Double Hockey Sticks
Mark 9: 38-50
Click here to view the full sermon for September 26, 2021 entitled, "Double Hockey Sticks."
Several years back, David Kinneman, the president of the Barna group- an evangelical polling company out of Ventua, California- put out a book titled "unChristian". It was based on three years of research into the attitudes and perceptions that young people hold toward those who claim to follow Jesus. The results weren’t good. In fact they were downright unsettling. As a general rule, the research found that Christians were seen as judgmental, anti-homosexual, hypocritical, too political and sheltered. We may want to protest such a portrait, or claim that it is untrue. Or better yet, We might try to claim that we’re not those kind of Christians.
You know the ones, With their smells and bells or with their hands in the air like they just don’t care or with their elaborate liturgies and stale prayers or with their amplified praise music and their projection screens. Or with their overly rigid moral political agendas or with their insufferably earnest social political agendas. We’re not like them, we might say. We’re different. Try as we might to manage our brand, the fact remains that this is how people who identify as ‘Christian’ are seen. We are seen this way, Because over time, Instead of giving life and hope Instead of bringing good news to the poor And release to the captive, our actions and our attitudes have been a stumbling block. The Greek used by Mark could also be translated “a scandal.” Our attitudes and actions have been scandalous.
And it’s useless to point the finger at someone else, some other tradition and say that they’re the ones to blame. The best critique of what is bad, What is rigid What is judgmental What is self-serving, Is the practice of something better. If people, and young people in particular, aren’t able to see and know Jesus aren’t able to feel loved and valued because we’re more preoccupied with our aesthetic, with how much better we think we are, with our own power and privilege and a need for others to be just like us, then that’s on us. What Jesus makes quite clear to his disciples (and that’s us by the way), Is that if we get caught up in who’s in and who’s out, who belongs and who doesn’t, who’s a member of the club and who isn’t, who’s doing it the right way, which usually just means our way, then there will be hell to pay.
But, of course, we don’t like to talk about hell. We’re far too enlightened to go in for any of that fire and brimstone. Maybe. I will grant you that, in general, when people talk about hell, what they have in mind bears a far greater resemblance to the inferno of the Italian poet Dante’s Divine Comedy than anything you’re likely to find in scripture. They envision a fiery pit where everyone they don’t like is consigned to eternal damnation. But that really isn’t what Jesus is talking about when he invokes hell to make his point. Not quite. For one thing, what we translate as ‘hell’ is the proper name for a literal place- Gehenna. Gehenna isn’t Hades. It isn’t the underworld of the dead. No Gehenna was a well-known location in one of the valleys outside Jerusalem.
It was the place where Canaanites before them performed sacrifices to the ancient near-eastern god, Moloch. Specifically, child sacrifices. In fact, it’s thought that the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac only to stop him before he can carry it out is meant to be a counter-narrative about how the God of Israel doesn’t require such human sacrifice. Anyway, the place was infamous. By the time Jesus offers these words, it’s become a garbage dump. And like many garbage dumps the world over, this one was constantly smoldering as trash was burned there. From human sacrifices offered upon the altar, to the refuse of Jerusalem, Gehenna was well known as a place of fire. And what Jesus seems to be saying is that it is the natural consequence of failing to recognize what no longer serves us as we seek to follow him. If our scandalous attitudes, action, and inaction lead little ones and young people to conclude that faith and church have little to no value. If what we’re doing is so bland and flavorless that it becomes nearly impossible to taste and see that the Lord is indeed good, then it should come as no surprise when we are cast aside, when we’re thrown on the trash heap to burn with the rest of the garbage.
I realize that sounds harsh. Jesus isn’t sugar coating anything here. Just days prior to this, his disciples were having trouble casting the demon out of a boy. So, it sounds a little like sour grapes when John starts complaining about the exorcist who doesn’t have the right credential but is obviously doing a better job of invoking Jesus’ name to cast out the demonic. And it doesn’t have to be nearly as dramatic as all that. Offering something as simple as a cup water to someone who is thirsty can be a powerful participation in the saving work of God among us, what Jesus calls the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven. We can get so preoccupied with how we’re doing what we’re doing, and who isn’t doing it the way we do; so preoccupied with how we’ve always done things, or who gets to do what, that we lose sight of all the ways in which God is already at work in the world beyond our often exceedingly narrow view of things. The hyperbolic imagery of amputation is meant to get our attention, and to wake us up to the very real consequence of majoring in the minors. Sometimes I wonder if we don’t become overly occupied with the small stuff because we’ve lost faith in the bigger picture of salvation that is on offer in following Jesus. Jesus is, quite literally, telling us to cut it out.
Or maybe we do it because the big stuff is so scary. Faith, forgiveness, grace, selfless love; those are hard and often painful to even think about, much less practice. Moving forward, trusting God when the outcome is uncertain and beyond our control? That’s scary. So we reach for what we can control, what we can manage. We put our hand on a wheel that already has a driver. Cut it out. Cut off that hand that wants to steer and trust that God has got this. God has got you. Forgiveness? Are you kidding me? And I’m not talking about theoretical forgiveness, forgiving the villains of history, or even on the front page. I’m talking about openly and deliberately saying to the person in your life who has hurt you the most, “what you did was not okay, but I would rather forgive you and move on than be forever burdened by the weight of something that will never be undone.” Maybe even saying that to yourself. Really? No, we trip over ourselves to condition our forgiveness on the other person, “if they say they’re sorry. If they make amends. If they work off that debt and put themselves solely at my mercy” Cut it out. Cut off the foot that refuses to walk in another’s shoes, that cannot or will not move from the place of our own righteousness vindication. Generous, selfless love? No way. Have you seen what’s out there? Have you seen how vicious and hateful people can be? Have you seen how they act? Cut it out. Cut out that eye that’s so well trained to see all the reasons why people are unlovable, that justifies putting them on the margins and keeping them there. Playing small makes all the sense in the world. It insulates us from putting ourselves in the uncomfortable position of not being in control. But here’s the thing that I think Jesus might be getting out. When we choose comfort over courage in order to minimize any criticism or risk, that is a recipe for maximizing apathy.
The sequence of events that Mark shares here is a cautionary tale for a community that purports to follow Jesus. We might think it’s our job to police what other people are doing in Jesus’ name. Or worse, we might be so busy worrying about what other people are doing in Jesus’ name that we completely neglect what we aren’t doing in Jesus’ name; in service to our comfort, at the risk of being too objectionable, to avoid having to actually lose our lives and the control we think we have over them.
There is the unquenchable fire of Gehenna that devours what no longer serves anyone or anything, and there is the fire that salts, that saves. Salt and salvation share a common root. Both preserve that which might otherwise go to waste. The fire that saves is the very thing we try so hard to avoid when we play small. The fire of risking faith, or offering unearned forgiveness, or unconditional love is ultimately how we are saved from the hells of our own making; the hell that would sacrifice our children to a world of small, safe choices that risk nothing and gain even less for the sake of the status quo.