An empty church, a sign of love

Galatians 6:1-10

Today I want to reflect on what it means to be a community in light of COVID-19, both as a community that holds to the words of scripture that remind us time and again that we need not be afraid and as a community that holds one another in love, a community that does not minimize the fears of others, and, ultimately, a community dedicated to the care of the most vulnerable.

            Firstly, I confess that I don’t know what on earth I’m doing. They don’t cover this in seminary. I suspect you are finding yourself in a similar boat, dazed by how quickly things are changing and unsure whether that’s prudent or how you should be feeling about that. The first step of all might be giving ourselves permission to stop and grieve, because we have lost things already and other things hang tenuously in the balance—trips and concerts, sports, weddings, even work and school and basically everybody’s social life. I’m sort of an action person, as some of you are, but you are not obligated to do things right now; you can grieve your losses, even if nobody you know ever gets sick.

Next, some perspective is helpful. The history of the world is full of challenging moments, many more-so than this one. The world God created and called “good” still grumbles under the weight of this brokenness we call sin. In other places in the world, Christians and non-Christians alike deal with these realities on a day-to-day basis, and it is our privilege to live in a place and time where this is odd and extraordinary.

We are so unaccustomed to this type of adversity that all we can think to do is go out and raid stores for toilet paper. It’s a sign that something is wrong with us that our first instinct is to hoard. So, I have some news that is at first going to sound bad: Life is not only about you—health is not about you, salvation—even—is not about you. Christ lived and died for the community of faith, and that we make that only about our personal and individual salvation is a symptom of a disease far more devastating than any pandemic. Our selfishness will lead to the pain and suffering of others, and that is true all the time, but far more obvious now.

            Let me be completely plain as it regards the novel coronavirus, and as a millennial myself, I am sick of healthy young people proclaiming that since there is little risk to them, everybody else is overreacting. Life is not about you. As Christians, we should be willing to make great sacrifices for the sake of others, no matter their vulnerability. Instead, too often we won’t even make small sacrifices unless there is evidence that our direct contribution is doing something, like we need to get credit for doing good. It’s selfishness, pure and simple. We should not live in fear, but we should put the needs of others before our own. Too often we are better at saying, “Thoughts and prayers!” than we are at committing to making ourselves uncomfortable for the sake of somebody else who has no choice.

I get it. None of us know what should be done, but one of life’s secrets is that none of us ever know what should be done. We do the best that we can with limited information. The test of whether a thing is right or wrong is not based on whether you are acting with an understanding of all the science or anything like that, or else we would be paralyzed. A choice is right if we make it for the sake of others and it is wrong if we make it our of selfishness. So many of the old fairy tales fail to tell us that good and bad are rarely obvious, but if we are making a choice with somebody else in mind—somebody who will not benefit us personally—then that choice can’t be wrong. It’s less often a choice between right and wrong and more often the choice between what is right and what is easy. 

From religious practice to discipleship

Mark 10:32-52

I can empathize with Zebedee.

Zebedee? you’re no doubt wondering. I don’t remember hearing about any Zebedee?

Oh, he was there. Mark 10, verse 35: “James and John, Zebedee’s sons, came to Jesus and said, ‘Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.’”

Zebedee is mentioned several times in the Bible like this, either as the father of James and John or as the husband of Salome, and he does actually make an appearance in Mark 1:19-20 when he is out fishing with his sons as Jesus calls them to leave him behind. So, we know he’s a fisherman but that’s pretty much it. Still, I strongly relate to Zebedee and I’ll tell you why: Because his grown-up children come to Jesus, the Son of God, the Savior of the world, the Big Kahuna, and they say, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”

I’m not sure there’s any moment in scripture where I completely get Jesus more than when these grown-up children come up, pulling his arm and saying, “Hey, Son of God… Hey, son of God! Hey! Hey! Look at us! Give us what we want!”

So, I feel for Zebedee, because if his grown-up sons are like this for Jesus, seriously what were they like back at home?

One of the metaphors most common to our relation with God is that of “Father.” It’s not the only metaphor we have of course, and in some ways it can be a troublesome one for some people. If you had a poor father in your life or if you lost your father, imagining God as Father can be either very positive as you yearn for the figure you were missing or it can be unhelpful and even traumatic. So, realizing that God as Father doesn’t work for everybody, it can nonetheless be a useful metaphor for some of us in moments like these. God as divine parent can help us to remember how childish we can be—not childlike, childish.

