Pastors, preachers, prophets: Why you might be some of those and what it means for your life

Mark 6:1-29

Every so often there will be a survey of people across various professions where they are asked about how happy they are in their work. Without fail, you’ll find that when these surveys are taken people in service industries declare themselves to be happier and more fulfilled in their work. At the top of the top you’ll usually find pastors. We are the happiest and most fulfilled in our jobs, but, as our health insurers will tell you, we’re also some of the least healthy professionals out there. Something about Jesus telling us to die to ourselves just doesn’t work well for the insurance industry.

            But there’s something else at work here. Anybody who does the work of following Jesus in a capacity where they feel unable to walk away will inevitably find themselves in a tricky place, because preaching Jesus means preaching against the comfort of people you love. Preaching Jesus means telling people you really like that they are dirty sinners. Preaching Jesus means creating distance between your words and your relationships. This is partly why over 70% of pastors report they have no close friends.

            I don’t say any of this to focus this message on me. I’m saying this because, in spite of some of your best efforts, the same work I do you are called to, as well, in different ways. You visit the sick, you teach, you even preach!—every one of you.

When I was interning in Oregon in 2009-10 in one of my first newsletter articles I talked about my faith upbringing and, as can happen when you’re in the echo chamber that is theological education, I slipped into language some people did not understand. I wrote that my parents were my first preachers, bringing me to church when I was just a baby. That week I had a member of the church, a grandfather of a classmate of mine at Luther no less, come up to me and say, “I didn’t know that your parents were pastors!”

I realized my mistake. I say preacher and the first image that comes to mind is “pastor.” We have to expand the meaning of that word again, because—let me tell you—pastors cannot be the only preachers. There are too many people preaching things. They’re preaching politics, they’re preaching sex, they’re preaching hedonism—they’re telling you that life is about pleasure and anybody who tells you differently is selling something. You all need to be preachers in your own ways, because nobody discovers God’s love for them and nobody hears about Jesus’ death or resurrection apart from your telling them about it.

Little resurrection versus big resurrection

Mark 5:21-43
 

Today’s reading is about little resurrection anticipating a big resurrection to come.

Today’s story from the Gospel of Mark is about Jesus on his way to heal a little girl, daughter of one of the synagogue leader. So, unlike most other times in the Gospel, Jesus is setting out here to help one of the people in power. Along the way he is confronted with a crowd that slows him down. Everybody, it seems, wants his power, even if they are in less dire need than this girl on death’s door. You can imagine the girl’s father’s desperation that these people get out of Jesus’ way.

Jesus ends up healing a woman who touches his cloak, unintentionally it seems. He stops to have a brief chat there about faith. Again, you can imagine the father’s consternation. Well, I can. If my daughter were dying I would be pushing all these lowly people out of the way. I mean, Jesus can heal them later! If the girl dies, she’s dead.

So, it is that the father finds out from an adviser that his daughter has died while Jesus is hung up with the crowds on the road. “Why bother the teacher any further?” asks the adviser. See, this is one of those great misconceptions that people have about Jesus up and down the stories we find in the Gospels. They imagine him a teacher—a rabbi. Then, when he heals, they imagine him a physician. What they don’t have is the imagination to believe that, perhaps, maybe, he is something greater. Perhaps, maybe, he is the Messiah. Perhaps, maybe, he is even the son of God.

None of that enters the grieving father’s mind, of course, because his daughter is now dead. Perhaps it was the crowds holding Jesus up or perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered. Either way, the scene is now set for Jesus to blow everyone’s expectations for him out of the water—again.

Playing the lottery

A week ago the Powerball went for something near $1.5 billion and, as seems to always be the case when the jackpot gets so large, people started talking and stores started selling tickets like bananas. People even lined up in some places for an hour or more to get Powerball tickets (not, of course, in Kittson county, where we tend to take our business elsewhere if there’s a line of more than two people). Also, as becomes more likely when millions of tickets are sold, somebody won the jackpot—three somebodies, from what I understand—and we can all return to our lives as normal with the exception of the occasional story of somebody blowing their life’s savings on lottery tickets or whatever.

I have to start by saying I’m pretty strongly against the lottery. Numerous studies have shown that it essentially amounts to a regressive tax on the poor, since areas that tend to sell the most tickets tend to be the poorer places in the United States. But beyond that there is something human about this desire we have in playing the lottery. As long as there’s a chance, we’ll take enormous risks on the possibility of payoff. For most people buying a $2 lottery ticket isn’t an enormous risk; it’s a small one with a big possibility of payoff, but it is that possibility, however remote, that captures us.

