SERMONS

By Rev. Anthony B. Robinson
Sabbatical Interim Minister
Mark 9: 38-50

September 27, 2009

As I noted in my article in this week’s newsletter our Scripture lessons this fall, and in particular the readings from the Gospel of Mark, are on the theme of discipleship. A disciple is a student of a teacher, a follower of a master. What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus?

In this crucial middle section of Mark’s Gospel Jesus is both preparing his disciples for his own coming death and teaching them about what it means to be his disciples.

And . . . the disciples don’t come off all that well. They screw up. They miss the point. They fail in the work. They are jealous of others. And when Jesus tries to talk with them about the cross, they are busy arguing with one another about which of them is the most important.

In some ways, it’s a discouraging picture. You almost can’t help looking at the disciples in story after story and saying, “What schmucks! What schlubs! What are they thinking?”

Like the opening story this week. Disciple John comes to Jesus to report, seemingly with satisfaction and pride, “There was a guy, calling on your name, casting out demons Lord; but he wasn’t part of our group. Don’t worry, we shut him down!”

To which Jesus says, “What are you thinking? Someone doing good work in my name? If he’s not against us, he’s for us!”

So the disciples, particularly in Mark’s Gospel, don’t come off looking real good. This may seem discouraging. And yet, in an odd way, maybe it is also encouraging. How so?

Well, it’s pretty clear that being a disciple of Jesus doesn’t mean being perfect. These are not Straight A students. These are C and D students. They may pull an occasional B but when they do you kind of feel it’s a fluke. Like getting your high grade in Driver’s Ed or Study Hall.

Being a disciple of Jesus doesn’t mean being perfect. It means you keep showing up, keeping trying and when you fail, you try again. You keep learning.

The important reminder here is that being a disciple of Jesus isn’t all about our smarts, our virtue or our perfection. It’s about God, and God’s grace. It’s about God’s capacity to use imperfect people for God’s purposes in the world. And that is, at least to my way of thinking, encouraging, more even than encouraging; it’s good news.

So today’s passage begins with John boasting that he has shut someone down because he wasn’t part of “our group,” and then there are a string of teachings from Jesus, several of which sound, well, grim.

“If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.” Wow! Or this, “If you hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell. If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out.”

You know how some churches, some preachers, frequently talk about taking the Bible literally? Given this text, isn’t it surprising that in churches where they make this claim, there aren’t more one-eyed or one armed people running around? Oh, don’t go there!

And then Jesus wraps it all up with a couple of sayings about salt, including, “If salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?”

I want to ask you think with me about this text in a slightly different way than we may generally have thought of it. Often people think of this in strictly individual terms, as addressed only to individuals. Take care that you aren’t a stumbling block to new believers. If you’ve got a sin problem, cut it out, get rid of it, and so on.

That’s okay, that’s one way to hear this. But I want to take a different tact. How about if we think of it as addressed to the community, to the church? Or maybe it’s both, both individuals and church? As I mentioned earlier, the focus of this whole part of Mark is on the disciples who are individuals but not only individuals. They are a group, a community, church-in-training.

To the community, the church, Jesus says, “If you lose your saltiness, what are you gonna do? What will you be? Saltless salt? Waterless water?” In this sense, if we hear Jesus as talking about the community, he’s saying that a community, a church, can lose its character, even its point. A church, or really any organization, can lose its identity and its purpose.

Perhaps you have heard the famous story of the life-saving club. Back east, on the shores of the grey Atlantic in New England, swimmers and boats would be caught in currents or sudden storms. So a couple of folks said, “Let’s start a life saving club. We’ll save people who are in trouble in the ocean.” So, the life-saving club is borne and all goes well.

One day someone says, “I think it would be great if we had a clubhouse, you know a place to take a shower, clean up.” Everyone agreed. Soon a clubhouse was built.

Time passed, things became more organized with membership and dues and by-laws, and one day someone said, “You know, I like our old clubhouse, but we really need to build something better, bigger, nicer, with rooms to relax and play pool, maybe and a bar.” And people thought that sounded good too.

