Sunday, September 27, 2015

Hellfire, Mark 9:38-50, the Rev'd Dr Richard Smith, September 27, 2015



We have a built-in desire to be great, to be awesome and fabulous. It’s the way the Creator made us, with an infinite desire to know more and more, to drink in more and more beauty, to love infinitely. Our mantra here at St. John’s, “More Love”, speaks to that desire. One medieval theologian calls it our most fundamental natural desire.

The problem is we don’t always know what truly satisfies that desire, where our true greatness really lies, so we try to satisfy it by various means: climbing the social ladder, running with the right crowd, dropping the right names, earning the right amount of money.

In this country, if someone asks “How much are you worth?”, we usually answer in dollar figures. “I’m worth $100K, $10K, or, embarrassingly we might say, “Well, uh, I have no money,” implying I’m not worth anything. We often measure our greatness by how much money we have.

This misunderstood sense of greatness puts us in competition with others. We compare ourselves: I might not be as “great” as that person, but at least I’m “greater” than this person over here. This is a teeter-totter of elation and depression, because there is always someone “greater” or “lesser” than we.

In today’s gospel, this desire to be great affects how the disciples react to the outside exorcist they run across. They see someone casting out demons in Jesus’ name, and because this exorcist is not part of their own community, they immediately perceive him as a threat. Someone is poaching on our territory. They guard their turf against anyone who might rival them in importance.

I see this as a face-palm moment for Jesus. I see him slapping palm to forehead and going "OMG. Why did you tell him to stop?"

Rather than celebrating with the ones from whom the demons were cast out, rather than rejoicing that their nightmares have finally ended, the disciples have become a tight knit power group. When good is done, and it does not result in their own enhanced standing in the world, they try to stop it. Their focus has become not the work of Jesus, but that others follow them, admire them, hold them in esteem. This, and not the work of the kingdom, determines what they do, the decisions they make, the strategies they develop as they move through life.

It’s been a family neurosis in Christianity down through the centuries, with one Christian community seeing another not as a co-creator in an amazing adventure of bringing a kingdom of justice and love to birth, but as a rival.

Over the centuries, this rivalry has led Christians down the path of war and bloodshed -- Catholics and Protestants, Orthodox and Roman Christians, Anglicans and Roman Catholics slaughtering each other, warring against each other, burning each other at the stake. Not to mention violence between Christians and Muslims, between Christians and Jews.

I suspect it is this sad legacy that Pope Francis had in mind this week in Washington when he spoke of the need to serve people and not ideologies, and to create a culture of encounter and dialogue.

It’s this path of violence lurking beneath what seems at first like petty rivalry between two communities that Jesus rails against in this passage, using images that are both grotesque and disturbing -- images of unquenchable hellfire, of cutting off your hand and foot and plucking out your eye. The kind of strong and grotesque images some artists might use to make a point they feel is critical. We saw this in the gospel a few weeks back where Jesus tells us to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Grotesque images enlisted to make a critical point.

The southern novelist Flannery O’Connor also uses grotesque and disturbing images. She says, "I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear." Jesus is using the grotesque in this passage in the hopes of getting his deaf, dumb, and blind disciples to hear, see, and speak.

One of the grotesque images he uses here is a hell of unquenchable fire. Preachers often interpret this to mean a place of punishment for sinners after they die, but in the original Greek, Mark’s words suggest something very different. He’s referring to a place outside Jerusalem called Gehenna. The ancient prophet Jeremiah spoke of that place. It’s where the Hebrew people once disobeyed God by killing and burning their own children in sacrifice. It was a place of cruelty and violence, of painful screams and a fire that seemed unquenchable.

Jesus is saying that the path of rivalry among the disciples can lead to this same kind of cruelty and violence -- as in fact it has over the centuries. And he is saying he will have none of it.

He adds even more grotesque images to make his point: “I’d rather see you cut off your hand, cut off your foot, pluck out your eye than to take that path of cruelty and violence.” He's using disturbing images and extreme language to make a critical point against war and cruelty and violence among his followers. The tragic history of violence by Christians shows how little we’ve understood this teaching.

Is there a way out of this? This misunderstanding of where our greatness really lies, with its subsequent rivalry and violent cruelty. Is there a way out?

Jesus final words in this passage give a hint: “Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another."

Salt is what gives our lives zest. It unlocks the flavors, the meaning, purpose, pleasure of our lives. It’s our awareness of how infinitely great, how fabulous, how significant we truly are.

Salt is the simple awareness that our worth is not something out there that is somehow lacking in us that we must strive for, compete with others for. We carry it inside, a gift from the one who made us. It has nothing to do with how much money we have, or which social ladders we’ve managed to scale, or whose names we can drop, or what we have accomplished. Salt is that abiding peace from knowing that we are, without ever lifting a finger, worth more than many sparrows, and every hair on our heads is counted.

Have salt in yourselves, Jesus counsels.

The task is simply to become conscious of who we already are: each of us a beloved daughter and son of a God who loves us extravagantly. At the end of the day, that’s all that matters. The task is to live from that awareness, to become more and more who we already are.

No need for rivalry to shore up an insecure sense of our importance. We are already infinitely important, infinitely great. No one, nothing, can ever take that away.