So I don’t know Zebedee, but I feel for him. James and John are childish in this story. “Allow us to sit at your right-hand and your left!” they ask.

In return they get a kindergarten response from Jesus. If you listen closely to the scripture you can hear the long sigh that Jesus let out here. It’s like that moment where the children’s sermon has gone out of control and the kids are pretty sure the pastor is Jesus and that he is going to give out candy like the Easter bunny, except—need I remind you—James and John are not children. Their stupidity is a little harder to excuse.

“Can you drink the cup I drink or receive the baptism I receive?” Jesus asks them.

“We can,” they answer.

This is where it gets fun, because the disciples still obviously don’t get who Jesus is, even though he’s spent every single chapter in the Gospel of Mark spelling it out for them. They think he is asking them if they can literally drink from his cup and receive the kind of baptism for the forgiveness of sins that Jesus received from John the Baptist. Well, that’s easy! Is that all there is to sitting at the right-hand of God?

They are asking a question about religious practice, but the answer Jesus gives is about discipleship. The difference between religious practice and discipleship is the difference between the meaningfulness of ritual and the testimony of self-sacrifice. We need both, but the great irony is that the disciples fail particularly hard at the latter: They don’t know what it means to be a disciple.

Cheap Grace vs Free Grace

Mark 10:17-31

I preach on this story so often when it is not the reading of the day that I hardly know what to do with it when it is. So, I figured that I would use the opportunity today to talk about why I find this story so applicable to so many situations.

            First of all, it’s about wealth, which is a subject everybody can relate to. The scene sets us up for the kind of hierarchical stratification in which we live most of our lives, judging who is wealthier, who is poorer, and trying to tease out what is a comfortable level of wealth for us to have and live our lives. Everybody does this; everybody has an idea of what is ‘good enough’ for them to feel like they are getting by, and everybody has an ideal of what is ‘wealthy.’

            This is when Jesus drops the bomb, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

            With the rug pulled out from underneath us, there is an obvious next question, “So what does it mean to be rich?”

            And I think this is one of the most important questions implied anywhere in scripture. It’s a question that will betray our motivations up-front, because anybody can argue that they aren’t really rich, not compared to so-and-so, or such and such. After all, if you make $100,000 a year, sure you are in the top tenth of one percent in the world in terms of income, but still you would have to put that much away for 10,000 years to become a billionaire. Since billionaires exist, how wealthy are you, really, in comparison?

            At first blush, Jesus leaves the door open. Perhaps to earn our place in the kingdom of God we just need to be really good lawyers, arguing that wealth is relative and how can I get snubbed in the kingdom of God when that pro athlete, who has only been blessed with being big, is so much wealthier than me? Or how I can be rich—really—when that other person got all their money from inheritance?

            It’s real easy to not be rich if we compare ourselves with others, but comparison is exactly the problem. The standard Jesus sets for us is not the rich and not the poor; he is not saying that you are wealthy because you have more than the people who use the food shelf, and he’s not saying you aren’t rich because you don’t have as much as a billionaire. The Jesus sets is whether you have given it all away. Verse 21: “Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’”

The least and the greatest

Mark 9:30-37

I was once in a sports bar with friends watching a game; it doesn’t really matter what kind of game it was. One of my friends was a mammoth fan of one of the teams playing—you know the sort, wearing the hat and jersey, cheering loudly, the whole drill. A few beers into the night and a fan of the opposing team a table over starts heckling him back. At first it’s good natured, then eventually less so. My friend is not one to stand down to a challenge, but he’s also not the type to get into a fight over sports. So, he hides that it’s bothering him until, eventually, he can’t stand it anymore, and, seething, he heads for the doors.

            I’ve been party to many such encounters between fans of various sports teams. I’ve seen it often from all the fans of teams I love to hate, but I’ve seen it also from Twins fans. I once helped get a Twins fan removed from a game for abusing a Yankees fan who was there with his family. I’ve seen it from Gophers fans, rioting in the street when I was in high school. I’ve even seen it from Bearcats fans, perhaps slightly less dramatically. Tribalism is alive and well in the sports world.