So funds were raised and a big, new clubhouse was built. When it was all done the life-saving club held an open house to show their new clubhouse off to the community. As people toured the new facility, someone said, “This is great, but I’m very interested in your work, saving people from the sea. Can you tell us about that?” The club member, leading the tour answered, “Well, actually we don’t do that anymore. We’re pretty busy with the clubhouse here. We do have an historical room where you can see pictures of the old days when people were out there on the beach saving lives.”

“But if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it?”

And there’s a funny thing. If another group had started doing the actual life-saving work, chances are good the boys in the clubhouse would have tried to shut ‘em down. “Hey, you can’t do that, we’re the life-saving club, not you!”

In fact, I heard a story just this week from a church here in Seattle. The church had a committee to maintain the grounds, the flower beds around the church and so on. But the committee wasn’t doing anything, and things were looking scrappy and neglected. A new person joined the church and without asking anyone, she just started taking care of the flower beds, planting beautiful flowers. Well, you can imagine what happened . . . the people on the landscaping committee were upset. “Who does she think she is? She can’t plant flowers, she’s not on the committee!”

So, earlier in this chapter of Mark, the disciples having proven woefully inadequate when it came to casting out a demon, but now, when they ran into someone who was doing the work, but wasn’t part of their group, they tried to shut him down.

In the late nineteenth century the great American evangelist, Dwight L. Moody, went on a preaching tour in England. Moody drew great crowds and led many to the Lord. But after he’d been at it a while a group of clergymen from the Church of England came to see him. There were unhappy.

“What we don’t care for Mr. Moody,” said the clergymen, “is your way of doing things.” To which Moody said, “I don’t care much for it either. But I prefer it to your way of not doing things!”

So I hear a two-fold challenge here in the words of Jesus. When the disciples are tempted to police others and get upset about what someone else is doing, Jesus says, “Examine yourselves. Have salt in yourselves.” “Are you as disciples and as church, serious about the mission, serious about a Christian life and discipleship?” Often the salt has lost its saltiness, as individuals we aren’t all that serious, really, about following Christ; and as churches, we seem to forget our real reason for being.

Like the life-saving club, many churches become focused on the clubhouse and the members, on keeping the membership happy or satisfied instead of focusing on Jesus Christ and God’s mission of saving lives. Over and over again the means, the building or the budget or the size, becomes more important than the end, the mission to which Christ has called us as his church and his disciples.

So this business of cutting off a hand or plucking out an eye–when you think of this as addressed to the church–may mean something different. It may mean that you may have to let go of some folks who aren’t supportive of, serious about, serving the mission of God. It’s painful, putting the mission ahead of any one person or family, but its important. If you get that priority reversed and are willing to do anything to retain one person, a couple people, or a family, the church loses its saltiness.

In fact, I was at a church last year in Toronto, an Anabaptist Megachurch, (which is sort of an oxymoron) that would have a “Purge Sunday,” every now and then. Because they attracted a lot of people, they would occasionally say, “We’re not interested in Christian tourism. If you’ve been here a while and haven’t made a commitment to discipleship, to mission and to being part of a house church, you need to move on, and find a church where you can make a commitment.”

Last week I was in Massachusetts where I was working with a congregation that had been founded in 1727. One of things I said to them, the kind of thing you can say when you’re a guest speaker who gets to leave, is that when churches are exclusively or primarily focused on meeting the needs of their own members, they tend to lose vitality and decline. When, on the other hand, churches have “an outward orientation,” when they care about people who are looking for God and about connecting with people and helping them to connect with God, they tend to be vital and alive.

You can hear that I think the mission of the church includes but is not limited to tangible help: food, clothing, shelter. The purpose of the church is to be a spiritual community, forming people in faith, connecting people to God, pointing to and bearing witness to the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

The Pastor at the church in Massachusetts had told me that the week before they had a special service. I mentioned it to them because it seemed to me an example of having more of an “outward orientation.” They had a “Blessing of the Animals service.” People brought their beloved pets to be blessed.

They put a sign on the highway announcing the service, and they held the service outside on the large green in front of the church. Through the signs, through the animal-connection, and by being outside, that church connected with a lot of people who were not church members. They manifested an “outward orientation,” caring about people who are looking for God, caring about people who may be spiritually homeless.