            Once captured, some people have within them a beast that will never be fed and they will become addicted. Not everybody, relatively few really, but far more than those who win. For every lottery jackpot winner there are a million or more people addicted to gambling. That doesn’t mean it’s universally bad, just that there’s always this side effect that we’re party to whenever we partake, whether it affects us directly or not.

            This is a human nature problem. What seems harmless, inexpensive and fun, will become something more devilish for some people some of the time. This is true about the lottery but it’s pretty universal to other areas of life. Say there’s a person with whom you are infatuated. You work up your courage and take the chance, finally, and confess you really like this person. There’s a chance they like you back, and a chance they don’t. This is life and love. And it’s messy. You might hit the jackpot or you might go away brokenhearted. But there are worse things than being brokenhearted, tough though it may be. Worse is becoming addicted to that infatuation. Worse is giving up on a relationship and instead seeking only the baser biology that drives it—sex only, not love.

            We are created to take chances. We have a God who gave us this potential to be something grand, but potential is also our weakness. Our brokenness is deep. What may be harmless for most is not harmless for all, and whether it’s the lottery, sex, alcohol, drugs, or even more banal things like sports or TV or social media our freedom sometimes leaves us captive. Unlimited freedom is a trap. We are created not to be completely free, or else God would have told Adam and Eve not only that they could eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but that they should! Instead we are created to become bound to the things that matter.

            These things are the virtues that Jesus lays out in the Beatitudes. Blessed are the poor, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, and those who are defamed. These are the things for which we should strive. These are the areas of ourselves to invest in. Meekness, mercy, purity, striving for peace. They  don’t seem like they are contrary to playing the lottery, and that’s exactly the danger. When we drift through life making choices not explicitly bad, but not good either, we gradually become bound to things that will hurt us and others. We were created for more than that.

            So I’m not saying “Don’t play the lottery.” Rather, don’t let your freedom make a fool of you. The odds aren’t in your favor—and in more ways than one. Invest in virtues that pay off in other ways. You won’t win a billion dollars, but your life may well be better off than if you had.

The Payoff: Why Jesus is better with parables than J.J. Abrams

Mark 3:1-34

So, preaching on agricultural messages to a bunch of farmers is fun…

            You’re all the experts. I’m the amateur. What could possibly go wrong?

            Plus, some of Jesus’ metaphors seem counter-productive to the way those of you who farm do it. I mean, again I’m no expert, and I don’t really know about scattering seed nowadays, but I don’t see many of you walking the fields, throwing it willy-nilly all over the place in the spring. The seed companies might like that approach, just cover inch of soil with the stuff, but I’m thinking it’s probably not the most efficient way. Also, this stuff about rocky ground and paths is probably something those of you in the Red River valley have trouble understanding. There are actually these things called rocks that sometimes live in the ground in the soil.

Mind blown.

            I’m also hesitant to preach on the agricultural parables because Jesus kind of jumbles them all together, and it’s hard to know where to begin or end. There’s the seed being sowed in different places, there’s the seed sowed and forgotten, and then there’s the mustard seed. It’s like Jesus just gets on a roll and starts rambling off all the agricultural metaphors he can muster one after another. Trying to follow all of this is kind of challenging. Then, to make matters worse, there’s all this mystery and wisdom in-between, a little bit about hearing and comprehending, about secrets and an explanation of why he speaks in parables to an unbelieving world.

            And you want me to keep worship to under an hour?! Each of these demands about an hour! I hope you all brought your sleeping bags.

            So rather than interpreting the agricultural metaphors for you (after all, you’re the experts, remember!), instead I’m going to focus on Jesus’ stated purpose for all of this. He quotes from Isaiah, scripture we actually read here on Sunday morning a couple months ago (I’m sure you all remember it like it was yesterday), saying that the purpose of these parables is that we “may look, but not perceive, and my indeed listen, but not understand, so that [we] may not turn again and be forgiven.”

            Oh joy. So, outsiders are kept out, unable to understand, because—well—they’re outsiders. The Gospel of the Lord!!

Forgiveness: The heart of health

Mark 2:1-22

Thoughts and musings on today's scripture. This is the format in which I am posting sermons on weeks I preach without a manuscript.

*Before Jesus, forgiveness was always temporary and limited. Baptism was something a person might do many times in life when they were feeling particularly repentant or in need of forgiveness.

