About fifteen years ago I met a man who had been a business
associate of my father’s when I was a child.
My parents had thought he was pretty interesting then, and that he’d only
gotten more so in the years since, which is why my dad thought the two of us
ought to get together. So I called him
up. We were eating sushi one day in
Sausalito, when I told him of my newfound interest in the Episcopal
Church. He mentioned that he took his
mother to services at Grace Cathedral a couple of times a month and he had some
mildly complementary things to say about the place. Then
he paused for a moment, looking at me as if gauging how much he ought to say,
and told me this story.
For a number of years he’d managed a hot spring spa and New
Age personal growth center down the coast from Big Sur. One night he and some of his friends decided
to do some executive team-building or something, and they all took a big dose
of a hallucinogenic elixir favored by indigenous shamans from the jungles of
the Amazon. Which I guess was groovy,
for all of them but one. When the drug
took effect one man started acting terrified.
As his friends tried to calm him down, he became more and more incoherent
and withdrawn, and then unresponsive, even catatonic. They tried everything they could think of to
help him snap out of it. They massaged him,
and beat drums, and smoked him with burning sagebrush; they waved aromatic
essences under his nose, and chanted “Om”, but nothing worked. They started to think he might die. Finally, in desperation, one of them started
saying the Lord’s Prayer. And that’s
what did it. Whatever strange, dark, land
that man’s soul was wandering in, it was the Lord’s Prayer that called him
back.
I thought of this story as I was reading again about how Jesus’
disciples try to stop a man from casting out demons in his name, because he’s
not official, and doesn’t answer to them. Jesus tells them to leave him alone—after all,
at least he’s not dragging his name through the mud, which lots of people are
happy to do. And, he adds, “Whoever is
not against us is for us.” “Whoever is
not against us is for us.” It is hard to
imagine a more generous statement of giving the benefit of the doubt than
that. But for whatever reason,
Christians throughout history have tended to ignore this story, and to reject that
principle.
We’ve preferred to do what Matthew did with this saying, when
he incorporated material from Mark into his own Gospel, which was to twist it
around to say: “whoever is not for us is against us.” And so we have supposed that everyone is
against us: Jews, Pagans, and Muslims, Animists and Atheists, Spiritualists and
Secular Humanists. Sometimes we were
right—they were against us—but sometimes
we were against them first. And for a
lot of our history, and I think this is still often the case, the people we’ve
been most inclined to imagine are against us, have been other people who take
the name of Christ.
I know that’s been true for me. You know that bumper sticker that says “O
Lord, save me from your followers”? For a long while I resisted calling myself a
Christian, not only because of modesty about what it really means to follow
Christ, and not merely because lingering doubts about God and the Bible and
Jesus Christ, but because I had serious, almost insurmountable doubts about
some Christians. And it cuts both ways—I
am absolutely certain that there are a lot of Christians who would have serious
doubts about me—if they would even consider me a Christian at all. The fact is we seem to have an inexhaustible
genius for thinking up new reasons to excommunicate each other.
It’s a tendency you can see already getting established in
the later books of the New Testament. Now I’m not going to stand here and say
that there is never a time when we have to challenge people who we think are
promulgating erroneous teachings or questionable practices in the name of
Christ. But Jesus is not worried about
that in today’s Gospel story. He’s happy
to give the free-lance exorcist the benefit of the doubt. Anyone who does honor to his name is fine
with him. There is, however, something he is
concerned about, something so concerning that he uses some of the
strongest, most over-the-top language in the Gospel to talk about it. And what he’s concerned about is “stumbling.”
But what is this “stumbling”?
The Greek original actually gives us a clue. The word is skandalizo, which is where we get the English word
“scandalize.” Literally, it means “to
set a snare for someone; to trip someone up,” but it can also mean “to give
offense.” In its passive form, it can
mean “to take offense.” Now, to better
understand what kind of “tripping up” Jesus is talking about, it helps to look
at the two other places in the Gospel where the word appears. In Chapter 6 of Mark, it is Jesus’ neighbors
in Nazareth who take offense at him. They are scandalized because they’ve known
him his whole life and his mother and brothers and sisters still live just down
the street, and they just don’t know to do with the fact that he’s come back to
town as this enlightened wonder-worker. So
they reject him. The other place,
besides today’s text, where skandalizo shows
up is in chapter 14, when Jesus and his disciples have finished their last meal
together and are on their way out to Gethsemane where he is to be betrayed, and
he says to them: “You are all going get
tripped up by what is about to happen; for it is written, ‘I will strike the
shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.’”
So when Jesus says in Mark 9 “it would be better to be thrown
into the sea with a great millstone around your neck than to cause one of these
little ones who believe in me to stumble,” he’s talking about not giving anyone
reason by our actions to lose whatever small measure of faith they have in
him. He’s warning his disciples against—oh,
I don’t know, treating them arrogantly, as if they aren’t “real Christians.” And when he talks about cutting off a part of
your body that causes you to stumble, and does it three times, he’s stating as
strongly as he possibly can what is at stake when we start to think of
rejecting him. The word that is
translated “Hell” in this passage is
the name of the place outside the walls of Jerusalem where they used to burn
the garbage. A stinking, smoldering,
wasteland of perpetual decay—do we need a better image of what the world is
coming to if it persists in taking offense at God?
But there is something that keeps things from turning to garbage. And this brings us to the last, and the strangest, in the strange string of sayings in today's gospel lesson. In the days before
refrigeration, salt was more than seasoning, it was preservative. Salt is what prevents decay. And the fire that consumes and destroys is not the only fire
there is. God offers us an alternative to the world as garbage
dump, which is to be salted, salted with the fire of the Spirit. And in Jesus, God comes in person to offer
this fire to all. The creative source
that preserves and renews life, is here, calling us to follow, assuring us that
any offense that others may take at us, any price we have to pay, is nothing. Or, we can take the garbage dump—the choice
is ours.
Don’t pay too much attention to what other people are saying
about Jesus, whether you agree with them or not. They can’t make your decision for you. And don’t fight with anyone over who knows
Jesus better—it only makes him look bad.
“Have salt in yourself,” he says, “and be at peace with one
another.” Don’t get tripped up, but keep
your faith in Jesus, who gives everyone the benefit of the doubt. Where we look for enemies, he looks for
friends. Where we divide and
discriminate, he creates community.
Where we seek to dictate and control, he sets people free. That’s why he’s the Messiah and we’re not.
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