By the way, two weeks ago at our Retreat, some of you suggested that Bethany have such a service, a service of blessing of animals. So I’ve discussed this with folks, and we’re going to do that, on October 18. I’ve never done such a service. Honestly, I’ve had doubts about this sort of thing; it’ll be a stretch for me. Whether this becomes for us an opportunity to reach out, to touch people who may be seeking God, will depend in many ways on you. But it could be a great time for you to extend an invitation to people to come and see, to participate in this community, it’s life and mission.

It’s very easy, in my experience, for churches to slip into a primary or exclusive focus on meeting the needs of their members, on becoming what you might call “membership culture” churches, and to forget God’s mission, bearing witness to God’s power to transform and heal and to be about the business of new life. When that happens the salt has lost its very essence, it’s saltiness.

Let’s be clear: it’s not an either/ or; it’s not either focus inwardly on needs of members or focus outwardly and on others; it’s a both/ and. We seek to grow in our faith, to nurture faith, hope and love here in all of us, in order to participate in God’s love in Jesus Christ for the world.

I remember when this congregation, Bethany UCC, was being planned and begun almost nine years ago. About fifty of us gathered on a rainy Saturday in late November. We had little brochures about this new church. We divided up Beacon Hill and we went from door to door, inviting people to come.

Now, I have to tell you, that was kind of a leap for me and I think for many of us. It was outside my comfort zone. And besides that, it was wet and cold. But, you know what, it was a great experience. Now, we didn’t knock on the door and say, “Are you saved?” No, we just said, “You know, we’re starting a new church. We’ve asked God to help us be a multi-racial, multi-cultural church. If you don’t already have a church home, we’d like to invite you to come.” Some people wouldn’t even open the door, a few people opened up but then slammed it. But most were interested. I had some great conversations. It was actually fun.

Just to be clear, this is not a sermon about membership growth. It is a sermon about mission, about being caught up as imperfect disciples, in something bigger. It’s a sermon about being part of God’s campaign to save lives, to participate in God’s love in Jesus Christ for the world, to help people find meaning and belonging.

I believe that’s the kind of church Bethany is and that Bethany wants to be. And I just wanted to remind us of that. I want to remind myself and I want to remind you too because I know how easy it is to lose that saltiness, that risky-ness, that sense of adventure. I know how easy it is to forget that God didn’t just call us to be served and have our needs met, but to serve and to take risks and reach out and be disciples.

I just wanted to remind you today that God has called us to a great adventure as Bethany UCC, to be caught up in God’s work of healing the world, or as our Jewish brothers and sisters say, the work of “Tikkun Olum,” repairing God’s creation.

How does this happen? How do we get caught up in that mission, that adventure?

It happens when we let God and God’s grace come into our own lives and fill us. There’s a receptiveness factor.

It happens when we trust that no matter how often, like the first disciples, we do miss the point or screw up, God reaches out in grace again and again to use people just like us. We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to get to our feet when Christ calls and go. There’s a risk factor.

It happens when, in all of our life, we are caught up in God’s great project and mission of love and renewal. There’s an adventure factor.

It happens when we step out of our comfort zone. I don’t know about you, but most of the time God seems to work by calling me out of my comfort zone, calling me to go someplace or to someone that is, well, just a little challenging, and which left to myself I wouldn’t do it. Sometimes that’s a jail or some such place, but sometimes maybe it’s blessing dogs, cats and snakes. Where is God calling you to go? Who is God calling you to go to? Receptiveness, risk, adventure: do those words and qualities describe what being a disciple of Jesus is about? If they don’t, I’m not sure I’m interested.

The other day I saw the email saying our Food Bank here needed volunteers, so I did that. A little out of my comfort zone or at least my routine. Connecting with people I might not have had a chance to connect with otherwise. Now I understand we can’t all do volunteer at the Food Bank. My point isn’t working at the Food Bank, it’s trusting God and getting out of our comfort zone. My point is having salt in ourselves.

Imperfect as we are, God calls us and God will use us, to be part of God’s great mission of repair, reclamation and healing. So get caught up in that mission, in that work, in that life. Give yourself to it in whatever way God is calling you to these days. And invite others to find their place in this work, in this community, in this life with Jesus. Because if salt loses it’s saltiness, if a church forgets its purpose, well, it ain’t good for much.

Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another. Amen.