Yesterday I decided not to help someone. It was nobody I knew—a man who had called the
church and gotten a number for pastoral emergencies from our recorded telephone
greeting. He told me that he’d called
fifty churches and that I was the first person to call him back. He was asking for more than I usually give,
two nights in a motel, and it would have been more than usually inconvenient
for me personally to do it. That was a
factor, I admit. But he was single male. From the way he described his situation, it
sounded like he’d survive. And you can’t
say “yes” to everyone, not if there’s going to be money in the discretionary
fund when an even more pressing need arises.
I didn’t judge him as unworthy of help.
I didn’t feel justified in what I did.
But I did tell him that I had decided not to help him, and that I was
sorry, which I was. A few minutes later
I got a text message calling me a “false prophet” and a “dog.”
Dom Helder Cámara, a Roman Catholic bishop in Brazil in the
1960s and ‘70s, famously said, "When I give food to the poor, they call me
a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." This is what happens in unjust social
systems. People turn against each
other. I’m not suggesting a moral
equivalence between the lonely man in need of shelter and the Brazilian ruling
class. I’m not putting myself in the
same league as Helder Cámara, equating courageous obedience to God’s commands
concerning the poor with lame rationalizations for shirking them. I’m just noticing something common in our
experience, that place where inequalities of wealth and power, and the work of being
present to them, gets us called names.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has been going around Galilee,
preaching in the synagogues about the kingdom of God, about how close it is,
about the shift in consciousness that brings people into it. He has been healing and casting out demons on
his own charismatic authority. And he
has been making provocative connections between the sicknesses he cures and the
social and religious conditions in Galilee, between paralysis and debt, between
hunger and Sabbath laws, between leprosy and priestly codes of purity. The tension between Jesus and the established
authorities is mounting and they send some scribes down from Jerusalem, Public
Information Officers, to issue grave warnings that Jesus is a black magician. He may have authority over the unclean
spirits, but don’t be fooled. He is in
league with Beelzebul, the prince of demons.
This is the secret source of his power.
Jesus responds to this accusation in a remarkable way. He doesn’t deny the charges. He doesn’t accuse his accuser in return. Instead he joins with the premise and plays
with it. “If I am using the power of
evil to drive out evil,” he says, “then that’s really a good thing, is it
not? Because if the devil is divided
against himself, he is like a kingdom at war with itself, or a house divided. And that means that his power is at an end.” Speaking this way, Jesus not only disarms the
fear and hatred which the scribe’s words were meant to arouse against him. At the same time, he turns the attention of
his listeners away from the imaginary bogeyman Beelzebub, and toward the real
danger that hangs over their lives. For,
even though he is having fun with the silliness of the scribes’ slander, he is not
making light of evil. Jesus, in his
teasing way, directs our attention toward the real spirit of evil in the world,
the one who works by making accusations, demonizing enemies, dividing kingdoms
and houses and people against themselves, and bringing all down to ruin
together.
Jesus then goes on to say something even more
surprising. “But no one can enter a
strong man's house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong
man; then indeed the house can be plundered.” I think it is safe to say that
Jesus is not advocating burglary. The
strong man must be Satan, and the property that should be plundered from his
house is us, the human beings on every side of a divided kingdom. It is all of us who are captive to the spirit
of inequality, and division, and insult, and Jesus seriously intends to set us
all free.
But to do that you need to get your hands dirty. You need to lay yourself open to the charge
of being a criminal, to take the place of a robber, as Jesus will do on the
cross. You can’t bind the strong man
without getting very close to him, “up close and personal” as the saying
goes. The other day in traffic with my
family we saw a bumper sticker that read, “God bless our troops, especially our
snipers.” Well, that approach doesn’t
work with Satan. You can’t snipe at him
from a distance. You can’t blow him up
from 7,000 miles away with a pilotless drone.
In the last year or so I have been approached at one time or
another by organizers for four different groups who are trying to bring
together faith communities to build grassroots power for social change. Of course they want me to get involved, or
more precisely, to get me to get you to get involved, and I have to explain to
them that we are still in this start-up situation and have our hands full just
getting our own fallen house in order.
But it is intriguing to me that at a time when churches and synagogues
are shrinking and closing their doors, and younger people are staying away in
droves, and nobody in the society at large seems very interested in what we
have to say, someone should be knocking on our doors looking to us for
leadership to save the day. Maybe these
organizers didn’t get the memo about the decline of the church. Or maybe there’s something else going on.
At the end of today’s gospel lesson Jesus’ mother and brothers
and sisters come to the door looking for him.
They’ve become uncomfortable with all the attention he’s been getting,
and the signs of trouble brewing.
They’re worried about him, and are trying to get him to come back home
and return to his senses. But when Jesus
hears that they are outside, he looks around at the people who are sitting with
him and says "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and
sister and mother.” Here is an
alternative to the society in which inequality sets people to blaming and
cursing each other. Here is a vision of
a single human family in which all are united in the freedom of obedience to no
one but God. Maybe the organizers want
to talk to us because, however imperfectly our communities of faith realize
this vision, as segregated as we may still be by divisions of class and
language and ethnicity, as haltingly as we may practice the ethical obligations
that are the natural working out of this vision, at least we keep the vision
alive. At least we know that this is
what our life together is supposed to be like, and that we are in need of repentance
and forgiveness when it is not.
And if binding the strong man, the spirit of inequality and
bigotry and hatred, really demands that we get personally involved, maybe the
organizers understand that only the power of the Spirit can give people the
courage, and the stamina, and the capacity for bearing the truth, to stick with
the work of liberation all the way to the end. Only people who know that the key to the new
age that the world is literally dying to enter is a complete change of heart
will steer clear of grandiose fantasies of power, and the seductions of
self-righteousness. Maybe the new
politics that the world needs really do start here, where we can take the
risks, and make the mistakes, and learn the lessons of loving one another
across our divisions, because we have been loved and because we have been
forgiven.
