Follow after Jesus, because you aren't Jesus

One of the most difficult parts of following after Jesus is learning how to be both a servant in the way Jesus served and to admit we cannot be Jesus. This is a more difficult line to walk than we might realize at first.

For example, I was looking through the library this past week as we are getting ready to clear things out for the daycare, and I noticed a DVD from a certain charismatic preacher that will go unnamed. I don’t doubt that this preacher—like many TV evangelists—got into ministry for good reasons—helping people, following after Jesus, the whole drill—but at some point things went awry. This man is most famous for bringing folks up on to the stage, dramatically striking them down with the purpose of healing them from their afflicions, but he’s equally famous for not allowing people with actual verifiable conditions (i.e. those who obviously need healing) to ever be among those who are on the stage.

I want to be careful with what I say about this because there are two things that may be true about healing ministry. 1) God can work miracles out of anything, and 2) Those who make it a show are likely to be frauds. The road to following after Jesus is wrought with pitfalls where we might imagine we are Jesus.

Lions and Tigers and Demons, oh my!

Mark 5:1-20

Today is everybody’s favorite biblical story—the Gerasene demoniac! You know, when all of you are thinking about your favorite Bible stories, there is Noah’s Ark, and Adam and Eve, and the birth of Jesus, and, of course, the Gerasene demoniac. OK, maybe not, but this story is in the Gospel of Mark, and it isn’t a quick aside either. Mark spends 20 verses out of only 678 in the entire book. That’s about 3% of the entire Gospel story on this particular demon possession.

            If we’re going to understand what’s going on here, then we need to know a few things about the Jewish faith. First of all we should know that Jesus and the disciples were Jewish. As a teacher, literally a rabbi, Jesus would have been charged with observance and interpretation of the Jewish faith. So, when they come across this demon-possessed man, everyone would have understood all the ways in which he was religiously impure—he lived in the tomb among the corpses, he likely eats from these nearby pig herds, and he cut himself, likely creating scars that also would have run afoul of Jewish law. From a modern perspective, we could label this man with any number of mental illnesses, but I’m not sure that helps us. At least, both can be true—he can be demon-possessed and mentally ill. We don’t necessarily know the difference.

If we’re going to read this scripture from a Jewish perspective (which was the perspective both of Jesus and those who would have first read it) we need to understand something about the law. In Judaism, there are three components to the law. One is to love God, summed up in the first three commandments; the second is to love other people, summed up in the final seven commandments; and the third is the holiness code that is written throughout the first five books of the Bible, which are laws that pertain to national identity and purity within religious practice. If you want to understand why a story like the Good Samaritan, for example, was so jarring for Jewish listeners, you need to understand that stopping to care for the bloodied man on the side of the road would have made the priest and the Levite impure. It was against the holiness code that was the very thing that made them Jewish.

The demon-possessed man in our story today would have presented similar problems. Besides being terrifying, he represented an affront to their laws. He takes it even a start farther by calling himself “Legion,” which was a Roman term for a regiment of six thousand soldiers, suggesting both that he is very demon-possessed and also that he is some kind of bodily representation of the pagan empire that ruled over their world. Everything about this man would have been offensive to the Jewish sensibilities.

So it is that Jesus comes into the picture. He exorcises the demons—after all, that’s what Jesus does throughout the Gospel of Mark!—but he does something interesting with them here. They beg him not to be sent out into the world. Firstly, this presents a notable picture, because we learn that exorcising demons does not mean that they are gone. Jesus doesn’t kill demons; he just removes them. Having done that, the demons beg to go into the pigs on the hillside.

Our modern Gentile sensibilities catch us off-guard here. If you are like me your first thought may be “Poor pigs!” What did they ever do to deserve this? But when we read this from a Jewish perspective, we should note that pigs are also ritually unclean. The deal that the demons strike with Jesus not only frees the man but removes a sign of the Gentile-nature of Gerasene as well. Having seen this, the locals beg Jesus to leave. These were their pigs, after all. It looks to them as if Jesus is coming as a kind of Jewish magician, which cannot be good news for the non-Jewish (Gentile) people of Gerasene. They are in awe of Jesus but that awe barely conceals their fear.

Outsiders who think we are in

Mark 4:1-34

There’s a line in this reading from Mark 4 that has always bugged me. It is the part where Jesus is supposed to be explaining things to the disciples and the other people in his inner circle, and he says, “The secret of God’s kingdom has been given to you, but to those who are outside everything comes in parables. This is so that they can look and see but have no insight, and they can hear but not understand. Otherwise, they might turn their lives around and be forgiven.”

I wonder if this bugs some of you as well? I mean, shouldn’t Jesus want people to understand, to turn their lives around and to be forgiven? Is he saying here that that’s not the goal?