            I thought about this today as I was reading the disciples arguing behind Jesus’ back about who is the greatest. I don’t listen to sports talk anymore, but I did in a former life and this is the kind of banal bull they are talking about all the time. Who is the greatest? What team has the most storied history? It filters down to the way that fans talk about sports. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen fans of teams I love who run across the guy (let’s face it, it’s always a guy) who says, “Yeah, but my team has more championships than yours!” As if that means anything in the context of who I might cheer for.

            The idea that there are winners and losers is prevalent in sports and in politics and in business—in basically every aspect of our lives. The world is full of winners and losers, we are told. Is it any surprise that the church is struggling to find its place in such a world? Or, I think more likely, the church has never had a place in the world; it’s just that for a long time the church was considered one of the winners. If you wanted to move up in society you went to church. Nowadays, since the Christian faith is winning less over other tides in our society; the church must fall back on being what the church was actually supposed to be all along. The Christian church doesn’t call you a winner; the Christian faith tells you that you are dust. And dust doesn’t give a hoot about winners and losers. Dust is just dust.

The Cross and Type-2 Fun

Mark 8:27-9:8

The Gospel of Mark is my favorite Gospel for two reasons. (1) It’s direct and to the point, and (2) the disciples are really dumb. Those two things give me comfort because I need to be reminded of what matters most of all pretty much every moment; I cannot hear about the cross often enough. And I’m also comforted by these disciples because if these were the guys Jesus chose as his right-hand men, then following Jesus really is open to anybody. If the disciples had been super big-head geniuses we could never know if we are enough, but since they are complete dunderheads we can all have hope. I can have hope not just for myself but maybe more importantly for those other Christians who never seem to get it either, because, Lord knows, I have seen some Christians justify terrible positions in the name of Christianity.

Like the disciples and the Pharisees both, we are always obsessing about the wrong things. We quickly sort everything into good and bad, success and failure. Meanwhile, Jesus is standing on the mountaintop transfigured, having just told the blockhead disciples that he is more than the messiah they expected; he is, in fact, coming to die for the sake of the world and rise again. And the disciples watch him transfigured and they say to themselves, “Ya know, I think we should put this guy next to Moses and Elijah. He’s almost as amazing as them!”

We shouldn’t be surprised. Jesus called these guys from their work as fisherman and tax collectors, tradesmen and carpenters, merchants, but never scholars of the Torah. Those who practiced trades like these would have lacked even basic literacy. They were elementary school drop-outs, not smart enough to make the cut to continue toward a professional career as a scribe or a lawyer. They were practicing the family trades because they weren’t good enough to do anything else.

In light of their simplicity, it makes sense that the disciples didn’t want Jesus to die. The simplest faith is to say “Death is bad, and life is good.” If it weren’t such a loaded political term today, we could say that the disciples were “Pro-life,” while the life they were in favor of was ultimately meaningless. Their faith in Jesus was misplaced not because they were bad guys but because they could not imagine anything better. Simple faith is not bad faith because it is simple, but simple faith is no assurance that your faith is in the right thing either. The disciples have bad faith not because they believe too much about Jesus but because they believe too little. Yet, far from disqualifying them, this seems to be precisely why Jesus chooses them.

The laws Jesus wouldn't have you follow

Mark 7:1-23

            I want to talk today about the three different types of laws. This is not the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd use of the law in the classical Lutheran sense—(that’s a topic for a dreary day when you want to take a nap); instead, I am going to talk about the three particular types laws that you can find in the Bible and why we only concern ourselves with two out of the three anymore in the Christian Church. Understanding the distinction between laws will help you to grasp what is happening in today’s reading between Jesus and the Pharisees, but even if you don’t care about this particular story because it doesn’t seem all that thrilling, it’s just as important to understand what laws are applicable and why so that you know what God wants you to do here and now.

            In order to wrap our heads around the law, we are going to have to fast forward a bit to another part of the Gospels. In this scene, a legal expert comes to Jesus (when I say “legal expert” I do not mean a lawyer as we would understand them today but an expert on the Torah which was the law of the Jewish people), and this legal expert asks Jesus a rather important question.

“Teacher,” he says, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (10:25).

Jesus responds, “What is written in the Law? How do you interpret it?” (10:26).

