June 9, 2024
3rd Sunday after Pentecost, Pastor Jodi Houge
Church listen. This Gospel story is challenging. And if you just don’t have the capacity to take it in today, there is another option. Pull out your bulletin and spend the next ten minutes on the first lesson from 2 Corinthians. Verse says “Do not lose heart.” Do not lose heart. Even as your outer shell fades, even as your body, fades. Even as the world crumbles around you. Even even even. Do not lose heart. If that’s what you need this morning, full permission to tune the rest of this out. Think through your week and ask, “When was a moment encouragement? When I had a sense of awe?” “What brought me back to my sense of humanity?” You have a few moments to ponder all that while the rest of us head over to the Gospel. Then we’ll meet up at the end.
The rest of you who had a good night’s sleep and a sturdy breakfast and you feel ready for the Gospel, come with me. After a careful study of this text, here is the nutshell: Jesus is out of his mind, has teamed up with Satan and is breaking up the family. Light work!
I guess what’s been most helpful is backing up and asking the question: How exactly did we get here? To this place in the Gospel of Mark, where Jesus’ family wants to tie him up and Jesus’ tells his first parable and it seems to go pretty badly. He spins a tail so shocking that it polarizes people politically and creates rifts within family and friends.
Often times we get a story from the bible and it can live on its own, without knowing what came before it. But this isn’t one of them. So here is the backstory.
Context: By this point in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has lived some life. Jesus has been baptized by John in the Jordan River, spent 40 days in the wilderness working some things out. He called a group of disciples together to follow (and they did). He healed a man with an unclean spirit, healed an entire city, when on a preaching tour in Galilee, tried to a beat at home, but man those crowds just kept coming, right into his house.
One day it was so packed you couldn’t wedge yourself into the door. Like a MN grad party in a garage, people were in there eating those tacos with Jesus, hoping to be healed. And man so desperately wanted to get close to Jesus so that he might be healed but he couldn’t get in the door. His friends were so determined that he get in there they hauled him to to the roof and cut a hole in the roof and lowered him down next to Jesus to be healed. Not only was he healed but all his friends were, too.
Then Jesus started messing with long standing faith practices for keeping the sabbath. He took his disciples on retreat to the top of a mountain and appointed them. Meaning, they would be doing all the same things he was doing—healing, forgiving, casting out demons. Which means this movement of God was about to get bigger and wider, healing widespread and unstoppable.
Jesus and his disciples came down from that mountain and Jesus went home. I suspect to have dinner, because they next thing the story tells us is the crowds showed up once again and he was so busy he didn’t have time to eat. Which is my personal nightmare.
All that happened in first 3 chapters of the Gospel. And brings up to where we enter the story in today’s Gospel. No wonder his family is worried for him. He is messing with both religion and political systems. And now it’s seems Jesus is taking a wrecking ball to families. So Jesus mother, Mary says to Jesus’ siblings, “go get your brother Jesus. He has gone too far and he’s going to get himself killed. We need to reign him in.”
At the time this story was taking place, family was the foundation of the social world. Not just in that it was important or meant people carved out time for Sunday dinner with grandma. Your extended family determined personality, identity and what sort of job you might do. It was how you socialized. Kinship was the backbone of the social order (p. 168)—the social order Jesus is now upending and reordering. That’s a lot.
But maybe the hardest part of this story to hear is the idea of eternal sin. That sounds terrifying to me. I got some help from peace organizer, activist, writer, educator, lecturer and preacher Ched Myers in his book Binding the Strongman. The translation “eternal sin” brings to mind the common notion of eternal damnation in hell. This could not be further from the truth, since Jesus is specifically exposing the sin of human divisiveness. The whole scenario of eternal salvation versus eternal damnation plays right into that sin! It is not the Gospel; it is anti-Gospel. The Good News is that Jesus inaugurates the new age of forgiveness.
This means it is no longer “us” and “them”. “Saved” or “unsaved.” The Gospel makes us one in Christ Jesus.
Instead, what if you trusted that is nothing you and do or say that is unforgivable? Even that thing you are carrying around that continually visits you in the small hours of the night. Even that. Trust the one whose whole program is forgiving.
There is a line in our Easter season liturgy that I carried around with me all season. It is “Blessed is our sibling Jesus.” I love it. It’s both expansive and intimate. Jesus makes us into family. Sometimes church leaders balk at the idea of church being family because of all the ditches we could potentially fall into—transferring the dysfunction of our own families into the church. Do we do some of that? Absolutely because all you know is what you know. But Jesus is telling us we are, in fact, family. We are kin~ Bound together by the grace of Christ.
Family at its best is a place of warmth, joy, support, It’s where you can learn. It’s where we can grow and change and be loved over the long haul. The aunties who loved you as a surly 13 year old, loved you as a fiery 20 year old, love you now as a thirty something.
Last Sunday, Pastor Bradley invited us to stand and move closely to one another and extend a hand of blessing toward one another. It’s a wonderful image of our reordered connection. You are kin. Whether you like it or not. We should give out balloons like we do at the birth of a child. These balloons would say, “It’s a family!” There are people who now are your blessed siblings who you would likely not choose. If that’s upsetting to you, take it up with Jesus. You can tell him he’s out of his mind or colluding with Satan. And he will likely look at your and say, “There, there, human. I know this is hard for you.”
Here is where we might meet up with those who are tuning out this Gospel and meditating on the first lesson, do not lose heart. Let’s be real. We lose heart all the time. Sometimes are hearts are lost, frozen in fear, anger, dread, exhaustion. And we need this (waves wildly) whole family to help us unfreeze. If you have trouble finding places of hope, then you will need the other folks here today to tell you where they are finding it.
Generally speaking, I tend to live in my head. It takes work for me access my heart, to figure out what I’m feeling. But when I am paying attention, fully present to life around me, I can access it. This last week, my spouse (Nate) and I took our paddle boards to Lake Phalen and paddled out into the middle of the lake. Yes, the world is crumbling around us in so many ways, but also, there is this—this lake, and these trees, and this blue sky and this sweet spouse. Do not lose heart.
Last Sunday, I wasn’t preaching or presiding, which means I sat over there in the chapel and got to watch as people receive communion. What a thing to witness. One of our youngest worshipers received the bread and that tiny cup of juice and stepped off to the side so that he had time to take it in at his own pace. His stance was full on delight, to be on the receiving end of all that mysterious grace. Do not lose heart.
We have these moments that unfreeze us, remind us that we are kin, that we are family. That even when things are hard or we hear a challenging Gospel story, we can trust that Jesus is leading us to more. More freedom, more healing, more mercy, more justice. And that there is nothing we can do that is unforgivable. Jesus has erased the categories of “saved” or “unsaved.” We are wrapped up in a blanket of mercy big enough to cover everything. So that you do not lose heart in yourself, your neighbor, in this family, in your sibling Jesus. Take in the goodness. Amen.