* Jesus really introduces two very new ideas about forgiveness on to the scene. 1) Forgiveness can be done once-and-for-all, and 2. It is accomplished not because of our choice but because of God’s choice for us.

*Both of these are completely radical. You claim you are the one doing forgiveness? That’s just words, say the Pharisees. What you’re saying is blasphemy.

*Since Jesus can’t prove that he’s the Son of God for them in any meaningful way (at least not yet), he does the next best thing. He heals the paralyzed man. Again, as in our story from last week, we can’t pretend that Jesus walked into this conversation with the expressed purpose of healing this man. He was more concerned about the forgiveness of sins. The healing was simply the means to show he had the power to forgive sins. That’s so often how it is: healing is a sign; not the actual thing.

            *For Jesus, forgiveness matters more than physical healing because forgiveness is about salvation and salvation is health in its truest, most complete form. It is health that persists in and through death, not apart from it.

            *Salvation (Lt. “salve,” or “health”). So, when we talk about eternal salvation we are talking about health at its completion; a creation that never degrades and is never subject to illness or injury.

            *But, more than that, by lifting up forgiveness above and beyond individual healing stories, and then healing a man because of the effort put in by his neighbors, this story suggests that individual health is nothing without communal health. Our understanding of what is healthy is tied to our baseline; the comparisons we make between what we view as a healthy life and one that is unhealthy. Though we may experience forgiveness as individuals, it happens in a wider, deeper way on the path that Jesus is walking. For example, the healing of the man is tied to the spiritual blindness of the Pharisees because it is precisely their agitation that leads the man to be healed. Maybe you’ve never thought about it this way. I know I hadn’t. But this healing story requires the Pharisees as a foil to Jesus for any of this to happen. Moreover, is the relative health of those around him that makes the paralytic aware that there is a bigger, better concept of health on offer; that, if only all his bodily functions were in order, he might be healthy like others are healthy; and it is that same awareness that leads his friends to bring him in the first place. They long for something better for him. So it is with the life that Jesus lives; he comes to show us what true health looks like—salvation health—which is a little of what Wendell Berry is getting at when he says that “the community… is the smallest unit of health and… to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.”

            *You can’t know you need salvation unless you can imagine the life that might be if only you weren’t so limited—physically, emotionally, and spiritually; all of them are essentially the same. Faith is evidence of things unseen but it is possible because of God-who-came-down-to-earth. Jesus is our example of what salvation is, of what health can be.

            *But before we can dwell too long on this scripture we jet back to Jesus’ impending crucifixion. The bridegroom story reminds us that Jesus came to die; not to do miraculous things. This is the great, wondrous paradox of our faith; that salvation comes through death.

            *Death is not the opposite of health; the opposite of health is isolation. It is a complete and utter lack of relationship with Jesus but also with the body of Christ in which Jesus is made known today. So, when Jesus heals he is so careful to make this about not the temporary gratification of feeling well but the ultimate triumph of life over death. Again, as Wendell Berry put it, “The world of love includes death, suffers it, and triumphs over it.”

            *This is why, sandwiched between these two stories about forgiveness and the immanence of the cross, there is this bit about Jesus eating with sinners. "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners,” Jesus says. The difference between sinners and the righteous is that sinners know that a part of them needs to die before they can be well; those who believe themselves to be righteous have no such awareness.

            *Central to everything in Mark’s Gospel is an awareness that not all is well with us; that we are the paralyzed man; that we could be much better than we are, and some of it is our fault but a lot of it is also completely outside our control. So, first we get an example of what perfection could look like—God sends Jesus. But then, when we get that example, we do exactly what people always do when confronted with an image of what they might be if only they were perfect: We kill him. We kill the example. Jesus had to die for our salvation, but he was going to die one way or another because human beings take perfection and kill it ALL THE TIME.

            *If you don’t believe me, check the internet. The internet exists to prove that human beings cannot handle nice things.

            *But more than nice? Perfect? We lose our minds with perfection. When confronted with something or somebody who is excellent the hive mind collectively spends all its time trying to figure out how to discredit or explain away their talents, work ethic, and the like—it’s that comparison thing again; we shoot ourselves in the foot as a community because we can’t deal with the possibility that others are better than us at anything. It’s easier to neglect our own flaws and search out those in others.

