To the other side

1 Samuel 17: (1a, 4-11, 19-23), 32-49 Psalm 9:9-20
2 Corinthians 6:1-13
Mark 4:35-41

I’ve just returned from a vacation trip to my brother’s wedding in Madison, Wisconsin, which began with four solid days of family gatherings and raucous festivities.  But when that was all over, my wife and daughter and I retreated to the home of Meg’s a college friend Pam.  And on our second day there we packed up our towels and bathing suits and a picnic lunch and brought along Joel, Pam’s younger son headed out of town to Devil’s Lake.

The sandy bottom of that lake stays shallow a long way out from the shore, so it’s a perfect place for children.  I played with the kids a bit, and then when I was satisfied that they were content with each other, I went to rent a stand-up paddle board from the concession by the beach.  I made a little voyage out into the middle of the lake before heading back in so that everyone else could have a turn.  Meg went for a cruise, and when she came back we let Risa and Joel take turns paddling around in the shallow water.

Then our hour was up, and I asked the kids if they wanted to ride on the front of the board while I paddled it back to the boat rental area.  They climbed on carefully and sat down while I shifted to the back to even the weight.  I paddled along slowly, skirting the crowd of bathers close to the shore.  We all had to concentrate on keeping as balanced as possible, because if one of us started leaning to one side, the weight of the others would accelerate us toward the tipping point.  By the same token, we had to be cautious not to overcorrect when we moved to right ourselves, and so spill over in the opposite direction. 

We made it to the beach at the boat rental area without capsizing, and it felt like a big relief.  But when you think about it, what was the worst that could have happened?  We would have tipped over and fallen into three or four feet of lake water, the same placid water we had been splashing and plunging and wading in just a few minutes before.  Something about riding on top of the paddle board and the illusion of mastery that it gave us changed the way we thought about that water.  From the precarious perspective of the deck of our little craft, it was no longer our cooling and refreshing friend—it was a dark peril to cross over using all our vigilance and skill.

The danger that the disciples of Jesus were in on that stormy night on the lake was very real.  Those waters were deep, and those men were quite familiar with them.  They knew how unexpectedly the squalls of wind could come down from cold heights of Mt. Hermon, and how quickly they could whip the surface up into dangerous waves.  So they must have been asking themselves what they were doing out there in the middle of the lake in the dark of night.

Well, the answer to that was easy—they were there because Jesus sent them.  Jesus said, “let’s go across to the other side,” and they went.  That’s what disciples do, after all—they trust the teacher and go where he tells them to go.  And insofar as we also are disciples of Jesus we are committed to doing the same.  We go where we think Jesus wants us to go, and at least part of what that means for us is that we go to church.  Now maybe we think that’s not a very risky thing to do.  This church building has been sitting here on this corner for 124 years, which has a reassuring ring to it.  Even the great earthquake of 1906 didn’t knock it down, so maybe it feels like a safe place where we are protected from the storms and tides and whirlpools of the world outside.

But the church is not some giant unsinkable cruise ship purring along high above the waves.  The massacre last Wednesday night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina reminded us that the church is a little open boat, and in a storm the waves are liable to come in over the side.  Our society is being buffeted right now by a storm of unchecked gun violence and long-simmering racist hate, and it’s tempting to want to batten down the hatches and turn the ship around, to look for a safe harbor where we can stay warm and dry.  But Jesus says, “friends, let’s go across to the other side.”

We are accustomed to think of the church as a place of refuge from the ugliness and sickness of the world.  But the career of Jesus is a sustained engagement with the “other side” of human experience, the side we prefer not to think about.  You can see this especially clearly in the Gospel of Mark, which doesn’t contain a lot of long quotations of Jesus.  There is no Sermon on the Mount in Mark; there are no lengthy parables like the story of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son.  What is in Mark are a lot of stories of the people that Jesus encountered along his way, and the things that he did and said to change their lives.  And what those encounters have in common it is that in them Jesus confronts some aspect of the human condition that we would rather not deal with.