On the surface level, this passage offers us an excuse to be the worst versions of ourselves. After all, if Jesus didn’t intend for other people to understand because they are no-good rotten jerks, then presumably those are the people we don’t like already, because we know we are the insiders, ergo the people I don’t like must be the outsiders. If we understand it this way, Jesus may be suggesting that we are on the inside, they are on the outside, and that’s how it’s always going to be. ]

But there’s a huge problem with that interpretation. Fast forward only fifteen verses and Jesus tells the disciples and the other wise guys, “Listen carefully! God will evaluate you with the same standard you use to evaluate others.”

Listen carefully! If you evaluate others and determine they are the ones on the outside, then Jesus is going to hold you to the same standard. And what is that standard? Well, he already told us! The standard is that we understand and interpret the parables correctly. And how shall we interpret the parables correctly? Again, Jesus has already told us the interpretation: He is the Son of God, he is the one who embodies God’s word for the world, he is the one coming to die for the sake of the world, so follow him. And how do the disciples do with this interpretation?

Uh oh. Here’s the big problem: The disciples fail every single time. In Mark’s Gospel, the disciples are the biggest blockheads of all. Whenever Jesus tells them that he has come to die they laugh it off and start preparing his throne for the eventual overthrow of the Roman government that they are expecting. Every time he tells them not to share about the miraculous healings because the only miracle that matters is the empty tomb they laugh him off and tell anybody and everybody about the super cool miracle they just saw.

Secrets and Demons

Mark 1:21-45

The Gospel of Mark catches your attention from the very first chapter. The first thing to notice is what’s missing. No birth story. No Jesus in a manger; no Bethlehem; in fact, no Mary at all. Instead, you get grown-up Jesus and the makings of a Hollywood thriller. There are demons everywhere, and Jesus goes around casting them out like he’s the t-shirt guy at a sporting event—everybody gets a demon cast out of them! This will prove to be just how Mark tells the story, and it is probably my favorite Gospel, but it’s not to everybody’s tastes.

One thing to note about the demons in Mark’s Gospel: they know who Jesus is. One thing to note about the disciples, the lawyers, the priests, and everybody else in Mark’s Gospel: They don’t have a clue who Jesus is, even when he tells them to it straight. Now, about those demons. The demons are part of daily life in a way that is foreign to the rest of the Gospels; in fact, it’s hard to find a corollary for all this demonic stuff anywhere in the Bible. Sure, there are instances of demons in some places, but nobody envisions a world crawling with them quite like Mark. The demons in Mark’s Gospel have two defining traits: 1) They know who Jesus is, and 2) They can do nothing against Jesus’ power.

Meanwhile, the people in the Gospel of Mark are all idiots. I’m not remotely being harsh either. Jesus spends the entire life of his ministry in Mark’s Gospel dealing with people who blatantly ignore everything he says. Every time he heals one of them he says the same thing, “Now, don’t go telling anybody about this!” And every time he does that what do they do? They go blabbing to everybody! This is a central point of Mark’s Gospel: The people never listen to Jesus; the demons always do. This is the first lesson of Mark’s Gospel: A mark of discipleship is not having a correct understanding of who Jesus was, because nobody did, but, rather, discipleship is about following Jesus even when you are getting it wrong.

This point will be brought home many times over the next few months as we read through Mark’s Gospel, because the disciples are the biggest blockheads of them all. They never get it. Not once do they recognize Jesus for who he really is. Jesus preaches a very simple message. He says: I’ve come to die for the sake of the world. And the disciples hear, “I’ve come to rule the world.” The people never listen, but the demons do.

Silence and Darkness

Luke 1:5-13, 57-80

I want to talk today about two of the things we fear about this season: Silence and darkness. Both of these things that seem at first like things to be avoided at all costs are also necessary to give this season the depth of meaning that it has.

            I’m not just talking about silent moments, either. I was editing this sermon last night after watching the kids all day, and I was desperate for silence, but Elias was still awake, Kate was watching TV, I was overwhelmed by noise and touch. Seriously, why do the kids have to always be touching me? I mean, I love snuggling on the couch for an hour, but why does one of them need to be sitting on my chest for the next five?

            Anyway, that reprieve of silence at the end of the day is obviously good, but there is something even more meaningful about silence that takes us from relief into uncertainty before encroaching even upon discomfort. Silence, like darkness, provides depth to the human experience, it forces us to confront things as they really are; it turns our autopilot off and forces us to think, to feel, and to live in the uncertainty.

            Yesterday was the shortest day of the year—the winter solstice. For six months, things have been getting darker and darker. With the encroaching darkness comes a weightiness to the season, a certain gravitas that we can feel whenever we wrest ourselves away from the shiny lights of commercialism and the busy-ness of responsibility. Perhaps this is why we fill our lives with so much this time of year. We fear the heaviness of the dark and the pregnant silence that comes with it. It is a season that bears the hopes and fears of all the years, as the hymn (O Little Town of Bethlehem) says.