            *But good news! Jesus came for people like you and me who like to kill perfect things with our words and our thoughts and our actions. Jesus sits with us. He even sometimes heals us. But that’s not really what it’s all about; that’s not really why he’s here with us. He’s here to accomplish real health; salvation-health. This is cross-oriented ministry. It is forgiveness. Real forgiveness. For you and for me. Which, given the state of our physical-spiritual selves, is exactly what we need. Walking? Yeah, that’s nice. The bigger question is where are you walking to? Is it out into the world, searching out diets and fixes and looking for health, or is to the cross, looking for salvation? They aren’t so different; one is just woefully incomplete.

            *You are healed. Actually healed. Because you are forgiven. That’s the heart of health. Forgiveness. So that when everything else breaks down there is ground on which to stand. Salvation-health.

Just noise

Mark 1: 21-45

Bits and thoughts, excerpts and ramblings on today's sermon topic.

The Messianic secret

What is going on here? Why does Jesus not want knowledge of the Messiah spread from one end of the earth to the other?

Because Jesus is not about healings, not about signs of power as we define them. Jesus has one purpose, one destination, and he doesn’t want to distract from the significance of that moment—not even a little.

The good news of the Gospel is not the healings. Don’t suggest that the Gospel is the healings. Those people will someday die. “Shut up, demons!” Jesus says. “Don’t pretend like that’s what it’s all about.” Don’t tell anybody. Demons, shut up. You don’t need to tell the world that Jesus is the Son of God. The world values words so little, anyway. You need to show it.

The only way to show it is the cross. The cross, the cross, the cross.  

Jesus knows that healing testimony is weak testimony; it’s too personal, too flimsy. Were you really healed, or did you just get better? You don’t believe because of healings. You don’t believe because of the demons. If you do, you’re only one failed healing away from a lack of faith, or, just as badly, suggesting that the lack of healing is part of God’s plan. It says right there in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus healed “many” who were sick. Not all. Even in the presence of Jesus in the flesh not all those who were sick were healed. Is it because God had a different plan for them? Is it because they were less worthy? No! This isn’t a story about healings.

We tend to put emphasis on the parts of the Bible we need. So if we’re sick then the healings become increasingly important, but this is a kind of self-centeredness. All of it is temporary; all of it is occasional. The real sickness is deeper and harder to believe. The real sickness lies in our heart.

When Jesus heals it seems to be spur-of-the-moment, random, and specifically done not to testify to his holiness. Shh! He says. This is not really what it’s about. So, when we are in need of healing we turn to God in prayer as these people ran to Jesus, but we do so not because we know God will heal us, but because sometimes God does. Miracles happen. They just aren’t the reason we believe.

And, yet, when faced with a miracle the healed can hardly help but preach about it. It’s interesting that the first thing these people do after being healed from a terrible disease is to break a commandment direct from Jesus: Do not tell anybody. Don’t tell anybody, because, as much as you experienced something incredible, this is still not what it is all about. We need something better than healing. We need better even than raising Lazarus from the dead, because Lazarus died again. So will those who are healed.

The cross. The cross. The cross.

Jesus has one destination and one purpose only. To heal not occasionally but once and for all, and to heal not our bodies but all our limitations—and the way this is done is through death. Not healing, actually, but resurrection.

Jesus tells the healed to be quiet because he is not really in the healing business; he’s in the resurrection business. Healing just happens in the presence of the resurrection. It’s a side effect, sometimes even accidental it seems (like the women who touches Jesus’ robes). Healing is just an appetizer; the main course is accomplished on the cross. So, don’t go about testifying about how good the bruschetta is. Wait on the steak. That’s what Jesus is up to. But the appetizer is so good that the people run off, having not yet tasted the main course.

Cross. Resurrection. All the rest of the Gospels merely set the stage. At best they add context; at worst they are a distraction. Don’t be distracted. This is about the cross. It’s about an empty tomb. From the beginning. Mark has no cute birth story, nothing charming about being born in a manger. He doesn’t have the political and social morals of Matthew or Luke. He doesn’t go out of his way to talk about lifting up the poor or go on long rants about being morally right before God. He doesn’t add a deep poetic tone the way John does; he doesn’t waste time on metaphors of light and darkness. Those things are distractions. What matters is the cross. So when Jesus does all manner of increasingly miraculous things Mark has Jesus saying, again and again, “Shh…” Don’t speak. Don’t say a word. Be healed, but be more than that. Be assured because something new is coming. Something extraordinary.

The cross. The cross. The cross.

Everything else is just noise.