The people who seek him out are the people we would rather not deal with.  They are the people we don’t want to know, or to become.  They are the sick, the outcast, the insane, the disabled.  They are the poor and the little children.   They are everyone who it is too much trouble, too time-consuming, inconvenient, and expensive to have to take care of.  Or if they are not, if they are people who have it all together, who are well-situated in society, and well-satisfied with themselves, Jesus’ encounters with them reveal their arrogance and self-righteousness.  He shows them their true colors, hidden under their cloak of prestige and respectability—the colors of envy, deceitfulness, and hate, and deadly violence.  Jesus shows them these things and he finds them turned against himself.

So following Jesus is no guarantee of worldly success, or even of survival.  The martyrs of Emanuel AME Church have proven that once again.  Following Jesus requires that we surrender all our illusions of invulnerability and control, and accept the full vulnerability of being human.  Sometimes it is all enough to make you wonder, like the disciples in the gospel, whether God is asleep, or simply doesn’t care.  But the journey across to the other side is not just a challenge to be met or a commandment to be obeyed—it is good news, and it comes with a promise.  This is the promise that in Christ God has come across to our side, to make this stormy journey with us.  That’s what “Emanuel” means, after all—God with us. 

The gospel is not just the story of Jesus’ encounters with a lot of sick and sinful people.  It is also the story of their encounters with him, encounters that bring a sudden end to the raging of the wind and waves, and to a great and mysterious calm.  The encounter with Christ does not leave us with a final answer to the human condition, but it does leave us with questions, planted like seeds in the center of our lives—questions about what we were afraid of, and what it might mean to have faith, and above all, the question “Who is this?” 

They are questions that transform the way we look at our journey.  They open up the possibility that there is another “other side” of human existence that we have scarcely begun to know, one that is fully human and at the same time divine.   They are questions that suggest that Jesus is leading us, not merely across social and racial and religious barriers, but also across the gulf between earth and heaven, between time and eternity, between death and life.  So the only response that is really fitting to the encounter with Christ is worship and praise.  But this is not worship in a spirit of triumphalism and certainty, but of awe and wonder.  It is thanksgiving that remains profoundly aware of the fragility and precariousness of human life, and of the mystery of God’s presence with us.  It is praise that is focused more on wrestling with the deep and life-giving questions than standing pat on the answers.  It is discipleship that knows that we are still in middle of our crossing, and that it is only by the gracious loving-kindness of God that we will make it to the other side.     

Mastering fear

Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1:21-28 

“The fear of the Lord,” says today’s Psalm, “is the beginning of wisdom.”  But some of us might disagree.  Sure, wisdom might have something to do with God.  Seeking God, perhaps, or loving God, or knowing God—these we might accept as starting points for wisdom.  But fear?  We like to think that God is loving and good, compassionate and generous and forgiving, and indeed the Psalm describes a God like that.  So what is there to fear? 

It’s a good question, and I think that to find the answer we have to look at what “wisdom” is.  Because wisdom, if it really is wisdom, is not abstract or theoretical.  It is always applied.  Wisdom teaches us how to live, how to find our way through the real world, with skill, equanimity, and grace.  But if we’re going to be honest I think we have to admit that we find the real world to be a fearful place.  We might reject the notion that God is someone to fear, but that doesn’t mean we are not afraid. 

The truth is we live in a world haunted by fear.  News about the economy, just to take one example, is full of fearful language.  Wall Street has “jitters,” we read, or the Federal Reserve seeks to “calm investors’ fears.”  Sometimes it even has to intervene to stave off a full-blown “panic.”  On a more personal level, my wife is fond of reminiscing about her childhood and how she and the neighborhood kids would play together outside, in and out of each others’ houses, and up and down and around the block until they were all called home to dinner.  But in our neighborhood today, though we know there are children because we catch fleeting glimpses of them from time to time, they are not out playing in the street.   And if they were, we wouldn’t let our daughter join them, at least not without adult supervision.  “Times have changed,” we say, but what exactly it is that has changed is hard to put your finger on, except that we are more afraid than our parents were.

We are afraid of things that we do not understand and cannot control, but that gives them power over us.  It doesn’t really matter if the Ebola virus, or Islamist extremists, or home invasion robbers pose a real threat to our lives—the fear of them is enough—enough to make us do things we wouldn’t otherwise do, or to not do what we otherwise would.  The fear is enough to curtail our freedom and destroy peace. 

