Mark 9:33-41
"33 They came to Capernaum. When he was in the house, he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the road?” 34 But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest.
35 Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.”
36 He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, 37 “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.”
Whoever Is Not Against Us Is for Us
38 “Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”
39 “Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, 40 for whoever is not against us is for us. 41 Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly be rewarded." (TNIV)
“From Ashes to Sunlight: The Phoenix Affirmations” Sermon Series, Week Seven
The most awe-inspiring church service I have ever sat in was not in a language that I could understand, or in a land that I could navigate, or at a time that I would normally have woken up for. The Church of the Annunciation is a great basilica in Nazareth run by the Franciscan order of Roman Catholic priests, and during my pilgrimage in 2010, I slipped into the domed sanctuary that morning to see, in the grotto where tradition says that Gabriel appeared to Mary, a Catholic mass being performed. I had come halfway across the world to dig up artifacts and tour holy sites, and on this day, all of that globetrotting and adventure-seeking was set aside precisely because I had come halfway across the world—only to feel completely at home in a church I had never seen and would likely never see again, because as I saw the mass unfold, from homily to Eucharist, it called out to Protestant American me, saying, “You are one of us.”
It is so difficult to overstate that sense of belonging in a world like Israel. I was staying at the Nautical College in Acre, a town that was shelled heavily with Hezbollah rocket fire during Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon. Our drives to Jerusalem would take us within sight of the heavily armed and armored walls that separated the West Bank from Israel proper. I spoke no Hebrew, no Arabic, I had tiptoed to the Western Wall and offended nuns with my covered head at the Church of the Beatitudes, it was a place and time so colossally different from where I was first taught of Christ, in America. But in that church service, I belonged in the Holy Land.
And so begins the seventh and final week of our sermon series together, “From Ashes to Sunlight: The Phoenix Affirmations.” This series is based on a book written by a United Church of Christ pastor, Rev. Eric Elnes, who has pastored a very successful church in Arizona, where they have made amazing use of a diverse array of tools and talents available to them in doing ministry. Eric then wrote this short book called “The Phoenix Affirmations,” after the town in which it was composed, but also for the image of the phoenix, rising from the ashes. And we have talked about a lot of things these past seven weeks together, and I am not even going to try to recount all of them in just a few seconds, because this week is the big one, it’s the take-home, it’s the call to serve—this week’s theme is, “Acting with meaning and with purpose to serve, and to strengthen, and to extend God’s realm of love.”
We’ve all heard that cowboy-ish, Clint Eastwood-esque saying—“If you’re not with me, then you’re against me.” President George Bush said it after September 11. If you’re a film buff like me, Kevin Bacon’s character says it in the latest X-Men movie that came out this past summer. And it is an attitude that more than a few churches have held, both past and present. They point to sayings of Jesus, like “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light, nobody comes to the Father except through Me” from the Gospel of John. And in response to that kind of a bunker mentality, I would guide those brothers and sisters to this story, here, as living, divine proof that you can proclaim Christ as the way to Heaven without being a prickly so-and-so about it, because Christ literally takes that mentality of “if you’re not with me, you’re against me” and turns it on its head—now it’s “only if you are against us can you not be for us.”
And for Jesus, that really is a winning strategy. Even the unchurched often hold Jesus in very high esteem, if only as a moral teacher. In America, at least, precious few are truly against Jesus, so by His logic, everyone else is with Him. Even ardent atheists can hold to the ideas that Jesus taught about loving your neighbor and giving to those who have less than you, yet we still will draw a line at what we do or don’t do based on a shared belief with someone. Say the Red Cross, a nondenominational charity, comes to me, a religious pastor, and asks, “Pastor, can your church host a blood donation drive?” What do you do? Jesus tells us that people and charities in the secular world are not necessarily against us—which means that they are still for us, even if we do not see it, so let us be for them as well. So of course you help the Red Cross!
Now, that’s a softball of a scenario I lobbed to you. The question gets decidedly thornier if the person or charity is involved in a religious wedge issue like abortion, or..Israel v Palestine. But, this, this is how someone can fly halfway across the world and feel so welcome at a mass—though I was not Catholic, or Israeli, or Palestinian, that I did not live there or had any right to say who should, it was a place for me, that told me I belonged there as a beloved child of God.
The Church of the Annunciation produced the exact opposite atmosphere that critics now say churches are about—the emergent pastor Brian McLaren writes of how church members “seem to want…a rigid, sectarian environment where the boundaries between “us” and “them” are constantly reinforced and celebrated, an insular environment which maintains aloofness, fear, or disdain towards the world and its problems.” I am not saying this church does any of those things. But you may know of churches that do. This sounds an awful lot like the same song I was singing when I was talking to you a few weeks ago about Biblical hospitality, and how it eclipsed simple tolerance. And it is—but the difference in today’s message is, how can you carry that hospitality, that sense of mission, into the community, into every other part of your life that is not contained within the brick and mortar of our beautiful sanctuary? How do you extend God’s realm of love, of belonging, rather than merely maintaining that realm within the church?
This time, it is the disciples, not Jesus, who provide the answer. And, as the disciples are wont to be, they show us what not to do. Their failure is twofold—they not only argue over who receives the highest honor in God’s kingdom—when Jewish tradition typically teaches that in death, all may become equal once more, having been freed of earthly riches. And then right afterwards, they are snitching on this anonymous fellow who can do what they can’t—only twenty-some verses earlier in this very chapter, the disciples attempt an exorcism and fail! So I suspect this rejection of the successful exorcist, whose only name to us is that of Christian, it was less about the exorcist using Jesus’ name than it was about jealousy. Both of these cases, at their roots, are about putting yourself before Jesus, about putting your individual identity before the identity that Christ gave you, the name of Christian, the name that literally means, “little Christ.” Before I am Eric, my name is Christian. Before you are Don, or Judy, or Doc, or Justin, your name is Christian.
Fundamentally, then, the single best thing that we can do to extend God’s realm of love is to put Jesus first. It’s an awful cliché to utter, especially towards the end of a sermon, and it is awful precisely because those exact same churches that Brian McLaren talks about—the ones insistent on making an “us and them” schism, the “answer” churches I talked about last week—talk all the time about giving yourself up to Jesus, putting Jesus first in your life, and then, when you violate one of their answers, when you do not tow the party line on those thornier wedge issues, when you actually want to help heal the world’s problems rather than avoid them, you suddenly become one of the “them,” not the “us,” and the church is acting not as Jesus would, but as the disciples would. The very early New Testament church called itself “The Way,” not “The Answer.” Putting Jesus first is not an answer—it is a way, it is the way, to extending God’s realm of love past these walls. I saw it in Nazareth—a church that because they put Jesus first, not the Holy Land first, or the church first, or themselves first, but because they put Jesus first, I felt like I could belong there. And the good news is that you do not have to travel halfway across the world to feel that belonging in your journey—know that you can do so here as well. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Longview, Washington
November 13, 2011
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