Never one to miss a good theology lecture, I was excited to learn last week that the seminary at Sewanee was going to livestream a lecture by Bishop Rob Wright of Atlanta. I enjoy hearing Bishop Wright speak, but even better, his lecture was advertised with the title, “Why Christian Nationalism isn’t Christian.” These days, you see, I just love to be horrified about Christian Nationalism. It’s my favorite thing to look down my nose at. It’s my favorite thing to use to stir up in myself that exciting feeling of fear and anger, seasoned with some smug superiority.
I
fired up my computer with great expectation and was disappointed to find out
that I had missed the first few minutes of the lecture. As I listened, I kept
waiting for Bishop Wright to start bashing Christian Nationalists. But he just
kept talking to us Episcopalians about how we can miss the mark and how we
can be better followers of Jesus. So I kept waiting, more and more
impatiently. “Maybe he made fun of
Christian Nationalists at the beginning of the talk,” I mused. “And I missed
it! Darn!”
As
the Bishop wound up his lecture, he just kept talking about how the world needs
God’s Love, and the ways in which we can respond to hatred. It was an excellent
lecture, and I certainly had to agree with everything he said …. But deep down,
I turned off my computer a bit disappointed not to have gotten my fix of picking
on a group of people with whom I profoundly disagree.
Jesus
would not have been pleased with me, as I was acting just like John in today’s
Gospel lesson. In today’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples are nearing the time
when Jesus will face crucifixion. He doesn’t have much time left to communicate
to his followers how they are to live into God’s Kingdom, into God’s dream for
the world. To top it off, the disciples, like us, just don’t seem to
understand. Here’s Jesus, with a little child still sitting on his knees, the little
child we Christians are supposed to emulate. Poor Jesus has just explained how we’re
to seek humility and love, rather than greatness and worldly power. And here’s
John, all excited to rebuke Christians who aren’t a part of his group!
Contrary
to the idealized portrayals in the book of Acts, the early church was as
fragmented and quarrelsome as the Church has always been, and Mark has Jesus
addressing the issue of “us” versus “them” in no uncertain terms in our Gospel
lesson. This part of the Gospel always reminds me of the church history lesson
I used to use with teens in Confirmation class. To engage the kids in my
lesson, I’d give them each a handful of old Playmobil figures from my basement.
Like the real Church, these figures are a motley crew: some hold props like canoe
paddles, suitcases, or even guns. Some are missing body parts, and some are
faceless adults and children. The task for the confirmands is to move these
figures in and out of groups as I outline the history of the Church.
As we go from a small community of persecuted Christians to a church split between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, to the divisions and wars of the Protestant Reformation, to the fragmentation within the Protestant Churches that creates all of our present-day denominations, the kids frantically try to keep up. As the communities in our story fight and morph, divide and dwindle, the teens move the Playmobil figures around the table. At the end of the exercise, we’re always left with tiny groups of pitiful Playmobil figures, clumped in irrelevant little circles all over the table, with their guns and canoe paddles and missing limbs. It’s hard not to shake our heads in sorrowful self-recognition at the sight. I’ll never forget the comment of one wise middle-schooler as the lesson drew to an end: “Rev. Anne,” she said, “why can’t all these groups just concentrate on what they have in common, instead of on the things they disagree about?” Jesus couldn’t have said it better.
Jesus
goes beyond just chastising the disciples for a lack of unity in today’s Gospel,
however. He seems to start threatening us about something even deeper. Like a
parent worried sick for her wayward child, Jesus uses strong language with his
followers, doesn’t he?! He needs us to stop what we’re doing and hear him now.
Using words of frightening hyperbole, Jesus warns us to quit focusing on that
log in someone else’s eye. Jesus knows that it’s going to take each of us, all
that we have, and all that we are, to live lives of Christian discipleship.
Rather than asserting our own superiority, our attention needs to be on caring
for the littlest and the least. We need to watch out for the series of self-imposed
roadblocks that litter the path of a Christian life, a life that even our own
hands and eyes and feet can pull dangerously off course from one moment to the
next.
All
the talk of “hell” in this passage might cause us squeamishly
non-hellfire-and-brimstone-Episcopalians to squirm and shut our ears. That
would be unfortunate. “Hell” here isn’t about the afterlife. Neither is it Dante’s
Inferno of pitchforks and eternal fire that we might imagine when we read
Jesus’ words. And this “Hell” is certainly not for other people,
for the people we deem unfit for our circle. This “hell” in the Greek text is
the word “Gehenna.” Gehenna is a real place. It’s valley near Jerusalem where,
at once point in the history of ancient Israel, human sacrifices were once
offered to foreign gods. As such, it was always known as a defiled and unclean
place. In Jesus’ day, Gehenna was a garbage dump for the city, a place where
burning trash smoldered night and day. What a fitting image of desolation,
defilement, and decay![1]
If
you want life in God, Jesus cries out to us, you need to rid yourself of everything
that’s a stumbling block, even if it seems as essential to your present life as
your hands and feet and eyes. If you hang onto your stumbling block, it will
burn away your time and your will. Instead of living into God’s Kingdom, you
will smolder in a metaphorical garbage dump of living death, until
nothing is left but dust and ashes.
It
is especially hard these days not to engage, like John and like me during that
lecture, in doubling down on difference, in making ourselves feel superior by
bashing those with whom we disagree. The media, social media, even authors and
speakers we rely upon, make it hard for us to walk in love across a minefield of
difference. With a perilous and fraught election looming, with violence growing
at home and abroad, with opinions and beliefs so different within and between
Christian groups, today’s Gospel is hard to hear and to follow. Please note
that I’m not saying that we should ignore the danger presented by Christian
Nationalism or any other hate-fueled group. Rather, I want us to hear Jesus’
warning to us, in our own lives and communities. It is so much easier to
put all of my time and energy in criticizing others, in explaining why someone
else is not Christian, than it is to get out there and do real works of love.
But to get out there and do real works of love is what we are called to do as followers
of Jesus.
Jesus
ends his own lecture in today’s Gospel with verses about salt, telling us to “have
salt in ourselves, and be at peace with one another.” One commentary calls
these two verses, “among the most difficult to interpret in the entire Gospel,”
which isn’t encouraging![2] It helps to understand,
though, that salt is associated in Hebrew Scripture with God’s Covenant. In the
Book of Numbers, a covenant of salt is an everlasting covenant between God and
God’s people. Yes, salt purifies through the fire of sacrifice, yet salt also creates
a bond, a promise to be forever in relationship with God. To share salt with
someone is to share fellowship with them, to be in covenant, in relationship
with them.[3]
Instead
of the conflict and strife that began today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus ends by
offering us the peace of covenant fellowship, the peace we know at the altar
rail, the peace we know in our beloved parish communities. Yet, for Jesus, we
aren’t just responsible for peace, for wholeness, within our parishes. We’re
responsible for peace and wholeness with everyone who bears the name of Love,
whether they agree with us or not, whether we like them or not, whether it’s
easy for us to share with them or not. It’s like the little poem says:
He drew a circle
that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.[4]
Just like Bishop Wright
said in that lecture.
[1]
Morna D. Hooker, The Gospel According to St. Mark (Blacks New
Testament Commentaries, 1991), 232.
[2]
Elian Cuvillier, L’Evangile de Marc (Paris: Bayard, 2002), 199.
[3]
Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of
Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 264.
[4]
Edwin Markham, from Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems, 1913.