It is when we consider this intersection of fear and power that I think we start to understand what the psalm is saying about wisdom.  Because the point is not that the God of Israel is a terrifying God, though he certainly can be when he means to, but that wisdom begins when we understand that in this world only God is to be feared, because only God has ultimate power.  We who do not fear God, and reject the very idea of fearing God, no longer believe in the power of God.  We might believe in a God who makes us feel better.  That is why we have such a need to for a “nice” God—but we don’t believe in a God with the power to save us from the things we most fear.

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus begins his ministry by walking into the synagogue at Capernaum on the Sabbath day with his four brand new disciples and beginning to teach.   Compared to the other gospels, Mark says very little about the content of his teaching.  He does summarize it right before today’s lesson, when he says,

“Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.””

That’s quite a message, but in the scene in the synagogue what is most important is the impact that the message has on Jesus’ audience.   They are astonished by its originality and by its power.  He speaks with authority, but it’s not the authority of being able to skillfully back up his arguments with quotations from scripture, which is what they are used to.  His teaching seems to come straight from the source of wisdom and truth.

Cynthia Bourgeault, whose book The Wisdom Jesus some folks at St. John’s are reading right now, speaks of the experience of hearing Jesus as a “recognition event.”  That is, his teaching isn’t about some religious beliefs or moral principles that exist “out there,” where you can hold them at arm’s length and turn them this way and that and decide what you think of them.  But it impacts people “in here,” in their own spiritual center, which stirs and comes alive, as if responding to a mother tongue once known but long-forgotten.  It is an experience of hearing the truth about oneself and about God, and recognizing what has always been known in the heart.

But the Gospel tells us there was one man in the synagogue that day whose spiritual center was not his own.  And while the others are moved by Jesus’ preaching, the spirit that has taken possession of this man recognizes Jesus’ person.  It sees who he really is.  It understands that his authority is not just a function of rhetorical genius or brilliance of insight, but of the identity and purpose given to him by God.  Jesus is on a mission, and his teaching is only one aspect of it; a mission to manifest the Kingdom of God, not only as a nice idea, but with power.  That kingdom is not going to come without a fight, and immediately, right from the start, the real enemies of God come out to do battle. 

I think it helps to understand what is at stake in this conflict if we consider why the Gospel refers to this antagonistic spirit as “unclean.”  In the Bible “clean” and “unclean,” are very important ideas, that do not mean what we might suppose.  They are not categories that pertain to hygiene, or to morality, but to religious worship.  They have to do with the way the ancient Hebrews perceived the world, and structured society, and lived their lives, so as to preserve the central place in all of it for God. 

And when they said that something was unclean it was not because they believed that it was hated by God, or outside of God.   God created everything that is, and pronounced that it is good.  But there are in our world objects and experiences that carry with them an intrinsic fascination and danger, things like blood, like the sleep and the death of the body, things like sex and childbirth. 

To the ancient Hebrew way of thinking, these things were unclean, not because they are “dirty” in some puritanical sense, but because they are powerful.  Someone or something that has been in contact with them needs to be made clean, to be purified by a religious act, to bring the numinous power of that contact back into its proper relationship with other things.  It needs to be realigned with the ordered world created by with God. 

And this was true not only of natural phenomena, and material things, but also of the spiritual world.  The Jews of Jesus’ time had a vivid sense of a world full of spirits, of unseen intelligences.  But some of these spirits refused their ordered place among the creatures of God.  Instead of worshiping before the heavenly throne, they preyed on human beings.  They fed on our fear, on our fascination with idols, with divination, sorcery, and human sacrifice, all our efforts to bend divine power to our control.  They sought to rival the angels, as if their power to dominate, to inflict insanity and sickness, to take possession of a person’s soul, were on a par with God’s power to heal, to bless, to give and preserve life.

Some people might say that modern materialistic science has made these ideas obsolete and irrelevant.  But what is at stake in Jesus’ conflict with the unclean spirit is not whether or not we believe in demons.  What is at stake is whether we believe there is anything more powerful than God.  Or let me put it a different way—of what in the world are you most afraid?  To what in the world do you turn to master the things that you fear?  How we answer those questions shows us where we still need to repent, and believe in the good news of God’s Kingdom.  It shows us where we still need Jesus to come in power.