For and Against

A sermon on Mark 9:38-50

[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by CrowN on Unsplash.]

One of the things I love about being a pastor is that people share their stories with me.

It’s not entirely a new thing in my life since I entered professional ministry… I am just generally one of those people that other people open up to.

Like, I can remember a number of times early in our marriage when I would be sat on the sidelines at one of Tyler’s work softball games and one of his co-workers whom I had just met that night would be opening up to me about their mom’s heart attack, or about their struggles with alcohol, or about their conflicted feelings about God stemming from Catholic school.

And those were actually my favorite side of the softball field conversations, because they really meant something, you know? It matters when someone trusts you with their vulnerability.

Wearing a collar just adds to the opportunities, because it mostly means that people don’t feel guilty about sharing their questions and personal pain with me, because it’s kind of my job. And I love that.

But there is one distinction in these conversations since I became of “person of the cloth” that I don’t love.

It’s when the person is deep in their story, processing whatever it is that they clearly need to talk about, and a swear word slips out.

And then their eyes get big, and they start stuttering through an apology about using that kind of language in front of a pastor.

Now, for the record, I genuinely do not care if people swear. I’d rather people not swear at me, like in anger or calling me names, but I’m all about honesty.

I appreciate when people feel comfortable enough to just be themselves around me, swears and all.

But it happens enough (including this week) that it reminds me how easy it is to forget about context…. To get so focused on what is happening in the front of our brain, that we don’t register other things that we know but just aren’t paying attention to.

And, of course, that applies to the stories we read in scripture as well as the conversations we have with people we think we shouldn’t swear around.

So, as we explore today’s gospel reading, I want to remind us of a few bits of context.

The first thing is that John’s little announcement about the disciples’ attempt to shut down an outsider using Jesus’s power without authorization comes immediately after the gospel we heard last week, in which Jesus reprimanded the disciples for arguing about who was greater.

I find this interesting.

It could be that this is just the familiar deflection strategy of “whataboutism”:

Getting uncomfortable when you Lord and Savior is calling you out on self-centered and ungodly behavior? Try distracting him by tattling on someone else going rogue.

Spoiler: Jesus is not actually distractable.

But, I don’t know. John’s story is just so on the nose.

Jesus tells them not to seek authority and power, and then John tells a story of trying to prevent someone else from exercising power.

I wonder if John is actually grappling here. Trying to understand how Jesus’s teaching applies…

Because on the one hand, John might be trying to say, “right, we were trying to take that other guy down a peg, because no one is supposed to be promoting themselves.”

But, the man wasn’t promoting himself. He was using Jesus’s name in his work to free people.

So, I think there’s another possibility. Maybe John actually saw the hypocrisy of the attempt to prevent the other man from doing things in Jesus’ name, when the disciples had all been worrying about the power of their own names.

Maybe John was actually saying. “Oh! Did we get this wrong, Jesus? We thought we were doing the right thing by gatekeeping… but now it sounds like maybe our focus on proper authority was off the mark…. And if that’s true, then help me understand. How we know who to trust, it it’s not just your inner circle?”

If John isn’t clueless, if he’s just looking for guidance, then I think the rest of this gospel reading sounds really different.

It’s not yet another rebuke. It’s the guidance John is seeking.

And here it’s relevant to bring up another part of the context that I had forgotten about too until a colleague pointed it out to me this week: this whole interaction occurs while Jesus still has a little child on his lap.

In last week’s gospel, when Jesus was redirecting his disciples’ misguided argument about who was the greatest, he pulled a little child into a hug and said, is essence.

“This little one here… welcoming him is what I want you to be focusing on. That’s what my work is all about.”

And that little child is STILL what it’s all about when Jesus tells John not to stop others who are doing Jesus’ work, just because they don’t know the secret handshake…

When he says “whoever is not against us is for us”…

When he tells his followers that “if you cause one of these little ones who believe in me to sin,” it would be better to disfigure or main or kill yourself than to bear the weight of that responsibility.

It’s a little shocking, disturbing even, to imagine Jesus exhorting his followers to such extreme lengths with a sweet little child right there listening to all of it…but it also changes the tone of the whole teaching.

Because it’s not some abstract principle of religious responsibility in this context.

It’s a visual, vulnerable reminder of why Jesus is making such a strident point about not misunderstanding the kind of welcome and servanthood that Jesus is calling his disciples to take on.

The child shows them and us why it all matters.

Why it matters for us to let go of ego-motivated striving and focus our energy on service and welcome instead.

Why it matters for us to not get distracted by petty categories of insiders and outsiders when it comes to supporting the work of Christ’s kingdom.

Why it matters for us to be willing to sacrifice our own comfort, and maybe quite a bit more, to ensure that our focus and our message and our witness is on what Christ teaches.

Because it’s not all academic. The extent to which we do or do not live into the vision that Jesus came to teach and to embody has real consequences, and those consequences matter, especially for the most vulnerable.

It’s a weighty responsibility.

And it can be hard to know what to do with it because Jesus does not specify the “sin” he is talking about when he tells his followers to cut off their hands or tear out their eyes if these parts of themselves cause them to “sin.”

It’s easy to take a word like “sin” and apply it to whatever favorite target a preacher may have. (I have heard those sermons.)

I suspect those kinds of sermons are at least part of the reason why so many people get so horrified when they realize they said a swear word to a pastor. (Again – really not a problem for me.)

But this is why we need the context: the reminder that the “little one” we are not to lead astray is the child Jesus brought into the midst of his disciples to exhort them to servanthood and to welcome.

Sin, as Martin Luther insightfully taught, is just putting ourselves at the center.

That’s what makes us want to be great.

That’s what makes us want to exclude those who are different.

That’s what we should sacrifice a limb to avoid.

The alternative is to put Jesus’s work at the center.

To be the salt of the earth that he has called us to be, focused on how we can serve the needs around us and welcome others just as he welcomed the little one who sat on his lap to hear his teaching.

Thanks be to God.