “the dream.” Though the schedule was tight, she wanted him to frost the cake with what she had heard him say on other occasions about God’s dream of salvation—salvation from the cruelties of slavery and the lynchings, beatings, and humiliations of Jim Crow. She wanted everyone to see God’s picture of a nation cast of the demons of envy, revenge, and hatred—those same demons that had been cast onto the bodies of the oppressed Negro.
As soon as he swung into those now familiar, but un-programmed cadences, one of his speech writers who had heard bits of them on other occasions, Clarence Jones, turned to the person beside him and said, “These people don’t know it, but they are about to go to church!”
When Pope Francis addressed our nation through our Congress two days ago, he also took our country “to church.” As the moral and political agents who are shaping public policies with our votes, time, and treasure he called us to responsibilities beyond ourselves in service to the redemption and healing of the world.
But I am not so sure the body politic likes going to this kind of church. Since the Enlightenment, the body politic has traded freedom of worship in exchange for the agreement of the church not meddling in public affairs.[i] The body politic, of which we are de facto members in the United States, does not like its projects of unlimited acquisition of power, possessions, and prestige to be questioned or interrupted by concern for the people who are in the way of them.
The Gospels are full of people in the way of the Roman Empire, in the part of it where Jesus lived, taught, and preached. In the Magnificat we hear that Israel-Mary gives birth to Jesus who will reawaken Israel’s prophetic witness of God’s concern for people who are vulnerable to being sacrificed by the privileged and the elite for the good of the order.
In Mark 8-10 we see Jesus educating his closest followers in the ways of God’s plan of peace for humanity and what the risks of implementing this plan are going to be. Written from the perspective of the ones who stumbled during those times, Mark is pedagogically generous in his depiction of how difficult it is to leave the mindset of the ways of the world and live in the beloved community of God. Like humans today, they were ready to follow a celebrity and trust in the powers of attraction for salvation from their present situation.
In the verses preceding the reading we just heard, Jesus has predicted his death at human hands for the second time. After a momentary pause, the disciples began a quarrel about which of them is the greater disciple, perhaps the one deserving of a special title in Jesus’ new political regime. At that ripe moment Jesus gave them a picture of what real greatness looks like in the Kingdom of God.
In the gospel reading this evening, we hear John’s response to this glamour-less picture of servanthood as the new standard of greatness. He tattles to Jesus about how they stopped someone from casting out demons in Jesus’ name because he wasn’t following them. They appear scandalized because an unauthorized, untrained person is succeeding at a task they themselves had recently been unable to perform! What is going on here?[ii]
Mark repeats this pattern after each passion prediction: Jesus tells them he will die at the hands of the authorities and the disciples follow with an incident of rivalry, jealousy, and resentment. After the first prediction, Peter attempts to lure Jesus into tit for tat rivalry with the powers. After the second, the disciples argue about who’s the greatest and resent the unauthorized exorcist. After the third, James and John make a play ahead of their fellow disciples sit at the head of Jesus’ victory table.
Mark is making it clear thrice over that misunderstanding the insidious nature of rivalry is related to misunderstanding the nature of Jesus’ revolutionary earthly mission of love and service for the salvation of the world.
God’s people of Israel have encoded this wisdom about rivalry in their foundational stories to which Jesus was heir: Eve’s temptation into rivalry with God, Cain’s rivalry with his brother for God’s preference, Joseph’s brothers’ rivalry for their father’s preference, and on and on. Not to be missed in the prominent position as the tenth commandment is the unequivocal prohibition of coveting what your neighbor has. But of course this is impossibly difficult because we are hard-wired to desire what others possess.
In 2012, a brain imaging study revealed that there is such a thing as nonverbal “goal contagion.” [iii] This automatic, unconscious activity of desiring what others are holding is advantageous to humans for learning what is good and useful, but it is also our greatest stumbling block because in case of limited objects of value like scarce resources, power, prestige, and wealth, there will only be winners and losers and cycles of revenge.
So Jesus gives a nod to the unaffiliated exorcist, for he knows that the world is full people waiting to be released from the ills of society’s neglect of them, more than the disciples can take care of by themselves. Then he gives the disciples his sternest warnings about how to follow him: Do not be scandalized by the vision of a world of mutual responsibility to one another, nor by what unlikely followers will help you. Whatever you do, do not lead others to stumble on rivalries for power, prestige and wealth, for you will end up in the hell you create.
For all human beings, this is easier said than done. The disciples’ conversion from rivalry for power would require the much more difficult experience of their abandonment and betrayal of Jesus that final week in Jerusalem. Their conversion would only become complete when they experienced the forgiveness of the risen Christ. Only after this would they be able to understand and trust this new creative way of being human together that is full of grace, goodness, mercy, compassion, and care for one another.
So what about us? Here we are some 2000 years later still trying to trust the Jesus Way in a very confined space. But I wonder if we might let Dr. King and Pope Francis take us to the church God has been longing for us to become—a church who will reclaim her historical vocation of forming disciples, the kind of people who are able to see the world through forgiven eyes and live in response to the view from below.
Jesus calls us to a radical spiritual transformation of how we think of ourselves as human beings and how we think of the world. I think Pope Francis was right to quote the American Cistercian monk Thomas Merton in his address to Congress this week. Merton, whose religious life spanned contemplation and social activism and built interfaith bridges, experienced this Jesus-enabled human transformation which begins with the shattering recognition of what we all do as human beings. Here is what Pope Francis chose to quote from Merton’s autobiography:
“I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God, and yet hating him; born to love him, living instead in fear of hopeless self-contradictory hungers.”[iv]
The Church, God bless her, is here to help us become liberated humans who are free to liberate others from a political mindset of selfish predation that thrives on human suffering. I pray we embrace the vocation of forming disciples who will continue the joyous work of helping all human beings to flourish. Maybe one day we will see those red, white, and blue Episcopal Church signs on our highways proclaim:
“The Episcopal Church Changes You.”
[i] Hill, John W.B. Making Disciples the Way Jesus Did (pdf) access through google search (use link from Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Music). Also see Becoming the Story We Tell (from the Primate’s Task Force, the Anglican Church of Canada, rev. 2015) link to pdf here: http://liturgy.ca/tag/becoming-the-story-we-tell/
[ii] A thread not developed in this sermon is that the disciples’ scandalized response to the outside exorcist is a feature of beginning to identify a common enemy needed for the reunification of a group that is experiencing threatening levels of competition within itself.
[iii] Lebreton, Kawa, et al. Your Goal is Mine: Unraveling Mimetic Desires in the Human Brain (Journal of Neuroscience, May 23, 2012; http://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/21/7146.full.pdf+html
[iv] https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/september/documents/papa-francesco_20150924_usa-us-congress.html