            This is the first thing of note: Jesus answers a question about the law with a question about what the law says. It’s not simply that the Pharisees are pro-law and Jesus is anti-law. In fact, as we discover, Jesus is much more into certain aspects of the law than the legal experts. Back to the scene: The legal expert answers Jesus, saying,

“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself” (10:27), quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and adding that bit about a neighbor. 

Jesus responds, “You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live” (10:28).

We should note here that an important facet of the law, according to Jesus, namely that it has two parts: Love God and love your neighbor.

Sounds simple, right?

If the question is, “Which laws should I follow?” then the answer is the ones that tell you to love God and to love people. Straightforward enough for us, but this would have created a host of questions in the minds of these legal experts since a good portion of the Torah pertains not just to laws about loving God and loving neighbor but also to laws about being set apart as the Chosen People. This third group of laws is where we find the contention between the Pharisees and Jesus in our reading today.

Powerful people who play the victim

Mark 6:1-29

Last week I mentioned that at least four churches still claim to have the head of John the Baptist. Well, this week we get to find out why John the Baptist is missing his head.

There’s a lot to unpack here but I want to start a bit with Herod. There is this long tradition in scripture of powerful men being portrayed as victims. Two of the most powerful people in the land where Jesus did his ministry were Herod, who was the political leader of Galilee, and Pontius Pilate, who was governor of Judaea. Pilate served under the Roman Emperor while Herod ruled Galilee as a client state of the Roman Empire. This Herod was actually Herod Antipas, the son of the King Herod who so famously sent those kings to find Jesus so he could have him killed.

The historical account of these two powerful men is deeply intertwined. For example, when Jesus first comes before Pilate in the trial scene after he is betrayed Pilate sends him back to Herod Antipas since Jesus was most active in his territory. At this point, the Bible tends to lean apologetically toward these two men. Pilate famously washes his hands of Jesus’ fate handing him over to “his own people.” Herod Antipas similarly is “deeply grieved” by the request to murder John the Baptist. It’s as if the Gospel writers are trying to excuse their actions to soften the blow of their characters, but you have to understand the history.

Both these rulers are attested to in other historical documents. Josephus, the most well-known and prolific historian of the period, mentions both. Pilate is attested in historical records as one of the cruelest rulers of the age. He is eventually removed from his governorship after slaughtering a group of Samaritans on an archaeological dig. Herod Antipas, on the other hand, is hardly a lover of this movement of Jesus-followers. He had John the Baptist arrested simply for telling him that his incestuous marriage was not kosher. So, when Herod excuses himself because he took an oath to Herodias, the young girl he loved (and was related to), the reader has to be awfully naïve to take this at face value. We should ask ourselves: Why is it that powerful men are excused for terrible actions because of an oath when those same men are constantly violating their oaths?

If you can’t uphold oaths consistently then any oath you take is worthless. To swear an oath is not to promise to do something unless it is inconvenient. Oaths either matter to you or they don’t. This was particularly true for Pilate in the scene surrounding the trial of Jesus. After all, Pilate had been particularly cruel to these people. So, in that famous scene when he presents Jesus or Barabbas and asks, “Which one shall I free?” the people know the correct answer. It might seem awfully egregious of the crowds to shout “Barabbas!” but perhaps less so when you understand that at an order Pilate could have his soldiers raid and kill everybody in the court. If you believe the crowd has the power, then the story means one thing, but if Pilate has all the power, then it means something altogether. History suggests that this was exactly the kind of governor he was, dangling what the people want but demanding what would best serve him. He was not a sympathetic character—he was a brutal authoritarian.

So, we have these witnesses several times in the Bible where powerful men are excused for the worst kinds of actions, but that doesn’t answer the question of “Why?” I believe this is a probably of time. Readers of scripture in the 1^st century would have known exactly who these men were and the substance of their character. Pilate’s name would have been Mussolini to them or Stalin; they would have known exactly what it meant. So, too, we have Herod Antipas, who abuses his power to marry whoever he wants, flagrantly flaunting the Jewish law practiced by so many in his territories, and then he turns it around and blames the murder of John the Baptist on his mistress and niece. Stand up guy. And yet you wouldn’t be alone if you felt an ounce of remorse for him. Powerful people abuse their power to bend the narrative toward feeling sorry for themselves. Powerful people have blamed victims for as long as there have been victims to blame. Scripture portrays them this way, because that is how life works. Powerful people play victims over and over again.