            God doesn’t show up in a light, airy moment. The Gospel accounts of the lead up to Jesus’ birth, the birth itself, and its repercussions all bear witness to a world in the throes of a long night. A petulant king fights back against a dangerous child—it sounds like The Mandalorian… or America 2019; history just circles back in on itself. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

            Today we read about Zechariah, the father of the John, who would become known as John the Baptist, cousin to Jesus. Zechariah receives a promise from an angel that he and his wife will have a son in their old age. Sound familiar? History circles back around—Abraham and Sarah become Zechariah and Elizabeth. But she couldn’t have been that old; after all, her sister, Mary, must have only been a teenager. So, in Zechariah’s case, his lack of belief seems like it has less to do with biological impossibility and more to do with mistrust of the unknown. Who doesn’t, really? Whose first reaction to angels wouldn’t be that they were being punked? Who doesn’t doubt?

            Still, because of his response, Zechariah is rendered mute. He can’t speak from the time the angel proclaims the coming child to the moment of his naming. That silence is itself a theological statement on how we are to wait. Zechariah is not being punished. He is being forced, like so many before and after him, to experience the silence between words where God moves.

Real comfort

Isaiah 40:1-11

“Comfort, comfort my people!” says Isaiah. Then, also, “The people are grass.”

            Isaiah hasn’t had a lot of pastoral training. Few prophets have. That’s not really their job, to be completely honest. Prophets are free agents, who are really just God’s agents, subject to nobody. It’s actually a bit strange that Isaiah leads with comfort, because so often the prophets burst onto the stage and can’t seem to help themselves but proclaim judgment and justice and all those things. Comfort is a softer kind of word, more a pastoral word than a prophetic one.

            But Isaiah is also bringing a different kind of message. For the last several weeks now I’ve been preaching on the change in the prophetic imagination as we leave behind old covenants and discover the new covenant. This new covenant is whispered in first Isaiah—an earlier prophet known as Isaiah, who we read about even before Harvest Festival—then in the reforms of Josiah, then in Jeremiah, and today, finally in second Isaiah. These are, in fact, the first words of 2^nd Isaiah, and it is the first time we hear in the book of Isaiah that Jerusalem has been destroyed.

            Perhaps that gives some clue why Isaiah leads with comfort. You preach comfort to people who need it, not to people who need to know about the impending judgment looming over them. No, these people have experienced the trauma of losing their homeland, of the desecration of their religious capitol, and the loss of their history in that place. These are people that need comfort, and, yet, that comfort comes not in a promise that they will one day return home.

The new covenant you won't believe

Jeremiah 31:31-34, 33:14-18

Two readings from Jeremiah today, three chapters apart, and both begin with the words “The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will… 1) make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah, and 2) fulfill my gracious promise.

            This gracious promise—this new covenant—will not be like the covenants of old… which is kind of weird if we’re being completely honest, because God makes these covenants with a people forever. God said to Noah, “I will never again destroy the world by flood, and here’s a rainbow as a sign of my covenant.” And God said to Abraham, “You will have descendants and land. This is my covenant.” These are supposed to be eternal promises, but these eternal promises are dependent on the people responding correctly. And there’s the really obvious flaw that Noah and Abraham and Moses seem to be missing: People absolutely never respond correctly. So, what good are these covenants, really?

            God makes a promise, says you get this nice thing as long as you obey, and about five minutes later people are like, “You know what would be really fun to worship? A golden cow!” A covenant that requires human beings to be something other than sinners is a worthless covenant, because we won’t be, we never been, and we never will be. Give us any length of rope whatsoever and we will manage to hang ourselves. Just because we have Jesus does not mean we have left this kind of thinking behind. The predominant view of God, even in Christian circles, is as one who gives us nice things when we obey him. Perhaps you’ve seen the Joel Osteen clip going around where he says, “When you are poor, broke, and defeated all that proves is that you are poor, broke, and defeated. It doesn’t bring any honor to God.”

            This, of course, is fundamentally opposed to everything Jesus said—blessed are the meek, become like children, etc—but it doesn’t matter. Osteen can get 40,000 people in a stadium to give him a standing ovation for saying it, because it is a sexy lie. We want to believe that we can lift ourselves up by our bootstraps and earn the covenant, like the Israelites were supposed to keep up with their end of the bargain. We want to believe we are different despite the fact that the entire history of the human race is marked by the failure to be even halfway decent followers of God the moment we provided with even a single alternative thing to worship. Osteen is low-hanging fruit, but he is a perfect example because the prosperity Gospel would be the best possible Gospel if it were possible.

            The problem is sin. The problem is us. God tried this prosperity business. That was essentially what happened with Noah and Abraham, with Moses and eventually with David. God tried to give us the possibility of living up to the expectations. Just be good, said God a hundred times, like the parent who feels obligated to parent in this way even when we know deep down that our children are going to not be the perfect little angels we expect them to be.

            So, when we come to Jeremiah, God has reached the stage of parenting where he throws up his hands and says, “Fine! Don’t be good then! See if I care!”

            But on the other side of this despairing over the behavior of God’s children—on the other side of exile and lots of death—comes this:

³¹ The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. ³² It won’t be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant with me even though I was their husband, declares the Lord. ³³ No, this is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my Instructions within them and engrave them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. ³⁴ They will no longer need to teach each other to say, “Know the Lord!” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord; for I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sins.